Square Dots

Jobs Machine

2012-01-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

Dan Mitchell at his "International Liberty" blog showed a graph charting education spending with achievement of 17-year-olds since 1970. The original graph was from a blog post by Andrew Coulson at Cato's "Cato@Liberty" blog. Here's the graph:

The steep blue line represents all education spending. The flat little lines at the bottom shows the percentage change in achievement. For all the spending, we got bupkis...except for the steep dotted line. That's the percentage increase in the number of education employees.

The bottom line numbers are:

Spending on Ed: +140%
Math scores: 0%
Reading scores: 0%
Science scores: -3%
Ed Employees: +75%

Our schools are worse, but they employ more people than ever. Increasing proof that the national education system isn't about education, it's a jobs machine.

Almost there

2011-12-08T09:01:00.001-08:00

Last January, I began casually beginning to supplement the 11-year-old girl's math skills. A few months later I took a look at the Independent School Entrance Exam and freaked. The math was really hard and some of the formatting of the questions was meant to seriously trick test-takers. In one 40-problem section, I got 6 wrong--some stupid errors, some misreading, and some because of the format.

At that point I started seriously working with her. I decided to tackle ratios, because that seemed to be the hardest, most frequent kind of question. We spent a month or two ripping into problem after problem. When we were done, she could do them every bit as well as I could, and sometimes better. Yay! We went on to other things like formulas of lines and probability.

Then came the fall and the start of the application season and the bringing in of a test-prep tutor. We're applying to 4 schools, which means 4 applications, 2 parent-only open houses, 2 student-only open houses, 2 parent-and-student open houses, 4 interview/tour days (all during school days), 4 thank you cards for the interviews, 16 different recommendation forms to give to the school and teachers, 4 transcript release forms, several months of meeting with the tutor, and finally, one ISEE exam to take. Only that last one and the last thank you card remains to be completed.

The ISEE is on Saturday. Afterwards we're going over to the nearby Burger King to get her a promised Icee.

It will be a big relief to get all of this over and done with. The ISEE scores come back pretty quickly. The schools send their acceptance notices March 23rd. Fingers crossed. We don't know where we want her to go next year, but we want to have the luxury of choosing for ourselves.

(With all of this, I pity one of her classmates; she's applying to 8 schools, with 8 applications, 8 parent open houses, 8 student open houses, 8 interviews, 1 billion recommendation forms...)

Paying the price

2011-11-10T09:09:00.001-08:00

The 9-year-old boy is bored.

This is becoming quite a problem, and he's complaining about it more and more.

First of all he's bored in science class. This particular problem started when I decided to be sneaky. I noticed that "The Magic School Bus" was airing on TV, commercial free in the mornings, so I set our DVR to record it. If you don't know about this show, it is a science-based cartoon where a magical teacher takes her third grade students on science adventures. They might shrink to the size of cells and enter a body to see how the immune system works, or they might go back in time to see the dinosaurs. The episodes are well done and actually informative. If you watch all of them, you really would have a good elementary-school level knowledge of science. When I began recording the show, I didn't tell him to watch it, or even tell him that I was recording it. I thought he might find it on his own on the DVR's menu. He did. It became one of his favorite shows, and he's watched each episode several times.

The problem is, now everything he is supposed to be learning in science class he has already learned from "The Magic School Bus," so he's bored in class. I still think there are valuable things for him to learn in class, and the teacher is one of the best in the school, but most of what he's being taught he already knows. The one good thing on the horizon is the school science fair. In third grade they present an animal (he did Great Horned Owls) and in fourth grade they present either a recent development in science or a major historical invention (his sister did the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity). That project should start up in the second semester, and should help alleviate his science boredom.

The second problem is in math class. Because he's been working on Aleks, and has done a sizable chunk of the 4th grade standard curriculum (in 2 months), everything in his math class is going to be review. The other day they started to work with variables in his class; he said he'd done this already, and the teacher asked him to help her present it. That was nice for him, but he's still bored and frustrated that he isn't learning anything new in math class. As far as I can tell, this problem is permanent. I'm going to keep him moving in math at home regardless of what happens in school. (I spent some time this morning creating and finding some supplementary material on multiples, primes, and factoring.) He needs to spend some time outside of Aleks solidifying some skills that only come through practice: standard arithmetic algorithms for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Lots of practice with long division (which his school's text book literally doesn't believe should be taught at all.) And lots of work with fractions. But I see him getting to the 5th grade curriculum within a month or two.

That's fine by me. The school's curriculum moves too slowly and they allow no opportunity for kids to work ahead. But moving ahead will make all math at school from this point on review and, thus, boring.

I guess the kid will just have to be bored.

Aleks update

2011-10-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

It's been about a month since the boy bumped up to the Level 4 course on Aleks. When he started, he knew about 63% of the fourth-grade curriculum, according to the California state standards.

One month later, he has spent about 9 hours working on the program. He is finding fractions very confusing; in part because he is always trying to figure them out pictorially, and he doesn't know how to go about it. Today however, I got him to some level of understanding of the "bowtie" method of adding and subtracting fractions with different denominators.

Bowtie method:

1) Get a common denominator by multiplying the two denominators together.
2) Multiply the left numerator by the right denominator
3) Put in the correct sign
4) Multiply the right numerator by the left denominator.

I also think I drew enough pictures so that he sort-of gets it. He needs more work on fractions in general, though. Especially converting mixed and improper fractions, and reducing fractions.

I have been assigning him some extra work in multiplication, which the program allows me to do. They call it a quiz, but I think of it more as a review worksheet. Sometimes you just have to work dozens of problems before it really sinks in, and Aleks doesn't do that unless you tell it to.

So, after a month, the boy has learned about 20% more of the curriculum, and currently stands at 84% of the CA standards for 4th.

He is doing about 7 topics per hour, and he has about 32 topics left. So another 5 hours or so should get him through. I would love for him to complete level4 before he does standardized testing in mid-November. That should be doable.

Suburban refuges aren't refuges

2011-09-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

When the Best is Mediocre : Education Next

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in our large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class.

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort.

My childhood district, which is considered to be a good one, with a high percentage of college-goers, came in at: 61st percentile in math and 74th in reading when compared to students in other developed countries. Los Angeles Unified comes off badly with: 20 & 25. Milwaukee comes off even worse: 16 & 26.

But the point of the article is to look at those nice suburban districts that so many people rely on. It points out that they aren't keeping pace with the educational attainment of students in comparable countries. In other words, the districts that we think are good, aren't.

Aleks says...

2011-09-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the boy (9) was working on Aleks. He had 3 of 5 pie pieces done, and another one was nearly done. Then, he got a bee in his bonnet and spent over an hour two days straight on the program. It's a really nice problem to have when you think your kid is working too hard and should back off! I didn't want him to burn out.

Still, yesterday, with the promise of getting his very-own real-world pumpkin pie if he finished his virtual math pie, he got through the rest of Level 3. This means in less than a month, he has done 45% of the California state standards for 3rd grade. How well he knows it, I'm not sure. Each topic only needs about 5-6 problems done correctly to pass it. It might be too much of a once-over-lightly approach, but, since math is cumulative, I'm hoping it will stay in his head.

Here are his pies:

Tomorrow, I'll switch his account to Level 4, and he'll take the Level 4 assessment for the first time, and get a brand new pie to work on.

Today, he was very proud of himself, and was shouting: "I won the pie!"

To which I answered; "I two the pie."

"I three the pie," he answered.

"I four the pie."

"I five the pie."

"I six the pie."

"I seven the pie."

"I eight the pie," I said, triumphantly.

"YOU ATE MY PIE!!!" he said as he attacked me.

We laughed and had a good day.

Low-hanging fruit

2011-09-25T10:04:00.000-07:00

Valuing Teachers : Education Next

Eric Hanushek presents the case for eliminating the lowest performing teachers. He believes that simply replacing as few as 5% of the worst teachers with only average teachers would pretty much eliminate the education gap with other high-performing countries and would result in a massive increase in our long-term economic outlook.

The key paragraph is this one:

Admittedly, these estimates are subject to some uncertainty. So if you think those that are given here are too high, even though they are based on the best of contemporary research, then just cut them in half. You will still have effects on growth of one-half of 1 percent per year, which produces impacts of $56 trillion over the lifetime of today’s child. In other words, to make the very large effects disappear, you have to make either the very strong assumption that student learning has little effect on the U.S. economy or the equally strong assumption that teachers have little impact on students.

Which is it? If a good education makes a difference, then having a bad teacher also makes a difference. The teaching profession is not a magical Lake Wobegon. Not all teachers are above average.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults

2011-09-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to link to this for ages.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults | EducationNews.org

In the United States, findings of national adult literacy surveys over the last thirty years have revealed tens of millions of adults whose literacy skills are poorly developed.

But rather than trying to address this problem through an extensive and intensive approach to adult literacy education, the major strategy has followed the homily that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Following this approach, we have tried to prevent the problem of poor adult literacy over the long run by improving the literacy skills of children in the K-12 school system. But [...] it has been argued that K-12 education is too late and that we need to improve children’s learning before they get to school. So over the years we have invested tens of millions of dollars in Head Start preschool programs for children 3 to 4 years of age. But since this has been found to not produce the hoped for long term improvements in cognitive skills, it has been argued that age 3 is too late and that we need to start with birth. So now we have committed billions of dollars to Early Head Start for children from birth to age three years.

The article is worth reading in its entirety. It goes on to debunk a major study which is used to justify Head Start. He shows that the study was deeply flawed. The best line in the article is from his fourth point on why the study is wrong:

instead of young adults taking the tests unaided, as called for in the administration procedures of the APL, in the Perry Preschool study, “the interviewer read each of the items to the respondent and could repeat them upon request”

So, on a test of literacy the test takers could have the thing read to them, and those successful results (!) have been used since 1984 to justify the massive spending on Head Start.

Spending time with Aleks

2011-09-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

The 9-year-old boy has now used the Aleks program about 4 times. Some of that time was working with their "Quick Tables," which is a math-fact learning tool.

