Educating through actual educating

Once again City Journal has a fabulous article. This on the education researcher Ed Hirsch, probably best known for his "What Every XXX Grader Needs To Know" books.

Hirsch was not originally an ed research, he started as a chemist, but fell into the field after looking at why some college students have an easier time learning than others. The answer he found was pretty fundamental: the students who had more knowledge found it easier to acquire new knowledge than students with less knowledge.

[ City Journal. "E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy" ] In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction)

The author of the article points out how education tends to work these days:

Parents saw Hirsch’s call for a coherent grade-by-grade curriculum as an answer.

I was one of those parents. My children were students at P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School. Our school enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s education jewels, and parents clamored to get their kids in. But most of the teachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. I once asked my younger son and some of his classmates, all top fifth-grade students, whether they knew anything about the historical figure after whom their school was named. Not only were they clueless about the military leader who delivered the final blow that brought down America’s slave empire; they hardly knew anything about the Civil War, either. When I complained to the school’s principal, he reassured me: “Our kids don’t need to learn about the Civil War. What they are learning at P.S. 87 is how to learn about the Civil War.”

Read the whole article, it's very good.

With this in mind, I picked up the "Kindergartener" and "First Grader" books of his and looked through them with our 4th grader and history in mind. She pretty much learned the Kindergarten book, but apart from the stuff on Ancient Egypt in the First Grader book--a subject she has been very interested in and has been a great self-learner, I think she doesn't know most of that book. Not to mention the Second, Third, and Fourth grader books.

Today, we read the Ice Age section and the Egypt section together. Tomorrow we'll do Mesopotamia and the three major monotheistic religions. After that, we get to what I think she needs most--American History, of which she knows next to nothing. Mind you this is a girl that can go on at length about how Emilia Earhart grew up and how she played with her friends and siblings, but I asked her yesterday if she knew who Magellan was and she didn't have a clue--he's a dead, white man, you see.

I'll start looking at what to go over with our second grader soon too.

A new talent emerges

So, we know Steven has at least one real talent: the ability to concentrate and persevere to get a big Lego project done. This week we discovered a new outlet...

This summer he went to UCLA tech camp for two weeks (actually called ID Tech camps by Internal Drive) The first week was a make-your-own-video-game class, which was beyond him in two ways: he's not very computer savvy, and he had pretty much never played or shown much interest in video games before the class. (This was before we got a Wii and he became addicted to the game de Blob (more on that later.)) His evaluation from that week was pretty generic:

Steven you have an amazing imagination! You had fantastic ideas for your game and I wish we had more time to complete them all. I love how you created all your own characters and customized your obstacles. I hope you come back so you can continue using your creative talents. Way to go this week. Have a fun summer and I hope to see you back at iD next year!

The second week was about making comic books and things like that with a computer. Steven got the idea, instead, to make a claymation, stop-motion movie instead. Tuesday night at about 6:30, he and his mom started making figures and a set made out of a box. He wanted to make a movie based on the Wii game de Blob. On Wednesday (with half the week over) he took one of our old digital cameras to camp and started putting together the movie. He took probably around 300 pictures the first day, and probably about the same number the second day. Everything got put together and the councilors added music and made it into a DVD. He did a really amazing job. This is the write up from the second week:

Steven, thank you for allowing me a window into the genius that dwells within you. Admittedly when you first described what you wanted to do, I was initially skeptical. Then again, so were the Fox executives when George Lucas pitched Star Wars. We all know how that turned out. From the exquisitely modeled de Blob characters to the painstaking art of taking hundreds of pictures, your stop-motion animation is an absolute masterpiece. I am extremely proud of you for sticking to your vision and truly creating your own adventure. You showed great diligence, always working on your project without prompting, even during our activities! As Palpatine said to Skywalker in Episode 1 of Star Wars, "we expect great things from you!" To next summer - and beyond!

A really great evaluation!

His councilor recommended he take a digital photography class and a movie editing class. He also said he had never seen a 7-year-old work the way Steven did.

I'd love to show you the movie, but the disk is in a format that I need to covert to something usable. I'll do what I can to post when I figure out how to work with an IVO file.

Here's the video:



I just did a quick count and their seems to be roughly 35 frames for every 10 seconds. That makes 570 images in total!!! All done in 2 days at camp.

The end is nigh

I've mentioned before (and here) that I believe the next big bubble to burst--and one completely deserving of that bust--is college education.

Here's another article which gets to the heart of the reason why this one is ripe for poppin':

[ By Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association ] Here are some hard facts most colleges will never tell you and most parents could not tolerate hearing. The general requirements of the first two years at most colleges are what high school should have been. That is what junior should have learned had he not been busy getting high, getting drunk, and being socially promoted.

Better high schools frequently use the same textbooks for the mandatory requirements that are used in the first two years of college. If a high school draws from the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, the courses will be more demanding than the first two years of most colleges.

