This article examines the terms “culturally deprived” and “disadvantaged” in light of their popular use in the sixties and following decades, particularly in the ethnic and mainstream press.
via TCRecord
Using data from the Digest of Educational Statistics, this article argues that an intergenerational comparison is a more productive, progressive method to interpret data used to gauge the achievement gap.
via TCRecord
A commentary on the Special Issue.
via TCRecord
Introduction to the Special Issue
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Since its popularization in the 1990’s, the term “white privilege” has become, perhaps, the central focus of “diversity” and “multicultural” education discourses. Although the concept can be a critical component of understanding and undermining racial hierarchies in schools, it has been co-opted (largely by white scholars and from scholars and activists of color) and often used in overly-simplistic ways. I discuss, for instance, the enforcement of dialogic controls in conversations about white privilege, and particularly in white educator caucus dialogues, that disallow consideration for intersecting oppressions, including economic injustice, thereby ignoring tremendous differences in access to privilege, even among white anti-racist educators. As a result, the popular “white privilege” discourse in education appears to be stuck in a state of arrested development that actually further privileges white keynoters and consultants who have built economically solvent careers by writing and speaking about it, sometimes without acknowledging how their privilege operates differently from that of white people who do not enjoy the leisure time or resources to write essays about white privilege. I argue that these complexities must be explored more earnestly, especially by white people in the education milieu, including me, who have strengthened our privilege through an increasingly profitable white privilege “industry.”
via TCRecord
This article examines how the context of work affects teachers’ job satisfaction, their decisions to remain in their school, and student achievement. The authors found that teachers are more satisfied and plan to stay longer in schools that have a positive work environment, and that students in these schools achieve greater academic growth. Although a wide range of working conditions matter to teachers, social conditions including the school culture, the principal’s leadership, and relationships among colleagues are most important.
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This article outlines a new conceptual framework for promoting postsecondary educational achievement and workforce development among low-income parents while simultaneously advancing the learning and healthy development of their young children. It proposes a dual-generational intervention—an approach that addresses the educational needs of both children and their parents—whereby early childhood education programs may serve as the access point for promoting low-income parents’ postsecondary education and career training.
via TCRecord
Entrants to teaching from other careers potentially provide a source of teachers for hard-to-staff rural and urban schools. Based on retrospective, longitudinal data collected through a survey of over 2,000 Teach For America (TFA) teachers who began their careers in schools serving high proportions of low-income and minority children, I found that older TFA entrants to teaching had a lower risk than did younger entrants of leaving low-income schools, the teaching profession, and broader school-based roles. I further found that, among those who left teaching, older entrants’ reasons for doing so differed from those of their younger counterparts.
via TCRecord
This article examines a reform effort initiated by a coalition of educational leaders and community-based organizations in Los Angeles as a means of providing high-quality public school options for students in an underserved community. Based on interviews with school district, community, union, and other educational leaders, this study explores how various political actors collaborated to bring about unprecedented education reform in the nation’s second largest school district, highlighting both the promise and challenge of community organizing for school reform.
via TCRecord
This self-study of practice explores how three mothers who are also educators negotiate their cross-class identities while living a curriculum of moral education with their children who are growing up upper middle class. The approaches and strategies of living a moral education curriculum chronicled in their stories offer a developmentally sensitive model of moral education that could, with modification, inform approaches to educating critical class conscious educators.
via TCRecord
It occurred to me that there is a simple pedagogical principle that explains the appeal of very early learning, homeschooling, and certain (not all) traditional methods of education, as well as why certain other methods of education strike me as a waste of time.
I hereby dub the following the principle of individual efficiency:
Seize every opportunity to help the individual student to learn efficiently–which occurs when the student is interested in something not yet learned but is capable of learning it, and especially when learning it makes it easier to learn more later.
In other words, when an individual student is capable of learning efficiently, seize the opportunity. If students spend too much idle time when they could be learning, if they are learning only a little, if they are not interested in what is being taught, if they have already learned it, or if they will not understand it, then they aren’t learning efficiently. When a certain approach ceases to conduce to efficient learning, try something else.
Why insert the word “individual” here? Because “efficiency” in education has entailed, historically, the “industrial model” of education. It might be an efficient use of resources for the state to pay teachers teach 35 students the same thing at once, but this is decidedly not the most efficient way for the individual student to learn. More on this below.
So far, the principle is unremarkable. But see how I apply the principle to a variety of educational issues.
1. Very early learning, by certain methods, is efficient learning. Under-fives, and even babies, are capable of learning much more than most people give them credit for. Just for example, they are capable of learning to read. Maybe more importantly, the use of books above all–but also flashcards, powerpoint presentations, videos, and iPad apps–can efficiently teach very young children vocabulary and basic concepts and skills that historically were not introduced until some years later. A lot of old dogmas about “developmental appropriateness” are going by the wayside as parents discover ways to teach their tiny tots much earlier, but in a fun, engaging way. Just bear in mind, I do not think that pressuring small children to learn is efficient. That makes them lose interest–which is inefficient–and not just in the “pressured” subject, but in all learning. Indeed, it is usually best to avoid pressure, whenever possible, regardless of age, which leads me to the next point…
2. Homeschooling’s main advantage is its higher potential for efficiency. In a homeschool (not a radical unschooling situation), parents can choose exactly the right books and other materials to match the student, both her interests and her capacities. (I am by no means saying that most homeschoolers actually do this, though. Just that they are free to.) Endless sifting for exactly the right educational materials and methods is extremely important if you want to keep your student’s attention and interest, and to keep challenging her. Done right, a homeschool involves constantly challenging the student, with no unnecessary review. (But beneficial review, yes.) Teaching my five-year-old homeschool student, I have developed a sense for what learning “feels like”: it seems challenging indeed, but not so difficult as to be boring or impossible; and it lasts for a limited length of time, about the length of my son’s attention span. We rarely spend too much time on a subject, but when we study, we tend to learn efficiently. In my own schooling, in good public schools, learning was rarely so efficient. As a result, my son is far better educated than I was at age five.
3. Unschooling, or at least “radical” unschooling, is often inefficient. Unschooling in its purest form entails allowing the child to choose both the subjects and the methods of study–and even whether to study at all. The parent does, of course, support and foster the child’s pursuits. It would be wonderful if it always worked. Unschooling does hold some appeal to me, because I think it is extremely important that students enjoy learning–efficient learning can’t happen if it isn’t motivated learning. Insofar as unschooling emphasizes listening to the student and getting heavy student input, I’m a fan. But unschooling in its purer forms permits students to avoid learning subjects when they, and their future learning, could benefit hugely. However much fun it might be for the student, however well it might prepare them for a particular trade, this is inefficient as a method of getting a liberal education.
