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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Japan’s Math Superiority - How much of a part do the jukus play?
GUEST BLOG BY NATSUKO, IN RESPONSE TO THIS LINK SUPPLIED BY MANABU WATANABE IN A COMMENT TO "THRILLING NEWS"
The blog is primarily about education in Japan after the early 2000s. I haven't lived in Japan since 2001 and it's been a long time since I finished school. So I am probably not very familiar with what the author is talking about.
Having said that, I still feel that Japanese education is a bit more advanced than that in the US/Canada when it comes to math (really I am talking about math only, as there are a number of issues with Japanese education in some other areas). Both in Ottawa and here in New York, I have met a number of Japanese parents who send their kids to a weekend Japanese school that follows the Japanese public school curriculum. The main purpose of course is to let the kids continue learning the Japanese language. But the parents also say that the US and Canadian schools' math curricula are about one year behind the Japanese one. So unless they send their kids to a weekend school, they would be quite a bit behind other kids in Japan when they return there.
When I was at elementary school (in the 80s), it was not common for elementary school kids to go to a "juku". Where I grew up, it was probably only about 10% of the kids who went to a juku (they were primarily kids from wealthy families who could afford to send them to a private junior high school, and it was meant to help prepare for the entrance exams for private junior high schools). It wasn't, and I believe it still isn't, common for parents to help their kids with homework either (my parents never even asked me about homework). So in terms of my math skills, I think I can give all the credit to the education I got at school. And I don't think my school was any more special than others. In Japan, people rarely choose where to live based on the quality of the schools. Over the last 10 years or so, people have started moving around based on the availability of day care (as more women now go back to work after they have kids), but it's still unheard of to choose where to live based on schools.
I also thought that I was getting fairly good education in math and many other areas at my public junior high school. But most of us started going to a juku after our first year (in 8th grade) to prepare for the entrance exams for high schools. In Japan, you go to an elementary school and junior high school in the district where you live unless you apply for a private school, but you have to write an exam to enter any high school, private or public. I can for sure say that I learned much more advanced stuff at a juku. At the same time, though, I think I was able to start learning very advanced maths at a juku in the 8th and 9th grades as I had already acquired pretty strong math skills by then.
I really think that the education you receive at elementary school is so critical to building a solid foundation in math - it would have been way too late if I waited until 8th grade. I can say with confidence that at least in my case, my elementary school education helped me build the strong math foundation. I am not sure what's happening nowadays, but in my day it worked very well that most of us started going to a juku at 7th or 8th grade, as by then the level of knowledge and skills among the kids varied too much for one school teacher to attend to everyone's needs. I enjoyed self-studying the content of our school math textbook, but I remember feeling a bit bored in a math class as my teacher naturally tried to ensure that everyone understood everything, which meant that he only focused on the very basic level of math. On the other hand, most jukus organize classes based on how well the kids did on their placement exams. So you study with other kids who have a similar level of knowledge and skills. The blog talks about the survey results where a lot more parents believe juku teachers are better than school teachers at improving their kids' skills, but that's totally natural as the teacher at a juku doesn't have to take care of a large group of kids who represent a broad range of abilities.
I looked at recent statistics and apparently there are 22,000 elementary schools in Japan, and 21,713 are public (213 are private and 74 are national - national schools are more like inexpensive elite/prestigious schools that are very competitive in terms of admission). This means that over 98% of kids go to the public school that is in the district where they live. And again, people in Japan rarely choose where to live based on the school. Although the blog indicates that 40% of elementary school kids go to a juku, I think it refers to higher-grade kids (4th-6th grade). I have a few friends (all very academically accomplished ones) who have kids between 1st and 4th grades and none of their kids go to a juku (and they all go to public school). So I think we can safely say that in Japan the vast majority of people still believe in the quality of education at public school to a large extent.
I honestly didn't find the blog very convincing. While I agree that jukus are an integral part of the Japanese educational system, as I said earlier I don't think they play a huge role in helping kids build the critically-important foundation in math during the early years at school. It is school teachers who play this role, and I think we can give them credit for successfully implementing the Japanese public school math curriculum. At the very least, I want to thank my elementary school teacher for the "A" in statistics that I got with minimum effort at grad school in Canada! But again, I have been away from Japan too long, so it's quite possible that things have changed a lot in those 20 years.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Spending Less and Learning More
In Ontario, education spending is way up and student achievement is way down. At the same time, the Ontario government is deeply in debt and getting deeper in debt with every passing moment.
