A new abroad adventure awaits!

I still cannot believe it is towards the end of July already! Wow. Where has the summer gone??! The heat here in Washington, DC has been unbearable, but I've been trying to make the most of it. Unfortunately, the idea of running long in 105 degree heat and humidity is usually not my top choice for a leisure activity. Hello, cross training!

Tomorrow, I leave for my two-week adventure in South Korea! I will be teaching and volunteering at a work camp/school on Jejudo Island, about an hour off the coast of Seoul. This island is supposed to be the "Hawaii of Korea," a place where I am bound to run into many Korean honeymooners, all wearing matching outfits! The island is supposed to be beautiful, so I am beyond excited!

Now is about the time where I usually freak out on what needs to get packed and done before leaving the States tomorrow. I am not a procrastinator by any means, but packing for abroad trips is often an overwhelming experience I try to avoid when possible. I have my packing list made and know what exactly I need to take with me. Now it's just a matter of getting it done!!

Many people have asked me why I would want to go on this journey alone. Why not travel with a colleague or friend? Originally, one of my colleagues was supposed to join me, but she had to back out due to financial constraints. Boo! Knowing me, though, I will hopefully meet some other great volunteers from multiple countries. I am extremely independent, self-sufficient, and open-minded, traits that will probably come in handy in Korea. Seeing as the age range for this volunteer experience in 18-35, I could very well be the "grandma" of the group. Fingers crossed that this is not the case!

South Korea is a beautiful country, and I am thrilled to finally have a chance to experience its culture, language, and people. Half my time there will be spent with younger Korean children, and the other half will be with the adolescents. It is our job to help lead lessons/activities, introduce our respective country's culture and language to them, and essentially, as a recent informational email called it, "be their friend." This is essentially the opposite of how I'm used to acting around students, so this should be interesting! We were asked to bring gifts for the children, a used item for our second-hand "peace sale," favorite recipes, and an ingredient for one of those recipes. Very cool!

So, here I go on a new abroad adventure that is bound to be full of fun, laughs, learning, and an all around memorable experience. I'll be sure to document everything carefully via camera and journal. Talk to you in August!!

Caught in the Middle -- and Loving It

Many people burst out laughing when I tell them I teach middle schoolers. "Why on earth would you want to teach those animals?" they ask. My reply, "They are the ones who need good teachers the most."

I remember hating middle school and feeling very uncomfortable with myself as a young adolescent. I struggled with my body image, self-esteem, self-worth, and desire to fit in and be accepted by my peers, as so many teens today do. I have always believed that the middle school years are among the most important and formative for students, as they are so impressionable and vulnerable at this age.

Consequently, I was not the least bit surprised to find a well-written article entitled "Caught in the Middle" in the Education Update newsletter I received in the mail from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, a professional organization I belong to. Arguing that the middle grades seek a bigger stake in school reform debate, the author explains how grades 5-9 are among the most pivotal in students' academic careers. Thus, they must be a key element of school reform. I could not agree more.

Unfortunately, in recent years, middle school reform has not received the kind of attention it deserves; the funding and focus often went to the early elementary grades or high school reform efforts. Middle schoolers truly are caught in the middle. According to the June 2009 National Middle School Association report "Putting Middle Grade Students on the Graduation Path," a sixth grade student who fails to pass language arts or math, attend school at least 80 percent of the time, or have good behavior will have only a 10-20 percent change of graduating high school on time. Wow. So many of my own students' faces describe these statistics perfectly, too many in fact.

Advocates of middle school reform want policy makers to recognize how vital and critical middle schools are in preparing and motivating students for high school work and graduation. These young adolescents have very specific emotional and academic needs, and any effort to improve student performance must include targeted measures for meeting their learning and developmental needs during this crucial time in their lives. Focus areas at this level, educators argue, should include academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity. We must have high expectations for ALL of our middle school students while treating students fairly and consistently, which is no easy task.

Other key middle school practices such as teacher teaming tend to strengthen these adolescents' learning and personal development. Students can also benefit from having the same guidance counselor all three years of middle school, a practice we feel strongly about at my school.

