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Boys Not So Bad Off After All

We've all heard about how boys' academic performance is in decline.  Well, that may not be entirely true. 

School study finds boys doing better than ever
A study released Monday claimed that the lack of educational success among boys is more the result of race and class than gender.

BY JAY MATHEWS
Washington Post Service

WASHINGTON - A study released Monday looking at long-term trends in test scores and academic success argues that widespread reports of American boys being in crisis are greatly overstated and that young males in school are in many ways doing better than ever.

Using data compiled from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally funded accounting of student achievement since 1971, the Washington-based think tank Education Sector found that over the past three decades boys' test scores are mostly up, more of them are going to college and more are getting bachelor's degrees.

Although low-income boys, like low-income girls, are lagging behind middle-class students, as a gender boys are scoring significant gains in elementary and middle school and are much better prepared for college, the report says. It concludes that much of the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that while the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him.

Read the rest here.

Faulty Sarcasm Meters

If you've ever tried to teach the concept of irony, you may find this (from the American Psychological Association) interesting:

THE ANATOMY OF SARCASM: RESEARCHERS REVEAL HOW THE BRAIN HANDLES THIS COMPLEX COMMUNICATION

Israeli psychologists draw conclusions from how brain-damaged people comprehend sarcasm – or not

WASHINGTON — The ability to comprehend sarcasm depends upon a carefully orchestrated sequence of complex cognitive skills based in specific parts of the brain. Yeah, right, and I’m the Tooth Fairy. But it’s true: New research details an “anatomy of sarcasm” that explains how the mind puts sharp-tongued words into context. The findings appear in the May issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

The Israeli psychologists who conducted the research explain that for sarcasm to score, listeners must grasp the speaker’s intentions in the context of the situation. This calls for sophisticated social thinking and “theory of mind,” or whether we understand that everyone thinks different thoughts. As an example of what happens when “theory of mind” is limited or missing, autistic children have problems interpreting irony, the more general category of social communication into which sarcasm falls.
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The findings fit what we already know about brain anatomy. The prefrontal cortex is involved in pragmatic language processes and complex social cognition, thus it followed that participants with prefrontal damage had faulty “sarcasm meters.” At the same time, damage to the ventromedial area, which is involved in personality and social behavior, will disrupt not only understanding sarcasm but also understanding social cues, empathic response and emotion recognition. The authors write, “Understanding sarcasm requires both the ability to understand the speaker’s belief about the listener’s belief and the ability to identify emotions.”

Read the rest here.

Reading the Web

Here's another piece (from the Hartford Courant) about the impact of technology on how students learn.  Perhaps the most interesting comment in the article (you'll have to click on "more here" to get to it) is a suggestion that students who are poor readers of traditional print texts can be good readers of the web. 

Testing Kids' Web Smarts

By ROBERT A. FRAHM
Courant Staff Writer
June 12, 2006

NORWICH -- Millions of American students still learn the way generations before them did - by reading textbooks and other material assigned by teachers. But do they have the reading skills they need to explore the wide-open, uncharted world of the Internet?

With the help of students like seventh-grader Erica Grant poised in front of a computer screen, University of Connecticut Professor Donald J. Leu plans to find out.

"We're going to ask you to think aloud. ... We really want to get inside your head and see the skills and strategies you're using," Leu tells her as she prepares to search the Internet to answer the question "Why do rainbows form?"

The recent session at Norwich's Kelly Middle School is part of a three-year, $1.8 million federally funded study to test Leu's theory that online reading poses new challenges to students and requires skills different from what most schools have taught.

More here.

Donald Hall Named Poet Laureate

New Hampshire poet Donald Hall named new poet laureate
By Beverley Wang, Associated Press Writer  |  June 14, 2006

WILMOT, N.H. --A fax last week informed Donald Hall he would be the next poet laureate of the United States, and since then, between phone calls, sitting for photographs and giving interviews, he has been thinking about his new job.