Quick Tables was a bit frustrating at first, because before they throw one math fact at you, they want you to have the keyboarding skills to be able to type in the answer quickly. After several sessions of simply typing in numbers, I punted. Though he was getting faster, he still wasn't getting to the point of the exercise: math facts. So, I took over the keyboard and now do the typing for him. We've used it twice, going over all 4 types of facts, but focusing more on multiplication. The program works cleverly. You begin with very simple facts like x1 or x2, then move up from there. It knows what you know and works on improving. I like it. I also like that it isn't flashy or time-wasting. Many online math games are more game than math. The kid ends up spending their time shooting asteroids instead of doing math.

The second part of the program is the Pie. The boy has a pie chart with each segment partially shaded. The shaded area shows how much of the pie he has mastered. He gets to choose which pie piece to work on, and which topics to learn. For each topic the program offers a few problems with an explanation there if you need it--you don't have to see it if you don't need it. After you've done a few problems--I think you have to get 3 or 4 in a row correct, the program allows you to move on. I'm happy that the boy realizes that three or four problems are not enough to really get a math concept, and he will often choose the "More Problems" option without any prompting from me. After a couple more problems, the program moves him on and back to his pie to choose another topic. He has already mastered 14 topics of the total 127 in the 3rd grade curriculum. That means he has moved from a 55% to 66%, To put it another way, he's learned 11% of the 3rd grade curriculum in just 4 sessions.

Instead of logging into the program and walking away, I sit with him. I can catch when he is going wrong, prompt him to use the explanations, and explain further if he needs it. The one time I walked away, he found it frustrating. I don't think he wanted to look at the explanations, or he didn't understand them if he did.

I also wonder if the initial assessment wasn't off because we did it near the end of a lazy summer vacation. I think that probably caused him to get a lower score on the basic arithmetic, but while sitting with him, I realized he has some big gaps. He's been doing geometry and was confused about the terms perimeter, parallel, and perpendicular. The perimeter problem surprised me a great deal. He was presented with a grid with a shape shaded in the middle. He easily counted the shaded squares to get the area (or multiplied if he could), but he wanted to count the number of unshaded squares around the outside and call that the perimeter. I think he got straightened out now, but he needs to review that a couple of times to lock it in. He also had no clue about equivalent fractions (x/5 = 12/20, what's x?,) but caught on very quickly. I don't think he's done much in the way of fractions at school other than counting what fraction of a figure is shaded.

I'm going to continue working with him every-other or every day if we can manage it. I don't want to do long sessions and burn him out, but he seems to enjoy it, and would often go on longer. Right now, I have my sites set on his standardized testing for this year. He'll do it in November, and at this rate, he should be done with the 3rd grade content and on into 4th grade math by then.

Update: We finally got past the assessment for multiplication, and I saw a great difference in his interaction with it almost immediately. He was shown the grid of multiplication, shown which he's already mastered and which need work. The program then offered several for him to focus on. We must have had some typing problems because there were several x2's that he certainly knew. With the chart in front of him, he quickly became interested in mastering the unmastered. In addition, he now has access to a couple math games. He also worked on a few new math topics in the main section of Aleks. He's almost up to knowing 70% of the 3rd grade curriculum! Wheee.

Aleks says

2011-09-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

In an effort to make sure that the 9 year old boy isn't playing catch-up as much as his sister, I've signed him up for Aleks.com's math program. It is an online math tutoring program that I found mentioned on several home schooling and parent websites. It starts with a 30-question evaluation of what the student knows.

I gave the boy, who is going into 4th grade, the 3rd grade evaluation. I wasn't entirely surprised, but I was entirely disappointed, that he only scored 55% on the test. That means he knows 55% of what he should--and that is comparing his knowledge to the California standards (we live in Los Angeles.) He was okay with the basics, but weak in geometry and fractions. His math program is philosophically opposed to teaching long division, so he will need some work with that, and his sister hasn't really been taught unlike fractions either, or division of fractions. Aleks, I hope, will fill in the blanks.

I gave his sister the 6th grade test (she's going into 6th and has been getting a great deal of tutoring in the last 6 months) and she scored a 71% on it--not bad. She already knows 71% of this year's curriculum and school doesn't start for a few days yet.

So, I will be using Aleks for him and not for her.

13 year-olds science experiment

2011-08-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees

Man! Wish I'd thought of it!

Spelling it out

2011-08-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

The 9-year-old boy hates to write. He was supposed to keep a journal over the summer. Stupid stuff like "My friend had his birthday party today. He took his friends to see "Planet of the Apes". I hated it. After pizza and cake, everyone came back to our house for a pool party. That was fun."

Getting him to write anything is like chopping his arm off. He will literally cry for an hour over his paper. I already knew that one the the hardest parts for him is his expectation of perfect cursive penmanship. He wants his letters to be perfect, and gets very frustrated if they are not.

What I didn't realize until yesterday was how much of his writing problem was due to his lack of confidence in spelling.

Yesterday, he found an IPhone app which seems to have helped him. It is a dictionary app with a voice activated look-up. He can say the word into the phone and get the spelling. He even seems to know enough about the homophones that he caught it when it spelled "weight" instead of "wait".

Hopefully, that will get writing and get the journal done.

Start heading for the exits

2011-07-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

Ax Head Start: Ending Programs That Don't Yield Results - TIME

Head Start has failed, but will still live forever:

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."

Why will it live forever when it has been proven to be useless? Because it employs lots of people who are now political cogs in the wheel of the left. Because the vain hope that preschool will solve all our problems puts up roadblocks in the way of addressing the real issue: our education system s^%$s--that's a problem that many people (teacher's unions) don't want to address because it threatens their jobs.

And the #1 reason Head Start will live forever: Because it makes people feel good about themselves by letting them pretend that they are helping the poor kids who are on the path to being rejected in our society. It's for the children!

Harry Potter Trivia

2011-07-08T16:11:00.001-07:00

Trivia Question--How many actors have played Harry Potter in the official WB movies? Not talking Potter Puppet Pals or anything else, just in the major motion pictures.

Update: The answer, I believe is 7. There are 5 people who are listed in the credits as being Harry Potter:

In the first scene of the first movie, we see baby Harry Potter. This role was played by triplets. In the credits they are listed as "Saunder's Triplets", so that is three actors already before before the big shiny "P" of the first title swoops in.

Daniel Radcliffe is obviously the main Harry, so we are up to four.

In the eighth movie, we see another baby Harry, this time played by Toby Papworth. So that makes five.

The question is: Who are the other two actors who have played Harry Potter?

Update and Answer:

Remember in both the second and the seventh movies, Harry took Polyjuice potion. When he did, he remained Harry but took on the aspect of the characters Gregory Goyle (played by Josh Herdman) in Chamber of Secrets, and Albert Runcorn (played by David O'Hara) in Deathly Hallows Pt 1. Therefore both actors can claim to have played Harry, bringing the total up to 7.

Atlanta burns again

2011-07-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted on Saltzafrazz)

A massive cheating scandal is rocking the Atlanta school district. A widespread and systematic effort to cheat on standardized tests has been uncovered. It included teachers, principals, staff, and superintendents. In some cases, they literally erased the kids' answers and replaced them with the correct ones.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

You can see the gains in this chart I posted several months ago, where Georgia raised its scores on the national test NEAP dramatically:

Click to embiggen.

It should also be noted that Georgian schools s*^%! If you line up all the states according to their various NEAP scores, Georgia would come in between 33 and 40 just about every time. They do a little better with English Language learners, where they rank around 20, even breaking into the second quintile with a rank of 17 for 4th grade math proficiency.

They s(%& even with the cheating scandal. Atlanta makes up just better than 4% of the population of Georgia. If the scores from the APS system are bogus, that means Georgia did even worse than everyone thought.

Deathly Hallows

2011-06-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

All done! Just over a week after beginning it, the 9-year-old boy has now finished the last Harry Potter book. For the record, The Deathly Hallows has 204,796 words, which brings the total number of words to: 1,090,739.

He would have finished it yesterday, but he was so nasty to his sister about reading, and kept stealing her book so many times, he got his taken away last night. He woke bright and early and finished it off.

Now....what next?

Half Blood Prince

2011-06-15T22:12:00.000-07:00

It took only two weeks for the now-nine year old to get through "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince." He finished it this morning. He read it all on his own, putting in several 100+ days. There are 168,923 words in it, which brings his HP word count up to: 885,943.

He also is trying to beat his sister through the books. She had a big head start, but he has come on strong the last few books. He started the sixth at about the same time she started the seventh. He got through his book, while she's only about 200 pages into hers. He hasn't exactly been trying to play fair; he keeps stealing her copy so she can't read it. Now he's hot on her tail and will likely pass her in the next few days.

Breakthrough

2011-06-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

It was a tough week tutoring the 11 year old in math. When she gets frustrated or confused, she shuts down and stops thinking. We hit a massive wall on Wednesday and it took days (and threats of finding her a different tutor!) to coax her out of it.

We've been doing proportions and ratios, which, now that I think of it, is actually one of the hardest subjects she needs to master before the ISEE. She has had a little exposure to everything else, but this comes out of the blue. It includes algebraic manipulation and a whole lot of reasoning.

But our problem wasn't even with ratios and proportions; it was with fairly simple fraction problems, sometimes with a variable, that she's been doing for months. She is able to do the hard problems, but got stumped on the easy ones. For example, here's a simple unit conversion problem. She couldn't get that you put the mile on the bottom of the second part, so that cancels the mile in the first part:

(Yes, I know that should have been 5280.) That is nothing but reducing fractions with words instead of numbers. She knows how to reduce a fraction! She kept trying to do it the opposite way, and got too frustrated to get it straightened out. This went on for two days in similar forms.

She also was adamant that I had told her, when you had one fraction equal to another with a variable running around, she needed to get the variable to the opposite of where it started. So, if the variable is in the denominator, you have to get it to the numerator (correct); and if it is in the numerator, you had to get it into the denominator (very incorrect!) Take this extremely easy problem:

All you have to do is multiply by 12 and you're done. Except she kept insisting that she had to divide by X! She couldn't accept that that was wrong, and switch to doing it the right way. She kept insisting and insisting that this is what I had told her to do!!! Finally, on the third day, the veil was lifted and she saw the light.