No matter what specific teaching strategies or school-wide practices are apparent at a given middle school, one thing is certain -- an emphasis on high-quality, rigorous instruction that expects all students to produce high-quality work will help create high-achieving middle schools whose graduates are fully prepared for the volume and diversity of work to come in high school, college, and beyond.

The full article is available at www.ascd.org. 

Where does the summer go?

I recognize it has been longer than usual since my last post, and for that, I apologize. Every year, I am mind-boggled at how quickly and swiftly the summer seems to fly by. Many of my non-teaching friends will lightheartedly harass me at having the entire summer off, but this summer is far from relaxing, boring, or ordinary for me.

Since closing out the final marking period and boxing up my classroom on June 17, I have been very busy and have accomplished quite a bit, both personally and professionally. I immediately completed a rigorous three-day course to earn Confidence Course certification, which will allow me to lead the Confidence Course workshops with the Grade 6 Outdoor Education program this fall (and in future years!). This program builds trust, confidence, creativity, cooperation, discipline, and teamwork among the sixth grade students, a process I am honored and excited to be a part of.

I have also spent several summer days in my school building beginning to prepare for the new school year. Many changes will be present this fall, including a new co-team leader, new assistant principal, several new staff members, the loss of former treasured colleagues, and the beginnings of an enormous three-year building renovation. Change is never easy, but I am trying to keep the most positive attitude and open mind possible about what lies ahead.

The last weekend in June, I ran my seventh marathon of the year with a colleague, whom I have lured into running marathons with me (!), in Charlevoix, Michigan. My goal is 12 marathons in 12 months this year, and hey, I am already over half of the way there! We enjoyed driving through most of the state of Michigan, a place much more beautiful and friendly than anticipated.

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a process management conference, which proposed a new way to problem solve and collaborate in a professional learning community. I look forward to seeing how my school's leadership team implements such processes with our decision making sessions this coming school year.

With other secondary English teachers in the county, I also had the opportunity to participate in two days of range-finding. In these sessions, we examined, scored, and discussed numerous eighth grade student writing samples to determine holistic rubric scores (out of a possible 5 points). I discovered that I tend to be a tougher grader of students' writing, which I am proud of. I want to hold all of my students to high standards and expect to see their best work on paper with each assignments.

Last week, I had the chance to visit my family up north and spend some quality time with my mother, who is a true inspiration for me. I enjoyed trading teaching stories with my uncle, who has been teaching high school social studies for over 30 years. While his population is far more "White" than mine, we still deal with many of the same challenges and frustrations on a daily basis. My family really wanted me to open up about my students and what it is like to teach crazy middle schoolers; I was more than happy to oblige.

This week, my school's leadership team is meeting all day every day to prepare for the year ahead. Thus far, the experience has been much more meaningful, beneficial, collaborative, and honest than in prior summers. Since my principal received essentially a vote of "no confidence" from the majority of her staff by the end of last year, she knew things needed to change, as did her immediate supervisors and our building's union representative. To her credit, she had the courage and bravery to bring in two consultants from the county to listen to us vent ALL of our concerns about what is happening in our school in the room without administration present.

Today, we came back altogether to review what these concerns are and participate in a wide variety of team building activities that revealed our true selves, backgrounds, and authentic experiences with race, equity, and learning. The result? We found ourselves learning a great deal about everyone else and realizing that everyone's "truth" is valuable and real, however different it may be from our own reality.

Truthfully, I am now more hopeful than ever that positive change is possible in our school and that our principal is willing to do whatever it takes to regain and rebuild our trust in her. This will not be an easy road, but no difficult process ever is. We will be tested as leaders of our school who represent the best interests of our students and teams of teachers. We will be asked to step outside our comfort zones and have the courageous conversations we would much rather NOT have. And most importantly, we will be charged with modeling the kind of teaching and leading we value and deem important for others to use in their classrooms.

Are we ready for this challenge? I certainly hope so.

