Quote of the Day: Knowing

True education should expand all the faculties of the mind:
memory, conscience, imagination, insight, intuition and brain.

When you just process information, you deny or cut off those other functions of the mind and reduce it to the brain alone, which is just simply [responding to stimuli]. The danger is unbelievable….

Columbia Teachers College held a symposium on “Knowing: How We Come to Know Things” and how important this is. Some speakers said that much that is being done in education denies these other functions of the mind and reduces them to the responsive] brain alone. They reminded us that those other functions—memory, conscience, imagination, insight, and intuition—are the functions by which we know absolutes and truths, [discern right from wrong],
and

are able

to know

God.

GenYvette Sutton

Be Good

Diana Senechal offers a review of the latest book by the author of The Bell Curve entitled Real Education and brings attention to a small but powerful arguement that is made about how teaching children to be nice is not the same as teaching them to be good.

"When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves."

She continues: "If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be."

Yup. Only in my role as my children's teacher have I come to appreciate the beauty of naming truly great works of literature living books . They really do shape you in ways that is hard to describe but present without a doubt. This is just one reason that I have been reading many of the works that I neglected in my own schooldays, having choosen instead to pass the test with my friend Cliff.

The argument for being good as opposed to nice also speaks to my absolute rejection of the worth of "team learning" as a worthy skill in the classroom. Been there, been the recipient of a bad grade because I feared that speaking up when my team was producing shoddy work would have me labeled as a control freak or worse. Also been there and been taken advantage of, being encouraged to do all the work myself and handing out A's to my undeserving "teammates". I believe that many who have gone to college, especially women, have similar stories to tell.

Kid Tested, Socrates Approved

"[Socrates once said,] `I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.'
My fear is that... we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance. Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something"
**From an article in Educational Leadership (Sept 2009)**
(emphasis my own)

The author goes on to support what I believe to be the way many homeschoolers are already operating: "Learning would take place both in and out of school. Teachers ... would learn alongside their students, creatively adapting curriculum to their students' needs. Like any creative effort, this collective journey would include errors, lack of good information, and false starts—a process of which Socrates would approve. Because teachers are knowledgeable about the learning process, they could serve as capable guides for their students, all the while promoting the requisite 21st century thinking skills of critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition."

I especially like the positive recognition of learning with your students and the granting of creative license to adapt the curriculum. These things are very present in my own homeschooling style but can sometimes be a source of stress when I view them as indicators of my shortcomings as a teacher (both in not being a certified expert at everything and not having been trained to implement the curriculum in the prescribed way). The author proposes that these things are actually strengths ~ and that Socrates would approve (Hooray for Me!)

The author concludes by encouraging us all to "embrace the new learning era of today to move beyond the false dichotomies and empty arguments of our tired education disagreements and to joyously engage with the future." Amen, Brutha.
And thanks to my mom, The Elementary School Principal, for noting this article for me.

The SAT: How Long Has It Been For You?

Interesting... I got 2 of the 4 math problems wrong. No surprise.
CLICK HERE to take this short quiz (just 12 questions).

Talk about promoting their test-prep classes! Check this out (from the website):
"Do you remember taking the SAT? Well it's changed—a lot—and the days of just showing-up and taking it without any preparation are long gone."

Fortunately for this family, we have taken to preparing ourselves to test our knowledge of these things waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy ahead of time, avoiding the need for The High School Cram.

I {heart} Cognitive Psychology+Education

My older daughter is my own personal poster child for the premise of this brilliant slideshow by Harvard-educated cognitive psychologist, David Willingham. And she'll share the frame with Daughter #2 after another year or two of decoding work!
Down with READING CURRICULUM!
Down with CONTENT WARS!
Down with ACCOUNTABILITY!
Down with DELIVERY MECHANICS!
Down with DRILLS!
Down with QUIZ TRICKS!
Down with STRATEGIES!

JUST. DO. IT... READ.

Fattening my Little Calves

A new report has been released by Common Core that suggests that the reason we are behind the high performing nations of the world is our lack of a comprehensive, content-rich education in the liberal arts and sciences; the absence of the dedication to educating our children deeply in a wide range of subjects.
The Core Knowledge folks put it best: What do we have that better performing nations lack? Data, perhaps. If you want to fatten the calf, surely we can do better than our present steady diet of thin gruel in between all those weighings.
No wonder it feels so natural for me to homeschool. It's simply another take on the age-old motherly instinct to feed our children well: stomach. heart. mind. soul.