[...] My neighbor’s daughter was valedictorian of her class at an elite, private high school. She enrolled in engineering only to find that there were lots of valedictorians. School was demanding. At the computer center in the middle of the night, she could find her classmates designing programs or doing homework.

In contrast, a hundred yards away on the liberal arts campus, a valedictorian would have been as rare as a student who didn’t download a term paper from the Internet. Here most students were seeking majors that put no premium on analytical skills or cumulative knowledge. The equivalent of writing computer programs as a hobby would have been reading a good newspaper or journal of opinion. But few of these students read anything, including the class assignments.

The author's recommendation: If your kid is studying something real, like math, science or engineering, don't worry. If they're studying fluff, send your kids to community college for the first two years, then, if they get through that, transfer to a 4-year. That saves money, and makes sure that the kids who will never graduate anyway don't spend 4 years and $100,000 partying.

And, if that doesn't work out, here's more good advice from the author: buy the kid a franchise with the money you would have spent on college. Set them up in business and a career. It is far more cost-effective and a better learning experience than anything they could get in college.

My bottom line: college isn't worth the money anymore. All it is a 4 years of partying with a little social networking thrown in, and thrown up upon.

Cross posted at Saltzafrazz.

No irony here

In a story about a college kid forming a men's group on campus:

[ Chicago Tribune ] Jessica Pan, president of Women in Business and a fourth-year student, questioned whether Men in Power's goals were being met by existing student groups.

"I'm not sure we really need another student organization that focuses on pre-professional development for men," Pan said, noting that, in just the area of business, there were five or six students groups that were gender-neutral.

Women in Business: You go girl!!!
Men in Power: Horror!!!

Falcon Update #26

So, here it is:



Really, really amazing.

I just made him a TShirt at Zazzle. On the front is that picture with the words "Lego Master!!" above it, and on the back:

5,195 pieces
307 pages
30 days
1 six year old boy
1 completed Ultimate
Collector's Edition
Millenium Falcon

We went out last night for ice cream and donuts at the Farmers Market. He had 2 donuts and 2 scoops of ice cream. I think the sugar crash gave him nightmares at around 11:30.

This morning, he woke up saying "I didn't finish it!"

And now, he is having regrets. He said this morning that he still wanted to work on it, and he's sorry it's over.

Falcon Update #25

Done

Done

Done!!!!!

He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!
He did it!

Falcon Update #25

Page 300...

Falcon Update #24

Page 298...

Falcon Update #23

Page 296...

Falcon Update #22

The end is really, really, really in sight now!!

I just filled 30 cups, which is the number Steven insisted I fill yesterday, and that's the end of them!!!

All the pieces are now in cups. There were a handful of leftovers, and I had to grab 2 pieces out of the garage Lego supply. Both were probably mistakes from earlier. For example, I had a 3-dot long piece leftover, but had to get a similar 4-dot long piece from the stash. That probably means a 4 piece was used somewhere it shouldn't have been earlier.

Tonight, very likely, we will see the end of the Falcon project!!

I talked to his teacher today, and she does want us to bring it all in. Yay!!! Share day is Wednesday.

Falcon Update #21

It was a 22 page day, to get to 284. Only 23 pages to go!!! The cock pit is complete now.

92.5% of the Falcon is done!!!!

Falcon Update #20

He did only about 1 page on Friday and only 3 or so on Saturday, and started Sunday on page 252.

However, he also sprained his ankle yesterday--quite badly, it was very swollen last night and it's hard for him to walk on today--which means he's not going to be up and running around much today. He's already done several pages, and is almost out of cups. He's working on the cladding on the back of the top, and has most of that done. There are a couple more cladding pieces in the middle and over the cock-pit, but after that, it's just adding some extra detail and he's done.

I haven't posted pictures in a while, but here are some:

May 6:





May 12:



May 16:

Falcon Update #19

Wow. He did pretty well tonight. He got half of page 248 done, which means we are now at 59 pages to completion!!!

Of course, we've been letting his homework slide since the project began...he didn't do his reading at all tonight. He's supposed to do at least 20 minutes of reading.

Falcon Update #18

(oops, posted this over on Saltzafrazz by accident!)

He did pretty well yesterday. He made it to page 217, and that included 3 pages he had to repeat to make the one for the other side of the ship.

Today, with a little time left (but he hasn't done his reading for homework yet), he's through page 228. He's built part of the cockpit which hangs off the starboard side of the ship. Very cool. I've laid out the pieces in cups to get him through page 241.

79 pages to go!!!!

Update: He did more! He's on page 234, with only 73 pages to go! I just did the math, and he's 76% of the way there!!! WOW! It's the home stretch! Or at least, we're entering the final turn.

Falcon Update #17

Pretty good progress on Sunday, passing the psychological barrier of "100 pages left!!!" He made it to page 207, with all of the bottom now complete, and the cladding on the upper side of the forward arms done.

He was grumpy all day yesterday, refusing to eat anything does that to him, but he still made progress. I haven't posted any pictures lately, mainly because all the work has been on the underside, and one day's picture looks just like the next. Now that he's back working on the top, that will change.

