SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Reading for Un-pleasure

When my daughter was four years old, I taught her to read using systematic phonics. It was not an easy process - my daughter found it very hard going and it took all the spoonfuls of sugar I could come up with to make the medicine go down, but she went on to become a voracious reader for whom reading was as comfortable as breathing. My daughter now thanks me profusely for her reading lessons.

I tell this story to make the point that a focus on the mechanics of reading does not turn kids off reading, as People for Education suggest in their just-released report “Reading for Joy”. According to the report, there has been a steady decline over the last 12 years in the percentage of Ontario students who report that they like to read, and People for Education point the finger at “our drive to improve the mechanical aspects of literacy”. The reality is, however, that it doesn’t matter how much drudgery is involved in the acquisition of a skill - what matters is the level of proficiency that results. People engage in activities they find enjoyable and fun. Period.

The current approach to teaching beginning reading, which in most classrooms still emphasizes guessing and skimming (very harmful to the development of fluent reading) and skimps on direct instruction of sequential, systematic phonics, guarantees that a sizeable percentage of students will find reading a struggle for the rest of their lives. And no matter how much teachers and librarians dangle enticing books in front of these students, they will persist in choosing easy and pleasurable activities like video games and sports over the difficult chore of reading.

So if the decline in reported reading enjoyment among Ontario students is not down to an increased focus on reading mechanics, what is causing it? People for Education cites “new distractive technologies, including social media”, and no doubt this is part of it. However, I think that the primary cause is the increased classroom emphasis on guessing and skimming and the simultaneous de-emphasis on sequential, systematic phonics that is resulting from the misguided - and heavily-enforced - policies of the Ontario Numeracy and Literacy Secretariat.

I feel passionate about literacy and the love of reading, and I plan to engage fully in the comments section of today’s blog!

Sunday at the Movies (Personal Excellence)

The speaker is UCLA Softball’s first All-American national champion and hall of famer.  She is the only person in NCAA Softball history to win a championship as a player and a head coach. Her tenure at UCLA produced 887 victories, 65 All Americans and 12 Olympians. In this short talk, she outlines how everyone can excel at his or her game - if, that is, he or she is prepared to make the effort.

Worlds Apart: the BC Teachers’ Federation and the BC Government

The latest addition to our lending library is Worlds Apart: British Columbia Schools, Politics, and Labour Relations Before and After 1972 by Thomas Fleming. The author is an emeritus professor in educational history and policy at the University of Victoria. It seems that the current conflict between the BC government and the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) with the teachers working to rule and the government unable to meet their rapacious demands, is only the latest episode in a long series of similar show-downs. Yet it wasn't always thus! In the early days, the province's educational system was "fluid and lubricated with goodwill" with "great harmony existing ... between trustees, teachers, parents, and pupils". 

Worlds Apart documents the road from unity to discord, identifying three main changes that shook the foundations of the amicable cooperation that had been achieved prior to their implementation. 

• The school consolidation movement, and the resulting bureaucratization of education
• The increasing inability of provincial decision-makers to cope with the new demands
• The growth of teacher influence and power

The author also explains that "the post-1972 expansion of the school's mandate into the social domain, the rise of special interest politics, the decline in school populations, and shifting provincial demographics have all strained institutional relationships and exposed fundamental insufficiencies in the structures that once governed and supported public schools".  Here is the author's take on the ramifications of the on-going war between the teachers' union and the province (p. 129):

"Certainly, by any standard, the bitter struggle between the provincial government and the teachers' federation over the control of public education for 40 years has proven costly. The disastrous state of labour relations likely constitutes the single most serious impediment to educational progress in the province - and has done so for some time. Decades of conflict have created deep fissures in a province already historically polarized in its political and economic outlook - and have eroded the school system's energies. Parents, the public, and even educators have become exhausted and frustrated with the stormy state of labour relations in schools and the fact they never seem to improve. This strife has tarnished public education's once-considerable lustre and, no doubt, has appreciably reduced public confidence in public schooling."