4. Memorizing some facts is efficient. The reason students should memorize, for example, basic arithmetic facts is efficiency. While I agree that they should be fully exposed to mathematical concepts and multiple methods of attack (understanding math is paramount), memorization of math facts is important because it makes it much easier to do higher math and science later. Use of calculators in elementary math is sometimes defended on grounds that adults use calculators, too, and learning how to use them is efficient. That may be, but it is far faster, and more efficient, to be able to do basic arithmetic without a calculator. This is only an example. Another example, which I’m going to choose just to annoy people, is history dates. Consider this list of important dates in history, which looks pretty good to me. If you’re a well-educated person, you should know some such list of dates. Such dates are the backbone needed to contextualize the historical order and length of other historical events. If you don’t have quite a few of those dates under your belt, you can’t really make much sense of other dates that you might come across in reading history–which means you won’t learn history properly, and you won’t want to learn history because it will be a puzzle. So it is necessary to commit a fair number of dates to memory simply to make later history more comprehensible and interesting.
5. Reading many carefully-chosen, well-written books is an efficient way to learn. Why is book-reading so efficient? A well-written book, when chosen to match the student’s interest and comprehension level, is designed to teach information in as efficient and attractive a way as possible. That, after all, is why we say certain books are well-written. Videos can achieve the same thing, but most videos cannot teach vocabulary and language skills as well as books. While it is not so popular for educationists to come out against books, they talk up a lot of other methods that do not require book-reading, and–well, there’s only so much time. My approach is different. Our homeschool is completely “book-centered.” We have six bookcases filled to overflowing (we need another one now) with children’s books, both nonfiction and fiction. I am absolutely convinced that my son is reading and learning far above grade level not because he has a high IQ but simply because I’ve read a zillion books to him, explaining everything in them that I thought he might not understand. I truly believe that, of the various general methods of learning, this is the most efficient way to gain knowledge. It even makes certain “skills development” unnecessary. Because we have read so much, we have not needed to study vocabulary, spelling, or even basic grammar as separate subjects (see below).
6. Incorporating illustrative multimedia to supplement reading is efficient. Book-reading is great, but you can make it even better by having an iPad on hand to instantly look up pictures, videos, maps, and encyclopedia articles to help clarify what it is difficult for you to explain in words. Sometimes a picture or video is absolutely invaluable in explaining some subject. I find this to be especially true in geography, and to a slightly lesser extent history and science. For science reading, I frequently do “mini-experiments” with whatever is on hand, using videos viewed on the iPad as a fallback.
7. Learning the texts of Western civilization is efficient. The more of the ancient Greek and Roman classics that students learn, the better they will be able to understand why our society thinks, judges, and works the way it does. This goes just as well for the most important works of literature, philosophy, religion, and art throughout the ages. Studying these texts is efficient because someone with a great foundation in the liberal arts finds it much easier to read and learn from all sorts of other texts. I suppose the same would also go for students of other great, ancient civilizations like China and India, but I don’t have any experience with that. Anyway, it is profoundly inefficient to expect students to be able to think or say anything interesting, or to learn much, about the big policy questions that are frequently the subject of “bull sessions,” without prior exposure to “the best that has been thought and said” about history, philosophy, or political theory. The same can be said for the discussion of classic literature taken out of context. A student who is mostly ignorant of history and other classics simply can’t appreciate, or say much that is not banal or simply incorrect, about a work of classic literature. This is why reading of the classics has declined: if you do it halfway, these books are just going to seem confusing and boring. If you go at it whole hog, you’ll actually enjoy them and learn a lot from reading them.
8. Grounded in enough reading, it is much more efficient to write a lot than to do “language arts” workbooks. Elementary school students spend hours and hours doing workbook exercises about grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. Some such work is, I agree, beneficial. But a lot of such work is unnecessary busywork if one has read and written a lot. The best way to get to an 800 verbal score on the GRE is not by studying vocabulary as a subject but by reading a lot of books and being introduced to vocabulary in context, and then looking up words that are puzzling. If, through reading, one is extremely familiar and comfortable with correct English, reproducing it in written form is much easier, and some of the time spent on grammar, vocabulary, and spelling becomes unimportant. Far more efficient is to do a lot of writing daily, to get copious feedback from a very literate person, and to revise. All that said, I am inclined to think that students should go through a full, systematic course of grammar a few times in their academic careers, and some supplementary work on spelling and vocabulary is a good idea. It’s also important to teach children how to use and appreciate reference books as they write. If a student enjoys browsing style guides, you’ve done something right.
9. Ed tech’s main appeal is its efficiency. When inefficient, it sucks. Educational technology–I think of websites like WatchKnowLearn, Reading Bear, and educational apps on the iPad–can greatly increase the efficiency of learning. At its best, ed tech increases student interest and attention span while delivering information or skills practice in a way that fosters understanding and memory. It doesn’t always work that way, though. Some educational software and Web tools and communities are decidedly less efficient than more traditional methods. We avoid it in our homeschool. Sometimes, though–as with the “Presidents vs. Aliens” app–I’ll let my son have a little “inefficient” fun if it means he’s going to know presidential facts backwards and forwards. Besides, sometimes having fun in this way makes something that otherwise might seem boring, like a thick volume about presidential history, suddenly more interesting.
10. The project method is inefficient. Now let me explain why I have it in for the project method. I have loathed this method since it was inflicted upon me back in the 1970s and early 1980s. It never fails to amazing me that teachers and education professors apparently can’t see–or worse, don’t care–that making models, playing dress up, putting on lame plays, and doing endless navel-gazing projects about themselves, and so forth, are an amazingly inefficient use of time. It is true that students can learn a few things very well from such projects. But in the same 20 hours that it takes to do some elaborate history project, a student could have read ten related or increasingly difficult books all on the same subject, written a serious report, and emerged a little expert. True, he wouldn’t be able to point proudly to a model of the pyramids or a mud hut village. But he would actually know something about ancient Egypt or African village life, something that he would remember. Moreover, if the books are carefully chosen to fit the student and for quality, and the student can choose the report topic and gets enough help with it, the student can actually like the reading and writing, as much as if not more than yet-another-art-project.
11. Many textbooks are inefficient. Textbooks are written to satisfy textbook adoption committees which are devoted to requirements that often make textbooks deadly boring, especially in the earlier grades. Going through a textbook might guarantee that you cover the “scope and sequence” of educational standards, but if students are bored, if they find some parts too easy and other parts insufficiently detailed, if textbooks insert unnecessary bias or instead render them so vanilla as to lack any personality, the result won’t inspire anyone. As a result, students don’t learn what they should from textbooks, which is just to say that textbooks are inefficient. We find that replacing one big textbook with many shorter books, chosen for maximum student interest due to excellent writing and accessibility, we learn far more than we would by studying a textbook.