The best thing is that a number of piece piles have been disappearing, as he uses up the last of some types of pieces. Several of the plastic bags have been emptied as well as some of the cups, and there aren't nearly the number of piles on the table anymore.

We had to cordon off the dining room on Saturday for his sister's birthday party. The sign read: "Only Wookies and generals in the rebel army allowed beyond this point." To which he replied: "It's rookies, not Wookies." I corrected him, but since he has never watched the original movies, he really doesn't even know what he's building.

He thought the Falcon was a really large ship, larger than the Death Star. I told him it was actually a small ship, but that it was the fastest.

Falcon Update #16

Yesterday he did only 6 pages, to go from 181 to 188, but at least he was back in school after two days off for a sore throat and fever.

He's almost done with all of the bottom, then we get to start putting together the top.

I really shouldn't say we, I find the pieces, he puts them together.

Happy Birthday To You!!!

Today is my niece's 9th birthday. Happy Birthday Elizabeth!!!

Falcon Update #15

He made great progress today. He was able to get through 25 pages of the book to make it to page 171. That's about 56% of the way done! Yay!!! He's averaging about 10 pages a day, which will once again put him on track to finish in a month.

Today, the top and bottom gun turrets went on. Actually, only the bottom one is officially on, but the top one is in place and will stay there until it has to be moved out of the way to put on other pieces. I think they had him make it well in advance of it actually being needed. It saves pages in the manual if they pair the two nearly-matching turrets together.

He also made a really good catch of a very old mistake. He was looking at the picture of the whole top of the Falcon, and he caught two missing pieces. He wasn't even really comparing the real Falcon with the picture, but he realized something was missing. We went back and couldn't find where they gave him the instruction to put the pieces on. Just in one picture they are aren't there, and in the next one they are. I figure it's my job to find the mistakes like that, but I missed that one for over a week. I'm really proud of him for figuring it out.

Boy readers. And Percy Jackson

Tech Central Station, which I suppose changed it silly name to the initials TCS a while back (not much of an improvement) reports on boys' reading problems and the fact that they have been scoring substantially below girls on standardized tests for 30 years:

[ TCS ] The good news is that reading scores for 9 and 13-year-olds are the highest ever according to results released this week from the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The bad news is that boys trail girls in reading performance at all age levels. The gap at age 9 is 8 points, at age 13 is 8 points, and at age 17 is 11 points. This is not a new trend—boys have been scoring lower than girls on U.S. Department of Education reading tests for more than 30 years.

The reading gender gap spans every racial and ethnic group, and categorically finds boys underperforming girls regardless of income, disability, or English-speaking ability.

The article talks about one way to change this:

One of the best ways to get boys reading is to offer them reading material that motivates them to want to read. Boys enjoy reading: nonfiction; stories with action and adventure; stories with male protagonists; and a wide variety of reading materials, including books, magazines, newspapers, how-to manuals, Web sites, comic books, and graphic novels.

Many teachers do not offer boy-friendly reading material because they view it as substandard. They believe it's better to require boys to read books that meet high literary standards, even if boys find those books unappealing. The fallacy of this line of reasoning lies in the results:many boys are poor readers.

The consequences of creating future generations of boys who hate to read are far worse than the consequences of succumbing to the natural reading interests of boys. The first priority should be to get boys excited about reading so they will become lifelong readers. Broadening their literary palates comes second.

I've been reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books lately (Lightning Thief, Sea of Monsters, Titan's Curse, Battle of the Labyrinth, and yesterday's release of The Last Olympian.) They are very, very boy friendly. It's all about being a hero (literally), being there to fight beside your friends, fighting the good fight, etc.

I actually had a strange reaction to one thing in the books. The stories revolve around a group of "half-bloods", or in mythological terms: demigods. Kids with one normal, mortal parent, and one god parent...as in Olympian gods, like Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, and etc. The kids are unabashedly referred to as "heroes" throughout the books. Just being a demigod means that it is their place in life to fight monsters and help their god-parents, making them naturally-born heroes.

But I've lived in a post-modern and liberal world all of my life. My high school, college, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, all of it was on the cultural and political left. I think I've been so ingrained against the idea of anyone ever being an unapologetic "hero" that my mind actually skips a step when I see the kids in the books being referred to that way. It's really a sad commentary, I think, that we can no longer simply accept the heroic without qualifying it and without suspicion.

In the end, Percy Jackson proves himself to be a true hero, and even the greatest hero of all the Greek myths. Nearly every feat of every hero from antiquity was thrown at him, and he survived "against all odds." But it is not only his fighting ability that makes him a hero, but two choices he makes in particular (neither is the one from the Great Prophesy.)

