Kevin Drum says this article is nonsense. Reading scores have increased significantly within all demographic groups.
What about kids not in a demographic group?
That's a good link! Also he basically agrees with me.
I still think you can make a strong case for fighting childhood poverty, though, but the details are slippery.
Ok! Comity! On to the next one!
Paul Ryan isn't even gone yet and you already want to give money to poor people.
Kevin Drum says that kids have been getting better at reading.
Though I agree that if we aggressively fought childhood poverty, reading scores would go up a lot faster!
Her days are numbered. She's all about legacy now.
Yarrow is from an earlier age cohort.
If you had been wealthier as a child, you wouldn't have felt the need to supply that context explicitly.
Raise your hand if you've even seen a violin.
I don't think I've been within 20 feet of a violin, but I've seen them at concerts.
I've held a violin, but not in public.
The violins are probably more scared of you than you are of them, sweetie.
If I said you had a beautiful violin, would you let me hold it against me?
I pass within 50 metres of literal shops full of violins four times a workday.
Wouldn't that risk getting it out of tune?
No matter how beautiful Moby's violins become, he always feels in his heart the ache of his missing viola.
Moby looks down, sees areolas, thinks "Why can't you be ar-violas? Whyyyy?"
Also, "Why are there so many aureolas in my office?"
Is an ar-viola like an ar-kansas?
It stands for Recreation Vehicoliola.
Right. So it's like a viola but hotter, wetter, and more Hispanic.
Apropos to nothing: I made a Human Centipede joke yesterday in class (I mean, we were studying composition of functions and f(g(x)) and the joke basically wrote itself...)(plus some students had been chatting about the movie at the beginning of class, so students were primed to be right there with me) and anyway today I'm wondering if I should actually apologize or just sweep it under the rug.
24: bringing us right back to Moby's nipples.
I assume you have the usual disclaimer ("I'm not in a serial killer or in way inclined to torture-murder my students") in your syllabus, so they know there's nothing to worry about.
Trigger warnings: advanced math, body horror, bad taste.
Only when reasoned discussion fails will we resort to violins.
bad taste Well, that depends which segment of the human centipede you end up as.
They will never forget how functions work.
The test scores are flatlining may be false, and sure, fixing poverty is more important, but I am going to stand up for the article in its recommendation that schools focus more on teaching facts about the world, ie basic historical facts and vocabulary, particularly at a young age -- and especially to poorer kids. The focus on "skills" as opposed to general knowledge feels like it leaves out something really important; even at my daughter's fancy-ass private school I am constantly struck by how little general knowledge stuff they teach and how useful it is for her in what they do to have some general sense of the outlines of eg American history -- and she still seems shockingly ignorant. This year they've been more rigorous about actually learning stuff and I feel like it makes a big difference.
My son learned about the pee tape at school. He was in the fifth grade at the time.
Amen to 34. Rocs have skills shoved down their throats at all hours and don't know shit about anything.
Now that I think about it, he probably learned that from another kid and not in class.
I mean settting educational policy based on the vague non-empirically tested personal feelings of parents like me is the ultimate bullshit, so I'm not actually advocating for anything. But still, I feel like there is a fact-learning gap.
My son is too young (5) for me to have a real sense of his general knowledge, but he certainly comes home from school with questions that suggest they are at least starting to broach questions about science and nature. I don't think anything on history, yet.
They do seem to be driving the pace on reading and writing faster than I remember from the same age. Hard enough that I feel that kids whose parents don't spend time every day with them are going to fall behind. Which includes us, since we both have stupidly long working hours and commutes.
I remember basically doing no homework at age 4 or 5. But then again, I may well be misremembering, as (in typical Unfogged fashion) I was a precocious-as-fuck reader.
I guess I could ask his social studies teacher.
"If you have deeply repulsive fetishes, you don't need to worry about STIs."
Why should a 6 year old in 2017 be able to read any better than a 6 year old in 1997?
Not sure it's a good reason, but the Flynn effect is one possibility.
Naturally, 29 and 31 set me off looking for a transcript of The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, but the internet has failed. Again. At least as to the violence/violins joke. Which iirc builds on the earlier line that for Tonight at least, Londoner's might sleep forever under a comforting blanket of thick English industrial fog.
34,38: Someone needs to write a book, or at least a list, of basic concepts that people need to grasp before they get out of high school. I want people with a basic public education to understand things like the sunk cost fallacy, or the tragedy of the commons, or zero-sum games. A proper high school education should cure things like libertarianism.
The FR system is very explicitly founded on teaching a common set of 1) historical/cultural "facts" and 2) interpetive/analytical "skills" in a highly centralized and top-down controlled format, but that is all premised on a very broad and deep societal consensus that the role of the schools is to form citizens. We're benefitting as a family from the additional gloss of the kid being exposed to the ususal UMC dinner table enrichment from an Anglo-American perspective, so that it is pretty obvious to the kid that chosen sets of cultural/historical "facts" and interpretive/analytical "skills" presented in any context are ideologically determined (whether consciously or not), particularly and hilariously evident on the FR-Anglo axis.