REASON #498: To Cut Out the Middle Man

From the KitchenTableMath blog:
There is a phenomenal amount of tutoring going on in affluent school districts. Phenomenal. One of the tutors working in my town told a friend of mine that she estimates half of the kids in Scarsdale are tutored.

I've come to think it was inevitable that matters would develop in this way.

First of all, public schools are built to provide inputs, not outputs: instruction, not achievement.

That may not have been so deadly when schools grouped kids homogeneously. With homogeneous grouping the classroom teacher probably had a decent chance of knowing where the kids were and of being able to teach to their level.

Along comes the de-tracking movement, and now you've got heterogeneously grouped classrooms with kids all over the map in terms of readiness. The inputs model hasn't changed, so teachers are told to teach to the middle, or they're told to differentiate instruction, and when teaching to the middle or differentiating instruction work for some of the kids but not all of the kids, you assume the problem is the kid, not the school. After all, the school's job is to provide opportunities to learn, and as long as you've put PowerPoints on the SMARTBoard, you've done that.

Then add to this set-up school districts in which the vast majority of parents are college-educated and affluent enough to hire tutors, and what do you get?

You get "high-performing" schools where the kids are being retaught by parents and tutored by tutors.

REASON #245: The Complexity of Reality

AS MUCH AS ONE CAN RESENT THE CHANGES IN CULTURE THAT TECHNOLOGY AND THE GLUT OF (MIS)INFORMATION BRINGS, SOMETIMES YOU GOTTA LOOK AT THE POSITIVES. ONE SUCH POSITIVE IS THAT WHEN YOU ARE TOO TIRED (LAZY) TO WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING YOU FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT ON YOUR BLOG, THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE ELSE WHO HAS WRITTEN IT (BETTER THAN YOU COULD HAVE) AND POSTED IT ON THE WEB. [From "Dodging the Homeschool Stereotype" by Susan Wise Baur]
Classical education leans heavily on the evaluation of evidence: The educated child learns to avoid logical fallacies, to decide whether arguments are trustworthy or flawed. And both secular and religious classrooms are prone to simplistic thinking. "The evidence for evolution is unambiguous!" announces the public-school science text, without any reference to the growing "intelligent design" debate. "The evidence for a young earth can't be refuted!" insists the Christian school text, in a breathtaking display of selective reasoning. Ad hominem attacks abound. "Only people who are in rebellion against God espouse evolution!" concludes the science teacher in the Christian school. And the secularist retorts, "Creationists want to plunge education back into the Dark Ages!"
With which teacher should I entrust my children?

Nor do I want my kids to learn history with all questions of religion either censored or simplified. Were the Crusaders soldiers of God or soldiers of Western imperialism? Religious educators are often too afraid to admit that devout believers did bad things; secular educators are often all too happy to point out that the love of God is the root of all evil.

My public school would teach my 9-year-old that Columbus was a self-aggrandizing representative of an expansionist empire determined to acquire more money and power while wiping out native cultures. On the other side, the mother of a Christian-school student told me with wide-eyed exhilaration of her son's American history lesson the week before: "Columbus went to the New World to share the gospel with the Indians! I never knew that! Doesn't that change the way you think about this country? We were founded on the declaration of the gospel! Isn't God good?"

So was Columbus a patriarchal aggressor or a humble servant of God? He was both.

I won't say that no classroom can address this issue in all its complexity. But there isn't one near me. Until there is, I'll continue to teach my kids at home.

SWB ~ I {HEART} YOU!

Where There's Smoke...

I can't recall where I first heard about Edutopia, an organization of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, but I am just so glad I did. While some of my early discoveries had me a bit skeptical about whether the programs described were truly as wonderful and effective as they appeared, I can't help but be hopeful [I even tear up a bit] when I read and watch people who are entrenched in the public school system express sentiments about education that speak to what I found so desirable and true when I chose to homeschool.
Check out this San Francisco design program (one of four "Full-Time Learning" programs currently featured on the site). The founder of the program speaks in last 2-3 minutes about his experiences pulling his son out of school to homeschool him and explains how this led to the idea. I don't know of any such programs that are happening in my own backyard, unfortunately, but time is on my side since my 2 kiddos are still of early elementary age. Just knowing others have tried and been successful in starting such community-based learning sure does give me motivation and courage to picture a direct involvement (taking the lead, perhaps?) in my own future.
Let's hope the smoke turns out to be a real flame of change in education.
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