Hmmm…
Math teacher Bowman Dickson has gathered some statistics on the frequencies of various words used by teachers of various subjects in their report-card comments on high-school students. Here’s one of his charts:
The phrase “more common” in the data above is short for “how many times more common than the average word.” (I think there are a couple of typos in the chart: “matures” should probably not have an “s” at the end, and “regine” should be… hmm, what should it be? “refined,” maybe, which appears elsewhere in DIckson’s article?) Anyway, one caveat: the data come all from a single school, a well-known private school in D.C. (not the school in Jordan described elsewhere in Dickson’s blog, which is where he used to teach). So I don’t know how representative the data are, but they still raise a bunch of thorny questions. Read the entire article for lots more data, statistics, and analysis.
Free quiz for the extra-attentive and resourceful reader:
- What’s the name of the private school in D.C.?
- Which of my classmates attended that school?
Categories: Teaching & Learning
Learning Strategies 