After several very frustrating days for both of us, we got through it. She'll need more time to let it all sink in, but she'll get it.

Order of the Phoenix

2011-06-09T05:41:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention that the boy finished the fifth Harry Potter book last Wednesday. "Order of the Phoenix" has 257,045 words in it. That brings his total Harry Potter word count to 717,020 since July 12th last summer. He read this one in two bits. We started it last November, but he stopped at page 94 and went on to read other things until a month ago. Then, on May 10th, he picked it up again. This time was different than his other forays into reading Harry Potter; this time, he was reading it all on his own. When I picked it up and read a page to him, he got mad and said I was reading it terribly!! So much for guided reading; he's over it!

He's already 157 pages into the sixth.

Math prep

2011-05-31T08:38:00.000-07:00

I've been working with the 11 year old, prepping her for the ISEE exam. I've come to realize that half the battle, or more, is finding the right materials. This was true of the boy's spelling as well. Once I found "All About Spelling" the rest was easy.

With math, the trick is to find as many problems as possible. Repetition and experience--practice to mastery, if you want to use the lingo--is the way and the light.

So, I've been hunting for good resources. I'm not exactly shocked that a Singapore Math workbook is currently my favorite. I've decided to work on ratios and proportions for a while, and this book:

has lots of good proportion problems just like the ones on the ISEE.

Of course, the more I look at these books (I worked through all the workbook the other day,) the more I realize how sloppy they are. Even the Singapore one has poorly worded questions and some flat-out wrong answers.

Poorly worded such as: You have a box of known dimensions, filled to height y with water. Rocks are added to bring the level up 10 cm. How has the volume of water changed? Well, of course, the water hasn't changed at all, you just added rocks.

Ann and Wilma share some apples and pears in the ratio 5:7.... Is the ratio the number of apples to pears? or is the ratio Ann's to Wilma's? I assumed the former, because it was closer to the modifying ratio. Unfortunately, they actually meant the ratio of Ann's to Wilma's fruit.

If Joe swam 33 laps on both days... Should that be 33 laps per day, for a total of 66 (which is what I assumed)? or should it be 33 combined on both days? The answer in the back of the book correlates with 33 laps total.

These are books that are republished regularly, you would think that they would fix the errors over time.

Great math website

2011-05-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

I just found a great math website for upper elementary and junior high. It's called Purple Math, and it covers all sorts of topics:

Absolute Value, Factoring Numbers, Fractions, Geometric Formulas, LCM and GCF, Metric Conversions, Negative Numbers, Number Bases (binary, octal, etc.), Number Properties (Distributive, Associative, Commutative, etc.), Number Types (natural, integer, real, etc.), Converting between Decimals, Fractions, and Percents, Rounding (and significant digits), Set Notation, , Beginning Algebra Topics, , Canceling Units, Distance Formula, Engineering Notation, Evaluation, Exponents: Basic rules, Exponents: Negative exponents, Exponents: Fractional exponents, Graphing Overview, Graphing Absolute Value, Graphing Linear Equations, Graphing Radical Equations, Graphing Linear Inequalities (of the form "y < 2x + 3"), Inequalities Overview (three solution methods), Inequalities: Linear (such as "2x < 4"), Intercepts, Midpoint Formula, Order of Operations, Polynomials (definitions & "like terms"), Polynomials: Adding & Subtracting, Polynomials: Multiplying, Polynomials: Dividing, Radicals (square roots, cube roots, rationalizing denominators, etc.), Ratio & Proportion, Scatterplots & Regressions, Scientific Notation, Simple Factoring like "2x + 6 = 2(x + 3)", Simplifying with Exponents, Simplifying with Parentheses, Slope of a straight line, Slope and Graphing, Slope and y-intercept (their meaning in the context of word problems), Solving Absolute Value Equations, Solving Linear Equations, Solving Literal Equations, Solving Radical Equations, Straight-line equations (y = mx + b), Variables, x,y-Plane (plotting points, etc.).....

Believe it or not, our just-turned-11 year-old has to know a lot of this stuff by about November of next year for a middle-school entrance exam...which is where I learned it. It's odd that in order to get into middle school, she has to show that she knows middle school math already.

We have a lot of work ahead of us!

Harry Potter and the 8 year old

2011-05-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

Last summer, our 8 year old boy, despite my discouragement, became determined to read Harry Potter. So we sat down and read it together. He needed a ton of guidance, and I read two out of every three pages of the first book. We went through it in four days. The second one took us longer, mostly because I didn't want to spend all my time sitting on the couch with him, regardless of my admiration for his enthusiasm. By the time the third one came a along his reading level had jumped substantially--just in time for the standardized tests at school.

Then I made him take a break and read three non-HP books on his own, with no guidance. Harry Potter IV is a loooooong book, and it took a while. We went on to start to the fifth, but he grew tired part-way in and went on to read other things.

Last weekend at a birthday party, I was talking to another parent whose son is the same age. He said his boy was reading the books on his own, and I commented that I didn't think our kid could read it without help.

Boy, did the kid prove me wrong!! On Tuesday he picked up where we had left off. Despite having the busiest week of his entire year--play rehearsals every day after school until 5:30, plus homework and a very busy weekend (rehearsals for his other play, his sister's birthday party, baseball, Big Sunday, etc.)--he managed to read over 130 pages completely on his own.

After struggling to get him to read last year, Harry Potter came to the rescue, After struggling to get him to read independently all this year, Harry Potter again came to the rescue.

Wisconsin vs non-collective bargaining states

2011-03-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

In the last few weeks, the post below and ones like it have been circulating around Facebook and the internet (see eg: here, in the comments here: , and here ):

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:

South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44th

Wisconsin is currently ranked 2nd. Welcome to the race to the bottom.

The statistics have become so widespread that they've been used by the Economist and Paul Krugman at the NYTimes has pulled similar data.

Rebuttals have pointed out that the SAT is a really bad way to judge educational achievement, since in Wisconsin in particular only a small portion of students—those heading for selective colleges—ever take it:

As it turns out, these ratings are bogus. For each state it adds the ranking for SAT scores to the ranking for ACT scores (and it's not even clear what year the data comes from), but it doesn't take into consideration the percentage of the population who take either test. The College Boards specifically warn against doing state-to-state comparisons for the SAT, because in some states all students are required to take the text, while in others only the best students do. Only 4% of Wisconsin students took the SAT in 2010, and since they tend to be the cream of the crop it's not surprising that Wisconsin does well (but third in the nation, not first). On the other hand, 69% of Wisconsin seniors took the ACT in 2010, and Wisconsin comes in 17th in terms of composite ACT scores.

A more thorough debunking of these statistics may be found here; among the revelations is the fact that the data is from 1999. The owner of this site is actually an advocate of "student organizing"; it is to his credit that he has the intellectual honesty to challenge claims that purport to back up his side of the argument.

So, since I like data, playing with data, and living in data, I decided to look at a much better measure of educational achievement—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

For a long time now, the US Department of Education has compiled NEAP scores. These are the results of exams given nationwide to a massive number of students. They show trends, and apples to apples comparisons can be made easily. The exams are given in Mathematics, Reading, Science, Technology and Engineering, Arts, Civics, Economics, Foreign Language, Geography, US History, World History, and Writing. The exams are given to both 4th and 8th graders. A pilot program has started to test 12th graders as well, but none of the states mentioned above are participants.

Iowahawk, the usually comedic web poster, took a break yesterday from satire to mine some of this data--he compared Texas and Wisconsin, with Texas coming out mostly on top.

As it turns out, I was already compiling data from this same source. I decided to focus on the two main parts of the NEAP results: Math and Reading. The reports for 2009 are available here: Math and Reading.

I looked at three categories of student for each grade level: 1) All students, 2) Students eligible for subsidized lunches—which is a short-hand way of looking at children in poverty, and 3) English Language Learners. I also looked at two levels of educational achievement: 1) students meeting basic requirements and 2) students testing as proficient. I took the 50 states and sorted them from best to worst and gave them their numerical rank (I gave states with ties the same rank.) The charts below show the numerical rank of each state with respect to the other 49. (Some students, such as people with reading disabilities, are granted special accommodations for the exam, I used those scores for the data below.)

It is clear that Wisconsin does quite well, especially in math, but the results are really not much to crow about. Wisconsin’s reading scores are actually surprisingly low. The best ranking for Wisconsin in math in any of the categories came in at a rank of 8—that was for 8th grade English language learners testing at the basic level. In reading Wisconsin achieved a rank of two for educating ELL students in 8th grade to basic levels. It should be noted, though, that ELL students do very badly overall.

Here is what I found:

4th Grade Math

For all students, and for these six states—remember Virginia, the Carolinas, Texas, and Georgia are used for the comparison because they do not allow their teachers to collectively bargain—Virginia, North Carolina and Texas are all better at getting kids a basic understanding of 4th grade math than Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the best of the bunch at getting kids to a proficient level, but 13 other states in the union actually do better than the cheese state, putting the dairyland in the second quintile. The percentage of Wisconsin students ranking at basic and proficient levels are: 85% and 45% respectively.

For students in poverty, Wisconsin gets a ranking near the middle of the 50 states: 22 for students reaching basic levels, and a better 19 for students reaching proficient. In Wisconsin 73% of students in poverty can do math at a basic level and 24% are proficient.

For English language learners, Wisconsin is well above the median for the 50 states with rankings of 14 and 13, however, among the six states presented here, Wisconsin actually does poorly, only Georgia does worse. In Wisconsin 66% of ELL students in 4th grade are at the basic level and 15% are proficient. The ELL scores, though, do have a caveat: not all states report these results. On this exam nine states did not report: Alabama, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Whether those states would change the rankings can not be known from this data.

