Knowledge is power

I'll have to come back to this later, but this is a "well, DUH!!" kind of education article, that at the same time flies in the face of every thing that teachers are taught about how to teach: 

When Knowledge Is Unforgettable  Adults remember more of what they learned in school than they think they do—thanks to an aspect of education that doesn’t get much attention in policy debates. 

Researchers have long known that going to school boosts IQ. The question is whether it makes people smarter by building mental horsepower, by adding to students’ database of knowledge and skills, or some of each component. Recent research published in Psychology and Aging shows that people who stay in school for a longer part of their lives are no faster at simple mental judgements (like line comparison) than their less-schooled counterparts. Other research published in Psychological Science shows that high-performing schools do little to boost kids’ mental horsepower. Instead, schooling makes students smarter largely by increasing what they know, both factual knowledge and specific mental skills like analyzing historical documents and learning procedures in mathematics.

In other words, education must be knowledge-focused--just like E.D. Hirsh has been telling everyone for decades now. Simultaneously, education schools have been downplaying the same need for knowledge because 1) they think learning science, history, spelling, etc. bores kids, and boredom is the greatest evil in schools to be rooted out and stomped on wherever it is found, and 2) kids don't need knowledge when they have Google!

Teachers are not psychologists

I posted the paragraphs below elsewhere after coming across this article  on judging teachers based on how well they instill "non-cognitive" skills in their students. Skills such as perseverance, grit, resilience, etc.

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Either you're a teacher, or you're are psychologist. Pick one.

Do not expect teachers to magically know how to be psychologists, and be able to perform that profession--along with their own--for 20 students at a time. A fully trained child psychologist has dedicated themselves to studying their profession through 7 years graduate school and has been licensed by their state and has professional certification.

"Non-cognitive" skills; such as grit, resilience, self-control, and emotional intelligence; are skills most kids will pick up naturally. If a child is having trouble with these, then they should be referred to a psychologist.

Teachers should be trained to know when a child might need to be seen by a psychologist and make that recommendation, but they should not be asked to do what they are clearly not trained to do. Nor should they be graded based on their student's progress in gaining skills they are not trained to teach.

Cascade of mirrors

A while back, I got upset with the dot school's 7th grade social-studies curriculum. These kids are supposed to me studying something like geography and world cultures this year. Instead they have an ad hoc theme based class. For the theme of "intolerance" they began with watching a video of a Holocaust survivor visiting the interment camp he spent time in. The class was then asked to write a reflection--a self-focused piece of navel gazing--on how the video made them feeeeeel. This was the first exposure these kids had gotten in their entire education to anything in the 20th Century, their first exposure to the Holocaust, and their first assignment is about how *they* feel.

I ended up writing a letter to the head of the middle school saying that of all the topic *not* to be about the kids' feelings and reactions, this was it.

Apparently, this teacher just looooves the "reflection". The kids are always writing reflections about how something makes them feeeeel, how it changed them, blah, blah, blah.

Yesterday in the car, the boy said that this was probably the only teacher he will ever have that would do this: they did a worksheet, then a reflection on the worksheet, then a reflection on writing the reflection.

Seriously! She had them write a reflection about their reflection.

Blood of Olympus

Yesterday they released the last of the "Heroes of Olympus" books, the "Blood of Olympus".

Not bad, but not really good either.

On the good side, Riordan mostly stopped doing the thing that has been driving me crazy through much of this second Greek-Roman book series: he's dealing with teens, so he constantly has them thinking that any time they use their demigod powers, everyone else must hate them for it. For example: Frank can turn into an elephant: oh no! Hazel will hate me now! Leo can shoot flames at people: that's just too weird, I'll never fit in now and everyone will hate me! Hazel can bring cursed gems out of the earth: no one will ever love me, wah!!

That got old five books ago. Riordan put a little of that in this book with Nico, but pretty much limited it to him and kept it to a minimum (and Nico has some freaky powers. [I loved it when he was told to get over himself, and that the only reason he's isolated is because he's isolated himself. Yep.])

The two major battles were a bit of a disappointment. The battle against the giants was over pretty quickly. Yes, it ended with a deus ex machina, but that was entirely appropriate--yes, the hand of Zeus came down and cleaned things up...and Athena's...and Poseidon's...etc. It would have been nice if that went on for more than half a chapter though. I would have liked to see more of how each demigod fought beside their parent. Annabeth and Athena, certainly, deserved more time, and Riordan could have been very creative about the ways they would play off each other's strengths. I always want more Percy and Poseidon, who barely rated a paragraph.

The actual defeat of Gaia was also over pretty quickly and was incredibly easy. Defeating a primordial goddess should be really, really hard!