A Better Way to Assess Teachers?

It is no surprise that many teachers grimace when they hear the Obama administration propose "pay for performance" mandates. This administration's Race to the Top program calls for just that, for teachers to be evaluated based on their students' test scores. Intrigued and anxious about this idea, I stumbled across a well-written but controversial article in The Washington Post last week that discusses this issue. I have to say that I agree with most of Michele Kerr's points, though I do see why so many readers had issues with her logic and seeming lack of emotional intelligence. Where do you stand?


The right way to assess teachers' performance

By Michele Kerr
Friday, June 18, 2010; A27 



The Obama administration's Race to the Top program demands that teachers be evaluated by student test scores. Florida's legislature passed a bill in April to end teacher tenure and base pay increases on test-score improvement; although Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed that attempt, legislatures in Colorado, New York, Oklahoma and other states have also modified regulations regarding tenure with an eye toward Race to the Top. Teachers protest, but they are dismissed as union hacks with lousy skills, intent on protecting their cushy tenured jobs because they could never cut it in the real world.


I'm a first-year, second-career high school teacher, a "highly qualified" teacher of math, English and social science, a standing I achieved by passing rigorous tests. I'm not a union fan, nor am I in favor of pay increases based on seniority or added education. Like many new teachers throughout the country, I was pink-slipped and am looking for work, so I don't have a cushy job to protect.


I'm not your typical teacher. But I believe I speak for many teachers when I say I'm willing to be tested on student performance, provided certain conditions are met. So let's negotiate.


I propose that:


(1) Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance.
Without the missing students, the tests won't yield a complete picture of learning. But the tests' purpose is to yield a picture of teaching, which isn't the same thing as learning. Teachers can't teach children who aren't there.


Results will reveal that many students miss this attendance requirement. Put that problem on the parents' plates. Leave it out of the teaching assessment.


(2) Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis.
Two to three students who just don't care can easily disrupt a class of strugglers. Moreover, many students who are consistently removed for their behavior do start to straighten up -- sitting in the office is pretty boring.


Yes, teachers could misuse this authority. But if teachers are evaluated by student learning, they must have control over classroom conditions. Then the administration can separately decide what to do with constantly disruptive students or those teachers who would rather remove students than teach them. But keep the issue away from measuring student performance; leave it as a personnel call.


(3) Students who don't achieve "basic" proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.


Students who can't prove they know algebra can't take geometry. If they can't read at a ninth-grade level, they can't take sophomore English -- or, for that matter, sophomore-level history or science, which presumes sophomore-level reading ability.


Not only is it nearly impossible for these students to learn the new material, but they also slow everyone else as the teacher struggles to find a middle ground. By requiring students to repeat a subject, we can assess both the current and the next teacher based on student progress in an apples-to-apples comparison.
If Race to the Top is to have meaning, we have to be sure that students are actually getting to the top, instead of being stalled midway up the hill while we lie to them about their progress.


(4) That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard -- the so-called value-added assessment.


I suspect that my conditions will go nowhere, precisely because they are reasonable. Teachers can't be evaluated on students who miss 10 percent of the class or don't have the prerequisite knowledge for success. Yet accepting these reasonable conditions might reveal that common rhetorical goals for education (everyone goes to college, algebra for eighth-graders) are, to put it bluntly, impossible. So we'll either continue the status quo at a stalemate or the states will make the tests so easy that the standards are meaningless.


Yes, some students are doing poorly because their teachers are terrible. Other students are doing poorly because they simply don't care, their parents don't care, their cognitive abilities aren't up to the task or some vicious combination of factors we haven't figured out -- with no regard to teacher quality. No one is eager to discover the size of that second group, so serious testing with teeth will go nowhere.


That's too bad. We need to know how many students are failing because they don't attend class, how many students score "below basic" on the algebra test three years in a row, how many students fail all tests because they read at a fourth-grade level. We need to know if our education rhetoric is a pipe dream instead of an achievable reality blocked by those nasty teachers unions. And, of course, if it turns out that all our problems can be solved by rooting out bad teachers, we need to find that out, too.