8th Grade Math

For 8th graders, Wisconsin does well overall, getting more kids to the basic and proficient levels than the other five states, and makes the top ten for overall basic skills. The percentage of students scoring at basic and proficient are a respectable 79% and 39%. Texas shows itself to be very good at educating children in poverty, getting a basic rank of 3 (they are tied for third place with South Dakota and Massachusetts, and North Dakota and Montana do better,) and a proficient rank of 9. (Wisconsin’s scores are 60% of student in poverty achieve the basic level, 20% proficient.) South Carolina is again the best at educating English language learners, tying with Virginia for the number 2 spot at the basic level and getting the second rank for proficient as well. Wisconsin does well (45% at basic, 9% at proficient), but lags behind Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—Georgia did not report these scores, neither did: Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming (16 states did not report ELL scores.)

4th Grade Reading

Wisconsin does surprisingly poorly on this exam. For a state that is said to have a good educational system, scoring below or at the median for reading among all students is not the educational beacon it’s been made out to be. Only 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders read at a basic level, only 33% are proficient. For students in poverty, the numbers are even worse. For the first time in the data I’ve looked at, Wisconsin falls into the bottom quintile of states, wracking up a pathetic rank of being the 42nd best (worst!) state in which to be a student in poverty. Of these six states Wisconsin is the worst at educating students in poverty (with SC tying at the proficient level.) In Wisconsin, less than half—only 46% of 4th graders in poverty read at a basic level, and only 15% are proficient. My own state of California is in the dead-last position, with only 38% of students reaching the basic level, and only 10% reaching proficiency. Again, South Carolina seems to understand how to teach English language learners, or their cohort of ELL students is different from the ones in other states. They have the honor of being at the top of the league in ELL. Wisconsin is better than Georgia among these six states, but is the second last in both basic and proficient ELL students. (Eleven states did not report their ELL scores.) Among ELL 4th graders in Wisconsin only 31% are at basic and 8% are proficient.

8th Grade Reading

By comparison to the other five states in this dataset, Wisconsin does well at educating students in 8th grade reading. However, with the exception of ELL students, Wisconsin still isn’t doing very well. Wisconsin has a 50-state rank of 19 and 15 for educating all students to the basic and proficient levels respectively. In Wisconsin 78% of 8th grade students reach the basic level of reading, and 34% are proficient readers. Again Wisconsin is below the national median at educating students in poverty to the basic level of competence (61% of students in poverty achieve basic scores), but does slightly better than the median at getting kids to proficiency (18%). The ELL exam is again hampered by the fact that not all states report these results; in this case nearly half (23) failed to report. Among Wisconsin’s ELL students in 8th grade, only 49% can read at a basic level and only 7% are proficient.

Conclusions: Don’t send your kids to school in Georgia! Georgia did poorly across the board, though in a couple categories Wisconsin actually did worse. Wisconsin comes in at being a better-than-average state for education, but not if you are a student in poverty. Of the 24 categories presented here, Wisconsin was the best of the six states in nine of them, Virginia: eight, South Carolina: seven (all ELL), Texas: four, North Carolina: one, and Georgia: none.

Does Wisconsin’s collective bargaining state shine above the ones without it? Not according to this data. Unlike the skewed SAT results, this shows these states doing some things well and some things poorly. None are shown off in a really good light, and Wisconsin’s reading achievement is surprisingly bad when compared to its reputation as a great state for education.

Future reporter

2011-01-27T22:18:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, the boy (8) decided to make a newspaper with stories he could get from students. That part fizzled, but with the Winter Concert coming around the same time, he morphed it into a series of interviews with some of the staff at the school. Each interview is about five minutes long, and he asked really good questions. I helped him to write an introduction to the videos and created a blog to host it. Here it is:

The Segar Press

Dumb question? or testing external knowledge?

2011-01-26T10:19:00.000-08:00

Results are out for the science section of our "National Report Card" (NAEP exams). The news is that the US had pathetic results, surprise!

I was looking through the sample questions and came to this question (click for full-size image:)

The correct answer is, of course, D; however, I don't see how you can possibly answer that question based on the "web" they showed. According to the graphic, decomposers are the ultimate consumers, in the end, eating everything. But the graphic does not show them being the food source of anything.

Despite the top part of the question stating "use the information in the food web to answer the questions that follow," the only way you could answer that question is to ignore the graph and use your own knowledge of the topic.

The need for phonics...in college?

2011-01-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

This is a story about British education, but I think it is a sad commentary on a lot of today's education in the US as well:

The report also found that many pupils were being held back by a failure to use phonics – the back-to-basics method of teaching pupils to read by breaking words down into individual sounds.

It said there were “few instances of systematic phonics teaching” in secondary schools or colleges, even though it was proved to help pupils struggling the most.

If a young adult--which is what college students are--needs help from phonics instruction, I would postulate that that individual has no business being in college in the first place*!

* People with learning difficulties such as dyslexia excepted.

Math inequality

2010-12-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

This is about twice as long as it needed to be, but it's worth watching:

From Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, why do boys outscore girls on the math SAT?

(cross-posted on Saltzafrazz)

Goblet is in the can!!

2010-11-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

The boy and I just finished "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". Yay!!! That one has 190,637 words in it. Add that to the previous 269,338 that we've read in the first three books, and we've done 459,975 words of Harry Potter since June. Cool beans!

The Lost Hero

2010-10-12T22:22:00.001-07:00

LOTS OF SPOILERS FOR THIS BOOK ARE BELOW. READ ON WITH CAUTION!!!

Two nights ago, I couldn't fall asleep until after one, despite trying.

Last night, I didn't try. At midnight, I was loading and reloading Kindle updates hoping to get the download of the new Heroes of Olympus book "The Lost Hero", by Rick Riordan. It finally downloaded at about 12:15... and I read for over 2 hours before forcing myself to go to sleep. I finished it (576 pages) this evening.

After reading the Percy Jackson series (Greek Mythology) several times, and reading the first of Riordan's Kane Chronicles (Egyptian mythology), I was eager for something new. I also wondered what Riordan could possibly do in the same world as the Percy Jackson stories, when he seemed to have blown through every major and a lot of minor stories from ancient Greek Mythology. What was left to work with?

Well, his answer was to overlay Roman mythology on top of the world he built centered on the Greek. Along came a hero who seemed to be the son of Zeus, but slowly it is revealed that he's really more the son of Jupiter. But wait, you say, isn't Jupiter just the same guy as Zeus with a different name? Yes, and no. It is the same god, but he has different aspects, and different personality traits reveal themselves when he portrays himself as Jupiter as opposed to Zeus. As Jupiter, he is more stern, more rigid, more distant, and more authoritarian--the god of an empire. Zeus is a little more easy-going than his Roman aspect.

So when Zeus has an affair with a woman, their offspring naturally speaks ancient Greek, ends up at Camp Half Blood, and calls dad Zeus. But when Jupiter has an affair, that kid naturally speaks Latin, ends up at a Roman camp (the name is never divulged in the book) and calls dad Jupiter.

That means that there are two groups of demigods: the Greek and the Roman. From time to time in history, the two sides meet...and usually pretty much destroy each other. After a particularly brutal war in the 19th Century, the gods decided to keep the two sides completely apart, and should they meet, all memories of the contact would be wiped out of their minds. Thus, each is completely unaware of the existence of the other.

First, a little history: Several thousand years before, after the first Titan war, it was followed by an even worse war, as giants were brought forth with the sole purpose of destroying the Olympians and getting revenge for the Titans. That war ended in Olympus's favor. Now, after the second Titan war (the Percy Jackson books), history is again repeating itself, and the giants are again on the move. This second war has the potential to be far more devastating that Percy's.

Along comes Hera/Juno, who takes a desperate gamble. She believes that only by uniting the two demigod factions, can the war be won. So she makes an exchange: A Roman demigod leader for a Greek demigod leader. She sends the leaders of both camps to the other camp, in order to attempt to establish good ties between the two. Thus, Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, disappears to the Roman side, and Jason, son of Jupiter, appears on the Greek side. Thus also, the "lost hero" of the title, actually refers to both of these exchanged demigods, since they have each disappeared from their regular worlds, and though Percy can't be found, Jason is pretty lost in this new world of his.

Of course, it takes pretty much the entire book to figure all of this out, because the Roman demigod's memory of his past has been completely erased, and all of this is revealed to him slowly. Percy plays no part in this book, except as someone being sought by others.

Another interesting theme, is the redemption of Aphrodite and her kids. In the first series, they were portrayed fairly relentlessly as beautiful, shallow, vain, spoiled, and wimpy. In the end, also, the leader of the Aphrodite kids turned out to be a (very repentant) spy for the Titans. In this book, far from being a vain wimpy, the lead girl--daughter of Aphrodite--is strong and capable, and doesn't care a lot about her looks. Aphrodite appears in the book and reminds her daughter that she was the first Olympian (the last book of the PJ series was called the "Last Olympian"), the offspring of Ouranos himself (while Zeus is only his grandson), and that she is far more than a pretty face. In the previous book, Riordan defended the hearth and the home by promoting the goddess of the hearth, Hestia (the last Olympian). In this book, he promotes love and devotion by defending Aphrodite.

The book, I think, is quite as good as the Percy Jackson books. It was fun, and funny in places, and the story was certainly engaging. I can't imagine that anyone who liked the Percy books would dislike this one.

Now I'm looking forward to the next. Interestingly, the next book is titled "Son of Neptune". That could easily refer to Percy, if the second book centers around him finding his way in the Roman world, but it could also refer to an unknown, and as yet undisclosed, brother. Should be interesting.

How far behind in math are the kids? (Updated)

2010-10-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

I was searching last night for a supplementary math curriculum to do with the kids. The school uses "Everyday Mathematics" which is renowned far and wide for its suckiness. At least the school sort-of acknowledges this and does actually insist that the kids master basic math facts. They do regular one-minute exams and need to get a certain number of problems done in that amount of time. This is particularly hard for our pokey 5th grader, who has to make it though 50 multiplication problems in a minute by the end of the semester--currently she'd doing 27-30.

