It’s cringe-y and funny and it just upset me and made me laugh until I snurfed green tea out my nose. I think you should read it too. Chag Holland is Cynical Dad and he is capable of making your day better.
I help out in my daughter’s class. I used to just do simple things like copy papers and cut out shapes and crap, but somewhere along the line, someone got the dumb idea that I could actually work with the kids and teach them things. Big mistake. Last week, I was working with a table of kids and teaching them how to carry ones. One of the little boys at the table spoke up.
Boy #1: I’m the best in the class at math.
Internal Chag: Um, no, or you wouldn’t be sitting here with me.
Girl #1: No you’re not! Hamid is!
Boy #1: That doesn’t count. Of course he’s the best at math.
External Chag: Why is he the best at math?
Boy #1: He’s from another country. All they do is math.
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Wired magazine calls him “the explainer.” Michael Wesch is a social anthropologist who teaches at Kansas State University. In his 15-minute TED talk, he explains the effects of media (social and otherwise) on learners, on humanity, and on the classroom environment.
Wesch also manages to squeeze in a bit telling other educators how to take advantage of all the media and the technology humans have available as a way to make students more “knowledge-able” than just knowledgeable. It’s not just memorizing facts and theories anymore—all the information is out there, students need to learn how to find it and ponder it and bring their own thoughts and theories to the table.
Watch it. It takes about 15 minutes; that’s less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee. And no way one cup of caffeine will blow your mind like Michael Wesch can.
Because everyone deserves to explain themselves, especially after a few high-profile articles come out telling the general public you’ve recanted your strongly held beliefs in your new book, below are some excerpts from Diane Ravitch’s Education Week blog, Bridging Differences. In the post, she explains what in the hell is actually going on, what she believes, and why she thinks her book is doing so well amongst the education community despite everyone else’s crankiness.
I have not changed my fundamental belief that all children should have a great education that includes not just basic skills, but history, literature, geography, civics, the arts, science, foreign languages, and physical education. I have never changed my wish that all children should have well-educated teachers who love their subjects and are well prepared to teach them to their students. I have never changed my skepticism about fads, miracles, and silver bullets, which come and go with great frequency in U.S. education. I have never abandoned my respect for the men and women who teach children and do the daily work that others (including me) talk and write about. I am not opposed to testing, but to the misuse of testing to punish people and close schools.
What did I abandon? The hope that choice and accountability could magically achieve the ends that I believe in. I am not opposed to choice—everyone should be free to choose another school if the school their child attends is not right for the child. And I do not oppose accountability, so long as it is used to help teachers, principals, and schools do a better job, not to punish them.
All of this is to set the record straight. On the whole, I am staggered, astonished really, by the response to the book. I am especially gratified by the warm reception it has received from teachers. Nothing good can come of any reform that teachers do not embrace: That is one of the lessons of my book. More…
I respect Ms. Ravitch immensely, and have been impressed always by her intellectual and logical take on education. I therefore find it hard to believe that she would suddenly do an about-face with no cause or forethought. She has nothing to gain by doing that, and she has her credibility to lose. The only humans that can claim open-mindedness are the ones that take in all available information, ponder the hell out of it, and then decide what their opinion is.
Included in a person’s claim to being open-minded is the ability and responsibility to continue absorbing information as the situation changes. How stupid would some jackass on the Titanic have been if he’d stood his ground and been sucked into the cold, dark sea screaming, “It’s unsinkable, I tell you! Unsinkable! You’re all idiots! Stay on board! It’s unsinkable!” Things change. Situations change. The world changes. Good thing we higher-thinking humans have the capacity to change our thinking.
Karen Schweitzer has a guest post up at Learn Me Good, one of my favorite education blogs. The post is a list of 25 Edu Blogs Worth Reading, and Educated Nation is included, which is lovely. Lovelier still is having a new list of education blogs to peruse (because I can’t seem to get enough).
As far as Learn Me Good goes, if you haven’t read John Pearson’s book or blog (they share the same title), I highly recommend both. You have to respect a guy who can write with such hilarity about his first year of teaching; how does one find humor in any trial by fire, especially one’s own?
This week’s Teaching Carnival is hosted by AcademHack. The theme is The Future of Education and is worth a thorough perusal. The most intriguing string of thoughts were Jim Moulton’s post about technology in education and what he observed on a recent trip as to India’s attitudes toward education (they are not effing around), and the follow-up comment Rajagopal Yadavalli made as someone who grew up in India, went to the U.S. for university, and is now living back in India. The differences between the two countries vis-á-vis how the students are taught and how they ultimately learn to learn are fascinating.
I did not see technology playing a widespread role in Indian private schools. Any success they have in producing academically strong students must, therefore, come from someplace else. Sure, some of it is simply a game of numbers – with enough people you will have some succeed to high levels. But as I became more aware of “how things worked” in these schools, I came to believe that the following things make a difference:
>>…hard work. Period. Show up, listen, engage, do the work. Including half a day on Saturday.
>>…discipline and organization, as in, “don’t question authority – just do the assignments.” As a result work gets done. By all. And if one does not want to do the work, that 1.2 billion population figure assures someone waiting to take any seat vacated. This discipline was clear in the teacher ranks as well, as they stood when I entered the room, and would stand to answer any question I might put to them during the workshop.
