SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

New Hope for Learning-Disabled Students

Norman Doidge is a Toronto psychiatrist and researcher who writes about the new science of neuroplasticity. In this TVO interview, Dr. Doidge discusses such things how IQ can be raised, blindness reversed, and learning disabilities cured. His book, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science, contains fascinating personal narratives showing how the brain has remarkable powers of compensating for even the most challenging neurological conditions. This excerpt (pp. 41-42) discusses the relationship between modern educational practices and the new understanding of brain plasticity.

“The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s, educators dropped such traditional exerciess from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and ‘not relevant’. 

“But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematicallty exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain power unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omni-present PowerPoint presentation - the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.”

Report Card Edu-babble

If you thought those standard Ontario report cards were supposed to end the edu-babble, think again.  Joe Fiorito reports, in the Toronto Star no less, that the “canned” comments section of the report card continues to keep parents scratching their heads over what exactly is being communicated. 

Parents will find these examples typical:

“Little Johnny sometimes explains how the particular characteristics of various text forms help communicate meaning, with a focus on literacy, graphic and informational texts.”

“On occasion, Little Johnny represents fractions using concrete materials, words, and standard fractional notation, and explains the meaning of the denominator as the number of the fractional parts being considered.”

Say that again?  Maybe if Little Johnny is so good at explaining “particular characteristics of various text forms” he could figure out his own report card.  

Global Cooling?

Most students are being taught there is a scientific consensus that global warming is taking place and that the world faces severe problems as a result. In fact, the science of global warming is far from unanimous, as this short YouTube video demonstrates. School for Thought draws this information to your attention for two reasons: firstly, we are appalled by the brainwashing about global warming going on in most schools; and secondly, we want to spread the good news that there is probably no need to panic.

Faith in Better Schools

This C.D. Howe site shows that some Ontario school boards are adding much more value to their students’ education than others. The top boards are: Eastern Ontario Catholic, Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic, Niagara Catholic, St. Clair Catholic, Thunder Bay Catholic, and York Catholic. In fact, 11 out of the 13 top-performing school boards are Catholic, and most of the Catholic boards outperform their public school counterparts in the same geographical area. In other words, Catholic schools tend to get better academic results with students of similar socio-economic backgrounds. 

As any real estate salesman will tell you, it is common for parents to choose their residence on the basis of the neighbourhood school’s reputation. Perhaps some parents will also start choosing their religion on the same basis! 

Single-Cueing Model of Teaching Reading

Most North American teachers believe in the “three-cueing model” of teaching reading, whereby skilled reading is dependent on the combined use of three different strategies: semantic cues (what makes sense based on what is known about the text and illustrations); syntactic cues (what makes sense based on the preceding words); and grapho-phonic cues (sounding out the words). This article clearly shows that the three-cueing theory is incorrect, and that beginning readers should instead simply be taught to sound out every single unknown word. It turns out that many of the strategies encouraged by the three-cueing theory (guessing, looking at the illustrations, skipping words, etc.) are not only unproductive, “they actually deflect students away from the path to reading facility. Sadly, many parents do not discover until about grade 4 that their children have been taught moribund reading strategies and, to their dismay, that recovery is unlikely.”