So if we're going to evaluate teachers based on student results, let's negotiate some reasonable terms -- and let's not flinch from whatever reality those terms reveal.


The writer, a Stanford teacher program graduate, taught geometry, algebra and humanities at Oceana High School in Pacifica, Calif.


Full article and readers' comments available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/17/AR2010061704565_pf.html

"Small Schools" -- Worth the Money?

It is no shock to any public educator that students tend to experience a great deal more of academic and personal growth with smaller teacher-student ratios. While the "small school" movement has lessened in popularity due to sheer costs of maintaining additional faculty members, the article below provides an interesting perspective on the effectiveness of smaller, more personal high schools. Sure, it is wonderful to provide students with options for attending high schools, especially for those who want to escape the anonymity of larger, much less personal high schools, but is the expense worth it? And can the cost of all those extra administrators and other support staff truly be justified? What do you think

Study Finds Success in NYC's 'Small Schools'

By Debra Viadero

At a time when reformers and philanthropists have largely turned their back on the “small schools” movement, a major study of New York City high schools has found that students are more academically successful in smaller, more personal high schools that they choose for themselves than they are in larger, more traditional schools.

The report released last night by MDRC, a New York-based research group, focuses on the 1.1-million-student school system’s effort from 2002 to 2008 to shut down 20 large, failing high schools and replace them with 200 smaller schools where students might be more likely to receive the attention they need. Researchers found that students who ended up in the small schools were more likely than peers in other kinds of city high schools to be on track by 9th grade to graduate in four years, to stay on track for three more years, and graduate from high school on time.

“This is the first convincing evidence that the ‘small schools’ model can be effective at improving student outcomes,” said Brian Jacob, a professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It’s incredibly important.” Mr. Jacob advised the researchers on an early version of the study.

The new study was financed by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was an enthusiastic early supporter of New York City’s small-schools initiative and others around the country.

Sparse Evidence

Like New York, many districts in the late 1990s and the early 2000s began to replace large, comprehensive high schools with smaller schools.

Many such efforts were spurred by the Gates Foundation, which poured nearly $1 billion into small-schools programs before deciding in 2008 to move in a new direction after some of those efforts proved disappointing. (The Gates Foundation provides funding to Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.)

One such disappointment was the high-profile closing of Denver’s Manual Arts High School, which closed in 2006, after persistent, poor academic performance.

And the handful of studies up until now on the topic of small schools were mostly descriptive or anecdotal.

“Nobody really had strong systematic evidence about the effects of those schools,” said Gordon L. Berlin, MDRC’s president. Mr. Berlin and others said the new study is important because it tracks a large-scale improvement effort, involves mostly disadvantaged students, and uses a more rigorous research methodology to compare students who were randomly assigned to their top-choice schools with those placed elsewhere or in regular city high schools.

“I hope this will lead to a conversation which involves the re-evaluation of small schools,” said Charles Payne, a social work professor at the University of Chicago. “In the ’80s, the talk about small schools focused on relationships, and that seems to have taken a back seat now to things like turnarounds.”

Use of various “turnaround” strategies to improve troubled schools is a policy prescription heavily promoted by the Obama administration.

But other experts expressed more skepticism about the results of the MDRC study.

“I don’t know how much of this is about choosing and how much is about small schools,” said Amy Ellen Schwartz, a professor of public policy, education, and economics at New York University and the director of its Institute for Education and Social Policy. “What would have happened if students were choosing large schools of choice?”

Home-Grown Schools

The study zeroes in on the 123 small schools that opened in New York City after 2002. Dubbed “small schools of choice” by the researchers, those nonselective public schools all enrolled 550 or fewer students in grades 9-12. Drawing mainly from disadvantaged student populations, most of the schools were located in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

While the schools incorporated a variety of themes, such as coastal studies, sports management, and media studies, all were required to offer features common to the small-schools movement. Such features include an “advisory” period to provide for closer attention by a teacher to a small group of students, partnerships with the local community, and common planning times for teachers.