Choice #1: I've always felt one of the most powerful stories in Greek mythology was that of Odysseus and Calypso. If you don't remember: Odysseus washes up on Calypso's island. She's beautiful, she's perfect, the island is perfect and peaceful, he could be immortal on the island with her, no more war, no more odyssying around the Med for 10 years. But it isn't enough. He can't stay because he is human. He must strive and struggle and fight if he is to remain human and to remain Odysseus. So, he leaves her and the perfect life behind. In the words of Tennyson:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little

In the books Percy is placed exactly in Odysseus's place. He has the same choice to make, and makes the same one. There is a war going on in the outside world, he won't leave his friends to fight it without him, and he certainly won't leave the girl he cares about out there without him.

Choice #2: (Spoiler Alert!!) The gods, in the end offer to grant Percy one wish. Greek Mythology is filled with heroes acting selfishly, and the point is made again and again in the books that heroes are selfish and not to be trusted in the end. Almost every old hero is held up as wanting from Orpheus to Hercules. But again, Percy passes the test. When he is offered anything, he chooses to use his wish to help others...pretty much stunning the gods by doing that. But he's a complete hero, a superior fighter as well as a friend and honorable young man.

One of the kids we carpool with is a 9.75 year old boy, and he has been reading these as well and loves them. I've given copies to my niece's classroom as well. They are really great boy books. Full of heroism and sacrifice and standing firm against the odds.

I highly recommend them to anyone.

Falcon Update #14

He didn't really do anything yesterday, or if he did, he pulled some of it back apart again because we were insisting he eat something. (He goes weeks where he barely eats, then finally eats everything for 2-3 days, and then stops again. Right now, not only is he at the lowest ebb, he's also got a sore throat and is a bit ill.)

Today he started on page 146 and has done several steps already. He's home sick with a sore throat and a low fever, so he can work on the Falcon today.

And it's his sisters' birthday! Yay!!!

Falcon Update #13

The boy just went to bed, after completing page 141. Not quite half way after 2 weeks.

Still, he took a lot of days off in there, and hasn't really worked very hard on it.

Late Addendum: By the way, we did another major sorting push today. We had three cardboard boxes on the floor with miscellaneous small pieces. I was out of the house for some reason, and my sister was helping the boy find pieces. She got so frustrated, she took out more plastic cups and began sorting again. By the time we were all done, we'd spent about 2 more hours sorting and had filled about 15 cups with pieces. There are only odds and ends and easy-to-find pieces left in the boxes now.

This is why the set is meant for ages 16+, the sorting and hunting parts are the hardest things to do. I think it would be very frustrating for my nephew if he had to do the hunting for all the individual pieces. Even my sister finds it difficult, because she doesn't know which pile to look in or where the piles are.

Falcon Update #12

I think he skipped working on it on Friday night, picked up a few pages Saturday morning to get to page 113. He's building the second forward arm now. But yesterday, instead of building legos, we went to Legoland.

When you buy way too much stuff at the Lego Store, they give you 2 free annual child passes to Legoland. So, the Falcon just saved us $106 in park admission. If we go the park one more time within a year, that will be up to 212! So, we sort of recoup part of the money.

The Big Store at the park had a completed Falcon. It's really cool. A few more weeks, and we'll be there! But, walking through that store, there is very little in there that he doesn't already have. His sister walked out with a little Bionicle, but there wasn't anything there for him to buy.

He's working on it now, and I have the next 15 steps-worth of pieces laid out for him and reading to be assembled. That will get him to page 122. The goal is page 153 for the day--making it the half-way point. We still seem mostly on-track to get this project done in a month.

Falcon Update #11

The full size of this monster is beginning to be apparent. The front-end superstructure just went on, so we now have the forward-most piece on the bow and the backward-most piece on the stern attached. It's 82 centimeters from front to back.

He's through page 107!!!

Yippee!! We're more than a third of the way through!

Free-Range Kids

(Ready for a post not about a Lego kit?)

I ordered the book "Free-Range Kids" today, by Leonore Skenazy. She became famous and infamous for allowing her 9-year-old son to follow a well-traveled route on a subway in New York City by himself!!! She gave him a cell phone, pocket change for a phone call and 20 dollars, assured herself that he knew exactly what train to take and how to ask for help if he needed it, AND LET HIM GET ON WITH IT.

Anyone who has read "The Cricket In Times Square" will recognize Skenazy's kid. In that book, a kid goes across NYC to Chinatown all by himself to find out just how to take care of his pet cricket. No parents hovering around, no chauffeuring parental unit, no adult supervision. And that book isn't that old. The book is so entirely quaint, because no kid these days would be allowed to do what the kid in the book does.

Except maybe Skenazy's kid.

I also have been reading through her entire blog.

Back around September 8, she wrote:

"And so many moms pick their kids up from the bus stop these days, it’s like they’re raising kobe beef. "

And those are kids who live a couple of blocks from the bus stop--in one case she mentions a parent who gets yelled at by neighbors for letting her kid walk to a school which is within sight of their house.

Kobe beef kids. Or maybe fois gras kids. That's what people are raising. Unchallenged, pudgy, doughy, utterly-dependent-until-they're-30 kids.