After looking through a bunch of curricula and reviews, I eventually bowed to the inevitable and bought two semesters of Singapore math (they break each year into two semesters, A and B--sold separately, of course.) The problem is figuring out how far behind the kids are! Because the kids are in grades 3 and 5, it seemed to make sense to buy 3A and 5A. I was guessing that the kids would at least be able to grow into them.

I was also looking at the curriculum's "placement" tests, which are actually tests at the end of each level to see if your kid is ready to move on. I know there are things on the test for the end of level 3A that our 5th grader would have a lot of trouble doing. And, no way our third grader could! It looks like I'll have to go further back for the 3rd grader, and hope I won't have to go further back with our 5th grader too! It would really be hard to convince her that she needs to go back and learn second grade math!

At least, I know the goal: get the 5th grader to algebra by 8th grade.

Update: The Singapore Math books came today, and I'm very very happy to report that our 5th grader will certainly not have to go back to level 3A. I don't think there's anything in there that she doesn't know how to do. I'll give her a few pages of review, just for practice, and move on from there,

I am also happy to say that the level 3A workbook is a pretty good fit with our 3rd grader. So, he'll be working with that one. He will need to review his multiplication tables through 5, but he has most of those down (counting by 2's is easy, 5's is easy, and I taught him the 3's song from School House Rock, so all that's left is 4's.) Some of the problems in the 3A book were actually very similar to what he's been doing in school lately.

Why do they make it so hard!!!

2010-10-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was helping the boy do his homework. He had 6 3-digit subtraction problems to do, and I let him get on with it. In the end, though I realize he'd done 5 out of the 6 completely wrong, and got the 6th wrong as well.

Since I know he knows how to do this, it was obvious that he was forgetting something. Nope! He was taught a new method today at school! So now, instead of knowing how to do it, and usually getting them all right, he's screwed up, confused, and frustrated by the new method.

Of course, this comes from Everyday Mathematics. The new method has the kids adding in the middle of a subtraction problem:

This is the big problem with Everyday Mathematics. They think it's important for kids to experiment with different methods, so that they can find the one they like best. Instead of picking one, simple, algorithm and working towards mastery, they keep throwing in new methods which--I swear--have the main purpose of confusing and frustrating the kids and flat-out preventing mastery.

Considering that EM was put together by Bill Ayers' education department at Chicago, I wouldn't be surprised if this actually was the goal. After all, math is hard! And if some kids can't get it, it really isn't fair that some do, and those who do go on to have challenging careers, stable lives, and become wealthier than average. Since we don't want that evil future inequality, let's just nip this dangerous math thing in the bud right from the start!

The more I see of Everyday Math, the more evil it looks.

Boy troubles are international (repost)

2010-09-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

(Reposted from February 1, 2010)

One point that Richard Whitmire over on "Why Boys Fail" (which recently moved to Education Week's website) always brings up, is that the "boy troubles" are actually an international phenomenon. Other countries have actually tried to address the problem, but the US ignores it.

Today, Phyllis Chesler posted four photographs from Cairo University, showing the graduating classes for 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. She posted them to show that in the 50's not one woman was wearing a hijab, in the 1978 photo one or two women are, but by the 2004 photo, all but one or two are.

I looked at something else in the pictures: the ratio of men to women. Here are the photos, with circles around the male and female heads (Click on photos to enlarge):

1959--> Men=68 (65%), Women: 36 (35%):

1978--> Men=39 (34%), Women: 74 (66%):

1995--> Men: 36 (35%), Women: 81 (78%):

2004--> Men: 19 (17%), Women: 91 (83%):

Most of the shift seemed to be over by 1978, with women reversing their percentage in 20 years. Since then, they've held on and increased their advantage: up to 83% in 2004.

Update: Got a link to this from Richard Whitmire. Thanks!

If You Want to Weep Over Numbers, Look to Boys

2010-09-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

Richard Whitmire puts it starkly:

"Michelle Obama gets weepy as she announces a White House mentoring program for girls. On what index are girls doing as badly as boys?"

If You Want to Weep Over Numbers, Look to Boys

Prisoner of Azkaban is done!!!

2010-09-15T20:34:00.000-07:00

Steven just finished the third Harry Potter book. I looked it up and it had: 107,253 words in it. I tried to read one page out of every three, while he read the other two-thirds.

Together, so far, we have gone through: 269,338 words of Harry Potter!!! Yay!!!

Hand in hand

2010-09-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

In the last few years, I've done a lot of tutoring of our 5-8 year old boy. We started with "Hooked on Phonics" and built from there. Last year, we tackled his weak spelling through the use of the "All About Spelling" curriculum. I also do a lot of reading with him (he hates to read alone--it's a very social thing for him.)

I've figured out one thing: Learning how to spell is crucial to reading!

The opposite is also, obviously, true.

Learning the rules of syllable division, vowel and consonant teams, and all of the rules of spelling has allowed him to sound out words he never could read before. He didn't learn that at school or from any reading/phonics curriculum. He learned it by learning how to spell.

So, these seem to me to be the crucial questions:

How much and at what level of detail are kids being taught the rules of spelling these days?
Can structured and rules-based spelling instruction help poor readers to catch up?
Is part of the reason for declining literacy rates (particularly in boys) due to a lack of strong spelling instruction? (Boys have always learned reading later than girls, but traditionally have caught up by 4th and 5th grades. That is no longer true, as early literacy is happening too early for many boys. In previous eras, how much did strong spelling instruction play a role in helping boys catch up in later elementary years?)
Most importantly, can detailed spelling instruction work as a second phonics course for learners who missed the first phonics go 'round in kindergarten and first grade? Putting it another way, is strong spelling instruction a way to help boys and late-blooming girls get the phonics they need, when they need it, without the stigma of remedial instruction, or worse: retention?

There obviously is no quick-fix out of the problems of declining literacy(*,**) But my hunch is that proper spelling instruction is one of the pieces of the puzzle.

(* Especially when middle and upper-income children come to school having heard literally millions more words than children of lower-income families.)

(** And when 25% of high school boys with at least one college-educated parent, can not read a newspaper.)

This will be an intersting year

2010-09-09T10:30:00.001-07:00

My 10-year old fifth-grader niece (and her brother) have been back in school since last Wednesday, and there are already ominous signs for her year.

Alarm bell #1: The first day, she came home with her schedule of classes. There, on Tuesday afternoon, every week of the year, was a half hour block named "Sustainability". I asked her about it, and it's only a little bit not as bad as it sounds. It's not a half-hour lecture on the environmental religion. Last year and this year, the kids have to do one half-hour presentation in class. Last year the kids had to teach something to the other students. Some did music, acting, singing, sports, something like that--my niece taught the scientific method: observe, make a guess (hypothesis), test the guess, analyze the results. She used a pendulum to show how you could predict the speed of the swing.

This year's class is a half-hour environmental presentation. I think I'll think of it as the first-communion/confirmation into the worship of Gaia.

Alarm bell #2: The first in-class "book club" book list came home. The genre for the first book is "realistic fiction". These are the 4 books that are on the list (with their Amazon synopsis):

Breadwinner: Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan, 11-year-old Parvana has rarely been outdoors. Barred from attending school, shopping at the market, or even playing in the streets of Kabul, the heroine of Deborah Ellis's engrossing children's novel The Breadwinner is trapped inside her family's one-room home. That is, until the Taliban hauls away her father and Parvana realizes that it's up to her to become the "breadwinner" and disguise herself as a boy to support her mother, two sisters, and baby brother. Set in the early years of the Taliban regime, this topical novel for middle readers explores the harsh realities of life for girls and women in modern-day Afghanistan. A political activist whose first book for children, Looking for X, dealt with poverty in Toronto, Ellis based The Breadwinner on the true-life stories of women in Afghan refugee camps.

In the wily Parvana, Ellis creates a character to whom North American children will have no difficulty relating. The daughter of university-educated parents, Parvana is thoroughly westernized in her outlook and responses. A pint-sized version of Offred from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Parvana conceals her critique of the repressive Muslim state behind the veil of her chador. Although the dialogue is occasionally stilted and the ending disappointingly sketchy, The Breadwinner is essential reading for any child curious about ordinary Afghans. Like so many books and movies on the subject, it is also eerily prophetic. "Maybe someone should drop a big bomb on the country and start again," says a friend of Parvana's. "'They've tried that,' Parvana said, 'It only made things worse.'"
Esperanza Rising: Grade 6-9-Ryan uses the experiences of her own Mexican grandmother as the basis for this compelling story of immigration and assimilation, not only to a new country but also into a different social class. Esperanza's expectation that her 13th birthday will be celebrated with all the material pleasures and folk elements of her previous years is shattered when her father is murdered by bandits. His powerful stepbrothers then hold her mother as a social and economic hostage, wanting to force her remarriage to one of them, and go so far as to burn down the family home. Esperanza's mother then decides to join the cook and gardener and their son as they move to the United States and work in California's agricultural industry. They embark on a new way of life, away from the uncles, and Esperanza unwillingly enters a world where she is no longer a princess but a worker. Set against the multiethnic, labor-organizing era of the Depression, the story of Esperanza remaking herself is satisfyingly complete, including dire illness and a difficult romance. Except for the evil uncles, all of the characters are rounded, their motives genuine, with class issues honestly portrayed. Easy to booktalk, useful in classroom discussions, and accessible as pleasure reading, this well-written novel belongs in all collections.
Kira-Kira: In Cynthia Kadohata's lively, lovely, funny and sad novel -- winner of the 2005 Newbery Medal -- the Japanese-American Takeshima family moves from Iowa to Georgia in the 1950s when Katie, the narrator, is just in kindergarten. Though her parents endure grueling conditions and impossible hours in the non-unionized poultry plant and hatchery where they work, they somehow manage to create a loving, stable home for their three children: Lynn, Katie, and Sammy. Katie's trust in, and admiration for, her older sister Lynn never falters, even when her sisterly advice doesn't seem to make sense. Lynn teaches her about everything from how the sky, the ocean, and people's eyes are special to the injustice of racial prejudice. The two girls dream of buying a house for the family someday and even save $100 in candy money: "Our other favorite book was Silas Marner. We were quite capitalistic and liked the idea of Silas keeping all that gold underneath the floorboards." When Lynn develops lymphoma, it's heartbreaking, but through the course of her worsening illness, Katie does her best to remember Lynn's "kira-kira" (glittery, shining) outlook on life. Small moments shine the brightest in this poignant story; told beautifully and lyrically in Katie's fresh, honest voice. (Ages 11 to 14)
Under the Same Sky: Gr. 5-9. At 14, Joe Pedersen is a spoiled rich kid who has never given a thought to the Mexican migrant laborers on his family's farm in upstate New York. But when he wants a fancy motorbike, his dad makes Joe earn the money by picking strawberries and hoeing cabbages with people he has never really seen before. Message drives the plot, and the lesson is heavily spelled out. But Joe's immediate first-person narrative humanizes the workers, including the "illegal aliens," and brings the reader close to their bitter struggle: the backbreaking, boring, sometimes dangerous work; and, for some, the constant dread of the police. Joe meets Luisa, who, at his age, has had to leave school, cross the border illegally, and labor to support her family far away. In the tense climax, he helps her escape the police--and he earns his father's respect for breaking the law.

