A veteran of the school wars herself, with the scars to prove it, Malkin Dare has had lots of experience dealing with education problems. If you want some been-there-done-that advice, give Malkin a call at 519-884-3166 or e-mail her at [email protected].

Question
I had a kind of surreal experience recently when I was buying an ice cream cone. The price was $3.35 and I wanted to lighten my load of small change. So I counted out $3.35 in quarters, dimes, and nickels, making three piles that totalled one dollar each and a fourth pile for coins adding up to 35¢. Two of my dollar piles consisted of four quarters. The cashier, a young teenager, then started picking up the coins one by one, starting with the ones in the 35¢ pile and adding them to each other slowly, moving her lips as she added each new one. As you can imagine, it took her quite a long time, especially when she had to do something like add 25¢ to a running total of $2.65. What in the world was going on? Port Carling


Answer
You were seeing the results of an education system that gives young children calculators at a very early age and encourages them to use them for everything. The clerk had clearly never been taught that four quarters equalled a loonie or how to group addends together strategically to make adding easier. And, of course, if you use calculators all the time, you probably don't need these skills.

The downside is, of course, that the clerk's process is very inefficient. It's true that she did finally arrive at the right answer, but it took her a long time and her full concentration. In the presence of larger or more numbers, this system would bog down. There's also something to be said for being so fluent in arithmetic that you can manipulate and estimate numbers in your sleep, freeing up your cognitive capacity to do more than simply crunch numbers.

Education leaders believe that giving calculators to young children frees them from the drudgery of learning number facts and other soul-destroying basic arithmetic, but the truth is the exact opposite. Children who can do calculations automatically, without using up precious cognitive space, are set free to grapple with difficult problems, while children who depend on a calculator are forever limited.

Regards, Aunt Malkin

Bullying
I just watched your video on bullying and I had to write to you to thank you for making it. This is a very powerful video, and it underlines the horrible consequences of a school system that doesn't deal with bullies appropriately. My daughter was bullied in school, and it was so awful for her that I started to home-school her. It's been like night and day - such a good decision!  Coburg, ON
The Importance of Good Reading Skills
My son didn't learn to read in grade 1 and things just went downhill from there. My husband and I tried working with the school but they seemed to think we were being critical of their efforts or something and everything we did made things worse for Justin. It was as if a bomb had gone off in our house. I can't tell you how terrible it was for everyone. Finally, I happened to come across your Stairway to Reading program and we decided to give it a shot. That was three months ago. Today, Justin is almost totally caught up in reading. He has started reading books for pleasure - The Cat in the Hat is his current favourite. We are just so grateful to you for making Stairway to Reading available. Owen Sound, ON

Low Quality Learning Approach
We recently learned that a Quality Learning Approach was implemented in our grandchildren's school six months ago without parents being aware of it. I have not been able to find any independent evaluations of the approach within the school frameworks. Ultimately, the approach appears to focus on teacher satisfaction under the guise of student achievement. For example, the eight-year-old and upwards children are given worksheets at the beginning of each week in numeracy and literacy and instructed to work through them on their own. If they have any questions, they are to ask four peers before going to the teacher. The children are then required to self-assess their work. If they do not complete the work satisfactorily, they are required to do it at home on the weekends without parental support. When a public meeting was called to discuss the parents' concerns, the staff completely stonewalled them, giving a 30-minute presentation and then allowing only 10 minutes of questions (which were not really answered). Is there research that compares traditional instruction with this approach? Australia

 As two of the books in our book review section attest, education leaders continue to promote - indeed insist on - all kinds of idiotic teaching practices and philosophies. 

The evidence is overwhelming that the non teacher-directed learning embedded in child-centred learning doesn't work.

• Common sense alone tells us that kids will learn more if teachers are allowed to directly tell their students what they know - as opposed to trying to infuse expertise into students by oblique and mysterious methods.
• The theoretical basis of child-centred learning has been destroyed by recent research in the field of cognitive psychology.
• The empirical evidence that child-centred learning is inferior to traditional methods is overwhelming.
• The results of child-centred learning are unsatisfactory, judging by the reaction of parents, post-secondary educators, and employers.

So if it's sooooo obvious that child-centred learning isn't working, why don't education leaders change the channel?

The most obvious explanation is that they don't want to admit they were wrong - and this is no doubt part of the explanation. But there is a fuller explanation, courtesy of an interesting book entitled Brain Bugs: How the brain's flaws shape our lives by Deaun Buonomano. 

In his book, Mr. Buonomano recounts the unbelievable story of a Hungarian doctor, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who in 1847 discovered that the reason so many women were dying of puerperal fever after giving birth was that their doctors were not washing their hands before assisting the delivery. Dr. Semmelweis' findings were ignored, indeed reviled, and he was forced to leave the hospital, eventually being committed to an insane asylum and dying at age 47 of a beating by the guards only 14 days after being committed.

So why did the medical establishment resist a breakthrough discovery that could have almost totally eliminated the approximately 25% mortality rate among parturient mothers? The other doctors simply couldn't afford to believe Dr. Semmelweis because they had to protect themselves from the knowledge that they had single-handedly caused the deaths of thousands of women.

For the same reason, education leaders resist the notion that their policies have resulted in untold misery and blighted lives for millions of children.

The author was a Teach for America teacher who discovered that it was possible to transform the lives of her ghetto students - and then became enraged because most ghetto students are just being written off. Ms Rhee went on to become the chancellor of the schools in Washington, DC, and then the president of a student advocacy organization called Students First. Here's an excerpt from her book (p.270) that speaks to Ms Rhee's determination to make it possible for all children to reach their full potential.

