TCS Daily - For Whom the Bell Curves: America's Education Dilemma: "Thirty years ago, a vocational school for typists or for TV repairmen would have made sense. Many professionals used secretaries for typing, and many people took broken televisions to the shop for repair. However, not many people could have spent their entire careers doing typing or TV repair. Today, people throw out broken televisions (unless they are under warranty), and most people do their own typing on computers. "
How are to design a curriculum for our children when we have no idea what their lives may be like in 20 years much less 50 years in the future.
• 5 years ago the iPod was just getting off the ground
• 10 years ago the Web found it stride
• 15 years ago computer became affordable to most people
The most important lessons we have to teacher our children in to be flexible in learning.
I truly believe most people can learn anything they want if they think it is important for them to know it. The problem with most schooling is that the material is not interesting and presented in a way that emphasizes that it is not worth knowing.
IQ is a good predictor for how well someone will do in school, but it doesn't predict how well someone will live their life, or how well loved they will be, or how much money they will make or how happy they will be.
You can pick people at random on the street and find out their IQs and their earnings and the people with the highest IQs probably won't be the highest earners and the difference between the lowest earning and the highest will be over 10x while the differences between their IQs will be less then 2x.
IQ isn't useless but it isn't all that useful either.
Children are different from each other. but they can be clustered together pretty well, if we wanted to. However we can't do that any more in our schools so we will have to pick up the slack for ourselves.
For example if we have a set of children very interested in playing musical instruments we can start them off by learning all about scales and technique, but we can expand on that interest and relate it to many other branches of learning. The mathematics of the octave are beautiful to ear and brain. The chemistry of metal to made a trumpet or of lacquers to coat a violin can be all related to musical learning.
But what do we really do: we throw 30 random children into a class and expect them all to be wildly enthusiastic about every subject from any point of interest. When the reality is only 5% of the students (1.5 students or 2 since we can't really have half a student in class) will care about the presentation of the material at any given time.
If we could group them together into classes of interested students they would do much better and much faster too. Though we would have to be a bit sneaky in presenting material they may be less interested in but are sure to need later.
I mean how can you go through 12+ years of school and never take a course in basic banking functions (checking, saving, credit card, mortgages, simple investing)? I did and it slowed me down.
So what do we need to teach?
• Reading and writing
• Mathematics
• Learning how to learn
• Life skills (cooking, cleaning, banking, driving, first aid, &etc.)
• General Knowledge (history, Chemistry, Physics, Biology)
• Talent honing
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Federal Report Shows Course Inflation
Grades are rising but learning is lagging, federal reports find - Los Angeles Times: "Among other things, Hall said, the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as 'course inflation' %u2014 offering high-level courses that have 'the right names' but a dumbed-down curriculum."
The papers are full of plenty of stories that test scores are rising, but that is not the whole story. There has been a certain undercurrent of worry about grade inflation. But it is much worse then that, whole courses are being inflated.
I keep seeing young people who seem to be missing important skills, but this kicks it up a notch.
I understand that there are plenty of families that cannot afford to do anything but send their children to public school. Just realize that all it is. is a babysitting service not an educational institution.
We have to take care of our children ourselves and teach them ourselves at night and on the weekends.
The papers are full of plenty of stories that test scores are rising, but that is not the whole story. There has been a certain undercurrent of worry about grade inflation. But it is much worse then that, whole courses are being inflated.
I keep seeing young people who seem to be missing important skills, but this kicks it up a notch.
I understand that there are plenty of families that cannot afford to do anything but send their children to public school. Just realize that all it is. is a babysitting service not an educational institution.
We have to take care of our children ourselves and teach them ourselves at night and on the weekends.
Federal Report Shows Course Inflation
Grades are rising but learning is lagging, federal reports find - Los Angeles Times: "Among other things, Hall said, the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as 'course inflation' %u2014 offering high-level courses that have 'the right names' but a dumbed-down curriculum."