>>…parents’ willingness to sacrifice material comfort to provide the best education they can afford for their children. The vast majority of Indian families do not live beyond their means.
>>…internalization of guilt by the children. Their academic success is a responsibility to their family, and it must be met. Sadly, this guilt was negatively reflected in the several accounts I read of young people taking their lives following release of major exam results.
>>…education as an industry. School, the right school, is heavily marketed as the key to happiness and success. Learning is heavily marketed, and the marketing works. With 1.2 billion people, one is constantly confronted by what it means to not have education. I have to think that a desire to not be part of the endless stream of unskilled citizenry makes it easy for the marketing to stick…
As I return from my trip, I am reminded that there is no digital solution to a fundamentally human challenge, and education is just that. Opportunities to learn must be available, but for the opportunity to translate into accomplishment at any level the individual must want it, the family must want it, and the culture as a whole must want it. The value of the “product” must be clear to all.
Interesting analysis presented here on Indian education. As someone who was born and brought up in India, and then studied and lived in USA, and now is back in India.. I completely agree with Jim here.
The importance of education is cultural. The middle class has shown the way over the last 20 years and now more and more believe that success in academics is the key to material success.
… The pressure on the students to do well academically is also all pervasive. As they approach their high school it starts to peak and is at its worst when they attempt the various entrance tests that determine their acceptability into the professional undergraduate programs.
However, what I find missing in the overall process is the application of knowledge. I think today’s education should be more focused on ability to find the information, determine its accuracy and then the ability to apply it to solve everyday problems. I do not find this happening yet in the Indian schools. Most schools are still focused on learning by rote – where discipline can make it happen.
As an graduate student in US University, I was amazed at the knowledge of undergrad students and their ability to solve real life problems with their learning from class. The application of knowledge is not something that is taught at schools in India. This is where the American Universities score big and why they are still the most sought schools of learning.
At one time in the not-so-distant past, home-schooling was an option chosen mostly by parents who wanted their kids out of the mainstream education system for religious or moral reasons. As either a sign that parents these days are much more involved with their kids’ education, or that the education system in this country is so broken that parents feel they can do a better job of educating their kiddos than the schools can, more parents are choosing the home-school route.
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007.
Some of the newer motivations parents have these days for wanting to home-school their kids are financial, increased family time, and “unschooling.” The unschoolers are the parents who want to move away from standardized curriculum and toward a non-traditional approach to teaching and learning.
As a parent interested in education, I tend to come across a lot of parenting and education blogs. There exists a solid contingent of parenting blogs by dads who have opted to stay home with the kids and do the home-schooling themselves. It’s like modern-day Sensitive Dad DIY stuff. And you know those dads win at any playground they go to; not only do they care enough about their kids’ well-being to opt out of the rat race, they also want to be in charge of the big learning project and do it all themselves.
As long as kids are being educated and have access to frequent social interactions with other kids, I don’t really care where their schooling takes place. I, myself, have nowhere near the level of patience required for staying home all day and teaching my kids what they need to know to survive. I can barely handle the weekly play dates my children have with their friends. The parents who are comfortable being home all day with kids AND who can spend hours every day teaching them have my utmost respect.
Since home-schooling will clearly never be an option for my family, I will always need to be involved with my kids’ schools and their policies on the two issues that would tempt me to jump ship and teach my kids myself: teaching to the test and recess reduction. Thus far, my daughter’s elementary school and my son’s preschool are maintaining a safe distance from my Limit Fence on those two issues.
Should recess time be reduced or should I catch a whiff of anyone teaching to the test, I’ll go from being a cooperative parent who helps out with classroom stuff and sympathizes with the teachers, to a cranky b**ch who takes her kids out of school everyday for their 20-minute “dentist appointment” so they can run laps around the block, and who oddly goes on a family vacation every spring and takes her kids out of school during NCLB standardized-testing week.
Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.
This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.
My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.
A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.
I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.
I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.
My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.
I totally do. I know that Mr. Obama was NOT named after the structures military personnel sleep in. Too bad for me, I had (had, until yesterday) my effing word processing program (Microsoft Word, if anyone’s keeping score) in its default auto-correct setting. I’ve always had it set there because it probably came set like that when I bought my MacBook. It has never been a problem until now.
Last week, I wrote a post the day after Election Day about our President-elect, Barack Obama. Right now, the red squiggly underlines are alerting me to the fact that Microsoft Word doesn’t think I spelled “Barrack” correctly; my computer, in all its infinite wisdom, thinks “Barack” is my misspelling of “Barrack.” *sigh*
So, unbeknownst to me, last week I typed in “Barack” and it was immediately corrected to “Barrack.” A good rule of thumb when writing an education blog is to avoid egregious misspellings. I’m just saying.
My husband gets full credit for reading the Obama post yesterday and giving me a heart attack when he said, “Um, hey, [he was trying to be gentle] did you know you misspelled Barack in that Obama post?” I said some bad words about mothers and stuff and dove for my laptop.
After fixing the error and recovering from my panic, I turned off the auto-fix thingy on Word. To avoid looking like a dumbass, I would highly suggest everyone else doing the same for the next four years or so.