In BC, on the other hand, student achievement is better than Ontario in all core subjects and education spending is increasing much more slowly than in Ontario. BC has a much different funding model, in that it gives parents up to 50% of the cost of tuition at private schools. As a result, the province spends much less of its budget on education than does Ontario.
This report suggests that if Ontario were to adopt the BC model, Ontario would save up to $1.9 billion every year.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Doretta on The Agenda)
Here's your chance to watch Doretta in action on Steve Paikin's The Agenda, along with some lesser lights like Annie Kidder and Caroline Alphonso.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
One for the Kipper
As this posting explains, the very successful KIPP schools are neither creaming off the best students nor kicking out the low performers. Yet KIPP schools are routinely turning around the lives of low-socioeconomic students.
KIPP schools show that, properly taught, all students can learn to a high standard. They have been doing this for 20 years now, and there are 162 of them.
KIPP schools prove that demographics are no excuse for student failure.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Discipline of Discipline
There have been some comments to yesterday's posting about the groping to build a body of knowledge to inform teaching. And here's another one, just for good measure.
Of course beginnings are faltering - think of the telephone - and it would be silly to hope that any new body of knowledge will suddenly emerge complete and perfect in every respect. Those involved in the new pedagogical movement understand this very well. Doug Lemov, for example, is revising his taxonomy as we speak, because he has found that some of it is too rigid and doesn't build in "love". Deborah Ball (TeachingWorks) has always valued the importance of conceptual understanding, continuing the tradition begun at the University of Michigan by Harold Stevenson of studying the brilliant "enhanced" or "assisted learning" approach used to great effect in Japanese elementary classrooms. Here is a passage from the book about the evolving understanding of "zero tolerance discipline".
"Carol noticed that one student, a girl named Taquisha, was reading that morning's copy of the Chicago Sun-Times. A few minutes before, Carol had shown the class a five-minute film, one of the everyday cultural artifacts that she used to prepared students to analyze texts like the Toni Morrison novel Beloved. She was in the middle of asking them to comment on what they'd seen when she noticed Taquisha's unconventional choice of reading material.
"The moment posed a challenge....Carol knew that she had several options for how to respond. 'I could have embarrassed her, punished her with additional work, lowered her grade, or sent her to the office.' But while she believed that some punishements could teach, she also knew that, in Taquisha's case, a punishment like sending her to the office would give the student exactly what she wanted - to be removed from any responsibility for active participation. And that was the opposite of Carol's goal.
"So instead of jabbing, she struck a playful tone. 'Other questions. Other questions,' Carol said calmly before making her move. 'Taquisha, you have a question inside that paper there?'
"'Yup,' Taquisha replied emphatically, retaining her fighting pose. Yes, I am indeed reading the Chicago Sun-Times during your lesson, Taquisha was effectively saying. The move was a taunt, a second invitation to spar. But instead of taking the bait, Carol deployed a response that she later called 'a kind of Tai Chi move'. Instead of responding to the 'yup,' Carol simply tilted the subject in her desired direction.....
"'What's your question?' she asked.
"Taquisha punched again, saying she wanted to know what the short film Sax, Cantor, Riff, by Julie Dash, had to do with the book they were preparing to read, Beloved....
"Faced with this third attack, another teacher might have finally given in. But Carol, determined to force Taquisha into the discussion, deployed another Tai Chi deflection. 'Well, that might be a question for me,' she said. Taquisha had, after all, posed a reasonable question - why were they doing what they were doing: what was the purpose? - and Carol wanted to acknowledge it as well.
"'Well,' Taquisha persisted, her permission to challenge granted, 'what does the book have to do with the girl and the man singing?' (Sax, Cantor, Riff depicted a sequence that included a woman singing an African American spiritual and a Jewish man singing in Hebrew.) 'Say that again,' Carol said. 'That's a good question.' She couldn't quite hear Taquisha's response - other students, apparently curious about the same question, spoke over her. 'What does the girl have to do with what?' Carol asked again. 'What does the girl have to do with the girl and the man singing?' Taquisha repeated.
