<p>Poetgrl, I know exactly what you mean. I’m glad you realize I was just trying to make myself understood by using a simple (though imperfect and ultimately incorrect) term, since its truth wasn’t vital for the truth of the example.</p>
<p>poetgrl: Lovely story. I’m so glad things worked out so well for your daughter, and I admire you for giving back in the way you do.</p>
<p>Can you tell me what you mean by “teach her to disorient herself?” I am really interested in the process by which she learned to read.</p>
<p>mythmom–</p>
<p>You can find the basics in a book called “The Gift of Dyslexia.”</p>
<p>It took only a week for her to learn to read after years of struggling with it. Ridiculous. We sent my father to California after it worked for my daughter. He was 60, at the time, and dyslexic, a non-reader, high school drop out. It took a week and he could read.</p>
<p>It’s been a few years now, and you still can’t get that man’s nose out of a book. He was recently heard talking about how “Water for Elephants,” the book, made him sob at the end, and he didn’t think the movie was quite as good. He was talking to my daughter, the dyslexic, who agreed.</p>
<p>That’s so touching. Hey, I’m 60 and just a parent. Not used to being grandparent age, but my kids are nowhere near there. Sigh. I will look that up.</p>
<p>Since I teach English in a community college I see a lot of dyslexics. I am always interested in helping young people.</p>
<p>I taught an eight year old to read this week after two teachers had given up on him. His father was one of my students. He only missed one class – to see this boy play his first Little League game.</p>
<p>Does anyone else find it hilarious that the President of Amherst so set on evening the playing field and eliminating a bias toward the wealthy is named Mr. Marx? Coincidence- I think not.</p>
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I caught that too; but Marx advocated tearing the system down and building it anew. This guy just wants to see more Pell Grant kids in top tier schools.</p>
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<p>Typing while driving does not seem like a very intelligent thing to do.</p>
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<p>Agree! But not because ‘elites’ should abandon outreach to exceptional low-income students, but rather that there are simply not enough slots in a handful of well-endowed “elite” institutions to accommodate even a significant (measurable) percentage of those who are academically competitive, regardless of the level and means of outreach. Broaden and deepen the opportunities to improve access to those academically deserving and motivated.</p>
<p>^ I agree.</p>
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<p>Yes. They should continue those outreach efforts and increase them. But the key word is “exceptional”. Harvard wants to and needs to find the diamonds in the rough and bring them to Cambridge and give them the opportunity so that the world won’t miss out on what brilliant and talented people can offer. These outreach efforts have nothing to do with trying to decrease socio-economic disparities.</p>
<p>Even if Harvard switched to admitting ONLY Pell Grant recipients, there are not enough spots at Harvard to make a meaningful change in the higher education opportunities available to the poor or to make a significant change in socio-economic inequities.</p>
<p>The article asserts that 62% of Amherst transfers are recruited from community colleges. Well gee, considering Amherst only admits about 10 transfers a year, that adds up to about 13 community college kids (out of 1600) with their feet on the ground at any given time.</p>
<p>This:</p>
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<p>…and I wanted to loop this back into the discussion of nurture “versus” nature. I.m.o., mythmom’s post #99 nails it. Like me, mythmom sees where the rubber meets the road, in the classroom. Academic achievement, let alone academic motivation, is hardly determined by IQ, even if everyone could agree on a supposedly “objective” measurement of intelligence quotient. IQ data is not predictive of academic performance because so much goes into academic performance: environment (big time), personality (more important than many of you possibly realize or have considered?), and effort (work!). Mythmom’s anecdotes illustrate the convergence of these, but I have a zillion more examples, positive and negative, to support the experience of those who teach.</p>
<p>My birth family is a perfect example: a mother who not only had a genius IQ, without exaggeration, but was academically-oriented, to say the least. Our house looked like an annex of some illustrious university’s library. In fact, it was rather intimidating to keep up with her, if you, as a child, were also academically inclined by preference/personality. My sister had some learning disabilities which were never diagnosed but which are clearly in place even today. She is not book-smart; she is practical-smart and has made herself successful by hard work; she also, with her ego, had no interest in competing with our mother, which would have been a losing proposition for her.</p>
