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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Raising strong children
I am reading an interesting book, Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength, and will review it soon. But I thought you might be interested in an excerpt from the book about the self-esteem movement. After explaining that the current emphasis on children's self esteem has led to a broad rise in narcissism, the authors make the point that there is an exception to this trend among young Asian-Americans. This excerpt (pp. 194-95) talks about what happens when Asian parents are more interested in instilling discipline and promoting self-control than bolstering their children's self esteem.
"Chinese parents and preschools pressure children quite early in life to become toilet trained and acquire other basic forms of impulse control. By one estimate, two-year-old Chinese children are expected to have levels of control that correspond roughly to what American children reach at age three or four.
"A clear difference between Chinese and American toddlers emerges when they're asked to override their natural impulses. In one test, for instance, the toddlers are shown a series of pictures and instructed to say 'day' whenever they see the moon, and 'night' whenever they see the sun. In other tests, the toddlers try to restrain themselves to a whisper when they're excited, and play a version of Simon Says in which they're supposed to obey one kind of command but ignore another kind. The Chinese four-year-olds generally perform better on these tests than Americans of the same age. The Chinese toddlers' superior self-control might be due in part to genes. There's evidence that the genetic factors associated with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are much rarer in Chinese children than in American children. But the cultural traditions in China and other Asian countries undoubtedly play an important role in instilling self-discipline, and those traditions in Asian-American homes have contributed to the children's low levels of narcissism as well as their later successes. Asian-Americans make up only 4 percent of the U.S. population but account for a quarter of the student body at elite universities like Stanford, Columbia, and Cornell. They're more likely to get a college degree than any other ethnic group, and they go on to earn salaries that are 25 percent above the American norm.
"Their success has led to the popular notion that Asians are more intelligent than Americans and Europeans, but that's not how James Flynn explains their achievements. After carefully reviewing IQ studies, Flynn concludes that the scores of Chinese-American and Japanese-American people are very similar to whites of European descent. If anything, the Asian-Americans' IQ is slightly lower, on average, although they do show up more at both the upper and lower extremes. The big difference is that they make better use of their intelligence. People working in what Flynn calls elite professions, like physicians, scientists, and accountants, generally have an IQ above a certain threshold. For white Americans, that threshold is an IQ of 110, but Chinese-Americans manage to get the same elite jobs with an IQ of only 103. Moreover, among the people above each threshold, Chinese-Americans have higher rates of actually getting into those jobs, meaning that a Chinese-American with an IQ above 103 is more likely to get an elite job than an American with an IQ above 110. The pattern is similar for Japanese-Americans. But virtue of self-control - hard work, diligence, steadiness, reliability - the children of immigrants from East Asia can do as well as Americans with higher IQs."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Teaching Math)
This video shows you how to teach addition facts. There are related videos on a variety of math topics, from long division to decimals to percents to discounts to perimeter.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Ode to my great-aunt
I refer you to this blog because I had virtually the same experience as the author - to wit, I endured a grade 7 & 8 teacher who taught and drilled her class how to diagram sentences. I hated it and thought it boring and a total waste of time, just more fuddy-duddyism on the part of our elderly teacher. Lo and behold, looking back I realize that my ability to diagram sentences, to feel their structure in my bones, is the foundation of my ability to write clear and interesting prose.
Really, this should not come as a surprise. Diagramming sentences is similar to knowing your times tables or being a good speller - a necessary pre-requisite to more advanced performance.
Just for the record, my grade 7/8 teacher also drilled us in spelling, and I am an excellent speller to this day. She didn't have to drill us on our number facts, though, because we all knew them by grade 7. And, by the way, this teacher was my great aunt Victoria Malkin.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
There is safety in numbers
At School for Thought, I tend to emphasize the importance of literacy but, as "Darlene" points out in this excellent posting from Hypatia's blog, math appears in one's life at all angles. Darlene can't help her grade 3 daughter with her math homework, nor figure out a budget. Math literacy is almost as important as the ability to read and write.
Another excellent posting from Hypatia's blog points out that in many cases we are paying four times for math education - the first time in elementary school when it is supposed to be taught, the second time in high school when remedial math courses are offered, the third time when paid math tutors are engaged by parents or students, and the fourth time when post-secondary institutions have to run remedial math programs.
Lastly, this posting gets to the heart of the matter in pointing out that standard algorithms like long division are not being taught in the Western provinces at all - even though long division is crucial to an understanding of higher math. I need hardly add that use of the standard algorithm for long division is given very short shrift in the Ontario curriculum as well. As an example, here is the relevant section from the Ontario grade 6 curriculum (p. 88): "solve problems involving the multiplication and division of whole numbers (four-digit by two-digit), using a variety of tools (e.g., concrete materials, drawings, calculators) and strategies (e.g., estimation, algorithms)".
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Cracking the books
Here's a short video of one of my personal heroes, Richard Feynman, explaining how scientists try to keep an open mind and are always ready to modify their pet theories. As a bonus, here is an excerpt from Dr. Feynman's autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (pp. 292-293) wherein he writes about his experiences reviewing elementary math textbooks.