Falcon Update #10

Yes!
Yes!!
Yes!!!

Afterburners!!

We've come a long way since I last posted a picture. Almost 1/3rd of the way through, with page 92 completed:

Falcon Update #9

About 10 days into this megaproject, and the boy is on page 85 (which included doing the same 4 pages 7 times). All 7 legs are now on, and he is working on piecing the big afterburners section together. He should get that on this evening, but he will be home from school late tonight.

Still, progress is being made. We're getting rid of a lot of the bigger pieces, but still have thousands of tiny pieces left.

Falcon Update #8

No progress on Monday.

The boy was building his own mini-Falcon out of the pieces. The rule was that the pieces could not leave the dining room. Though they often did, I'm pretty sure they are all accounted for.

Falcon Update #7

Lots of progress today. He's built most of the bottom third, including four of the legs on the bottom. The thing now stands up off the table. Also, at least one drivers' wheel has been installed.

It's only 3:45 here, and he's on about page 74.

He has made a goal for himself today, which is helping to keep him focused. He has decided that he wants to put the blue panel of rear afterburners on today. That means another 20 pages, but it looks like he could make that.

If he gets there, the schedule looks like 3 weeks from start to finish.

Sunday Update: After writing the above, I realized that pages 72-75 contained a single set of instructions that needed to be repeated 6 times, for a total of 7 "legs" for the falcon. He made all but two of them before jumping in the pool shortly before bedtime. So, he's not quite past page 75 yet.

Falcon Update #6

Some progress today. He's through page 51. He starting to work on the undercarriage, below the main superstructure. Which means instead of truss-style elements, he's doing more work with plates.

Falcon Update #5

No progress yesterday.

Almost anti-progress, actually. The boy decided he wanted to bring things closer to him, so he undid the clips tying the sheet to the table and pulled.

Lots of piles spilled over and about 50 pieces ended up on the floor.

Took the better part of an hour to get things back where they were.

Falcon Update #4 - B

Finally, some pics:

Building:


And the pieces...more are still in the box, including the thousand or so little teeny tiny ones, and the stacking makes it look less than it is:

Falcon Update #4

He worked on it a bit today. After 4 days, page 46 of 307 in the manual is completed.

At this rate, we're looking at less than a month, and my guess is he will do more on the weekend and tomorrow, when he has more time.

Falcon Update #3

Not much progress, but it was a school night, and the boy spent almost 2 hours in the pool.

Ended up on step 38

End of day 2...Falcon Update #2

After day 2, we're about 1/10th of the way in on page 33. The instructions take 307 pages.

Not bad, considering he hasn't spent a lot of time doing it it.

We have a system, I find the pieces and he puts them together. So far, so good.

End of day 1...Falcon Update #1

He got a late start on the Falcon, and only put together the first 11 steps.

Time marches on...

And so it begins....

My almost-7 year-old nephew has begun working on the biggest Lego kit - The Millennium Falcon - all 5,195 pieces of it.

Unfortunately, the pieces aren't sorted very well, so my sis and I have just spent about an hour and a half trying to organize the pieces.

....the kit is designated for age 16+

Boys and writing

A comment on my last post mentioned that lots of boys seem to claim to have physical pain when they write.

Ralph Fletcher also mentions this phenomenon in his book "Boy Writers" (without adding any suggestions for a solution.)

Our boy has occasionally mentioned his hand was tired, but hasn't done so lately. However, when I watch him write, it becomes clear that he pushes the pencil very hard on the paper. It's hard for him to use a mechanical pencil, for example, because the leads always break.

When I am helping him with homework, I always am telling him to write gently and not to push as hard.

I don't know how many boys who claim hand pain are being overly aggressive with their pencils, but that might account for some of it.

As for our boy, the problem has usually been that he can't think of anything to write. Today, however, he was all excited to get to school so he could finish the book he was working on.

Wait a minute...Reverse that...Thank you.

Because we have a 3rd grade girl, we know, roughly, where our 1st grade boy should be academically. A few months ago, we looked at the school work that he was bringing home and were disappointed.

Much of it was not done. Often what was done was wrong. When things were done wrong, there was no attempt by the teachers to offer instruction or correction.

In short, the work, particularly in writing, was shoddy.

So, my sister asked for a conference. The teacher was able to show her enough other work to satisfy us that he was doing better than the things he brought home led us to believe.

Still, my sister stated her worry that his writing wasn't as good as it should be, and wasn't anywhere near where his sister was at a comparable time.

At that point the teacher said: "Well, he's a boy, and boys aren't as good at writing."

At that point, my sister's jaw just about hit the floor.

Image a teacher saying this: "Well, she's a girl, and girls aren't as good at math."

It would never happen. NEVER. But a first grade teacher with a masters in education spewed the opposite at us.

This is what boys are up against. Expectations that they can't be expected to be as good as girls, a lack of interest in getting them to be as good as girls, and an acceptance of their second class status in the classroom.

No wonder boys are doing so very badly; this stuff starts as soon as they pick up a pencil.