<p>My older brother had two physical birth defects due to my Mom’s rubella when he was in utero. He also has some emotional/psychiatric manifestations of unknown cause, which affect his ability to think expansively and to imagine (his two sisters have observed). (Imagination and intellectual risk are incredibly important elements of learning and achieving.) </p>
<p>Younger brother and I were the academics. Please no one here even think of telling me that he and I were not severely advantaged in being raised in a household with such a mother, who walked around the house routinely reciting Shakespearean soliloquies, excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s poetry, etc. The kitchen was filled with graduate-level literary references; when we watched t.v. it was mostly highbrow; magazines included those that appeal to the intelletual elite, the culturally-inclined, and the well-informed; and our dinner table discussions (including my Dad with his own 4-year top university education, and an amazing vocabulary) were ones William F. Buckley would have enjoyed. Whenever any of us, (if ever!) at any time of day or location, made a grammatical error in speech, we were immediately corrected by one of our parents. </p>
<p>It was both implicitly and explicitly assumed that younger bro’ and I would go not only to college, but a fine college, and continue to excel there. And due to our desire to perform academically early in life, were also allowed to attend very selective private high schools. So in this mini-lab one saw several dynamics developing:</p>
<p>(1) exceptional genes, while unevenly distributed (as often occurs, other posters here noting that)
(2) intellectually rarefied environment as an option for those who wished to exploit that
(3) a differentiation of personalities and physiological givens, resulting in different outcomes within that same environment
(4) the effect of spoken assumptions about futures on the outcomes of those futures</p>
<p>Then I will add the instructional component, which in my family’s case existed both in the home and in the schools. Hey: coming home after school merely accelerated the learning, and I don’t mean in a “drill” way; quite the opposite: in a deeply thinking way. Not only were the site public schools 3-4 times as good in the critical thinking curriculum they delivered (versus today, in the same/similar locations), but my family’s discussions were extended lessons in critical thinking. </p>
<p>Undoubtedly lots of people on CC had similar experiences – although perhaps not as extreme as the case of my mother. But my home environment was 180 degrees of what most low-income environments are today – which, if I had not attended such wonderful k-12 schools – would have helped me envision college and prepare for college much better than many low-income students now. (We were not low-income but middle-income, with rather high-income cultural & intellectual tastes, and our disposable income purchases reflected that.)</p>
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<p>The actual number may not be great, but the percentage is. The whole mission is to give CC students hope that they can go to a school such as Amherst after starting at a CC, for whatever the reason was. Amherst gives many of the few slots they have each year to non traditional students, including older military. With such a small student body, of course the actual numbers may be small.</p>
<p>^^I just find the whole tone of the article to be a little patronizing, especially, since Marx basically left Amherst at the height of the financial meltdown and, but for a last minute donation from an anonymous donor would almost certainly have had to modify its financial aid policies just as its Little Three sister school, Williams did. If Marx so believed in these policies he should have stuck it out a little longer.</p>
<p>^
Sorry Johnwessley, I don’t agree. President Marx has the right to change tones and go to the NY library if he wishes. The assumption that if the big donor (who is not that anonymous) had not made the donation that the FA would have changed, is complete speculation.</p>
<p>Post #119 is a great story proving 1) that dna dominates as this child had incorrect reading resources until age 12 yet still aced the SAT with only a few years of reading behind her. And 2) how a test proved her intelligence to college admissions not her gpa.</p>
<p>An unusual story but telling as to the importance of IQ and the SAT test in identifying diamonds in the rough.</p>
<p>Ucb, I only text and drive on bancroft:)</p>
<p>Poetrygirl: very very impressive that your daughter scored 2400 on the SAT. There’s. About 2 million kids worldwide who take it each year and less than 100 who get a perfect 2400 score, very impressive!</p>
<p>And telling that almost all 100 perfect score kids apply to stanford and harvard and 75% are rejected…ec’s are key!</p>
<p>And like your daughter my daughter had few resources up to age 12 and then my daughter didn’t really go to school much from 12 to 16, to busy performing, and had no sat prep but managed a 2300. So in my experience with kids like this they will prevail regardless of resources, or more accurately additional resources</p>
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<p>[bolding mine]</p>