- "It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden, 'BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!!' - there would be a big explosion from the 'volcano' below.
- "The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for 'sets') which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous - they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by 'rigor'. They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in face, useless, at that time, for the child.
- "I understood what they were trying to do. Many people thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.
- "I'll give you an example. They would talk about different bases of numbers - five, six, and so on - to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten - something to entertain his mind. But what they had turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: 'Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.' Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it. There's no point to it."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
A question of bullying
Guest blog by Monika
My 11-year-old godson recently became a bully.
- He has been threatened with suspension.
- My cousin, her husband, the grandparents, and I have discussed this with him.
- We have supplied him with examples of good behavior.
- He has been told that he will be cut from the soccer rep team if he is suspended.
- I’ve given him a book for boys, with amazing male role models.
- He’s been reminded that God is watching and knows all.
- He’s been told that he is valued and loved, and we want him to grow up happy, capable, knowledgeable, etc.
- We’ve all asked if there is anything bothering him – separately.
This is not a stupid kid – he is highly intelligent and very capable in school, as well as very athletic, and has attended Atrium – Montessori style Catechism classes where everyone whispers and instills values of “love thy neighbour – even when difficult” since he was three). Here are his reasons:
- "I don't know."
- "My friends were being mean."
- "It seemed like fun."
My godson understands it’s wrong – but the desire to pin someone to the ground and feed them grass “seemed like a fun thing to do at the moment”.
And for the record, no he wouldn’t want that to be done to him.
????????????????
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
More cents than sense
You may have heard of Bill Gates? Well, Bill caught the edreform bug a while back and, since he has billions of spare dollars at his disposal, he joined the cause in a big way. However, being a big success in one field doesn't automatically mean you will succeed in a different field....
The first main thrust of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was to spend $1.6 billion dollars over a ten-year period on an initiative to foster small schools. This didn't pan out, as the Gates freely admit. Now they have a new idea, to wit identifying and quantifying aspects of effective teaching. Their foundation is orchestrating a 335 million dollar Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) project designed to identify best practices in teaching, but the results of the first year of this study, which were promised for spring of this year, have not yet been released - suggesting that MET is not having much luck either. I will go out on a limb and predict that the Gates' second big idea will fail as well.
From SQE's perspective, all this expensive experimentation is very frustrating. Imagine what we could do with more than two billion dollars! (There's a DONATE button in the left-hand column.)
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth…
Jack Lakey, marvelling over the misuse of apostrophes and hyphens in this sign, describes the modern epidemic of apostropheitis as one of the mysteries of modern life, given that "schools are still teaching punctuation and grammar".
There could be several explanations of this mystery. For example, perhaps there is an up-until-now-undetected disease which attacks that part of young people's brains that understands punctuation. Or maybe there is a secret (and huge) band of apostrophe lovers which has this amazing ability to somehow over-ride the punctuation skills of recent graduates. Or possibly it's the latest fashion among youths to want to appear stupid and uneducated.
Lastly, improbable as it may seem, there is always the chance that schools are in fact not teaching punctuation and grammar, or at least teaching them so badly that they might as well not be.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Physics and Free Will)
This video is interesting in and of itself, but I mostly present it because the same site offers oodles of five-minute (or shorter) informational videos on wide-ranging topics - from origami to motorcycles to cooking to college prep and on and on....
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Do schools exist to serve their students, or vice versa?
Diane Ravitch has written this article explaining why she disapproves of the Parent Trigger, a new measure in some US states that allows "a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school". Here is the main thrust of her argument.
- "To me, a public school is a public trust. It doesn't belong to the students who are currently enrolled in it or their parents or to the teachers who currently teach in it. All of them are part of the school community, and that community needs to collaborate to make the school better for everyone. Together, they should be able to redesign or create or discontinue programs and services. But collaboration is not the same as ownership. The school belongs to the public, to the commonwealth. It belongs to everyone who ever attended it (and their parents) and to future generations. It is part of the public patrimony, not an asset that can be closed or privatized by its current constituents.
- "If a school is dysfunctional, those who are in charge of the district are obliged to find out why and to do whatever they can to fix the problems. If the principal is incompetent, he or she should be removed. If there are teachers who are incompetent, they should be removed. If the school is doing poorly because it lacks necessary resources, the district is obliged to do whatever it can to improve the school.
- "But giving the current parents the power to close the school or to hand it over to a private management company is akin to saying that whoever uses any public facility should have the same power, the power to transfer control to a private entity. It means if those who use Central Park in Manhattan don't like the way the city of New York takes care of it, they should be able to sign a petition and privatize it. If a majority of those who patronize a national park sign a petition, they should be able to hand control of the park over to private managers. This makes no sense."
In my opinion, the Central Park comparison is not a valid one since there is no law compelling people to send their kids to Central Park, nor do the services provided in Central Park heavily influence its visitors' life outcomes.
But enough about me. Do you agree that public schools are a public trust, and that parents should not have a say in their operation?