From these and other schools, 80,000 rising 9th graders each year are required to pick 12 as their top choices. Based on those student lists and schools’ geographic locations, students are then assigned, via a centralized-placement system, to a high school.

When a school is oversubscribed, the system randomly assigns students. The researchers used those “mini-lotteries” to assign students to either control or experimental groups. Randomized studies are considered a powerful means of determining whether an intervention causes an effect because students are not handpicked or self-selected.

Since not every school was oversubscribed, though, the researchers based their findings on a much smaller final sample of 21,000 students, roughly half of whom landed in a top-choice school. The rest attended a mix of other kinds of city schools, some of which were lesser-ranked smaller schools.

Overall, however, the control-group schools were much older and larger than the “small schools of choice.” More than half the students in the comparison group attended schools with more than 550 students, according to the report.

Perspective on Numbers

While the students entering small schools were academically and demographically similar to their control-group peers upon entering high school, they were more likely, by the end of 9th grade, to be on track to graduate, the study found. In the small schools, 58.5 percent of students had passed enough courses to be on the four-year graduation track, compared with 48.5 percent of the students in the control group.

By the end of the fourth year of high school, the graduation rate for small-schools enrollees was 68.7 percent, compared with 61.9 percent for the control-group students. A larger proportion of the small-schools graduates had also earned the state’s Regents diploma, which requires students to earn a higher passing score on state exams.

The researchers also found that the positive effects were similar for students from a variety of subgroups, including minority students, males, and those with a history of poor achievement.

Some researchers disagree, however, on how to think about the 6.8-percentage-point difference in graduation rates between small-schools graduates and their counterparts elsewhere in the city.

Mr. Berlin said the difference is large, given that the results come from randomized studies, which rarely show large effects in education. It’s one-third the size of the graduation-rate gap that separates black and Hispanic students across the city from their higher-achieving white peers.

But David C. Bloomfield, the program head for educational leadership at Brooklyn College and a professor of educational leadership at City University of New York, said the magnitude of the impact was “relatively small for all the attention that has been lavished on these schools.” The small schools all received $400,000 in startup grants over four or five years, as well as technical assistance from intermediary organizations such as New Visions for Public Schools—help that many experts credit as a key to New York City’s good results.

The Gates Foundation, which ultimately invested $150 million in the New York small-schools effort, issued a prepared statement yesterday calling the findings “great news for New York City students and for all school reform efforts dedicated to increasing college-readiness rates and grounded in improving the quality of the interaction between students and teachers inside the classroom.

Honoring Our Military & All Those who Serve our Country!

Last week my aunt passed along a heartwarming true story I immediately knew would be worth posting. While not directly related to my teaching, it reminds me of the constant sacrifice on the part of all our armed forces to ensure our safety every day. This year, I taught many students whose parents are veterans, currently serving abroad, or work in a nearby army hospital. This one's for you!

------


The airline captain writes: My lead flight attendant came to me and said, "We have an H.R. on this flight." (H.R. stands for human remains.) "Are they military?" I asked.

'Yes', she said.
'Is there an escort?' I asked.
'Yes, I already assigned him a seat'.
'Would you please tell him to come to the flight deck? You can board him early," I said.

A short while later, a young army sergeant entered the flight deck. He was the image of the perfectly dressed soldier. He introduced himself and I asked him about his soldier. The escorts of these fallen soldiers talk about them as if they are still alive and still with us.

'My soldier is on his way back to Virginia,' he said. He proceeded to answer my questions, but offered no words.

I asked him if there was anything I could do for him and he said no. I told him that he had the toughest job in the military and that I appreciated the work that he does for the families of our fallen soldiers. The first officer and I got up out of our seats to shake his hand. He left the flight deck to find his seat.