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I’m sure I could go on, but I think I’ve demonstrated that the principle of individual efficiency does pretty deeply explain my stands on various educational issues. Well, at least I find that interesting; I seem to have put my finger on a system.
For the philosophers out there, if you want a further argument for the principle itself, I think it follows from a traditionalist goal for education, together with a basic principle of rationality. Given that the goal of education is the development of academic knowledge and skills (to include a broad and deep comprehension of Western civilization and science a.k.a. liberal arts), the next big question in philosophy of education is how to describe the most rational means to this end. The principle of individual efficiency is my stab at that.
I wonder–would progressive educators in their many contemporary forms disagree with the principle, or would they instead disagree that the principle supports my conclusions? I’m guessing it would be the latter. But I think it is ultimately the principle itself that they are bound to reject. Ultimately, progressive education is not about individual efficiency in education at all. Maybe I’ll say what I think it’s really about later.
Some people will inevitably read the title and first few paragraphs of this post, skim the rest, and come to a major misinterpretation. Misinterpretation #1. Some might assume that I am defending the “factory model,” merely because the word “efficiency” is associated with that in the field of education. Nothing could be further from the truth. I reject the factory model and instead embrace homeschooling precisely because the factory model is so inefficient. Misinterpretation #2. Some might suppose that I am defending “tiger moms” who constantly pressure students to learn and achieve. Well, no. Efficiency is about quality, not quantity. It requires some discipline, but not harsh discipline. I think education is most efficient when the student is sincerely interested and motivated. That requires plenty of breaks and plenty of student input.
Since I started Citizendium, which invites experts to be “village elders wandering the bazaar” of an otherwise egalitarian wiki, and am well-known for criticizing Wikipedia’s often-hostile stance toward experts, I am sometimes held up as an example of someone who places too much trust in experts.
In fact, I have quite a bit less trust in experts than most people have. When I learn that something that strikes me as, at least, capable of being reasonably doubted is the overwhelming majority opinion of experts, I become very suspicious. Moreover, this has long been my attitude–not just recently, but since before Citizendium, or Wikipedia for that matter. Let me explain why, and remove the puzzlement these claims must provoke.
First, however, let me explain why I respect and honor experts. If they really are experts, and not just “the most knowledgeable person in the room” on a subject, it is because they have so goddamn much knowledge about their subject. Even if I disagree with an expert’s views on controversial issues, I stand in awe when it is clear that they can explain and evidently understand so much. Knowledge per se is deeply important to me, and not just correct memorized information, which computers can ape, but deep understanding. It is extremely satisfying to have demystified something that was previously puzzling, or to have come to a more complex understanding of something that seemed simple, though I earlier did not understand it and it was not simple. A person has my respect who has grasped much of what is, to me, still mysterious and complex about a subject.
Still, my respect only goes so far, because I am aware of a certain problem with expertise and especially with the social nature of contemporary research. People are sheep–even very smart people, trained in critical thinking. When there is a “consensus” or “broad agreement” in many fields, it becomes politically difficult to express disagreement. If you do, you seem to announce yourself as having some serious personal flaw: stupidity, ignorance of your own field, not being current on the literature, possessing poor judgment, or being ideologically motivated, dishonest, or unbalanced. This is true not just in obviously controversial or politically-charged debates, it is also true about completely abstract, apolitical stuff that no one outside of a discipline gives a rat’s patoot about.
Thus, due to the lemming-like conformity among many researchers, academic agreement tends to feed on itself. An attitude becomes the only one worth expressing, even if, on the more objective merits of the evidence itself, such confidence is not warranted at all. Such biases can swing 180 degrees in one generation (think of behaviorism in psychology).
I don’t know enough about intellectual history to say for sure, but I suspect things weren’t always quite as bad as they are now. I suspect that academic conformity has been growing at least since I was in college myself, anyway. There have been intellectual trends or “schools of thought” for millennia, of course, and when scholarship was dominated by the Church and religion–in medieval times and to a lesser extent until the 20th century–certain points of doctrine were held with easily as much dogmatism as one can find anywhere in academe today. But in the last century, some causes of academic conformity have certainly grown more powerful: academic success is gauged based on how much one has published and in high-ranking journals, while researchers are expected to build upon the work of other researchers. There is, therefore, an economic incentive to “play it safe” and march in lockstep with some particular view of the subject. This situation has become even more dire both due to the extreme competition for jobs in academe and research, and due to the literal politicization of some fields (i.e., the devotion of whole disciplines to political goals).
This problem has become so pronounced that I find it is impossible really to evaluate the state of knowledge in a new field until I have come to grips with the leading biases of researchers–how professional conformity or political dogma might be giving an aura of certainty or consensus to views that ought, in fact, to be controversial and vigorously discussed.
I could cite several instances of unwarranted confidence in academic dogma from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and education, but frankly, I don’t want to offend anyone. Academics, of course, don’t like to be called sheep or dogmatists. Besides, I think my point will be more effective if I let people supply their own examples, because you might disagree with mine. Care to discuss some in comments?
Let me conclude with a prediction. Contrary to some, the Internet is not going to limit the prerogatives of experts; they have important roles to play in society, and we cannot function at our best without our most knowledgeable people in those roles. But one of the more interesting and often delightful aspects of the Internet is that it provides a platform for people with nonstandard views. It will also–it does not yet, but it will–provide a way to quickly compare current views with views from the past. These two comparison points, nonstandard and historical opinion, were not so readily available in the past as they are or will be. The easy availability of these dissenting views will make it increasingly obvious just how dogmatic academe has been. Indeed, this has already started, and is one reason why experts and academics as a group have taken some hits to their credibility online. Finally, I observe that, for all the ovine nature of researchers, youth often loves to smash idols, and new “education 2.0,” degree-by-examination, badge, and other schemes might make such nonconformist idol-smashing a better career option. I suspect we will see a crop of younger researchers making careers on the newly-viable fringes of academe by pointing out just how ridiculously overblown certain academic dogmas really are–and students eager to save on tuition and get a broader perspective will flock to tutorials with such independent scholars.