The confluence of a common set of "facts" and "skills" only seems to really play out as fully in the US system in AP exam prep courses, so only for the cossetted UMC and children of striving MC/WC, which sucks big time.
I'm not sure of when or why teaching facts went by the boards. I think it started with a protest against the selection of facts being taught in the 1960s. Facts should be alike alternate side of the street parking suspensions. When an out group starts becoming an in group, it should get to add some new facts and get alternate side of the street parking rules suspended on its holidays.
The cop out was that instead of teaching facts, they'd start teaching skills, as if skills were somehow or other naturally neutral. The problem was that it is impossible to teach skills in the abstract. They have to be skills that let one do something. So now we're stuck with a hodge podge of reading examples and students learn little of geography, history, science or anything else.
There's a public school in Boston that made writing a priority. Students have to write something in every class: history, English, science, even physical education. I assume they do something like that with reading too. Even if the kids never geton the Booker short list, they'll still have picked up some useful info.
Dorothy Sayers is fascinating on this:
The young mind experiences great difficulty in disentangling the essence of a subject from its accidents; and it is disconcertingly evident, in discussions on the platform and in the press, that the majority of people never learn to overcome this difficulty.
The public do not care whether they are being told truth or not. The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense--that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print.
(from The Mind of the Maker, written, I suppose, in 1939 but from long experience of the advertising industry)
39: Home work for 4-year olds seems absurd. Even 10-12 years after me the expectations for 5 year-olds in kindergarten were higher than when I was in kindergarten, but they weren't doing homework.
Selah is in kindergarten at a high-poverty urban school where she tested in despite being ineligible by age, so by state standards she should have been in preschool one more year. She can sound words out well and do basic math, as of last report card was "proficient or distinguished" (so at or ahead of grade level) on all but I think three of the Common Core skills she's supposed to be learning. But she also guided us through her science lab last night and explained a lot of what goes on there and what they were studying by building houses out of straw/sticks/bricks to see what gets knocked down and about the states of matter, always a favorite for little ones. It was also the art show and so she had her songs about the different kinds of lines and could talk about positive and negative space and what sort of colors were being used and what she learned about various cultures through the lens of her art projects. She also had no trouble saying hello to the principal, who said she's always quick to greet him when he visits her class, or to talk to other students and teachers.
At test time she will probably do well, and she's also probably got the most social-cultural capital in the class, but her classmates (half of whom aren't even native English speakers) who are also learning the same stuff probably won't all be able to make all the same connections or be comfortable enough on a computer to do as well as she will. Yet they too are bright and charming to talk to and can sing all the songs and rhymes and dances (why not learn the Macarena when you're learning the months in order?) she can as well as analytical skills. I just know from experience with other children who haven't had it as easy as she has (not that entering foster care as an infant, moving to a new home after a year, having those parents split up a year later is the definition of easy even without the early interventions she needed) that the stress of daily living will sometimes mean not being able to keep up with understanding school work.
They do have homework but it's a packet given out on Monday and collected on Friday, to be done at the child's pace and without meaningful consequences for losing it or not completing it. Mara and Nia in fourth and fifth grade don't get homework because teachers have decided it's not worth their time to fight about it with students or to copy papers that won't come back. But I think they'd like to assign a little. Selah had homework for a few weeks in kindergarten because it was something her teacher had to present to her own teacher for the program where she's trying to get a BA. I was annoyed enough I planned to not allow it, but Selah loved doing it and felt terribly grown up, so she did her little coloring projects and that was the end of it. (That she went to a strong preschool program definitely also helps her performance now.)
Not that anything matters here because our governor is hell-bent on destroying public education and has just installed a board of ed that will help him do it and put charters in instead. But I continue to think my kids are at good schools with terrible test scores and I'm okay with that.
50: 3rd and 4th grade I had a little homework. 5th grade I went to brainy girls private school and got about 60 minutes worth, 6th grade was 90 minutes, and 7th grade was 2 plus hours.
At that age, I thought it was worth it.
what they were studying by building houses out of straw/sticks/bricks to see what gets knocked down
See, that shouldn't be left to the schools. The only thing that can stop a big bad wolf is a big good wolf.
Not a woodsman with a gun? Arm the grandmas!
50: How many Core Skills are there?
In Kentucky, four. Reading, writing, math, and pointing out that evolution is just a theory.
Obviously, only the last one is required for all students.
54: "I noticed that my grandmother's teeth were larger than mine, although they did not seem unusually so." #comeyforkids
55: Dozens. The report card is now four pages long. I was on the school council there when we changed it, but I can't imagine it's actually a popular choice with the parents and guardians.