Style versus substance December 14, 2010
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, family, homeschooling, older son, teaching, younger son.Tags: homeschooling, learning styles, school, visual-spatial
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I think I spent the vast majority of the older boy’s elementary school years arguing with teachers who didn’t understand that a kid could be both LD and gifted. The arguments that they presented seemed extremely superficial from my perspective.
For instance, they told me he was not good at math, and they used the following as evidence:
“He doesn’t have his tables memorized.”
“He keeps flipping his numbers around. His numbers are malformed.”
“He has to think for a long time about his computations.”
The teachers used these arguments as justification that he should not be allowed to progress in math.
I come from a different perspective: thinking about how to do math is far more important than memorizing tables. If he understood what he was doing, no matter how slow, there was no reason to hold him back. Far better to learn the process to figure these things than mindlessly memorize a bunch of numbers. Tables can be printed out on paper and referenced.
When I finally gave up and homeschooled, that is exactly what I did: I printed out addition and multiplication tables. I explained how to use them. Then I started moving him very rapidly from single digit to multiple digit manipulations. I never made him memorize anything. However, he knows his times tables as well as any other kid his age. In fact, chances are he knows them better since he’s taking college algebra and trig as a freshman in high school.
The reality is that comprehension is more important than computation when it comes to math. Yes, getting the computation right is important, but that’s also why we have tools (ranging from calculators to mathematica) to check ourselves. Knowing how to do the problem is essential for fixing our errors: that is something a calculator can’t explain.
Unfortunately, now that the younger boy is in school, these arguments are coming on all over again. Interestingly enough, they don’t seem to be around math, which is the older boy’s phobia. No, the younger one is acknowledged to be quite adept mathematically. But they were claiming he is behind in reading.
The younger boy has quite a perfectionist streak, and so if he can’t do something perfectly, he doesn’t like to do it at all. And worse yet, he compares his abilities to his brother’s all the time. (He doesn’t realize that his brother has had a decade to master a lot of these things.) Reading has always been a bit terrifying for him.
When I mentioned to the teacher that the books they were sending home were far too easy (things he’d read in kindergarten), she told me that they were looking for comprehension. That was actually part of my problem: the books they were sending home had no plot, so if you ask him what happened, he couldn’t tell you. However, I started him reading Magic Tree House books, and he had no problem telling me what happened there.
Fortunately, the books coming home seem a bit better, but I got a note from the assistant teacher saying that one of the things they were working on was reading “smoothly”.
I have three issues with this. First, reading aloud is not as simple as just plain reading. While I can imagine that a child who reads well out loud is a good reader, I don’t think a child who may have difficulty articulating what they’re reading implies they aren’t a good reader. Even if the reading is choppy, if they aren’t struggling to read the words, then that’s a good indicator they understand the words. Saying ‘choppy reading indicates he’s having problems’ is like saying a kid who writes their numbers ‘funny’ is not good at math. Second, I feel that if you send a more difficult book home with a kid, they’re going to be exposed to many more words, which will give them more practice. This, obviously, will create a better reader than giving them books which are not challenging: increase the learning curve, and the rate of learning will necessarily be higher. If you don’t challenge them, they’ll continue to plod along at the same slow pace.
The final issue is that this will be very child-dependent. In this case, I have already had my son’s IQ tested, and one thing that came out of this testing is that he, like myself and his brother, is strongest in visual abilities. He may have a lot of difficulty reading “smoothly” for a while because, being a visual learner, he will need to translate every word he reads into a mental picture. This means he will read the word and have to pause after it to process what it looks like. Then he will read the next word and do the same thing.
The problem I have with all of this is that the focus is not on comprehension and higher-level cognitive skills. Kids are held back because of lower-level skills, the kind that require practice. Rather than giving kids stimulating work to practice on, work that challenges the higher-level skills, it’s easier to focus on the areas where there may be functional weakness, holding the child’s mind hostage to their motor functions.
As I was pondering this, an article on visual-spatial learning from the Eide Neurolearning Blog popped up in my reader. (Honestly, it was incredible timing!) After discussing ways to deal with visual learners, they ended with:
Be Patient Young visual thinkers are classic late bloomers. Yes, there are ways to help, but it’s also a good idea to understand big picture view of their growth and development.
It was good to remember that this too shall pass, despite the fact that I’m frustrated to be dealing with these same issues again.