We completed our preflight checks, pushed back and performed an uneventful departure. About 30 minutes into our flight I received a call from the lead flight attendant in the cabin. 'I just found out the family of the soldier we are carrying, is on board', she said. She then proceeded to tell me that the father, mother, wife and 2-year old daughter were escorting their son, husband, and father home. The family was upset because they were unable to see the container that the soldier was in before we left. We were on our way to a major hub at which the family was going to wait four hours for the connecting flight home to Virginia.

The father of the soldier told the flight attendant that knowing his son was below him in the cargo compartment and being unable to see him was too much for him and the family to bear. He had asked the flight attendant if there was anything that could be done to allow them to see him upon our arrival. The family wanted to be outside by the cargo door to watch the soldier being taken off the airplane. I could hear the desperation in the flight attendants voice when she asked me if there was anything I could do. 'I'm on it', I said. I told her that I would get back to her.

Airborne communication with my company normally occurs in the form of e-mail like messages. I decided to bypass this system and contact my flight dispatcher directly on a secondary radio. There is a radio operator in the operations control center who connects you to the telephone of the dispatcher. I was in direct contact with the dispatcher. I explained the situation I had on board with the family and what it was the family wanted. He said he understood and that he would get back to me.

Two hours went by and I had not heard from the dispatcher. We were going to get busy soon and I needed to know what to tell the family. I sent a text message asking for an update. I saved the return message from the dispatcher and the following is the text:

'Captain, sorry it has taken so long to get back to you. There is policy on this now and I had to check on a few things. Upon your arrival a dedicated escort team will meet the aircraft. The team will escort the family to the ramp and plane side. A van will be used to load the remains with a secondary van for the family. The family will be taken to their departure area and escorted into the terminal where the remains can be seen on the ramp. It is a private area for the family only. When the connecting aircraft arrives, the family will be escorted onto the ramp and plane side to watch the remains being loaded for the final leg home. Captain most of us here in flight control are veterans. Please pass our condolences on to the family. Thanks.'

I sent a message back telling flight control thanks for a good job. I printed out the message and gave it to the lead flight attendant to pass on to the father. The lead flight attendant was very thankful and told me, 'You have no idea how much this will mean to them.'

Things started getting busy for the descent, approach and landing. After landing, we cleared the runway and taxied to the ramp area. The ramp is huge with 15 gates on either side of the alleyway. It is always a busy area with aircraft maneuvering every which way to enter and exit. When we entered the ramp and checked in with the ramp controller, we were told that all traffic was being held for us.

'There is a team in place to meet the aircraft', we were told. It looked like it was all coming together, then I realized that once we turned the seat belt sign off, everyone would stand up at once and delay the family from getting off the airplane. As we approached our gate, I asked the copilot to tell the ramp controller we were going to stop short of the gate to make an announcement to the passengers. He did that and the ramp controller said, 'Take your time.'

I stopped the aircraft and set the parking brake. I pushed the public address button and said, 'Ladies and gentleman, this is your Captain speaking I have stopped short of our gate to make a special announcement. We have a passenger on board who deserves our honor and respect. His Name is Private XXXXXX, a soldier who recently lost his life. Private XXXXXX is under your feet in the cargo hold. Escorting him today is Army Sergeant XXXXXXX. Also, on board are his father, mother, wife, and daughter. Your entire flight crew is asking for all passengers to remain in their seats to allow the family to exit the aircraft first. Thank you.'

We continued the turn to the gate, came to a stop and started our shutdown procedures. A couple of minutes later I opened the cockpit door. I found the two forward flight attendants crying, something you just do not see. I was told that after we came to a stop, every passenger on the aircraft stayed in their seats, waiting for the family to exit the aircraft.

When the family got up and gathered their things, a passenger slowly started to clap his hands. Moments later more passengers joined in and soon the entire aircraft was clapping. Words of 'God Bless You', I'm sorry, thank you, be proud, and other kind words were uttered to the family as they made their way down the aisle and out of the airplane. They were escorted down to the ramp to finally be with their loved one.

Many of the passengers disembarking thanked me for the announcement I had made. They were just words, I told them, I could say them over and over again, but nothing I say will bring back that brave soldier.