Good grief! Each of these is pushing a political agenda--especially the last "message drives the plot" (guess which one my niece picked!) With the possible exception of the first one, set in Afghanistan, they are all pushing the same political agenda.

Alarm bell #3: Looking through her binder, I come across a chart that she had made:

There, in the middle, is the phrase "Story of Stuff". I took the chart to her and asked her about it, and she said it was notes from a video they watched in their "Sustainability" class.

At that point my blood began to boil.

“The Story of Stuff” is a video being shown all over the place to students. It is every bit as bad, or worse, as “Inconvenient Truth.” It decries consumerism, exaggerates every bad thing that human beings do, scares kids about “toxins”, and is a massive club to beat kids into environmental, anti-consumerism, anti-corporate hysteria.

You know something must be really bad, when the first thing about it on Wikipedia is “The Story of Stuff is a polemical animated documentary.” Yes “polemical” is the first thing that should be said about it.

Will there be any countervailing video shown describing the real “Green Revolution”, which fed millions of people who would otherwise have starved through better agricultural techniques? Will there be pro-capitalist videos shown which describe how pre-capitalist and non-capitalist systems create societies filled with poverty, illness, corruption, tyranny, and death? Will there be any videos shown which herald the advances the first world has made in solving many of the world's problems—how every time the world is faced with a problem, human ingenuity is able to fix it?

I’m not exactly betting the farm on that one.

I told her she has to fight back. Her answer to that was to get upset and say: "I can't, I'll get a bad grade!!!!"

Yes, our 10-year-old is already cowed.

Alarm Bell 4: Before school even started, we got the after-school class list. One of the items was "An Interactive Art Exploration of The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago". What is the Dinner Party? It is a feminist art installation, in which a dinner table is set with pieces reminiscent of important women. However, the dinner plates are decorated with "vulvar and butterfly" designs. Yes, a class for 3rd through 8th grade about a piece of vaginal art. You can not Google Judy Chicago without pulling up art you really do not want an 8 year old to see (a 3rd grader)--if you were at work, the websites would probably be blocked. One of her pieces is called "Menstruation Bathroom." How can they design an after school class for 8-14 year olds about an artist that it is not safe for the kids to google?! What were they thinking???!!!

So, that's just the first week of school. It's going to be an interesting year.

Second Potter book has been read!

2010-08-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Last night, a little after 10, Steven completed the second Harry Potter book. At 85,141 words, that puts his Potter reading total at: 163,107 words. It took him longer than the first, in part because we never seemed to find time to read during the day, but we went through 60 pages yesterday to finish it. I probably read more of this book than that last, but he still read more than 75% of it.

Now, on to Azkaban!

The boy's latest obsession

2010-07-15T06:54:00.001-07:00

The boy has his healthiest obsession since his Lego Summer.

I while back, he became interested in Harry Potter and asked me a million questions about it; however, I thought he wasn't ready for a 308 page book.

Then, he found out about a knick-knack Harry Potter ring, and his mom said she'd get it for him if he read the book.

He began it Monday night and read 29 pages. Then on Tuesday, he read another 49 pages. Yesterday, he read 84 pages. He can't read it entirely independently and needs someone to sit with him. He has trouble with the names, with getting off by one line, with Hagrid's lines, and with some of the little words. He gets most of the big words just fine.

He's now on page 162, and wants to spend today reading too. At this rate, he should be done by next week.

Update: He finished it! He read 74 pages on Thursday, and 72 pages on Friday. For a total of 308 pages in 4 days plus a few hours on Monday. We looked up the word count and it comes in at 77,966. That's more words than he's probably read in 6 months or more.

I started following along with my finger and he started reading much better and faster, with fewer silly mistakes in the little words (he reads almost all of the big words easily). I've been telling him for years to follow along with his finger, and he totally refuses to do it.

Last day of school!!

2010-06-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the boy's birthday, so we now have a 10-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy. Yay!! The kids are big! The boy, though, seems to have had at least one extra growth spurt that she hasn't had, and has pulled to within one inch of her for the first time. I was thinking he wouldn't pass her in height for years, but I might be wrong. She grew two inches this year to his three. If they do that again, he'll be her height when their birthday's roll around next year.

The school handed out report cards last week, so we already know that they did pretty well. The boy struggles in writing, but most of the rest was quite good. He's good in reading and math. His biggest problem is neglecting the things he doesn't like to do.

She did really well in very nearly everything. She got one bad, very bad, grade and that was for not turning in her (completed!) homework time and time again during the year.

For the first time, he had a better year than she did. Her teacher was difficult, and he finally caught his stride. But all in all it was a pretty good school year.

Today at 1:00pm, we will officially have a 5th grader and a 3rd grader in the house!!

It wasn't a fluke!!!

2010-05-14T18:39:00.001-07:00

Steven wasn't at school last Friday, so no spelling test. However, he took one today...

100% again!!!!! (95% on the flip side.)

It wasn't a fluke!!!

Book Review: The Red Pyramid

2010-05-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Amazon Prime, I got Rick Riordan's new book "The Red Pyramid" a day early, and finished it up Thursday night.

This is the first in a proposed 3-book series. Whereas Riordan's Percy Jackson books asked the question What if the Greek gods were still around? The Red Pyramid changes the Greek gods to Egyptian ones.

Oddly, though, this book didn't remind me of the Olympians books so much as it did Riordan's other project: The 39 Clues. In the 39 Clues, a brother and sister discover that they are part of an amazing and important family as they travel the world to complete a difficult quest. (Riordan only wrote the first of the 39 Clues books, but wrote the overall arc for the 10-book series on behalf of Disney publishing.)

The Red Pyramid has a brother and sister team traveling the world on a difficult quest while learning they are part of an amazing and important family.

The kids in the 39 Clues are escorted by an intriguing au pair. The kids in the Red Pyramid are escorted by an intriguing cat/goddess, Bast.

The kids in the 39 Clues pick up...well...clues, as they work to piece together a bigger puzzle. The kids in The Red Pyramid pick up clues as they work to piece together a bigger puzzle.

So, other than the fact that the overall pattern of the book is familiar, what does this book bring to the table?

The cool part of the book is finding out how Egyptian mythology worked and the relationship between Egyptian magicians and the gods. It is a very different relationship than the more-familiar Greek mythology. The Egyptian gods can be controlled by magicians and magicians can draw on the power of the gods, giving humans much more power in Egyptian mythology.

Other than that, though, I found the book pretty flat. And, though I saw parts of the ending coming, I still found it convoluted and anticlimactic. Throughout the book we are told of the evils of one god, and his quest to destroy North America. But when the final battle concluded, that god was basically told to shape up and allowed to go on his way (because a bigger threat was looming). After hearing about this guy's evilness for so long, not having him really vanquished came as a bit of a let down. Nor was it explained why a good talking to would be sufficient to keep this god quiet until he was needed again. Either I missed something, or it wasn't explained very well.

I would say there are plenty of better books out there to read. If you're interested in Egyptian mythology, you'd probably like it, but I wouldn't go out of the way to read it. Wait for the soft-cover.

A very good day

2010-04-30T20:16:00.000-07:00

Today was a very, very big day!

First of all it was the science fair at school, and our fourth grader did a great job!!! She did it on the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They've been working on this project since January, and she really knows her stuff!!

Even our second grader loved the science fair, and he was very proud of his sister.

They had an assembly in the morning with the kids and the parents. The fourth grade had to sing a cheesy version of John Lennon's "Imaging"...Imagine no pollution. It's easy if you try...no smog around us... I was proud of the kids, when it was time to stand up and sing it, they all groaned.

Then, I got the call around lunch that the girl's glasses were ready. It's a one-day glasses store, and she only picked them out yesterday after school. She barely, barely needs glasses. Her perscription is -0.75/-0.5, but she's been getting headaches at school, so glasses it is. Here she is (in her t-shirt from the fair):

It's hard to tell, but the glasses are very thin blue wires.

Then, the big surprise came in the boy's homework. He had a two-page spelling test today. Here it is:

Yes, that says 94% on one side and 100%!!!!!!!!! on the other. And this was from a boy who was scoring in the 30's just a few months ago.

Now, we had a bargain with the kid. There is a shirt he absolutely loathes. If he scored 90% or better on a spelling test he could cut it up. He went one better. He cut it up, then had me burn it:

Now the kids are chilling watching a Harry Potter movie.

Both kids say this was their best day ever!

Modern versus classic

2010-04-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

With reading lots of children's literature, one thing really stands out: New books don't hold a candle to the old ones.

Even modern books that I like are not written nearly as well as the old ones are. There tend to be a lot of slang terms, bad grammar, a lack of punctuation, simplified sentence structures, and poor editing.

Reading an older book like "Ann of Green Gables" or "Pippi Longstocking" really shows the difference. The writing is richer, more complex, better thought out, and more standard in its grammar and style.