OMG, it’s August! August 2, 2010
Posted by mareserinitatis in career, family, grad school.Tags: August, fall, school
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Yesterday was, sadly, the first day of August. I’m feeling a stirring of panic coming on. I have set a goal to pick a dissertation topic by the end of the month. I will have it done, but I’m trying to make up time lost on an unexpected move and a huge time suck at work. July disappeared far more quickly than I expected, and it wasn’t as a result of anything I did.
I also have a book chapter to write for an open source publisher. When I agreed to it, September seemed so far away. Now…it doesn’t.
The older boy will be starting school in 3 weeks rather than after Labor Day. School starts about 1 1/2 weeks before Labor Day in North Dakota, while it starts the day after Labor Day in Minnesota. I actually prefer how North Dakota does things as they also let out before Memorial Day while Minnesota schools go into early June. Yuck.
Admittedly, the older boy is only going to school part-time. I have figured out what we’ll be doing for curriculum at home (and he seems halfway excited about it), but I dread the discussion I will be having with school administrators in a couple weeks.
On the up side, I will not be going back to Minneapolis (much to everyone’s relief, save the older boy) nor will I suddenly have the shock of being back in classes or TAing…for the first time in a very long time. I will still have 3 months to muck about in my yard, I will get to keep working at my current job (which I enjoy 95% of the time and which uses far more of my technical skills than TAing), and there will only be intermittent trips to Minneapolis rather than having to make a trip 2-3 times per month. Those things make August seem far less intimidating.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Nothing to do August 1, 2010
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, societal commentary, teaching.Tags: education, school, summer vacation
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As I was standing in line at the grocery store, waiting for the new checker to figure out what she was doing, I saw that Time magazine had a cover article titled The Case Against Summer Vacation. (The complete article isn’t available online unless you have a subscription to Time.)
Despite the way the title came across and some of the pictures featured kids sitting in a traditional classroom, the article itself is more balanced than I thought. It doesn’t seem to favor leaving kids in school longer but employing more summer learning programs that try to teach skills but don’t require seat work.
The article probably had the opposite effect, however, in that I was wondering why, if these programs are so effective, aren’t they utilizing the same methods during the school year?
Particularly damning, in my opinion, was a chart of data compiled by Karl Alexander at Johns Hopkins. I’ll reproduce the data here. The chart gives several countries, the number of days children spend in school, the number of total instructional hours, and average math scores for fifteen year olds in each country.
Looking at this data, it does seem like there is a pretty good correlation between number of days spent in school and math scores (with Mexico and Brazil being notable exceptions). On the other hand, if you look at the relationship between total instructional hours and math scores, there is absolutely no relationship.
If anything, this says to me that we’re not getting a good ROI. The US has the highest number of instructional hours with middling math scores. We’re taking all this time from children and then telling they need more instruction to compete internationally? Again, this indicates a lack of effective teaching and instruction.
One thing that really bothered me was this excerpt:
Karen West, director of Corbin’s Redhound Enrichment program, says, “Eighty-eight percent of our children live in latchkey families, and we have no Boys & Girls Clubs. Really, there was almost nothing for them to do.”
This bothers me for the same reason that pictures of kids sitting in classroom with the teacher in front bother me: learning and education do not equal sitting in a classroom. There seems to be this notion that if we aren’t programming and scripting children’s every moment, they are doing “nothing” and not learning.
As a child, I would have been classified as “at risk” because I lived in a poor family, the kinds of kids that this article focuses on. However, summer was never a time where I had “nothing to do.” If I was bored, my parents always said, “You know where the library is.” I was taking care of my younger sister when I was 8 and she was 6. (Yes, I’m quite aware that’s illegal now and would certainly not expect something similar from my children.) I learned how to cook and clean. I had chores to do at home. I read books. I learned to enjoy listening to music. I drew pictures. I dug holes in the yard. I made up and wrote stories. My dad was a carpenter, so of course I became interested in woodworking. When I was a bit older, I volunteered to be a counselor in training at various day camps or would check out the local museums. And I wandered over to the library a couple times a week to find new books. Yeah, those antiquated devices that have ink and paper.
To be perfectly honest, I think the real problem is how much time is spent in school already. Kids come to understand that ‘learning’ means sitting at a desk. They come to despise books so that a trip to the library is often seen as punishment (especially when some schools won’t let them check out anything outside of their grade level). They’re so programmed that they never have time outside of school or sports or whatever to enjoy other hobbies or interests or even to learn how to deal with boredom.