The papers are full of plenty of stories that test scores are rising, but that is not the whole story. There has been a certain undercurrent of worry about grade inflation. But it is much worse then that, whole courses are being inflated.
I keep seeing young people who seem to be missing important skills, but this kicks it up a notch.
I understand that there are plenty of families that cannot afford to do anything but send their children to public school. Just realize that all it is. is a babysitting service not an educational institution.
We have to take care of our children ourselves and teach them ourselves at night and on the weekends.
The papers are full of plenty of stories that test scores are rising, but that is not the whole story. There has been a certain undercurrent of worry about grade inflation. But it is much worse then that, whole courses are being inflated.
I keep seeing young people who seem to be missing important skills, but this kicks it up a notch.
I understand that there are plenty of families that cannot afford to do anything but send their children to public school. Just realize that all it is. is a babysitting service not an educational institution.
We have to take care of our children ourselves and teach them ourselves at night and on the weekends.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Do unions increase productivity? | Free exchange | Economist.com
Do unions increase productivity? | Free exchange | Economist.com: "Some thoughts on markets where unions will produce higher productivity:
There are opportunities for deploying capital to replace low-skilled labour
The union wage is higher than the average prevailing wage for the workers' cognitive endowments and/or educational level
There are significant transaction costs to finding and retaining labour, such as the construction trades, where it is more efficient to call the union labour hall and tell them to send over 50 guys than hire them individually
The work easily lends itself to classification and regularisation
Productivity is easily measured"
In interesting article to read not long after Steve Jobs' speech against teacher's unions and my post on measuring worthwhile things.
There are opportunities for deploying capital to replace low-skilled labour
The union wage is higher than the average prevailing wage for the workers' cognitive endowments and/or educational level
There are significant transaction costs to finding and retaining labour, such as the construction trades, where it is more efficient to call the union labour hall and tell them to send over 50 guys than hire them individually
The work easily lends itself to classification and regularisation
Productivity is easily measured"
In interesting article to read not long after Steve Jobs' speech against teacher's unions and my post on measuring worthwhile things.
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine: "For a few decades, it%u2019s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent."
This is fascinating and it is something I am glad to have been reminded of.
I knew I had read something like this some time ago. It took me a little while to find up but I did. In the late 1990's Alfie Kohn wrote Punished by Rewards: The trouble with Gold star, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes.
His work was a bit more comprehensive involving not just school children but also salespeople. The results from his work were very interesting:
• Children retain 30 times more information if they are interesting in it then not.
• Companies that do not use commission systems to pay their sales team will increase sales by 300%.
• Rewarding people for doing something will lose interest in doing that thing even if it was fun before, this appears to be a long term effect, too.
You probably know a few children that can spout of thousands of facts about their favorite sports team, collectable card game or cars. Yet they can't seem to remember their times tables.
How to make it interesting?
That is the easiest thing of all: relate it to something they are interested in.
Something that would really freak out old Alfie is Dora the Explorer: They drop praise throughout that little show. Can it actually be damaging to our little ones. I doubt that Dora's praise is counted nearly as much as our's but we have to make our praise mean more.
The most powerful boost to self-esteem is accomplishment.
"Do, or do not. There is no try." -Yoda
This is fascinating and it is something I am glad to have been reminded of.
I knew I had read something like this some time ago. It took me a little while to find up but I did. In the late 1990's Alfie Kohn wrote Punished by Rewards: The trouble with Gold star, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes.
His work was a bit more comprehensive involving not just school children but also salespeople. The results from his work were very interesting:
• Children retain 30 times more information if they are interesting in it then not.
• Companies that do not use commission systems to pay their sales team will increase sales by 300%.
• Rewarding people for doing something will lose interest in doing that thing even if it was fun before, this appears to be a long term effect, too.
You probably know a few children that can spout of thousands of facts about their favorite sports team, collectable card game or cars. Yet they can't seem to remember their times tables.