"I vividly recall the school year I spent in Seoul, where every one of the seventy children in the classroom was given a rank, from one to seventy depending on academic achievement. Being the KSL (Korean as a second language) student, I was number seventy. Every child and his or her family knew exactly where they stood. If you were number eighteen, your mother pushed you to get to at least number fifteen by the end of the semester. If you were number eight, the expectation was that you needed to get to six. There should have been only one happy kid in the classroom: student number one. But that wasn't the case. The top student was always looking over her shoulder. 'Oh crap,' she'd think. 'Here comes number three!' Or, 'Number two is gunning for me on this test.' Number one turned out to be the most terrified of them all.

"I'm not advocating for our society to become like Korea. The constant competition creates too much stress in many students and strains within the families. But it's important to know what we're up against. Children in other nations are fiercely competitive. We are not doing our kids any favors by teaching them to celebrate mediocrity, to revel in the average, and to delight in merely participating."

Seven Myths About Education. Daisy Christodoulou.

The author is an experienced school teacher in England as well as an academic researcher. She shows that education in England is strongly influenced by the following seven myths: facts prevent understanding; teacher-led instruction is passive; the 21st century fundamentally changes everything; you can always just look it up; we should teach transferable skills; projects and activities are the best way to learn; and teaching knowledge is indoctrination. These myths are strongly promulgated by education leaders and trainers, and most classroom teachers have no idea that they have been sold a load of horsefeathers. In this excerpt, the author recounts her initiation into the world of real research.

"After I had been teaching for 3 years, I took a year out to do further study. I was shocked to stumble across an entire field of educational and scientific research which completely disproved so many of the theories I had been taught when training and teaching. I was not just shocked; I was angry. I felt as though I had been misled. I had been working furiously for 3 years, teaching hundreds of lessons, and much information that would have made my life a whole lot easier and would have helped my pupils immeasurably had just never been introduced to me. Worse, ideas that had absolutely no evidence backing them up had been presented to me as unquestionable axioms."







Teacher Proof: Why research in education doesn't always mean what it claims, and what you can do about it. Tom Bennett.

This is another book by an English teacher, once again focusing on foolish classroom practices but this time zeroing in on the fads that come and go like a series of angry tornadoes. Once again, the author severely criticizes education leaders' propensity to cite terribly shoddy research in their zeal to bolster the case for the latest fad. From page 2:

"Education is a human field that longs to be as exact as a physical science, but isn't. Often, no one knows anything. That doesn't mean we know nothing; we desperately wish we had the answers, and that kind of demand won't be denied. Answers are sought, so answers are found. Just as anxious men will pay money for panda penis and spells, so will anxious educators, under pressure to improve results, reach for the magic beans and the magic potion. Cue: educational pseudo-science. Learning styles, thinking skills, multiple intelligences, Visual/Auditory/Kinaesthetic Learning Styles (VAK), Brain Gym, and on and on. Smelly air fresheners to aid memory, flipped classrooms and taxonomies from Mars ... all promise to revolutionise the classroom... 

"Values become facts, which are then taught and propagated in educational training establishments; courses are available on the internet, bought by LEAs [school boards] and hoisted on the unsuspecting profession, who have little leverage to say no. And as new trainees come through the system, they believe what they were taught in the crib of their profession, and pass it on to their own trainees. I can't remember the last time I met a teacher who knew if Bloom's taxonomy was ever criticised; who knew the evidence that supported VAK; who discovered for themselves if group work really was the best way to learn. Who can blame them? Who has the time?"






The Way I See It: A personal look at autism & Asperger's. Temple Grandin.

The author is herself autistic, but very high functioning - mainly as a result of the measures her mother took when Grandin was a child. So the explanations and advice in this book come from someone who's definitely been there and done that. Her primary directive to the parents of autistic children is - doing nothing is the worst thing you can do. The excerpt (pp 21-22) elaborates.

"Young children with autism spectrum disorders do not learn by listening to and watching others, as do typical children. They need to be specifically taught things that others seem to learn by osmosis. A good teacher is gently insistent with a young autistic child in order to get progress. The teacher has to be careful not to cause sensory overload, but at the same time has to be somewhat intrusive into the child's world of stimming or silent withdrawal in order for the child to engage in learning.

"When children get a little older, they need to be exposed to many different things to stimulate their continued learning in different areas of life. There also need to be expectations for proper social behavior. When I look back at my life, my mother made me do a number of things I did not like, but these activities were really beneficial. They gave me opportunities to practice social skills, converse with less-familiar people, develop self-esteem and learn to negotiate unanticipated changes. None of these activities caused major problems with sensory oversensitivity. While Mother may have pushed me to do things, she understood well that a child should never be forced into a situation that includes painful sensory stimulation.

"By age five, I was required to dress up and behave in church and sit through formal dinners both at home and at Granny's. When I didn't, there was a consequence, and I lost a privilege that meant something to me....

"When I was reluctant to learn to ride a bike, I was urged to learn. Mother was always testing the limits on how far she could push me. I became motivated to learn after I missed a bike trip to the Coca-Cola plant.

"When I was a teenager, the opportunity arose for me to visit my aunt's ranch in Arizona. At the time, I was having non-stop panic attacks and was afraid to go. Mother made me go anyway, telling me I could come home in two weeks. When I got there, I loved it and stayed all summer."

Click here for a very cool inter-active video that walks you through what to do if someone needs urgent assistance, for example a heart attack. You could save someone's life!