This article examines the efforts of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation to have Black history taught in White southern schools from 1928 to 1943. The author raises questions about teachers’ activism and the impact of curriculum on shaping teachers’ and students’ attitudes and beliefs.
via TCRecord
In view of the widespread attention given to endowments of colleges and universities in recent decades, this historical essay explains how the importance of endowment, the emphasis upon increasing it, the competition for it, and even its current meaning originated between 1890 and 1930. This development established an upper tier of wealthy universities that maintained their elite status through the ensuing century, thereby contributing to the stratification of higher education in the United States over the long term.
via TCRecord
This article provides a conceptual analysis of empirical research that examines the connection between teachers’ education and its outcomes, consequences, or results, and then links this research to the political controversies and the local and larger policy debates that have shaped it. The article identifies six genres that capture the multiple ways researchers from different disciplines and with different intentions have conceptualized and studied these connections.
via TCRecord
Excelsior College, formerly known as Regents College, is a fully accredited New York state private institution that grants degrees based on exam scores and portfolio evaluation. As such, it is a natural fit to students who want to study using free online resources and who cannot afford to attend college (or more precisely, who can’t afford to pay back the loans they’d have to get). I’ve been mentioning them on this blog, and have been following them since touting a Tutorial Manifesto back in 1995. There are a couple of other established state degree-by-examination institutions as well, including Thomas Edison State College and Charter Oak State College.
A vice president at Excelsior e-mailed me to point my attention to Excelsior’s new “10K Degree Program.” Now, not having first-hand experience with Excelsior, I can’t endorse the program, but if I were a high school junior or senior who had not been accepted to a college, I’d definitely give Excelsior’s program a serious look. My favorite argument for such degrees, quite apart from the arguments about cost and the abundant free college-level content online, is that one-on-one education by the tutorial method is more pedagogically sound than the lecture, text, and exam method used at many universities. The advantages are similar to the advantages of homeschooling–only at the college level. Such a system, only expanded and found in all 50 states and around the world, is a key component of my notion of how higher education might be revitalized in light of the Internet revolution.
Whenever I think about Mozilla’s Open Badges project, I can’t help but think that Excelsior’s program is a bird in hand. I’ll be surprised if the badges idea ever goes anywhere, mainly for the following argument: a badge is a credential; to have any appreciable practical use, a credential has to have credibility; credibility can be conferred only by careful evaluation by experts of examinations or work; and experts don’t work for free. This requires something similar to an accredited degree-by-examination program–like Excelsior’s. To be sure, there is a need for a cheap, widely-accepted, credible credentialing process that is beyond traditional degrees. But that is already available, it seems. The market just needs to be expanded and, perhaps, updated.
The Open Badges program promises “a simple framework that’s open to all.” But they sometimes write as if Open Badges is mainly about letting people define their own badges, which they then claim on their own say-so. ”What’s wrong with that?” my fellow free knowledge advocates say. Well, it’s great to trust others when it comes to letting them participate in a wiki or a software project. That’s a little risky, but it often works. It is a completely different kettle of fish to trust others uncritically when they make claims about their own qualifications. That’s just naive–just look at the false claims people already make about their skills on their resumes.
Insofar as Open Badges wants badges conferred by objective third parties, based on real quantifiable achievements–MIT might be one of them–then we’re back to talking about things like accreditation and solid credential-granting bodies. But as long as the open badges system has reliable checks in place that establish that badges can’t be claimed when they haven’t been earned, I’ll be a supporter of open badges, too. But I think that the more anarchistic free culture types aren’t going to like such a result, and, as happened with Wikipedia, their influence is bound to spoil the Open Badges project. We’ll see.
Excelsior, at least, has already solved the credibility problem. They may not be a top-tier institution, but an Excelsior degree is a real degree–and a very inexpensive one, too.
(I have no relationship whatsoever to Excelsior and am commenting only out of a long-standing personal interest in distance and alternative education.)
This paper introduces the special issue on Teaching Quality
via TCRecord
This article examines ways in which the accountability context influences teaching, and explores the challenges these influences pose for research on teaching. We focus on three core dimensions of teaching: who is the teacher, is teaching practice stable or changing, and what constitutes teaching quality. Policy influences on these areas challenge researchers to specify more carefully who is responsible for teaching whom, maintain flexibility in data collection, retain research participants across years, and examine alternative conceptions of quality teaching.
via TCRecord
This article explores challenges in seeking to characterize and compare high-quality mathematics and reading instruction. Using the construct of cognitive demand, we share data illustrating the challenges and our attempts to overcome them.
via TCRecord
This article discusses three challenges associated with the study of teaching quality: striking a balance between complexity and simplicity in the portrayal of teaching, addressing the potential conditional nature of what constitutes quality teaching, and appreciating the multiple perspectives by which quality teaching might be judged. We describe our own attempts to address these challenges in a longitudinal study of reading and mathematics instruction in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in moderate- to high-poverty schools, provide a mixed-methods analysis to demonstrate the conditional nature of quality in teaching, report our results, and discuss implications for future studies of teaching.
via TCRecord
Kathy Sierra blogged earlier today six years ago (!) that “The future is not in learning“; the future lies, instead, in “unlearning.” This sounds awfully like another example of the geek anti-intellectualism that I love to hate; we’ll see about that. Since that’s how the post comes across–beginning with the title–it has already gotten a lot of attention. Geeks just love to hear that, in the future, they won’t have to learn things. They just love to talk about how they’ll be able to upload their memories to the Internet, how Internet search makes memorization a waste of time, how they just can’t make themselves read books anymore, how the intellectual authority of experts is passe, and how the liberal arts and college generally are a waste of time. For all the world it seems they really hate learning. So when Kathy Sierra says that the future is not in learning, they start salivating.
In fact, Sierra’s main message is excellent, one that is not at all anti-intellectual. She’s saying that since the times they are a-changin’ so much, we have to roll with them faster and faster, as change accelerates. This is itself very old news, but it’s always nice to be reminded of such perennial wisdom.
Too bad that, as a premise, it hardly supports the post’s dramatic title or its opening pseudo-historical timeline. Her timeline asserts that in the 1970s, the question was (somehow–who knows what this means?) “how well can you learn?” In the 1990s, it was “how fast and how much can you learn?” But today we have evolved! Now it’s about how quickly you can unlearn!
If we take the latter claim in any general sense, the argument is fallacious, of course. It is true that in the 1970s education theorists talked a lot about how well we learn; they still talk about that. It’s also true that there was a movement to accelerate education, especially among young children, which had its height in the 1990s and in the heyday of NCLB. But when Kathy Sierra next points out the homey, perfectly old-fashioned truth that we must change our habits to keep up with the times, she is changing the subject. The following argument contains a fallacy:
1. We should unlearn habits that do not conform to new developments.
2. New developments are now coming fast and furious.
3. Therefore, the important new virtue is not learning, but unlearning.
The premises (1 and 2) do not support the sweeping conclusion (3). I do not contradict myself when I maintain that we should still learn quickly and a lot (allegedly the “1990s” virtue–I thought it was an ancient virtue, but maybe that’s just me), even while maintaining that we should change our habits as they become outdated. The premises do support a much more modest conclusion, that being fast and flexible in how we change our habits is a new virtue. But to say so entails neither that “the future is unlearning, generally” nor that ”the future is not learning, generally.” So this is a plain old logical fallacy. I leave as an exercise to the reader to name the fallacy.