My biggest gripe--and it is a pretty big one--is that Riordan has been foreshadowing since, I think, "Titan's Curse", seven books ago, that Percy would have to deal with his fatal flaw--excessive loyalty to his friends. This should have been a traumatic event, difficult and painful to overcome. Riordan even foreshadowed that the decision would be a life-or-death one, as in: leave one friend to die in order to take care of a problem elsewhere. It was supposed to be a pivotal decision which would decide the fate of the world. Despite all of that hinting over the course of several books, in the end it was a squib. If it is in the book at all, it is in half a paragraph, and his decision is a simple one. He had to choose between letting three of his friends focus on fighting Gaia without him--which he knew they were capable of doing, or go help Annabeth who was about to be overwhelmed. The way it was laid out, this was pretty much a no-brainer for him. No trauma, no angst: go help Annabeth and trust the others to take care of other matters.

I can't tell if Riordan just forgot to put it in, forgot that it should have been a bigger deal than he made it, or if the structure of the book made it hard for him to cover. In this second Olympus series, Riordan has been writing each chapter from a particular character's point-of-view. But, in this book, all of the chapters are written from the point of view of Jason and his friends (Jason, Piper, Leo, and Reyna) or from Nico's. Neither Percy nor Annabeth have a chapter of their own, nor do Hazel or Frank. It's hard to make a big deal of Percy's dilemma, when he is never the focus of a chapter. I had been waiting for this for years, and went away very disappointed.

And no death! In two major battles--the biggest battles since the age of Heracles--not one of the major characters gets killed off. This is what separates "Harry Potter" from Riordan. Rowling had battles with real repercussions: Cedric dies, Fred dies, Lupin dies, Dobby dies, Dumbledore dies. Everyone has to deal with those losses, the guilt of surviving, the drive to finish the job, and move on. Riordan seemed to know that in the first series: Selena, for example, dies. So does Ethan Nakamura. Luke's death is part of the whole point of the series--and certainly the Great Prophesy. He redeeems himself and sacrifices himself to save the world. Their deaths meant something for the plot. They were sacrificing for the greater good, and accepting that sometimes that is necessary. Their deaths drive others to greatness. Without Selena's death, you don't have Clarisse slaying the drakon. Without Ethan's and Luke's, does Percy give up immortality to keep his promise?

But, in this series, Riordan balks. I'm sure he's setting up another series (and left lots and lots of loose ends to tie up later,) and didn't want to write anyone off, but massive battles and victories like this should come with a real cost--which was even mentioned and was a minor theme in this book. He chickened out, when he should have been ruthless.

Overall, I didn't enjoy this second Olympus series as much as the first. Riordan seemed to get lazy and was writing by the numbers. Step 1: pick a god or monster. Step 2: the demigods meet the god or monster. Step 3: either the demigods have to fight the god/monster or work with them. Step 4: pick another god or monster. Step 5: repeat... A little more creativity would have helped. Also, as I said before, the teen angst was boring and always hitting the same note over and over again. Teens are more interesting than that, and demigod teens even more so; he made them boring.

The books were enjoyable, but I prefer the original Percy Jackson books by a pretty wide margin.

Education spending is not the same as educating

This study by Andrew Coulson (or, perhaps I should say: Andrew, Son of Coul) at CATO is an impressive piece of work. A few years ago, he published a study showing how test scores in math and English have been completely stagnant (I believe using the NAEP) since the 70's, while at the same time the inflation-adjusted money we are spending on education has skyrocketted. In short, he showed how spending on education is not the same thing as actually educating, and did so in a spectacular fashion.

Now, he is out with a more-detailed study (using the SAT--but washed of any socio-economic or "who takes the test" baggage, then compared to the NAEP), which shows the same results on a state-by-state basis.

Here's his graph for Massachusetts. Most states are similar.

Rise of the X-Games

[ The Overprotected Kid, by Hanna Rosin ] What’s lost amid all this protection? In the mid-1990s, Norway passed a law that required playgrounds to meet certain safety standards. Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early-childhood education at Queen Maud University College in Trondheim, had just had her first child, and she watched as one by one the playgrounds in her neighborhood were transformed into sterile, boring places. Sandseter had written her master’s dissertation on young teens and their need for sensation and risk; she’d noticed that if they couldn’t feed that desire in some socially acceptable way, some would turn to more-reckless behavior. She wondered whether a similar dynamic might take hold among younger kids as playgrounds started to become safer and less interesting.

I have long thought that the rise of x-games, wild trick skateboarding and biking, etc., was in large part due to how we've coddled our kids for so long. They are so bored with the activities we have given them, that they are desperate for something unexpected and exciting

ISEE results

Results are in, and it looks like the boy got the scores he needed. I'd be very surprised if he didn't get into the same school that she's in. Their grades are similar, and their test scores are almost identical, and she's doing well there.

