Madeline Levine’s book Teach Your Children Well (see Judith Warner’s review, NY Times 7/29/12) includes a startlingly true statement that serves as a call to action. She says, “When apples were sprayed with a chemical at my local supermarket, middle-aged moms turned out, picket signs and all, to protest the possible risks to their children’s health, yet I’ve seen no similar demonstrations about an educational system that has far more research documenting its own toxicity.” A few years ago while I waited for our 12-year-old daughter’s swimming lesson to end, I heard a mother bemoaning her children’s lack of enthusiasm for school. “Each year I hope they’ll realize the…
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Joining an Education Resistance
The books I gobbled up when I was a teenager frequently took place during World War II and included characters who were part of the Resistance, groups of individuals who acted at great personal risk to oppose conquering enemies. I remember hoping I’d have their courage in similar circumstances. I feel very lucky I haven’t had to find out. Those stories, however, have given me the courage to move past fear on a few occasions. One New Years Eve I stood on a San Francisco sidewalk and yelled at passersby to draw attention to a man who was attacking a woman in shrubs next to a building. At first I…
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The Dangers of Deadly Dull Classrooms
A concerned friend of a second grade child sent me an email the child’s teacher recently sent the parents. The friend wanted to get my impressions. Here was my immediate reaction to the email (which you will have a chance to read not just once, but twice): my body tightened. I felt sorrow for the child. I felt a combination of disgust and despair that the teacher clearly has no idea how dull and dispiriting this classroom and teaching approach sounds. I was curious to see what Natalie and William thought. I printed out the letter and asked them to jot down their responses. I’ve pasted in the teacher’s email…
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Great Ideas from Finnish Schools
I enjoy learning how “school” is approached around the world and found this interesting article Schools We Can Envy, about Finnish Schools, in the New York Review of Books. Here’s the link to the article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/schools-we-can-envy/ Here are a few sections I marked as especially interesting: To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school. They do take tests, but the tests are drawn up by their own teachers, not by a multinational testing corporation. The Finnish nine-year comprehensive school is a “standardized testing-free zone,” where children are encouraged “to know, to create, and…
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Deciphering Graphs
In fourth grade, Natalie sat down with her big box of color pencils and noticed that she used some pencils more often than others. She lined them up–shortest to longest–and then created this graph to show usage. During seventh grade, Natalie and I began taking a careful look at graphs in the New York Times, which frequently uses well-conceptualized, visually interesting graphs to impart information. Our appreciation for information analysis (and semantics in the following example) deepened with the interesting illustration below of the ways in which one can get very different answers to a polling survey based on the phrasing of the question. Thus, ever since we sat next to…