Lest I be accused of misconstruing Kathy Sierra, let me add this. I know that she spends most of her post explaining how we should unlearn certain outdated habits. I agree that this is excellent and timely advice. But that does not stop her from titling her post “The future is not in learning…” and contrasting the new virtue of “how fast you can unlearn” with the old virtues of “how well you can learn” and “how fast and how much you can learn.” But the fact of the matter is that unlearning outdated habits is a very, very different kind of learning (or unlearning) from learning facts.
Besides, even if you say that what we should unlearn is certain facts, the facts tend to be about narrow, practical, and necessarily changeable fields, viz., technology and business. Just because technology and business are changing quickly, that doesn’t mean a lot of our knowledge about other topics is becoming uselessly outdated. If that’s the argument, it too is obviously fallacious.
So does Kathy Sierra deserve to be called an “anti-intellectual” for this argument? Well, on the one hand, one can’t take her argument at all seriously as an argument against “learning.” On the other hand, she does seem to have something of a disregard for logic, and if she doesn’t literally believe her title, she does seem to pander to the anti-intellectual sentiments of certain geeks. I hate to be uncharitable, and I wouldn’t want to accuse her of encouraging people to stop learning so much, but look–the anti-intellectual sentiment is in the title of her post. Yes, maybe she is merely gunning for traffic by pandering to geek anti-intellectualism. But why would she want to do that if she didn’t share their biases against learning?
UPDATE: see below. Kathy Sierra responds to point out that this is a six-year-old post. I don’t know quite why I thought it was posted today! But I’ve already made a fool of myself, and I’m not one to stop doing so after I’ve done it publicly, especially at someone else’s expense.
It’s been a long time since I gave an update about what I’m doing with the boys, who are now 5.5 years (H.) and 15 months (E.).
I guess the biggest news about H. is that he’s now writing regularly and doing quite well with that, but we’ve made progress and made minor adjustments with nearly everything.
Mathematics. We’ve finished the Singapore Primary Mathematics 1A, and recently started 1B. I’m very happy with the Singapore system. The more we’ve studied math, the more I’ve come to understand some of the methodological issues. I now believe even more strongly that it’s a good idea to expose a child to many different ways of solving a problem. Math isn’t about coming up with a working heuristic to solve a problem, it is about understanding the relationships between various very abstract numerical concepts. This understanding, rather than the mere ability to work through a problem, is the goal. The Singapore method (or at least, if that’s what’s in these textbooks & workbooks) is built on this insight. We discover that we didn’t really understand a certain concept until we try to tackle similar problems in a new way–and the more ways we have of tackling a problem, the more we really understand what’s going on. Yesterday (as it happens), H. said that he likes his Singapore books precisely because they give him different ways of doing, or thinking about, the same problems.
At the same time, I also believe it is crucial to memorize certain basic facts in different subjects. We haven’t started memorizing much yet, but we have started memorizing addition and subtraction facts. For this we’re still chugging through Two Plus Two Is Not Five, which I can recommend highly–or at least, it’s worked very well for us so far. We spend half our time on the Singapore books and half (or so) on Two Plus Two. H. is now well into Tier 5, which means he’s in the home stretch (there are six tiers). There are very few simple addition and subtraction facts he doesn’t have memorized now. But, before you sneer that this is rote memorization–which, of course, it is–you should bear in mind that he has also had an in-depth introduction into different ways of thinking about these same sorts of problems. So he has both memorized and understands most of his basic sums and differences (I think, or hope).
We also “take a break” once every few weeks by doing a chapter from Life of Fred: Apples. This could be safely skipped, but it’s “enrichment,” and H. likes it. He also fairly regularly does iPad math apps, just because he likes it. I also got in touch with Dr. Miles Jones of Jones Geniuses and should be trying out his curriculum sometime soonish.
I’d say math is one of his favorite subjects just now. He rarely resists or wants to do something other than what I say we’re going to do on a given day.
Writing. There’s a lot to report here. First, a little about penmanship. In the last report (August 2011), I said we were still doing penmanship. For another month or two, I guess, we were switching off between having him write one sentence with very careful penmanship, and writing three sentences without paying (much) attention to penmanship. But for the past 4-5 months have worked almost exclusively on writing. I still do (even recently) make him practice his penmanship from time to time, but not too often. Mostly I simply make him rewrite certain letters, or practice them over and over if they’re a chronic problem. (This is the sort of one-on-one attention that homeschooling allows for.) Simple practice, without trying too hard, has improved his penmanship quite a bit. He’s faster and a little neater than he was six months ago.
Until recently, we were doing just a couple of different writing assignments. In one variety, we would agree on some sort of theme (what you’d do with a million dollars, your trip to the park, a story, whatever), I would give him some instruction or advice, and let him go. In the beginning I hovered over him and helped him (and this was useful). Soon I found it was fine for me to just go up and work and let him write by himself, although sometimes I’d have to go back and advise him on various things. In the other variety, I would simply say, “Write at least three sentences” (or sometimes “at least four” or “at least five”), and he would go and come up with all sorts of stuff. He got into the habit of asking for blank “books,” which were 3-5 pages of printer paper folded over and stapled on the “spine.” He would end up writing a lot more than five sentences on these, illustrated. These were usually about things he was interested in, or related to studies. A couple of times he made a History of the World. Once, an Atlas. Frequently, they were story books. A lot of times these sorts of compositions, stories, and “books” don’t make a lot of sense in terms of choice of topic and relationship among sentences.
Then about a month ago I posted a question on the Well-Trained Minds Forums, and was inspired to rethink how I’m teaching writing. It occurred to me that H. could benefit from beings systematically exposed, maybe not to grammar at this point, but to rhetorical modes, in a certain way. So at first I introduced “historical narratives,” because that was (for whatever mysterious reason) what H. picked from a list I gave him. Then “dialogues,” and right now we’re doing “character introductions/descriptions.” In each case, each day, I find three examples that are “pure” examples of the rhetorical “mode,” so to speak, we’re focused on. So the historical narratives had little or no dialogue or description, etc.–just the recounting of a sequence of events from history. I would read and discuss each example, explaining their main features. Then I had H. copy one. He didn’t like copying much, but it wasn’t too much of a struggle to get him to do this. After doing that for three days (up to half a page of RediSpace notebook paper per day–which isn’t too much, I think), then we’d switch gears for three more days. We’d begin the same way, by looking at a few examples of the text type (sitting in the big chair together). Then we’d pick one, and read it two or three times, discussing its main features. Then, H. went and rewrote it from memory. He usually did an excellent job of this. After the rewriting phase, we’d begin an “original work” phase, in which (at least in the case of dialogue and description) he would make up his own. He has also dictated a number of original compositions, which I typed in; these could be longer. In fact, today, we did a 200-word dictation that specifically combined description, then narration, then dialogue. Here it is (this was heavily guided by questions and corrections from me, but it’s 90% his language and story):
My Mousie
My mousie is white all over, and he has a tail. He is pretty big, for a mouse. He is a puppet. He has a place for your finger to fit in. His name is Mousie. I like pretending to feed him some food–especially pretzels.