2nd bubble under pressure

I figure the next bubble to burst will be college education. How many parents want to pay for 6 years of partying, or pay to see their kid come out the other side as the next great scholar of gay-minority-womens' studies.

There are signs around here of trouble in the education markets. The acceptance letters went out this past weekend for private high schools in Los Angeles, and surprisingly, I've heard no stories of kids missing out on their first choice. In previous years, only the well-connected or well-heeled got into some of the toniest schools. This year, they're taking everybody.

Why? Well, from talking to fellow grade school parents over the weekend, economic pressures must be hitting these schools hard. We know of several families that are trying to move into areas with acceptable public systems, so they don't have to pay as much for their kids' education, or so they can save their money for high school and college. If that carries over the entire market around here--remember the entertainment industry has been hit hard for years--that means that a lot of spaces are opening up at all these schools, applications are probably down, and acceptance letters are going out in abundance, because schools are worried a lot of families will look at the price tag and the economy and decide it isn't worth it.

My guess is that the exact same thing is going on at the national level with colleges. Only there, they are likely being hit very hard by the tanking of the stock market. All of those education savings accounts are worth about half of what they were a few months ago. Where families might have figured that they had enough to get their kids through a 4-year school, they are now looking at only enough for 2 years. Sorry kid, no private school for you--you're going to State U!

In addition, how many people would choose this moment to take out student loans?

Watch for it in the next few months, as students get their letters and have to make their decisions. Public/cheaper schools are going to be swamped. Private schools will be very worried.

(Cross posted on Saltzafrazz.)

Why "boys being boys" is so damaging

This recession is pummeling undereducated men more than any other group. The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma stands at about 12%, the rate for people with a college degree is about 4%. When you seasonally adjust the numbers, the no-high school unemployment rate tops 14%

A hugely-disproportionate number of undereducated people are men.

Here's a great post on Carpe Diem with the data.

Bottom Line: Women (men) are getting an increasing (decreasing) share of college degrees, and the gap between jobless rates for college grads vs. workers without a high school degree has been widening for the last year. Those two trends could help explain why: a) 82% of the job losses over the last year have been jobs held by males, and b) the gap between the male jobless rate (8.3%) and female jobless rate (6.7%) widened to 1.6% in January, the largest male-female jobless rate gap in BLS history (back to 1948).

I would add a note to say that illegal immigrants compete against this same undereducated demographic more than any other. So, not only are the uneducated losing out in a complex world, they are also getting hit by having more competition for jobs and lower wages because illegals act as "scabs" undercutting wages of legal workers.

Success!

A year and a half ago, on the last day of my nephew's second year of pre-school, just days after his 5th birthday, I began an intensive effort to get him reading, writing and doing basic math. We started with Hooked on Phonics and soon moved on to easy readers. For numbers I used a dot-to-dot generator to get him counting to 100 (see the links on the left), and moved on to workbooks after that.

The goal was straight-forward: to get him to second grade in the 2009-2010 school year. This was made harder by the fact that the school absolutely refused to give him a year of academic kindergarten--while kids just a week or two older got an intensive program of phonics, whole words, writing, math, and fact-based learning. That is what I had to try to replicate at home. My job was to make sure that when he started the 2008-2009 school year, they could not deny that he was capable of doing 1st grade work, thus leading him to 2nd grade next year.

The enrollment contracts for next year arrived in the mail today.

We did it! He's going to 2nd grade next year.

I'm so proud of him for the work he did, however reluctantly, and for being able to learn from a teacher who didn't know what she was doing half the time. (It was hearing the word "sight words" while at the kids' school that got me on the right track. Sight words were what he needed the most, but I had forgotten all about them.)

I know that another family, who we warned about the school's tendency to flunk 6 year olds, was in shock after a parent-teacher conference a few weeks ago. They didn't take the advice we gave them last year to do work outside of school and to be proactive. They trusted the school to educate their kid. Big mistake. Their child will now turn 19 before heading off to college. Our kid will turn 18 just in time for high school graduation.

K versus C

How do you teach a kid which words start with a "k" and which words start with "c". Well, here are two ways:

1. Remember that the combinations "ce" and "ci" make the soft "s" sound, not the hard "k" sound. So, a word spelled "cite" would be pronounced like: site. So, that word must be spelled with a "k": kite. (A similar rule exists for "g": "ge" and "gi" frequently make the soft "j" sound, particularly in the middle of words: eg. engine.) Everything that has a different first vowel starts with a "c".
   
   
2. Just remember: "Hey kid! Kiss the kind king, and keep the key in the kitchen with the kite, and never kick the kitten, the kettle or the kangaroo."

I came up with that phrase this way: I went to the Dolch words* and found the few that start with the hard "k", I also went to the Fry words* and found the hard "k's" there. Then, I added "kid", "kettle" and "kangaroo" from memory.

Kangaroo is obviously the exception, since it has an "a" as leading vowel.