"I had one friend, I asked him to give me ideas for what I can do as poet laureate, and he typed out 85," said Hall, a former New Hampshire poet laureate.

Maxine Kumin, a friend and former state and national poet laureate from Warner, founded a women's poetry series. Ted Kooser, the current poet laureate, has a weekly newspaper column, "American Life in Poetry."

In the living room of his farmhouse Tuesday, Hall wondered whether he could persuade a cable television network to run an occasional program of poetry, or convince satellite radio to create a poetry-only channel.

"I think most of the things I think about are unrealistic because they would take a great wad of cash to get started," he said. But you never know. "I can ask," he said, smiling.

Here's some information about Hall, from the Academy of American Poets.

It's the Apostrophe

It seems obvious that the internet will change some aspects of written language, but which ones?  Here are some possibilities (from the Toronto Star, June 6, 2006):

Adios, apostrophe
The Internet is killing off punctuation it doesn't need, want or comprehend
Compound words, hyphens are also facing extermination
by Jen Gerson

Its? It's? '90s? One word, two? A hyphen? Huh?

It's old, it's useless, it's annoying and according to one linguist, the Internet bell doth toll for the apostrophe, among and other arcane punctuation.

"People are absolutely confused about punctuation, particularly about apostrophes," says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of Alphabet to Email: How written English has evolved and where it's going.

As if to prove the point, the publisher accidentally left out the apostrophe of the "it's" on one of the first drafts of the book jacket.

Baron researches the effect of instant messengers, email and SMS on language. And she says that in the next 10 years, the Internet will shave the fat off of questionably useful punctuation.

"If you Google a word with an apostrophe, Google doesn't care," she says.

It's true. A search for 90's, '90s and 90s' turns up the same 10 websites, albeit in different orders.

Equally insignificant for Google were compound words and the hyphen.

Most literate users won't distinguish between e-mail and email, for instance — in the world according to search engines, it's all email to them.

"Language changes over time naturally. But now we're very confused," Baron says.

Read the rest here.

Together At Last

From The Boston Globe:

Hawthornes to be reunited
Wife's remains to be returned from UK
By Raja Mishra and Sally Heaney, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent  |  June 1, 2006

In life, they could barely stand to be apart. But, in death, an ocean separated them. Now, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne will soon be together again after nearly 150 years.

The remains of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and their daughter Una will be brought across the Atlantic and reinterred June 26 in the Hawthorne family plot at Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, where the renowned author of ``The Scarlet Letter" and other classics was laid to rest in 1864.

``I once thought that no power on earth should ever induce me to live without thee, and especially thought an ocean should never roll between us," Sophia had written to her beloved during their only prolonged separation in life.

But that is indeed what happened in death.

After Nathaniel Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, N.H., Sophia and their three children, Rose, Una, and Julian moved to England, where the family had lived when Hawthorne was in the diplomatic service.

Sophia died there in 1871 at age 62 and Una in 1877 at 33. Both were buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London.

Read the rest here.

"Beloved" Named Best Novel Since 1980

From Editor and Publisher, May 11, 2006: 

NEW YORK "Beloved" is most beloved. That was the result of a New York Times Book Review's survey of 124 prominent authors, critics and editors, who selected Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” as the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years. The results will appear in the May 21 issue of the Book Review.

The Morrison novel, published in 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Among those surveyed were noted authors Michael Chabon, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Safran Foer, Carlos Fuentes, Nadine Gordimer, John Irving, William Kennedy, Stephen King, Ian McEwan, William Styron, Anne Tyler, William T. Vollmann and Tom Wolfe.

“Beloved” received the most votes of any single work of fiction, but the prolific Philip Roth amassed the most overall votes, with six of his novels among the 22 books that received multiple votes.

Besides "Beloved," those in the top five were Roth’s “American Pastoral," Don DeLillo's “Underworld,” Cormac McCarthy's “Blood Meridian," and the collection of John Updike's four "Rabbit" novels, "Rabbit Angstrom."