One day, Mousie went out. He got into his car, which I made specially for him, and drove to the family room. I pushed him along. From there, he drove over to the study table, which is where I study. Then he saw our math books and our RediSpace notebook. He bumped into me accidentally because it was time for me to study.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Mousie replied, “You’re fine. I regret that I need to study.”
“Get the pencil sharpener,” I said.
Mousie climbed up and stood next to the pencil sharpener, and he said, “I need help carrying this.”
He let me move the pencil sharpener down. I sharpened a pencil quickly and started doing math.
I gave Mousie his own pencil, and he started math too.
The End
Is this “rhetorical modes” work improving his writing? I don’t know. I imagine so, but I’m going to let him take regular breaks from this sort of systematic training to write whatever he wants, maybe encouraging him to write some more of his “books.” (He childishly boasts that he is the best writer in Ohio, and he yesterday said that writing is his favorite subject. So this shouldn’t be a tall order.)
However the systematic “rhetorical modes” training will work out, in the last six months or so, I’ve noticed a marked improvement in all aspects of writing–penmanship, spelling, grammar, focus of text, etc. I’ve been frankly amazed at how much progress he made without any systematic training in spelling, grammar, style, or rhetorical modes, before we started the more planned-out work a month ago. I suspect that what matters more than anything is, quite simply, a good quantity of writing daily.
I do correct his spelling, but in fact I rarely have to make many corrections, and almost always the corrections are of quite hard words. I am sure that his early systematic phonics training has helped him to pay attention to just how words are constructed, so he knows when a word is misspelled, and so can often figure out the right spelling himself. So far, I haven’t had any particular desire to train him in spelling–I haven’t seen a need, beyond correcting his spelling and occasionally making remarks like “the <shun> sound at the end of words is often written t-i-o-n.” I’ve looked at spelling programs and they look extremely basic and dull. I guess we could try some more advanced ones. Maybe we will after another while.
It’s the same way with grammar. I rarely have had to explain agreement or even contractions–for whatever reason, he just writes grammatically excellent sentences. Occasionally they are complex, too, although usually they’re pretty simple. I did have to change “did’nt” to “didn’t” the other day, and for the first time explained that the apostrophe meant that a letter was omitted, which is why it’s between the “n” and the “t”. For this reason we haven’t yet tackled a systematic grammar. We did read two Basher grammar books, Punctuation and Grammar, and I explained as much as I read (if not more). He’s asked for another Basher grammar book, but I’m not sure there is one. Maybe that’s my cue to just break down and get him a grammar book. I think they did help a bit, and H. liked them both a lot–specifically requesting them for dinner table reading. So far, I don’t see a lot of need to introduce him to grammar, when he’s introducing himself so well. Of course, he does make grammatical mistakes from time to time, and I do correct and explain them. He also have been going through a 3rd grade vocabulary enrichment book, which is kind of fun, and that allows me to explain the difference between nouns, verbs, and adjectives repeatedly.
There’s one other thing to report here. Lately I have been writing a lot (mostly just to work things out for myself) about how to teach writing, and so I’ve given serious thought to the classical and Charlotte Mason notion of writing “narrations.” A narration is basically a writing exercise in which the student summarizes, or at least writes what he or she remembers, from a text read once, carefully. I started a thread about this to solicit help. Suffice it to say that we’ve done around ten narrations in the last few weeks. We’ve approached them in a number of different ways. He has done fine with these, although of course it will take time and practice before he is able to do them well without any prompts. I also don’t think we have time to do them multiple times per day, as some other homeschoolers, with older children, say they do.
Drawing and art. I’ll talk a little about drawing and art here because we sometimes do that accompanying writing or after writing. About 90% of the time, when he does drawing or art, he does it without much direction from me. The other 10% of the time, I try to take him step-by-step through some project, almost always a drawing project. Obviously, when we do the step-by-step thing, he does much better. His drawing and art is not better than the average kindergartner’s, I’m sure, and might be a little worse. I’d like to work more systematically, maybe a couple times a month, on drawing, but I haven’t yet found a good program to follow. Here I really need a good program because I’m no great artist myself. We did have a weekly art class at the YMCA, which was great. We’ll be going back for more of that. This has taught him about a bunch of art media that I never would have taken the time to touch myself.
Science. We’ve been reading Basher science books (Periodic Table, Chemistry, Rocks and Minerals, Physics–he greatly enjoys these, though of course he doesn’t grasp all of the concepts yet), and a variety of others, over the meal table. Since we don’t get science much at any other time, about 40% of mealtime, I’d say, has been devoted to science lately. Still, it occupies less time than we spend on other subjects, I’m afraid. In fact, I think I’m probably falling down on the job a little bit on science, especially because we’ve stopped doing experiments and Electronic Snap Kits nearly so much–we’re down to just about one experiment per month or so. At times in the past, we often did 2-3 per week. I guess I haven’t had time myself (these are very time-consuming to get ready), and I really want to start going through science more systematically. I guess I can see some benefit from doing so, and H. doesn’t really seem to care what we read when it comes to choice of science topics. The main reason we have put science relatively on the back burner is that I’ve wanted to get math and writing off to a solid start in 2011–and that we really did. Besides, it’s not as though we’re entirely neglecting science, and we have read a lot of science books.
Geography. After lunch, we spend around 15-20 minutes per day reading 2-4 pages of a geography book and looking at related pictures and videos, as well as the globe, maps, and atlas. Sometimes he does more than this (rarely tracing maps, for example). I read this to him, so we’re really learning quite a bit of geography together. Most of it is new to me, too–at least, at the in-depth level we’re pursuing our geography study. As to the method itself, I’ll quote something I put in on welltrainedmind.com a couple days ago:
The books mostly introduce different countries, organized by continent. [Currently, South America.] Our favorite series are True Books and National Geographic Countries of the World. We’ve done Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and now we’re almost done with Colombia. Chile and Argentina next, to finish our study of Andes Mountains countries, and then we’ll wrap up with Venezuela and Brazil. We’ll skip the small countries (the Guyanas, Uruguay, and Paraguay) and didn’t spend so long on Bolivia. (I wouldn’t recommend doing them in the precise order we’ve tackled them–we did because we started by using a “spine,” and Peru was the first South American country in the “spine.” In fact, we have a couple of spines (children’s atlases that feature a significant amount of text about the countries), and while we still use these, they have become practically irrelevant once we’ve reading whole books. We toss off the sections about the area of South American we’re studying in a day or two, and basically just use it for reinforcement/review. We have also read a couple books about South America in general.