* The Dolch words are a list of words that kids are supposed to be able to sight read at different ages. The list is broken down into Pre-Primary, Primary, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. But the way I see it, a first grader should pretty much know them all.

The Fry list is a bit more interesting. A researcher added up all the words we encounter as adults on a regular basis. Counted each instance of each word and ordered them from most common to least common. What he figured out was that half of all the words we encounter every day are the same 300 words: a, an, the, and, etc. That's the Fry list. I figure that if a kid can sight read those 300 words, reading becomes a snap--a kid already knows half of all the words on the page.

Teaching to the script

City Journal is really a good magazine, and always has interesting articles. At the moment their featured story is on pre-Kindergarten curricula and whether any of it is worth the time. (Studies seem to show that it can be very important for lower-income or low-education households, but that middle to upper income/education kids don't need it.)

From the article:

By age three, the authors [ of this book ] found, children from families headed by parents who were professionals had heard, on average, over 8 million more words than children from welfare families. The kids themselves had spoken over 4 million more words than the welfare children. The oral vocabularies of the professional-family kids exceeded those not just of the children but of the parents of the welfare families. This astonishing language gap has grim consequences: follow-up studies showed that it correlates closely with large deficits in vocabulary and reading ability at age nine—which, in turn, correlate with large deficits in the reading ability, and consequent prosperity, of adults.

That's a pretty sad statistic. So, the question becomes: how do you overcome that sort of a deficit?

Apparently, teachers aren't exactly trying:

We should temper our compassion for the overwhelmed Head Start and pre-K teachers, however, by recognizing that they have not only failed to close the education gap but have done much over the years to widen it. Like those who practiced medicine 200 years ago, most early-childhood educators demonstrate little regard for scientific findings and base their classroom efforts on theories and personal preferences that empirical evidence has repeatedly contradicted.

That sounds like our experience at our school, as well. The "don't tell us the facts, we know what we are doing! (Sit down and shut up!!!)" mentality.

Central to the typical early-childhood educator’s worldview are three ideas: that it’s better for young children to learn through play than through work; that children learn best and are happiest when they can help direct the pace and content of their own learning; and that a child’s mental abilities develop at a natural pace that adults cannot do much to accelerate. If a child fails to learn something, it’s not because the teaching is faulty, in this view [emphasis mine]; it’s because the child is either “learning disabled” or not yet “developmentally ready” to learn it—a notion derived from the theories of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that mental abilities developed in age-determined phases.

[...] The largest experiment ever to compare different approaches to instruction in the early grades [ which you can read about here ] , sponsored by the federal government in the 1970s and known as Project Follow Through, tracked more than 75,000 K–3 students. It found that only one of the nine methods examined—the one least in keeping with educators’ traditional views—had consistently accelerated the academic achievement of poor children. The least successful approaches all shared the prevailing ideas. And if an approach fails in kindergarten, you can bet that it will fail in pre-K, too.

But Follow Through’s results proved too unpopular for the government to act on.

What were these magical results?

The one approach that Follow Through found had worked, Direct Instruction, was created by Siegfried Engelmann, who has written more than 100 curricula for reading, spelling, math, science, and other subjects. [... the teaching program includes ] concepts like relative direction (A is north of B but south of C) and the behavior of light entering and leaving a mirror.

Here is a chart from the Washington Times from the study. DI easily does the best, especially in cognitive development, which no other method managed to improve, and in "basic skills" which did much better than all the rest. (This image is from the here):

[...] Engelmann and two colleagues, Carl Bereiter and Jean Osborn, went on to open a half-day preschool for poor children in Champaign-Urbana that dramatically accelerated learning even in the most verbally deprived four-year-olds. Children who entered the preschool not knowing the meaning of “under,” “over,” or “Stand up!” went into kindergarten reading and doing math at a second-grade level. Engelmann found (and others later confirmed) that the mean IQ for the group jumped from 96 to 121.

That is simply stunning. Early education seems to be about waiting until the kids are "ready", but according to this program, when you actually challenge the kids, they're brains respond remarkably well and their IQ jumps by an amazing 25 points!

In effect, the Bereiter-Engelmann preschool proved that efforts to close the achievement gap could begin years earlier than most educators had thought possible. The effects lasted, at a minimum, until second grade—and likely longer, though studies on the longer-term effects weren’t performed.

Direct Instruction has been proven to work, but it isn't hard to see why teachers must hate it. It is a system where teachers are literally given a script which they are instructed to follow verbatim. It requires very little teaching "expertise" on the part of the teacher, because all of the expertise was needed in writing the scripts. The system relies heavily on student involvement in class-wide question and answers. The teacher tells the students about something, then asks them questions about what she has told them, then builds from there.

Currently, there are only a handful of programs out there which use DI. However, just as the KIPP program is catching on, DI is catching on a little. For one thing, in a district which may not be able to entice high-quality teachers to join their staffs, it doesn't matter that they end up with the dregs of the teaching profession. As long as the teacher follows the script, the class moves along appropriately. Some schools have turned to DI specifically for this reason.