Few modern books can really compare to the old stuff. Even the Harry Potter books, which are among the best written of the modern books I've read, desperately could have used editing--"The Order of the Phoenix" and the later books in particular.

The sad thing is, I don't think this is just a matter of cutting out the editors in favor of cost-cutting. I think it is a general deterioration in our society's ability to write.

As much as I like the Percy Jackson books, I can't help but note that they are actually not written very well. And the author is a former junior high English teacher!

If the teachers don't write well, what hope for their students?

Writing really well, not merely telling a story and putting words on a page, may be a dying art.

Book review: City of Ember

2010-04-30T11:23:00.001-07:00

After seeing the movie of "City of Ember" I wasn't terribly impressed. Nevertheless, there was enough to the story to intrigue me, and I got the book.

It was a surprise. The book is fairly short, and is essentially straight-up science fiction. Some big, unexplained catastrophe has occurred. This has rendered the surface of the world uninhabitable. Before the end of the world, a handful of experts created an underground city called Ember. They stocked it with food, babies, and elderly couples. The elderly parents were barred from discussing the surface world or anything from outside of Ember. In this way, the children would grow up content with their city and not harbor any regrets for the lost world of the surface. The experts who built the city also left behind instructions on how to leave the city. Instructions to be followed two hundred years later.

Unfortunately, the instructions get lost, the food and supplies are running out, and the electrical power of the city is failng. It is left to two kids to try to get out of the city and try their luck on the surface--that part is very Logan's Run.

I really liked the book. The characters are pleasant and there are many little things and ideas in the book that are clever and keep your attention. That's one of the good things about science fiction. It's the little, clever, what-if ideas that can get thrown in along the way. How would the inhabitants of a dying world behave? How would they react to blackouts, which would be the equivalent of the sun going out in our world? How would they remember foods that are no longer available?

I haven't read any of the sequels yet, but I do recommend the first book in the series.

Book Review: Mysterious Benedict Society

2010-04-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

I've read all three of the MBS books. They are all interesting and good. It's worth it to go to a book store to read the first part of the first book, which is funny and clever.

The book follows (what else but) an orphan as he responds to a newspaper ad for a child seeking "extraordinary opportunities". When he responds, he joins a number of kids for a written exam. The exam is absolutely impossible, and some kids leave the room in tears.

Nevertheless, the boy uses his exceptional brain to pass the test. Other tests follow, and in the end, he and three other kids have all passed.

What follows is a tale of adventure and danger, intellect and puzzles. The four kids have to team up to save the world from a mind-control device. Needless to say, they succeed and go on to other adventures in books 2 and 3.

These books reminded me most of "7 Professors of the Far North". But it's been a long time since I read that one.

These books aren't deep reads, nor do they have themes beyond using your gifts and working as a team. But they are fun.

Book review: Ann of Green Gables

2010-04-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

I read "Ann of Green Gables" about a year ago. Of all the books I have ever read, this one had one unique element--more on that later.

The basic story is simple. An elderly couple (brother and sister) need help on their farm and decide to adopt a young boy. Instead of a boy, a mix-up leaves them with a girl. Though the brother takes to her immediately, the sister takes more time. The girl is a dreamer and loves gothic stories of tragedy and love. Whatever she does, she does wholeheartedly.

As the girl grows older, she, naturally, begins to mellow. By the end, she is an adult who has put many of her childish fancies aside.

This brings us to the unique element. In the beginning of the book, it is not only Ann who is over-the-top in everything. The author's voice is as well. All the descriptions are enthusiastic and a little overblown. If the book continued that way, it would have been cloying and annoying. But by the end of the book, the author's voice has also mellowed, the storytelling has become more settled and mature.

I don't think I have ever read any other book in which the author's voice changes and matures as the book progresses. That makes this book unique.

I don't think this book is for the middle grades, but junior high and up would enjoy it.

Book review: Cricket and Hugo

2010-04-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

Since almost all I read these days are kids' books. I thought I should start leaving reviews...

About two years ago, I read "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" which won the Caldicot Medal for outstanding picture book. At the time, it was like no other picture book anyone had seen, and the award drew a lot of criticism. The book starts out with page after page of pencil drawings. You see a kid running, then ducking behind a grate in the wall, then peering out from behind a clock, etc. Page after page after page of drawings. The book isn't a slim little pre-school reader. When there is text, it's more at the 4th grade level or higher. It's meant for older kids.

The book has two parts. The first tells you of Hugo and his struggle to survive essentially on the streets. His uncle, who maintained the clocks at the Paris train station has disappeared or died, and Hugo is left with no one to take care of him. So, he takes over his uncle's job and paycheck. He figures that as long as the clocks continue to run properly, he'll be able to continue on. Obviously, he has struggles and problems. By the end of the first part, he is in a more-secure position.

That is as far as our then-third grade girl got in the book. Which is too bad, because the second half is great. Hugo discovers a mechanical man and begins to repair it (I think that actually happens in the first part of the book). The thing is made with extraordinary complexity. Wind it up, and it can draw a complete and complex picture on a piece of paper. This leads to other discoveries, and in the end Hugo himself becomes a master of making similar automatons.

The book is exciting and interesting. I highly recommend it.

Right after I read "Hugo", I read the old classic "The Cricket in Times Square". I found the two books were perfect companions. Both have an adventurous boy who move about their cities, both take place in train stations, and both have a sense of wonder and magic.

Not only do I recommend both, but I recommend they be read together.

In fact, they would be great books to pair up in a book club. The club could discuss the differences and similarities between the two and the similar thematic threads.

All about spelling

2010-04-13T19:45:00.000-07:00

That last post wasn't the reason I sat down, this one is:

It's been almost two months since I posted about the spelling lessons that I'm doing with our soon-to-be eight year old.

They are going great. Really great.

We have gone through the first two books of the All About Spelling program and are into the 7th chapter (or "Step") in the third book. Today we worked on the second-most common spelling of the "er" sound (it's ur like in "nurse".) We've also been working on the consonant-le words (able, little, circle, ladle, etc.)

Right now, homophones are the big stumbling block. I made up a big stack of flash cards, but they really are a frustrating thing to learn. Mail/Male. Tail/Tale. It all blurs together and it's hard to keep straight. He has almost gotten the variations of right/write down. Unfortunately, he knows all four, when I wanted to keep it simple at two. He always wrote "rite", so I told him that was a religious ceremony. Then I dropped a hint that there was a fourth (wright) and he wouldn't let me get away without telling him about it. So now, he has to figure out right/write/wright/and rite.

Today, using syllables, he spelled "together" right. He finally retired "because" from our flash cards. His start-of-the-week spelling test at school was an 80%, with one really dumb typo (mumber instead of number.) He has also brought home an 85% on the much-more-extensive Friday spelling quiz. We've promised him that if he scores 90 or above, he can take a scissors to a shirt he really hates.

Interestingly, there have been a couple of times when what I'm doing with him at home was the same thing they were doing with him at school. That was really great, because it fit the two lessons together with great reinforcement.

Unfortunately, as usual, the teacher at the school isn't exactly encouraging. He's excited about what he knows (he was teaching a kid in class today the "ijuv" rule (English words don't end in i, j, u, or v)) and talks about it at school. When he mentioned breaking a word up into syllables to his teacher, he reports that she told him not to do that.

Huh?

How else are you supposed to spell words if you don't break them down into the syllables? I remember clapping them out when I was in grade school too. I know they are teaching some of the rules, because some of the worksheets he has brought home have the rules at the top (when to use "tch" and when to use "ch", how to turn "carry" into "carries", etc.) It just seems strange that they aren't using syllables to teach kids when consonants double in the middle of words, at least.

So, four months into the program, and he's into the level-3 book, which seems to be at about where his class is. His spelling has improved dramatically. It's still sometimes hard to get him to sit down for his lesson, especially when he has school homework to do too. But I think the best thing is that he seems excited to know the rules of spelling and to show other people what he can do. He's gotten to the point where he is proud of his spelling abilities, and he's getting close to being a good speller for his grade.

Lightning Thief Movie (Redux)

2010-04-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

I meant to do this post ages ago, but I might as well do it now.

Most of the differences between the movie of the "Lightning Thief" and the book were okay by me. I would have preferred the book version, but going to the Parthenon in Nashville was a pretty good idea for the movie.

There is one pretty big thematic element that was changed, though, that stuck in my mind long after I saw the movie. Here it is:

In the book, the gods don't have much to do with their kids. This is one of their big rules. But it isn't done out of malice or out of any true neglect. In a sense it is just the opposite. By separating themselves from their kids, they are forcing their kids--born to be heroes and leaders--to find their own way in the world. In a sense, it is a choice between the kids having a silver spoon in their mouth from the day they are born, and thus never having to fight for anything in their lives, and between the kids having to fight for every gain--making each success more worth while. It's a very ancient-Greece sort of idea, and was in line with the old myths.

The movie totally turns that on its head. In the movie, the gods desperately want to be a part of their kids' lives and to help them, but they are barred from doing so because of an edict from Zeus. Instead of a well-thought-out and true-to-the mythology concept of letting their children find their own strength, we get a post-modern concept of parenthood as coddling and protective. Only a stupid law keeps the gods away, very much against their will.

Anyway, that is the one big difference that stuck with me all this time.

(And I still want to know why the Kindle version of the last book is slightly different than the hard-cover.)

Book Review: 39 Clues

2010-02-22T09:14:00.000-08:00

"The 39 Clues" books are sort of the Monkees of the kid-lit book world. It's not a natural construct, but something put together by a publishing house--Scholastic--to make money. The idea is this: pick one author to write a general story arc for a series of 10 books, then play a sort of telephone game with the writing of them--each book gets written by a different author. Each author is allowed to put their own spin on things, within reason, but they have to stick to the main arc and get their characters to the desired place by the end of the book. Basically, with the end of the Harry Potter series, Scholastic had to come up with some new ways to get kids to buy their books. This was one of the things they thought up.