As we read the books, we very frequently look things up, either on maps in the book itself (especially when using the superlative National Geographic books), or on a 16″ floor globe we have (for less-detailed things), or a ginormous atlas we have (for more-detailed things). When there is not a picture of a place or thing in the text, we usually look for one on the iPad. Using iPad to search Google Images is one of the best ways to supplement and make things “visual”–we also do this with history study. We also frequently look for videos to illustrate things like music, ethnic groups, and more about what things looks like in general. The iPad also has a couple of good apps, Google Maps, Google Earth, and a couple National Geographic map apps. I’ve also had him trace simple, line political maps of South America and Colombia using tracing paper. But I’d say 75% of our work is reading the books about countries.
I’ve never seriously considered using a canned geography curriculum. It’s simply not detailed enough and frequently involves what seems to be busywork, which I would like to avoid.
My argument for using books, and not doing so much map copying, projects, or worksheets, is simple: it’s more efficient and I think he’ll learn and retain more in the long run. Of course, it’s impossible for him to retain all, or even half, of the information he’s exposed to–but he’s exposed to so much more, and such a richer and richly interconnected variety of information, that he comes to “live in” a continent. Factual information such as a country’s capital is becomes second nature, because it’s mentioned many times in different contexts: several times in the text, in our study of the globe, atlas, and map apps, pictures, videos, etc. Because of the rich variety of media, our focus on only the best geography books, and our daily (albeit fairly brief) exposure, we have come to enjoy the time learning about different countries. The other day, my son had another 10 minutes of reading to do in his daily hour of reading, so he read six pages of the National Geographic Colombia book–which bothered me, because now I’m not going to be able to read it! We are as it were slowly travelling around South America. Because we’ve learned so much, things that might seem dull, like the varieties of Indian groups or different geographical areas (e.g., “Los Llanos” grasslands in Colombia and Venezuela, or the Guajira Desert which I hadn’t heard about before), become genuinely interesting. It really, really helps–in fact, is absolutely essential–that we look at pictures and videos of things we’re unfamiliar with, or things which we think might be impressive to look at. Combining a reasonably detailed text with lots of visuals makes all the difference.
I happen to think that study of geography is at least as important as modern language study. If a large part of the reason for studying a modern language is to be able to get around in that country and to understand the culture, how much more important is it to study the country itself, head on? Geography is necessary is you want to travel, to understand international news, and to formulate opinions on foreign policy. It also helps a child to understand the wider variety of current human experience, history, landscapes, etc. It makes a child more worldly and less provincial–and hence capable of understanding many things he might not otherwise be able to understand (or, not so easily) when it comes to subjects that really demand an open yet critical mind, such as philosophy, history, and world literature.
“Reading” and chapter books. H. has continued to read for an hour a day every day after geography. Last time I mentioned that H. liked to read out loud. Well, after a while he started reading silently all the time and I’ve never heard a peep from him since. As a result, he has gone through a fair number of books. He’s also become much more comfortable doing his hour of reading now–while when we started it was often a struggle, now I usually say, “It’s time to read,” and he’ll just get to it. I am not going to prepare a list of all the books he’s read recently, but he has read quite a few chapter books. The highlights included Susan Wise Bauer’s The Story of the World, Vol. 1 (314 pages–entirely his idea to tackle this), Beverly Cleary’s three Ralph Mouse books (starting with The Mouse and the Motorcycle), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (I read Harry Potter #1 to him, he read the second to himself, and got halfway through #3 before he called it quits for now), a couple of Secrets of Droon books, six Flat Stanley books, a couple King Arthur books, and others. I’d say it’s been about 70% fiction, 20% history, 10% science and transportation. I encourage chapter books. But when he tells me, as he occasionally does, that he is tired of chapter books and he wants to read easier books, I let him. His favs there include “Let’s Read and Find Out” science books, various books about cars and trucks and construction, and the giant Richard Scarry books. More generally, he picks out his reading material himself–although from a bookcase stocked with things I think he’ll like.
I gave him an incentive (something I have done, just occasionally, when it seemed helpful) to finish the Ralph Mouse books: I said we could get him some related toy if he finished Runaway Ralph. So we went online and found a great mouse puppet. H. has never ever been attached to stuffed animals to the extent that he is to this mouse. For the first time he is sleeping with it, carrying it around, etc. ”Mousie” sits overlooking math and writing homework, piano, meals, etc. For Christmas he asked for a motorcycle for the mouse. So he got one, and though it was not the most expensive present, it was definitely his favorite.
We were reading something from the absolutely wonderful Children Just Like Me where some kid said that he liked math but didn’t like reading, and H. piped up to say that he liked reading. That was great to hear. Not only is he now quite resigned to his hour of reading to himself, he really seems to enjoy it. In fact, I am seeing him more and more picking up books on his own again.
At bedtime I read chapter books to H. for 20-40 minutes. These are almost always a little higher-level than the books he chooses for himself. We’ve read quite a few–again, I won’t list them here, but they include The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew (more engaging than LWW itself), Little House on the Prairie, a mid-level edition of “Aladdin” and stories from the Arabian Nights, Stuart Little (this was the first chapter book I read to H. after Winnie-the-Pooh–he liked it at the time and loved it again recently), and quite a few others. We’re actually only 1/3 of the way into Little House now. We read Little House in the Woods when he was 3 or 4, and half of Farmer Boy. He liked those at the time, but he just loves Little House now, and I don’t blame him–it’s just such a wonderful book. We also read literature at mealtime, intermixed with other stuff. This has included D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and The Aesop for Children, The Golden Children’s Bible (an excellent version which I had as a child myself, but which he nixed halfway through–I’m sure we’ll come back to it–he declares forthrightly that he does not believe in God, whenever the subject comes up, and I tell him that he is too young to have made up his mind), about 1/3 of the entire fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson (that was a lot of reading)…and no doubt a few other things. We’ve done a lot of fantasy-oriented reading lately, as you can see. I was impressed by the appeal of fairy tales to H. now–in the original versions. We tried the original versions when he was 2 or 3, and (of course) they were too advanced. Now he rather likes them. This is an excellent way to get him used to more archaic language, which he really must if he is going to be really comfortable with classic literature.