Although the BCTF has positioned itself as the defender of the sacred trust of education and the students' champion, it is obvious that its constant noisy and disruptive behaviour is in fact bad for the BC education system and bad for the children. H/T TA

Don’t Try This At Home

I'm definitely not advocating this - after all, one who incites a lawbreaker to commit a crime can do jail time for being an accessory before the fact - but there is new hope for parents who are unhappy with the quality of education their children are receiving. Some parents in France, angry because they felt their children weren't getting a good enough education and especially dissatisfied with one particular teacher, took some of the staff hostage. You can read about it here in the Huffington Post. This story is seemingly on the up and up, because I found another reference to it in the UK's Daily Post. 

Apparently, all of the hostages have been released now, but only after it was agreed to transfer the disliked teacher to another school. No word on whether there have been promises to improve the quality of education at the school.... H/T to PB

Constructive math pedagogy rests on pillars of sand

In the edreform business, "the research" is constantly being cited by people on both sides of an argument. Kind of like God being on both sides in a war, don't you know.

But of course there is research, and then there is RESEARCH. Here is an eye-opening article about the nature of the research cited by proponents of cognitive-based math teaching (constructivism). You may be thinking that this is going to be very dry reading with, as the author puts it, remarks about the F-test being used inappropriately when the G-test should have been used or somebody's kurtosis being inadequate, but it's not like that at all. The author writes in a very droll, tongue in cheek sort of way concluding, for example, that he would probably have been better off if he had never got interested in this topic in the first place.

So go ahead and read the article: it won't hurt a bit. And for sure, once you have read it, you will no longer be confused when a progressive math educator cites "the research". H/T RC

Math Class Shouldn’t Be Tough

In light of the tremendous response to the WISE Math initiative in western Canada, I thought you might find this article of interest. Although it is talking about the US, and the first 12 paragraphs may or may not apply to us in Canada, the rest of the article deals with a phenomenon which is all too similar here. This phenomenon is the under-enrollment of students in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects. 

The point is - we're graduating way too many liberal arts students and not nearly enough STEM students. With the growth of the high-tech sector and technological developments in general, more and more jobs require technical skills. And, not only is this where the jobs are, but also the STEM jobs pay a lot more. You would think there would be a stampede of applicants for the STEM subjects. But there isn't.

There are undoubtedly multiple factors at work here, including unenlightened counselling on the part of parents and high school guidance teachers, but there is no doubt that students are unlikely to go into astrophysics if they struggled with math in school. Yet virtually all students can learn math to a high standard - if taught properly. H/T to JE

Are charter schools worth the bargain?

From time to time, there has been a discussion in our comments section about whether or not teachers at charter schools are - or ought to be - unionized. Now comes a report from the Center on Reinventing Education showing that about 12% of charter schools are unionized, but that most of that 12% are charter schools that were converted from conventional public schools and kept their bargaining agreement. Some others are in states that require unionization. Charter schools that organize through employee vote are a rarity. 

The study also found that "on average, charter school contracts are more flexible than traditional district contracts."

No more lessons on reading the greens…

Balanced Literacy works about as well for teaching children to read as Balanced Golf works for teaching children to play golf, according to this dripping-with-sarcasm piece by Kerry Hempenstall. 

Sunday at the Movies (Khan Academy)

This is by way of letting you know that the Khan Academy has branched out from its primary emphasis on math and science to include history, civics, and art - and more is on the way.    YouTube link.    Khan Academy link. 

Help yourself!

Kitchen Table Math has links (down the left side of your screen) to all kinds of helpful resources. Here are a few examples.

• Daily Writing Tips contains a wealth of free resources for advanced students who wish to improve their writing, perhaps even make their living by their pen. 
• Math-Drills.com has over 10,000 free math worksheets for JK-9.
• The Kitchen Table Math list provides links to their our favorite math, spelling, and homeschooling books, supplements, and manipulatives for kids.

And here’s a bonus link to a fun site that teaches kids (and their parents) where things are in the world.