Part of the reason for the series is to tie it all into a website and a series of clue cards--some of which come with the books, some of which are sold separately. The idea behind that is to pull the internet generation into the series and create a web/book synthesis. The books provide about 10 of the 39 clues, and many of the others can be found on the website. I just spent some time on the site, and it has some interesting games and things on it.

As for the books, they are very quick reads and the overall story is interesting. The basic concept is kind of fun: there is one family, the Cahills, who are behind almost everything in history. Members include: Edison, Marie Curie, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Mozart, Amelia Earhardt, Deng Xiao Ping, and just about any other historical figure you could name. The family is divided into four branches: an inventor branch, a artistic branch, a power-hungry branch, and a branch known for physical strength. At some point, the family developed a great and powerful secret. But the secret has been hidden for hundreds of years. In order to discover it, you have to find the 39 clues. Some of the family branches have discovered some of the clues, but you need to bring them all together. If you do, then you have the most powerful secret on the planet.

Sent to hunt for these clues are a number of teams. One from each family, plus the lead characters, Dan and Amy Cahill. The books take Dan, Amy, and their au pair, Nelly, around the world and into many dangers. In the end, though other teams may have gathered a clue or two along the way, Dan and Amy, so far, have been able to collect them all.

There is definitely a difference between the different authors. Some of the books are simply better written than some of the others. The books, however, are very expensive. There will be 10 books in total, and each book is $13.00. That's a lot of money for books which can be read in a couple of hours. These are definitely library books. They're not good enough to go out and buy $130 worth of book, but they'd be good to borrow for a little light reading.

Spelling

2010-02-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

Did you know that "been" is the only double-e word in (American) English that isn't pronounced with the double-e sound?

Do you know that "open" syllables are syllables that end in a vowel and "closed" are ones that end in a consonant? And that open syllables tend to have long vowels and closed ones have short vowels? (Take the word open. There are two syllables: o - pen. The first syllable is open and has a long-o. The second syllable is closed and has a short-e.) Who knew?

That's the sort of thing I'm learning while teaching our 7-year-old how to spell. I've purchased the All About Spelling program and have been working with him for about two months now. We're a little more than half way through the second level. We just did the "er", "ar" and "or" sounds. (They are their own syllable type--R-controlled. There is also the silent-e syllable type, the vowel-team syllable type. I think there is also the consonant-le syllable type but we haven't gotten there yet.) Next up is the "third sound of u".

He seems to get it and to be learning something. I'm supplementing it with my old friends, the sight-word flash cards. But when he goes to school, he throws out what he's learned and still spells pretty badly. At least, his scores on their weekly tests have gone from the 30% range up to the 60% range, but there's still a long way to go. One problem he has is his refusal to start sentences with capital letters. If he just did that, his scores would go up. And if he would just remember to think about spelling in syllables, it would help too. His spelled little "litle" last week, which he never would have done if he had clapped it out.

I do like the spelling program. It is a good way to make sure that we aren't skipping something. It in part works as a phonics review--I'm especially looking forward to that with the vowel blends, where he's a little weak. It also is a structure that helps to make sure that we do the work. I wouldn't know where to begin to teach him otherwise, and we'd just be spinning our wheels.

His favorite part is the "Jail." There is a card-stock sheet with a drawing of a jail on it, and when we come across a rule breaking word, we throw it into the jail. It's a way of reinforcing the irregular words.

Our 9-year-old is actually a bit jealous. She says she was never taught the rules that he is learning. On the other hand, she's a very good speller, so it doesn't matter much for her.

Lightning Thief Movie

2010-02-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

In May of last year I posted about the Percy Jackson books. Last week the movie of the first book the "Lightning Thief" came out. I took our two kids and the two kids we carpool with. Our 9-year-old has read the first book in the series, and the older boy we carpool with has read all 5 and did so voraciously.

I think all of the kids liked the movie, but the older boy and I spent most of it comparing it to the book. There were a ton of changes. The kids are supposed to be 4-5 years older than in the book (16 vs 12, and the lead actress was actually 23.) The plot was changed pretty heavily, and they pulled the Hydra out of book 2 and put it in this movie. They skipped the St Louis Arch and a ton of other stuff. The biggest change was that the underlying villain was completely missing. In the books, the person behind all of the plot was the Titan Kronos, father of the gods. In the movie, the plotter was a demigod son of Hermes. If they plan on making another movie, they are gonna have to get Kronos into the plot somehow. Considering the books center on Kronos's return to power, it would be hard to make the movies without dealing with him sooner or later.

I listened to an interview with the author. He sold the movie rights before his book even got published and had almost nothing to do with the movie. He hadn't seen it yet at the time of the interview--he's been working on his new "Kane Chronicles" book and the first of the new "Camp Half Blood" books (Percy Jackson sequels, of a sort,) so he hasn't had time to see it. His two sons had seen it though and seemed to like it.

I thought the movie was okay and I'm glad it's holding its own at the box office this week. I hope it does very well.

Boy troubles are international

2010-02-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

One point that Richard Whitmire over on "Why Boys Fail" (which recently moved to Education Week's website) always brings up, is that the "boy troubles" are actually an international phenomenon. Other countries have actually tried to address the problem, but the US ignores it.

Today, Phyllis Chesler posted four photographs from Cairo University, showing the graduating classes for 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. She posted them to show that in the 50's not one woman was wearing a hijab, in the 1978 photo one or two women are, but by the 2004 photo, all but one or two are.

I looked at something else in the pictures: the ratio of men to women. Here are the photos, with circles around the male and female heads (Click on photos to enlarge):

1959--> Men=68 (65%), Women: 36 (35%):

1978--> Men=39 (34%), Women: 74 (66%):

1995--> Men: 36 (35%), Women: 81 (78%):

2004--> Men: 19 (17%), Women: 91 (83%):

Most of the shift seemed to be over by 1978, with women reversing their percentage in 20 years. Since then, they've held on and increased their advantage: up to 83% in 2004.

Update: Got a link to this from Richard Whitmire. Thanks!

Why math education doesn't educate

2009-12-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

I have a friend with three nephews. One was in eighth grade last year and took the private high school entrance exam--the ICEE--last year. His math scores were awful. Despite that glaring warning that the school they go to--the same one our kids go to--doesn't teach math, the family did not immediately hire a math tutor for their seventh grader.

Well, one year later, the now-eighth grader has taken an ICEE practice test and has completely bombed the math. He now has one week to prep for the real ICEE exam.

The real question is why our kids' school, and just about every school out there is so bad at teaching math. As usual, City Journal has the answer:

During the 1970s and 1980s, educators in reading, English, and history argued that the traditional curriculum needed to be more “engaging” and “relevant” to an increasingly alienated and unmotivated—or so it was claimed—student body. Some influential educators sought to dismiss the traditional curriculum altogether, viewing it as a white, Christian, heterosexual-male product that unjustly valorized rational, abstract, and categorical thinking over the associative, experience-based, and emotion-laden thinking supposedly more congenial to females and certain minorities.

Those trying to overthrow the traditional curriculum found mathematics a hard nut to crack, however, because of the sequential nature of its content through the grades and its relationship to high school chemistry and physics. Nevertheless, education faculty eventually figured out how to reimagine the mathematics curriculum, too, so that it could march under the banner of social justice. As Alan Schoenfeld, the lead author of the high school standards in the 1989 NCTM report, put it, “the traditional curriculum was a vehicle for . . . the perpetuation of privilege.” The new approach would change all that.

Two theories lie behind the educators’ new approach to math teaching: “cultural-historical activity theory” and “constructivism.” According to cultural-historical activity theory, schooling as it exists today reinforces an illegitimate social order. Typical of this mindset is Brian Greer, a mathematics educator at Portland State University, who argues “against the goal of ‘algebra for all’ on the grounds that . . . most individuals in our society do not need to have studied algebra.” According to Greer, the proper approach to teaching math “now questions whether mathematics as a school subject should continue to be dominated by mathematics as an academic discipline or should reflect more fully the range of mathematical activities in which humans engage.” The primary role of math teachers, constructivists say in turn, shouldn’t be to explain or otherwise try to “transfer” their mathematical knowledge to students; that would be ineffective. Instead, they must help the students construct their own understanding of mathematics and find their own math solutions.

Nearly every math curriculum out there in the country today signs on to these theories. Nearly every elementary school teacher in the country signs on to these theories, and when you suggest a more-robust teaching strategy, their heads start doing 360's on their necks.

We had an argument last year that our 1st grader wasn't learning his math tables. The teacher asked my sister in horror if she wanted to do "drill and kill!?" My sister replied, "yes, of course!"

The idea that mastery requires regular practice and effort at memorization is actually thought to be destructive of a student's educational attainment. It's said to numb the brain and turn them off of learning.

I would maintain that the frustration which comes from not having basic mastery of the simplest of arithmetic is what is destructive of students' will to go on. If you can't rip through the easy stuff, won't you be scared of trying anything harder? Won't you be wasting your time working the easy part of a problem, instead of focusing on the harder part.

And most of all, educators' misguided view of math education completely precludes the idea that some of their students have an aptitude and a native desire to go on to careers in the math and sciences. These teachers are essentially slamming the door on that potential right from the start.

Educating through actual educating

2009-11-06T16:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-08-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-19T08:37:00.003-07:00

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

2009-05-18T18:04:00.003-07:00

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

2009-05-18T18:04:00.002-07:00

Page 300...

Falcon Update #24

2009-05-18T18:04:00.001-07:00

Page 298...

Falcon Update #23

2009-05-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

Page 296...

Falcon Update #22

2009-05-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-17T21:10:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T19:52:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-05-11T14:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

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!!!

2009-05-06T21:52:00.001-07:00

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

Falcon Update #15

2009-05-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-03T21:35:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-03T09:21:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-30T21:29:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-29T22:11:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-04-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-21T21:20:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

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

Time marches on...

And so it begins....

2009-04-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-01-31T16:56:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

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

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".
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

2008-11-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-22T14:51:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-11-14T11:00:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-11-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

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.