<p>…except that colleges, overall (at least in this country) do not agree with you…one reason being that k-12 – or k-10/11/12 – depending on timings of individual test sittings- affects those testing results.</p>
<p>Here is what poetgrl actually said in that post 119, and I will bold for emphasis:</p>
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<p>SAT
Preparation for Section I (Critical Reading) is directly and indirectly taught, well, sort of, or not at all – depending on school and home environments and parental education</p>
<p>Preparation for Section II (Math/Quantitative) is directly and indirectly taught, well, sort of, or barely at all – depending on courses offered in middle and high schools and the methods used to teach those analytical courses, including encouragement of problem-solving approaches outside of textbook templates.</p>
<p>Preparation for Section III (Writing) is directly and indirectly taught, well, sort of, or barely – depending on how early and how well writing is taught in middle and high schools, how much in-class practice is demanded for the persuasive essay.</p>
<p>ACT
More textbook based, as a test. More classroom-oriented, as a test. Thus, overall, quite dependent on quality of student’s k-12 education.</p>
<p>Further, however, the science section very much depends on the student’s exposure to reading of, and application practice with, scientific data. Thus, those students who have been fortunate enough to have lab-based science courses, and/or texts & class discussions which explain that and test that skill, are advantaged in the ACT science section.</p>
<p>Reading is key to all learning, including math. This child doesn’t read until 12 yet aces the SAT. I don’t believe resources are the reason for her test success.</p>
<p>epiphany,
I think you got right to the heart of it. There are many people who with the right environmental conditions—schooling, coaching, practice, diagnosis and proper treatment/accommodation of learning disabilities, time, nutrition, and on and on—would be capable of producing top SAT scores, but who for want of some or all of those do not do as well. It is the height of arrogance for those who do produce top SAT scores under optimal environmental conditions to claim this somehow proves their innate dna-derived superiority.</p>
<p>Anyway, as much of a pain as pacheight is being here, I think he pretty much conceded the argument back in post #119 when, in response to the assertion by BillyMc that the “skills” needed to do well on the SAT “can be genetic; they can also be environmental; they are, in fact, a mixture of both,” pacheight wrote:</p>
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<p>Now apart from the fact that pacheight presents absolutely no scientific evidence for the 80/20 split, that’s still an enormous concession. Think about it. Scores on any section of the SAT range from 200 to 800, a 600-point spread. 20% of that range is 120 points. Even if pacheight is correct that environment counts for “only” 20%, that means environment could account for the difference between an 800 and a 680, or a 750 and a 630. </p>
<p>But that’s probably not even the right way to look at it. Better to look at percentile rank distributions. SAT scores tend to follow a “normal” distribution, heavily clustered around the median score of 500, with long tails above and below that figure. An 800 is represents the 99th+ percentile of test-takers. The 80th percentile—20% lower—is a 600 for SAT CR, 620 for SAT M, and 590 for SAT W. Thus even in pacheight’s made-up world where “only” 20% of the skills needed to do well on the SAT are environmental, there’s effectively no difference between a 600 and an 800 as a measurement of the dna-derived component of those skills. If we go with a 50/50 nature-nurture split (or whatever cognitive science is telling us the figure is these days) there’s effectively no difference between an 800 and a 500—or between a 500 and a 200. </p>
<p>That’s not to say the SAT has no value in telling us something about academic preparedness, which presumably requires both nature and nurture. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it tells us anything about innate dna-derived “intelligence,” because your 800 could reflect the same genetic endowment as someone else’s 600 (on pacheight’s ungenerous 80/20 split) or someone else’s 500 (on evidence from cognitive science).</p>
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<p>“No value”? 
I think that’s one of its chief values. But that was my point exactly. Academic preparedness is the fruit of three factors: inborn IQ, quality of school-based academics relative to the test in question; home environment (especially parental education). </p>
<p>I am also not even accounting for the subtraction due to accommodated or unaccommodated LD, or the addition due to coaching. (Keep in mind that there are some test-prep companies that engage in a practice which many of us in education find highly unethical: spoon-feeding customers complete Essay Responses based on an expected array of prompts, and having those students memorize 5 such complete essays. It’s not hard to do, given the formula-based expectations for the essay elements. It explains why many students who otherwise struggle with writing – or at least are not talented in writing – can pull off an 800 on the essay.)</p>