For some reason this finding seems to shock teachers, but I doubt it shocks many parents:

The school also found that kids enjoyed learning “hard things” from adults and gained confidence as they gained skills.

Update: From an article in the Journal-Sentinel about a Milwaukee school that adopted DI (and saw "proficient" or "advanced" kids go from 22% of the school to 57% of the school in a couple of years):

When Direct Instruction was introduced at Siefert, not all the faculty agreed with the move. Some teachers opted to leave the school rather than adopt a method they didn't like.

Now, support among teachers is strong and some say the criticism from teachers elsewhere has given way to questions about what makes it work.

Kelly Collin, a first-grade teacher who now coaches other staff members on how to use Direct Instruction, said: "Teachers resent it because it's so scripted. But is it about me being happy or them (the students) learning?"

Update II: Here's another report/study on DI from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. One of the questions they asked new teachers is whether they had studied DI in teaching school:

Direct Instruction received little emphasis in the professional training of new, first-year, regular-education elementary school teachers responding to our survey. Most of the new teachers had done no study of Direct Instruction at all, and those who reported some study of it nonetheless described themselves as poorly or slightly informed. Second, the new teachers who said they had learned something about Direct Instruction in their training programs apparently did so primarily through observation and practice in student teaching, guided by their cooperating teachers. Regarding on-campus coursework, a small subset of respondents (65 percent of fewer than half of the total sample) said that Direct Instruction had been a topic in some lectures.

These conclusions are noteworthy for several reasons. First, they call into serious question one of the claims most often made by teacher trainers about the importance of university-based teacher training. The claim is that university-based training programs are critically important since they are uniquely well-suited for imparting training based solidly on theory and research, as opposed to the homespun nostrums and expedients that new teachers might otherwise have to fall back upon. Yet the theory and research base for Direct Instruction is for the most part excluded from teacher trainers' scope of reference, despite the fact that the relevant evidence has been disseminated widely and is easily accessible. The exclusion cannot be explained by a lack of time for the study of Direct Instruction in preservice programs. University-based training programs for elementary teachers devote large portions of time to coursework in the teaching of reading and language arts. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, for example, elementary education students complete at least nine credits of coursework on the teaching of reading and language arts; in this coursework and in other required, professional courses, there would be ample opportunity for careful attention to Direct Instruction if it were deemed a priority among teacher trainers. Nor can the exclusion be explained by a lack of interest on the part of new teachers. Once they are introduced to it, new teachers do show an interest in Direct Instruction, as evidenced by the generally favorable attitudes toward it reported by our subjects.

Gender gap

Every time a president is elected who has young children, the big question is: will they send them to the DC public schools? or will they do what every other president has always done and sent them to private school.

I've long thought there was an easy solution to that question. Send the kids to public school...but do it from Camp David. There in rural Maryland is a nice safe family-friendly place to keep your kids--away from the madness of Washington, and within a couple of miles from very fine public schools.

So, I went looking for what the schools are like in that part of Maryland, and I discovered that Maryland very helpfully breaks down their student test scores by gender. The gaps between boys and girls are pretty stark--in both math and reading. (Click on the Male and Female boxes on the right to break it down by gender.)

Here are the results. The numbers are the percentage of kids testing at "proficient" or "advanced"--in other words at grade level or above:

Grade 3:  Math      Reading
Boys..... 81.9      79.7
Girls.... 83.4      86.5
Gap......  1.5       6.8

Grade 4:  Math      Reading
Boys..... 87.6      86.0
Girls.... 89.6      91.0
Gap......  2.5       5.0

Grade 5:  Math      Reading   Science
Boys..... 79.5      84.2       64.6
Girls.... 81.6      89.3       63.2
Gap......  2.1       5.1       -1.4

Grade 6:  Math      Reading   
Boys..... 73.7      78.4           
Girls.... 78.0      85.4           
Gap......  4.3       6.0

Grade 7:  Math      Reading   
Boys..... 65.7      77.1           
Girls.... 70.9      85.5           
Gap......  5.2       8.4

Grade 8:  Math      Reading   Science
Boys..... 59.8      68.4       61.5
Girls.... 64.0      77.6       61.4
Gap......  4.2       9.2       -0.1

So, by the time kids get to high school, there are about 32 boys to every 22 girls below grade level in reading.

Though the state breaks down the pass-rates by ethnicity for the high school level, it does not break it down by gender. So, a similar chart can't be made for the upper grades.

Missing men (III)

Reading through the comments at Mark Perry's blog and elsewhere, the question of the breakdown of degrees by subject area and gender came up. So, I charted it by subject, using this data from the D.ofEd and is for 2005-06.

Click on the images to see full size.

Bachelors:


Masters:


PhDs:

Missing men (II)

One of my favorite blogs--mostly because Mark Perry manages to find the data I try to search for and can never quite find--has a couple graphs on the missing men in higher education. It is stark and long-term scary:







His data source is the Department of Education.