How to make it interesting?
That is the easiest thing of all: relate it to something they are interested in.
Something that would really freak out old Alfie is Dora the Explorer: They drop praise throughout that little show. Can it actually be damaging to our little ones. I doubt that Dora's praise is counted nearly as much as our's but we have to make our praise mean more.
The most powerful boost to self-esteem is accomplishment.
"Do, or do not. There is no try." -Yoda
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
What's Special About This Number?
What's Special About This Number?: "0 is the additive identity.
1 is the multiplicative identity.
2 is the only even prime.
3 is the number of spatial dimensions we live in.
4 is the smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps.
5 is the number of Platonic solids.
6 is the smallest perfect number."
This is a fun little site.
1 is the multiplicative identity.
2 is the only even prime.
3 is the number of spatial dimensions we live in.
4 is the smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps.
5 is the number of Platonic solids.
6 is the smallest perfect number."
This is a fun little site.
What Are You Measuring On Your Child's Education
There is a not so old saying, "What gets measured gets managed." The trouble is when what is getting measured is the wrong thing then what is getting managed is getting mismanaged.
In the computer industry there was a time when KLOC was all the rage. That is a programmers productivity was measured by the thousands of lines of code he generated. Well, programmers aren't dumb, so they changed their coding style to write their code in the most expansive way possible. It didn't make the code any better nor did it make production go any faster, but they got pay raises if their code was bloated. I was once part of a team working over some code and one of the developers found 10,000 lines of code that was never called and he deleted it because it was unneeded. Why was it there? To boost the numbers when KLOC was the managed number.
I was also in a call center, and the only thing they measured was call time. CSRs might not get paid very much but they aren't dumb either. It wasn't uncommon for them to hang up if a call went too long. There was no real way to measure customer satisfaction.
When it comes to your children's education: What are you measuring?
I think it is safe to say that virtually all of us have had classes that all you needed to do was cram some facts for the test, regurgitate them and then forget them because we had no reason to help them stick.
A test is a useful tool if you have a class of 20+ children. It gives you an idea of how the class as a whole is doing. You aren't going to have that many children. You can use more useful techniques to find out how well your child is learning. The best one is to just ask them to help solve problems for you as they come up in daily life. Watching how they solve problems as they come up will tell you a lot about how they are learning.
What we have to do is to be aware of all the teaching opportunities there are all around us. Cooking is one of the great ones. Cooking involves physics, chemistry, and biology. Changing the size of the recipe is a great for practicing fractions.
In the computer industry there was a time when KLOC was all the rage. That is a programmers productivity was measured by the thousands of lines of code he generated. Well, programmers aren't dumb, so they changed their coding style to write their code in the most expansive way possible. It didn't make the code any better nor did it make production go any faster, but they got pay raises if their code was bloated. I was once part of a team working over some code and one of the developers found 10,000 lines of code that was never called and he deleted it because it was unneeded. Why was it there? To boost the numbers when KLOC was the managed number.
I was also in a call center, and the only thing they measured was call time. CSRs might not get paid very much but they aren't dumb either. It wasn't uncommon for them to hang up if a call went too long. There was no real way to measure customer satisfaction.
When it comes to your children's education: What are you measuring?
I think it is safe to say that virtually all of us have had classes that all you needed to do was cram some facts for the test, regurgitate them and then forget them because we had no reason to help them stick.
A test is a useful tool if you have a class of 20+ children. It gives you an idea of how the class as a whole is doing. You aren't going to have that many children. You can use more useful techniques to find out how well your child is learning. The best one is to just ask them to help solve problems for you as they come up in daily life. Watching how they solve problems as they come up will tell you a lot about how they are learning.
What we have to do is to be aware of all the teaching opportunities there are all around us. Cooking is one of the great ones. Cooking involves physics, chemistry, and biology. Changing the size of the recipe is a great for practicing fractions.
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