Now, we wait until March to know for certain.

Clueless

Our kid's school has a "Smart Lab", which is a place where kids can play with technology.

Here is a transcript-by-memory of a conversation I had with the instructor:

Me: Do any of the kids do any actual programming?

Instructor: Oh, yeah. Have you heard of Scratch?

Me: Yes. That's basically like MindStorms; you tell it to move the figure three steps this way, two steps that way. I mean actual coding.

Ins: Sure! Some kids even make webpages.

Me (trying very hard not to laugh in his face): No, I mean actual programming, like goto subroutine, if this then that.

Ins: No, not really.

Me: (Beating my head against the wall)...

Expectations

I suspect that this:

When it comes to preparing Latino children for college, some of the most successful school districts in the South Bay and Peninsula [aka. Silicon Valley] post the worst failure rates.

In the Sunnyvale elementary district, where 82 percent of Asian students become proficient in algebra, only 10 percent of Latino students do. The district is tied with Berryessa and San Mateo-Foster City for the lowest Latino algebra proficiency rate -- the greatest single predictor of college success -- among 54 school districts in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.

The dismal figures signal an educational crisis, say authors of a report being released Wednesday, as districts fail the largest-growing demographic group. Latinos make up 38 percent of K-12 public school students in the two counties.

Is closely related to problems like this:

Here we break to explain that Title One is – afaik – a Colorado program for children with learning disabilities.  To my knowledge, neither of the kids had been in it.

However, as I’ve learned over the years, my knowledge is often far from complete, and what happens OFFICIALLY is also not what happens in truth....

... I think the other day I said it was in third grade that the school gave us trouble over Robert.  I was wrong, it was actually in first grade.  I sent them a kid who could read, write and was working on fractions.  Imagine our shock when in our first first grade conference, the teacher informed us that Robert was learning disabled and would probably never learn to read and write.  This was particularly surprising since one of her pieces of evidence was a worksheet that consisted of 1+0, 2+0 etc. across the top of which Robert had written in properly spelled words “this is stupid and boring.  A number plus zero always equals the number.”

... the most important – the teacher, who btw, we later found out did this every year to a kid she perceived as ‘minority’ (this, btw, in a town that is one of the most liberal areas in CO.  I told this story to a leftist friend who absolutely refused to believe it.  And yet it happened.)

Sara Hoyt, who wrote the above, is from Portugal; therefore, her kid was deemed by this teacher to be a Hispanic minority in need of remedial ed.

How much of this is teachers who can not conceive of Hispanic kids being capable of college-prep work?

What a year!

6th grade assignments given to niece this year:

1) Find a song with a similar theme to each chapter in a book. Print the lyrics and a paragraph explaining why each song is apropos. Put them together in a jewel-case insert for a CD. Make cover art for your "album". (Educational value ~ 6)

2) Make a 3-D model of an Egyptian temple (she made hers out of gingerbread. Educational value ~ 2)

3) Make a visual presentation of a Roman villa and and an oral presentation or video where you pretend you are a real estate agent trying to sell it to a modern buyer. (she used minecraft--Educational value ~ 2)

4) Describe a smart-phone ap you would make to illustrate your assigned Greek god--it can not be any type of game. Make a poster advertising your ap. (Educational value ~ -75)

5) Make a poster of a book like a movie poster. (Educational value ~ 1)

6) Track the weather in a city for 2 weeks, then make a video of a fake weather forecast for that city. (Educational value ~ 5)

7) Make a 3-foot mask of an assigned god's head. (Educational value ~ 2)

8) Make a self-reflective comic book to show how how you grew socially, academically and emotionally this year. (Educational value ~ 5)

9) Write a research paper on Roman mythology and how it was used to promote the empire...Nah, just kidding! They wouldn't assign something like that!!

While she's relatively creative and artistic, her brother (currently finishing 4th grade) is a perfectionist who is so fastidious about his work that he freezes up when asked to do things like this. He's going to implode with a curriculum like this. She is thrilled to be leaving the school in less than a month and hopeful that her junior high will not assign crap work like this.

Girl-child makes her move

After a lot of work, we got an acceptance letter for one of the top 12 prep schools in the country for the 11-year-old. It looks likely, though still not 100% certain, that she will be attending Harvard-Westlake next year. It's really quite cool; though it's a pretty hard-core school.

Almost there

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...)

13 year-olds science experiment

The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees

Man! Wish I'd thought of it!

Harry Potter Trivia

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

(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

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

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.

Future reporter

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

Prisoner of Azkaban is done!!!

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!!!

Second Potter book has been read!

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!