History. History has been another favorite, although lately sometimes not so interesting to H.–he has suggested that we skip history a few times in the last few weeks, for example. Anyway, we did finish Bauer’s Story of the World, Vol. 1–in fact, as I said above, this is one H. read to himself, but I also read it to him. We also finished the quiz book about that. In addition, I read him the matching section of Gombrich’s Little History of the World, and he read some of this to himself, too. We also listened to the whole thing, all the way to the end, in the car. We finished the ancient world sections of the Kingfisher Atlas of World History and of the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History. Anyway, as of a few months ago we’ve moved on to medieval history in all four sources (we’re on Volume 2 of Bauer). We’ve also read a couple books about Vikings and medieval life; he likes the stuff about castles and Vikings pretty well, so we took some detours from our main reading to dip into that. Apart from the Usborne Cleopatra book and a few others, I don’t think we read as much history at mealtimes, so history too has been somewhat downplayed in recent months, again mostly in favor of “the basics” of math and writing. We’ve also been reading lots of You Wouldn’t Want to Be series books, which are just great.
Latin. H. has been doing Latin on average about 3-4 times a week, I’d say, although it’s supposed to be daily. Latin time is always before breakfast–it doesn’t take long, about 10 minutes or so. Still we (I’m doing it too–but lagging behind him, always threatening to “catch up”) are making progress. We’re on Rosetta Stone Latin, Level 1, almost done with Unit 3 out of 4. He goes in phases when he likes it and does it without complaint, and also when he says he doesn’t want to do it at all–sometimes I let him skip it in those cases. Sometimes I just forget to tell him to do it, and he rarely does it without being told. Already, here and there, we’re seeing the advantages of studying Latin, in vocabulary items. I’m sure we’ll spend more time on it when he’s a little older and we’re done with all three levels of Rosetta Stone. At the rate we’re going, it looks like we won’t finish until he’s 7 or 8. Maybe that’s OK, or maybe we’ll speed it up later.
Typing. We went through one or two periods in which H. was practicing typing fairly regularly (this software), but since it was always after math and writing, and since these took a lot of time, we ended up giving up typing. More recently, H. has been practicing typing and writing by writing emails to family members. He still hasn’t learned what he needs to, to write a standard sort of letter, but it does give him practice on typing and writing (including spelling, grammar, etc.), and also keeps him in touch with his extended family, which is nice.
Music. I’m rather proud of the work we’ve done in this area. I believe we first started on the Music for Little Mozarts program just before he turned four, and he didn’t have any motivation to do it, and I didn’t want to try to force him. So we did very sporadic lessons when he was four, and when he turned five, we tried piano lessons–which we dropped after a month because he wasn’t getting much out of them. Well, we’ve continued to do two “micro-lessons” (5-10 minutes apiece) per day, and as a result he’s finished Book 2 today (just a coincidence). He’s excited about Book 3, which it happens arrived in the mail today. He’s gotten a lot better, sometimes practices (or at least makes up his own little tunes) by himself, and generally has a positive attitude toward piano. We’re also renting a fiddle, and are threatening to return it since he isn’t practicing and I’m not going to require that he practice it. But the threat is getting him to practice some, and I’ve given him a couple lessons a week in the last few weeks. Still learning how to hold the instrument and make a sound, but he’s also made some progress here, too. I expect we’ll return it and try again in a year or two. Starting with piano is a good strategy anyway.
Other stuff. Brief reports on other subjects that are mostly on hold:
Memorization: last year we memorized 10-20 poems or pieces of poems, quotations, etc. We stopped doing that for the same reason we stopped typing. This makes me regret, but he’s still just five, and I’m not prepared to ask him to do more; I guess I’d rather that he learn math and writing very well at this point.
Chess: in this time period we finished a chess tutorial book and also joined a chess class/club for 5-7 year olds (what a precocious bunch this was, let me tell you!). We got a tournament-style chess set, played lots of chess games, and studied the game in various ways. In the end, however, for whatever reason, he lost interest, or as much interest anyway. We still play, but not as much, so we won’t be renewing the club. I think trying again in a year will be a good idea. At this point he’s getting some of the basic strategy and seeing most of the more obvious threats, but he’s still struggling to understand how to checkmate.
Logic: finished Lollipop Logic, Book 2, which was very easy, but slightly harder than Book 1. I’m not sure it did him the slightest bit of good, but it’s an interesting intellectual challenge. We’re skipping Book 3 in the series and going on to Primarily Logic, which we haven’t started yet.
Art history: we studied this quite a bit between the ages of 2-4, but not so much in the last year. I finally ordered The Art Book for Children, and I think we’re going to try doing some art “narratives,” possibly during mealtime.
One of the big questions I’ve been wondering about lately–as you might guess–is whether we should continue doing math and writing so intensively (i.e., daily) or instead start doing other things more. It’s not really an option for me to do more educational stuff. He already gets 3-4 hours of study in per day, and given the quality of the study time, that is quite enough.
Over on welltrainedminds.com, a few different people have hinted that we are trying to do too much, or too early. I don’t bother justifying our accelerated pace–it’s a ginormous online community, so nobody cares anyway, and I have a feeling it would not come across well. But I am aware that, just because people are in favor of taking education out of its institutional context, and are otherwise bucking the system, that doesn’t mean they’re terribly open to every option. A lot of homeschoolers have really bought into the idea of a lot of stuff is or isn’t “developmentally appropriate” when it really has to do with the sort of preparation a student has had.
I find “classical” homeschoolers refreshing in that they are really trying to find the best ways, or at least the best ways they know how, to give their children a full, rich education. But the only places I’ve found online where people don’t seem to look at you funny (virtually speaking) for doing accelerated education and focusing on learning facts, and simply learning as much and in a high-quality a way as possible, are the baby learning forums like BrillKids.com.
As to baby E., well, that will have to wait for a separate update. Suffice it to say that the only reading program that he has asked for consistently every day is…drumroll please…Reading Bear! Since he turned 12 months (he’s now 15 months) he has had a great interest in seeing it for 10-15 minutes a day. He’s now actually reading (and saying out loud) some words, including go, cat, ball, dog, and other words that he can say. Anyway, more about that later.
This analytical article focuses a philosophical lens on quality teaching in general, mathematics and reading education, and prominent research paradigms. It then turns the same lens on the High-Quality Teaching (HQT) study, an examination of what teachers do to help fourth- and fifth-grade students succeed in reading and mathematics. Our intent is to demonstrate how such philosophical scrutiny can lead to a fuller understanding of high-quality teaching in its varied manifestations.
via TCRecord