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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Educate yourself about good health
So, it's the last day of 2013, and time to make your resolutions for the new year. Ever helpful, we are providing a link to a life expectancy calculator, which will guide you in the right direction (away from smoking and excessive drinking and towards exercise, good nutrition and stress reduction). Why not do the calculations and then post your life expectancy calculator to our comments section? I'll go first. 88
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Morphemes and Spelling)
Here's a video that will make you think about English spelling differently. H/T TB
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Strike while the iron is hot!
School's out - meaning that it's an excellent time for parents to after-school. As a reading tutor, I always found my lessons worked better during school vacations because for that brief period there were no well-meaning teachers telling my student the opposite of what I was saying. Here is a list of free Internet resources.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
You pays your money and you takes your chances
It's been a couple of weeks since the release of the latest round of TIMSS and PIRLS international comparisons of student achievement. Here is an excellent analysis of the results - excellent because it compares and contrasts the PISA results with the TIMSS/PIRLS. The PISA tests are described as trying to get at how well students can apply their learning to solve real-world problems, while the TIMSS/PIRLS tests are designed to assess how well students have learned the curriculum taught in schools.
In a nutshell, Finland does well on the former but not all that well on the latter (similar to Ontario). In which sphere of achievement would YOU prefer schools to excel?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The myth of ability
A new study from Germany suggests that intelligence is important only in the beginning stages of mathematics (perhaps in terms of how quickly new concepts are grasped), while factors like motivation and study habits are far more important to long-term learning.
In this vein, I offer an excerpt from John Mighton's book The Myth of Ability (p. 12). Dr. Mighton is an award-winning playwright and mathematician. After outlining how he taught himself to write (because he found out that Sylvia Plath had taught herself to write by sheer determination - there was no "gift" or innate ability), Dr. Mighton decided to try to realize his own lifelong dream of becoming a mathematician and enrolled in two first-year university math classes.
"When I received the results of my first test, I wasn't surprised to see that I had failed. I knew the test wasn't fair: some of the material had not been covered in class (it was taught several weeks later). As the professor handed back the tests, he read out the names of the few people who had passed and told the rest of us that we should consider dropping the course. Mamy students did exactly that; the ones I talked to believed that the professor had made an objective assessment of their prospects as mathematicians. I stayed in the course, but only because of the confidence I had gained as a tutor.
"I failed other tests from time to time, in other courses, including two of three comprehensive exams for my doctorate. in the beginning, it was very hard to suppress the feeling that I had failed because I had finally reached a level of mathematics that was beyond me. Gradually I saw that questions I once found impossible on a particular test seemed trivial a month or a year later: there was no threshold that separated one level of mathematics from another. Sometimes I did badly because I was nervous (on my comprehensives I made mistakes that were equivalent, in higher mathematics, to 2 + 2 = 5) or because I hadn't had time to digest the material properly. Sometimes the tests were unfair."
As he mentioned in the excerpt, Dr. Mighton tutors children in math and has found that they can all become competent mathematicians. To close, here's a relevant quote from p. 16 of The Myth of Ability.
"I sometimes wish I could travel back to my childhood to regain the time I wasted in self-doubt (and not just in mathematics). But I'm grateful to have found some faith in my abilities. One day, I hope, that same faith will be considered the right of all children, and they iwl not have to wait for some accident, likke a book of letters, or a tutor assigned by mistake, to reveal the vast potential that might otherwise have been lost."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in your stars but in yourself….
Seven years ago, one of the big American teachers' unions (UFT) started a charter school, promising to show "real, quanitifiable student achievement and with those results finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success". more Unfortunately, the promised results failed to materialize and now the UFT charter school is threatened with closure. more So is the union chastened and admitting that maybe the union contract is an impediment to success after all? Not at all. Here's the school's rather novel excuse, proffered by the principal.
“Right now in this building, our level 3 and 4 students are being recruited by other charter schools, out of the fourth grade,” she said. “We don’t go in and rob another school of their top learners. But many charter schools have an aggressive on-the-ground campaign to get the better students.”
Welcome to the real world where no one likes competition - except the customers. H/T DW
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
School’s Out
Well, 'tis the season to be jolly - school's out and all the kids and teachers are on holiday - so we at School for Thought figure we can take some time off too. Have a great Christmas and see you back here on Wednesday.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Times have changed - sort of)
I couldn't figure out how to get this video into today's blog - so I am going to try something different. If you would like to view it, e-mail me and I will send it to you asap. It's a pretty cute Christmas video that techologizes the first Christmas story. h/t LL
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Here’s a way to save $2,000,000,000 a year without sacrificing effectiveness
The US government has spent almost two hundred billion dollars on its Head Start program since 1965 - so it makes sense to look at whether the program is getting results. The government's last two program evaluations have found Head Start to have little or no enduring impact on its participants' cognitive, social/emotional, health, or parenting outcomes, and this is also true of the third and final phase of the evaluation of Head Start. (The few very slight positive impacts reported at the end of grade 1 are highly likely to wash out before long, meaning that the US government has spent huge amounts of money on a program that accomplishes little or nothing.)
Of course, this finding has important implications for Ontario where the government is spending something like two billion dollars a year on its full-day kindergarten program for 3-5-year-olds. So far as I know, there is no plan to evaluate whether full-day kindergarten is positively impacting Ontario students.
As Moira MacDonald documents in her column, there is a significant downside to full-day kindergarten on top of its eye-popping cost.
It is worth noting, by the way, that Head Start targets disadvantaged children - a population that would be more likely to benefit from intervention than the full-spectrum approach used in Ontario.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The irrational fear of for-profit education
It's a funny thing. Most people understand that competition and the profit motive are desirable when it comes to businesses, and even quasi-governmental institutions like the post office or the LCBO. Everyone knows that monopolies are unresponsive, inefficient, and expensive. We like the competition among grocery stores, car dealerships, dentists, and so forth, because it means we get excellent service in these sectors. I get far better service for my cat than I could get for my mother when she got sick. Of course, the difference is that in Ontario human beings have to get their health care from a government monopoly, while animal owners are able to choose among competing veterinarians.
So everyone realizes that the private sector generally provides much better service. However, for some reason, most people think that, even though it's bad to have a monopoly if you're providing groceries or banking services, it's okay to have a monopoly if you're providing education services. But there isn't really any reason to think that the education sector is exempt from the forces that apply to other sectors of the economy. This article in the Wall Street Journal points out that there are already many for-profit entities involved in the delivery of public education (for example, bus companies, textbook publishers, architects and contractors, cafeteria operators, and uniform manufacturers).
Public education has not improved because it has been sheltered under the protective wings of a monopoly for a long time. Henry Ford, too, had a monopoly of a sort, and so for a while he was able to get away with offering Model-T Fords in any colour people wanted, as long as it was black. But before long, competition caught up with Henry, and now consumers can have a lilac-tinted convertible BMW if they want. Education is much more important than cars, and we have put up with "all-black Model-T" schools for far too long. It's high time we exposed schools to the dynamic forces of competition and found out what the educational equivalent of a BMW is. H/T Chas