I respectfully ask that all of you reflect on this event and the sacrifices that millions of our men and women have made to ensure our freedom and safety in these United States of AMERICA.

The Dumbing Down of Society......

Politics aside, this article from last week is compelling (and depressing!) from an educational point of view. As an English teacher who constantly emphasizes the importance of knowing high level vocabulary to her eighth graders, the article is also extremely disheartening. What do you think?

----

Language mavens exchange words over Obama's Oval Office speech

By the CNN Wire Staff

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Nearly 2,700 words with little jargon
• People understand spoken and written word differently
• Payack gives Obama "Solid B"

(CNN) -- Language experts weighed in Thursday after poring over the nearly 2,700 words of President Obama's Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster.

"It was straightforward and easy to understand," said Ron Yaros, assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, referring to the explanations of the crisis and its possible solutions. He divided the speech into 1,200 "idea units," each of which represents a point the president was trying to make.

He then looked at how many of those idea units contained jargon -- unexplained terms that the average person might not recognize -- and found none in the 65 idea units that explained the problem.

Of the 417 idea units that discussed what Obama planned to do, "I found only one idea unit that probably would be potentially confusing to a nonexpert. That was the term 'relief well.' He never explained that."

BP is digging a relief well that is expected to intersect with the blown-out well in August. At that point, BP plans to pump heavy drilling fluid into the runaway well, ending the flow.

"If you look at the entire speech, and you look at the amount of jargon, it came out to 1.5 percent," he said.

iReporter:Obama's speech too fuzzy on details

But Obama's speech may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday by Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor.

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Payack, who gave Obama a "solid B." His Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: "That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge -- a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy."

"A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary," Payack recommended. "That's the type of phraseology that makes you [appear] aloof and out of touch."

Yaros disagreed, supporting the quality of the president's explanation for spelling out the efforts under way, even if they have not succeeded in ending the flow.

"He's just trying to be transparent," Yaros said. "We can't cure cancer, but I'm comforted to know that the best researchers in the nation are devoted to finding a cure."

Payack found these three sentences insensitive: "Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it is not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years."

"You shouldn't be saying that in Katrina-land," said Payack, referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast. "New Orleans lost a third of its population [to evacuees who did not return]; it's still recovering."

But he praised Obama's phrase "oil began spewing" as active and graphic.

Obama's nearly 10th-grade-level rating was the highest of any of his major speeches and well above the grade 7.4 of his 2008 "Yes, we can" victory speech, which many consider his best effort, Payack said.

"The scores indicate that this was not Obama at his best, especially when attempting to make an emotional connection to the American people," he added.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence "added some difficulty for his target audience," Payack said.

Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, was unimpressed with Payack's criticism of the sentence length.

"I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster," Liberman wrote on his blog.

"Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3,283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!"

Yaros challenged the value of Payack's analysis. "There's a tremendous amount of difference between analyzing the written word and interpreting the spoken word," said Yaros, a former science reporter who studies how to make complex topics understandable.

Payack acknowledged Thursday in a telephone interview that his analysis is indeed based on a written version of the speech, but said that does not necessarily render it invalid. "With the internet, probably as many people read the transcript as heard it," he said. "To think it's not read and analyzed by tens of thousands of bloggers is looking at the old model."

Yaros countered that he doesn't just count words and sentences, but instead measures the audience's comprehension of news content.

Liberman said the "grade level" calculation had been debunked as "a mindless bit of math" that does not take into account the skill with which words were chosen or delivered.

Yaros, too, declined to rank the speech by grade level. "In my opinion, placing a 'grade level' on 2,698 written words that are spoken (with a variety of delivery aspects such as pauses, emphases) does NOT accurately represent the importance of clear explanations about the KEY information presented in the speech," he said in an e-mail.

"In other words, I could confuse you with my introduction and conclusion, but if -- in the middle of my talk -- I specifically addressed and answered your concerns, then I have adequately communicated what you CARED about."

Full article and video of Obama's speech is available at:  

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/06/16/obama.speech.analysis/index.html?hpt=C1