"Later, watching the exchange on videotape, Carol marveled at the evolution. In just a few minutes, Taquisha had shifted from open defiance to challenging the lesson plan to asking a sophisticated question that was exactly what Carol had hoped for when she first launched the discussion.
"The two sequences in the film - the young African American woman singing, on the one hand, and the Jewish man singing, on the other - were disconnected scenes. As far as the viewer knew, the two hadn't even seen each other. But Taquisha made two important assumptions: one, that the author (in this case, the director) had created the work with some kind of intent; and two, that her role as a reader (or in this case, viewer) was to impose some form of coherence on the apparently disparate scenes.
"'That is a beautiful and sound question,' Carol said, after rephrasing it. 'Found it in the Sun-Times too, didn't you?'
"'Yup!' Taquisha said. Except this time, the yup had a different sound. She was no longer resisting."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Thrilling News!
The profession of teaching is reminiscent of the early days of medicine - incoherent and ill-informed and dominated by fads, with practitioners operating on their own with inadequate tools and training, groping for better methods and having no good way of communicating their breakthroughs.
So I can describe only as THRILLING a book called Building A+ Better Teacher: How teaching works (and how to teach it to everyone) by Elizabeth Green.
Operating pretty much under the radar is a movement to develop excellent teachers by showing them how to use good teaching methods and furnishing them with good teaching materials. There are a great many moving parts to this movement, but the epicentre is TeachingWorks at the University of Michigan.
Back in the dark ages of medicine, people tended to believe that good healers were born, not made - but of course nowadays we know that good doctors are those who take full advantage of the best techniques and medicines. Well, we are still pretty much in the dark ages of education, and so people tend to believe that good teachers are born, not made. This, too, is incorrect - and TeachingWorks is here to prove it.
Today's child-centred philosophy is a reaction to a time in the distant past when there was a huge emphasis on facts and knowledge, and hardly any emphasis on understanding. Now, of course, there is an over-emphasis on understanding - to the detriment of facts and knowledge.
TeachingWorks is working to find the right balance - how to spark a thirst for learning in kids while ensuring that they have the tools and the ability to reason that they need to quench their thirst. Already, there are thousands of classroom teachers trying to implement the new way, mostly in charter schools, and the results are very promising.
Being a skilled teacher is incredibly difficult. At present, very few prospective teachers get the training they need, and they are pretty much thrown into classrooms with zero preparation. A few develop into gifted teachers through their own efforts, many just get by, and perhaps half bomb out and leave the profession after a year or two.
Undoubtedly, the same phenomenon would happen in medicine if doctor training were as useless as most teacher training programs. However, it begins to look as if teacher training is finally coming of age.
I am so excited by this book that I will be writing more about it over the next few weeks.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Jim Mayberry
Today, we pay tribute to Jim Mayberry, a former member of the SQE board, who died in St. Catharines last week. Jim was a gentleman and a scholar, and for many years he diligently proofread our newsletter for us. Here is Jim's obituary. H/T CT
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Tuesday at the Movies (ESA’s)
I defy you to oppose Education Savings Accounts (vouchers for special needs kids) after watching this clip.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
O Tempora! O Mores!
Here is a news item that puts flesh and blood on Ontario literacy standards. The high school graduate in the article has won a $250 bursary for writing the best essay about her community.
Clearly, the winner can read and write (although one suspects that the newspaper might have cleaned up a few spelling and grammar errors), and would pass most literacy definitions. However, her writing is at a very low level - rambling, repetitive, mindless, and of impoverished vocabulary and sentence construction. It's very reminiscent of Internet chatrooms.
Since she is "leaving for university momentarily", one has to wonder what how good the writing skills are of the non university-bound students. Plus, don't forget this was judged the best essay - suggesting that she is one of the better high school graduates.
If you ask nicely, I will reproduce one of my high school essays. There is quite a contrast! H/T CT
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Praise)
Although it's not exactly a movie, this short clip makes a dramatic statement about what to praise children for.