I saw this on CNN today.

Now, I met a LOT of students in college with absolutely ridiculous career goals. They weren’t the sharpest pencil in the drawer to begin with, and they were also lazy, yet they still thought they could–or at least SHOULD–become doctors and lawyers even as they were pulling Cs in Poli Sci 110 and failing Bio 101. The reason for this is that, throughout their school careers, they were told ANYONE can do ANYTHING they want to, and they were given trophies at the end of every event just for showing up because They Are Special People.

It is possible to be not terribly bright and make it through law and medical school. It’s even possible to be not terribly bright and be as good at your law or medicine job as the average doctor or lawyer. But there is a certain minimal intelligence needed for these careers, and it’s as pointless to try for them if you haven’t got what it takes as for a kid with Down’s Syndrome to attain a full high school-level education. It simply isn’t possible.

Yet few of the students who “try” and fail fall into the category below possible competance. Most COULD make it–if they were willing to work as hard as they’d have to in order to attain the knowledge to be successful in upper level courses and med or law school and to maintain the GPA that would get them there. But they weren’t taught “most people can be successful in most jobs if they put forth the required effort.” No, they were taught that the most important things were high self-esteem and high goals, the latter of which should be achievable without going through anything that could possibly make you feel bad about yourself. Remeber, you can do ANYTHING! They see tough courses as a personal affront to their universe–that the world has somehow spun off its axis if they are required to exert themselves to keep from failing. And so, unsurprisingly, they do fail. And whine about the unfairness of life that doesn’t just hand them everything they want.

I hate the cult of self-esteem. I loathe it. It teaches people that the most important thing is not to be good people, decent people, skilled or hardworking people but to like themselves and be happy with themselves as they are and to think that how they are is GREAT.

Excuse me? The Nazi party was made up mostly of normal, average people. The people who hacked their neighbors apart with machetes in Rawanda were normal, average people. Being “yourself” as you NATURALLY are is far more despicable than admirable. We should teach children to reach beyond themselves, to imitate people of great talents and/or virtue, to improve themselves mentally and physically and to derive satifaction from improvement rather than simply sitting, sluglike and complacent, at the lowest common denominator–which is so low that almost any atrocity is not out of character. The history of normal people has been one of insignifigance interspersed with horrific brutality. This is not something to be proud of or to wish to preserve.

I really think this attitude is why so many Americans–children and adults–despise people who are either smart or virtuous. It’s okay to admire Mother Theresa, who is dead now and was in India when she was alive, but any neighbor whose family and attitude might resemble Ned Flanders should be hated for making us look bad, and there must be something really freakish and wrong under the too-perfect exterior that will make us feel good about our own broken lives. It’s great to admire Stephen Hawking, but at the same time, it’s almost expected that an intelligent child will be persecuted and treated like a freak for daring to display any sort of precocity int he school room and endangering the SELF-ESTEEM of the teacher and the other children.

Esteem is something that should be EARNED. It makes sense to esteem people who are especially skilled, who are effective, who are compassionate or unselfish or the like. Esteem of oneself should not be the default emotion when one analyzes one’s on life. That’s a breath away from entitlement and selfishness, both of which should be spurned and condemned.

The front of my house is currently painted 3 colors: white, from the primer on the new siding; red, from the old paint; and gray, from the new paint.

I wonder how many neighbors it freaks out.

I wonder how many neighbors it WOULD freak out if I left it that way for a month.

BTW, falling off a ladder while painting? Not recommended. Fortunately, my huge backside is good for something!

There have been a number of studies on using Singapore Math in the US, and the consesus is that if the teacher understands the mathematics, the program gets fabulous results, but if she doesn’t, the results are barely better than a traditional program.

For this reason, I strongly recommend any teacher not incredibly comfortable with mathematics to buy the parent and/or teacher guides available at Singaporemath.com!

Another criticism of Singapore Math is that it’s “too conceptual” and so is good for gifted students but not good for the average or below average student.

This is utter nonsense.

It is true that Singapore Math requires more of the student, but what it requires is comprehension. This is not a flaw of the program but a key to its success! Virtually all students MASTER a given topic before going on, not by simply being able to complete an algorithm but by actually understanding the concept and applying it to a variety of situations. This helps the struggling student because he will not forget a topic he’s spent a long time on and has truly understood.

The proof of this comes in the TIMSS scores–the international measure of science and math ability. The reason that Singapore so outstripped all other countries in 1999 is that the bottom third of the students did extremely well compared to other countries–in fact, the average student in the bottom third (17th %ile) in Singapore did better than the AVERAGE American student (50th %ile). That’s powerful data.

Another complain about Singapore Math is that it doesn’t review enough or have enough practice for non-gifted kids to master the material. This comes from a confusion about the Singapore Math system. The basic materials include two slender textbooks and two slender workbooks for each year, BUT there are additional materials. Students who need extra help have Extra Practice books for each grade level with more problems, while those who are mathematically gifted can use the Intensive Practice books, which have more challenging work.

In addition, in Singapore, children have mathematical drills (facts and computational fluency) as a completely different activity than their lessons in math. The textbooks make no attempt to drill facts, nor do they return to previously taught concepts merely to drill–simply because it is taken care of outside of the lesson time!

As a side note: Some parents of mathematically gifted homeschool students think that drill are unnecessary because their kids can derive the answers fairly quickly. In this, I have to disagree. Many, many gifted kids HATE learning math facts because they are used to things being easy for them and memorizing facts usually isn’t. (Bright kids are often uniformly slightly better than their peers in all activities–say, at the 80th %ile for memorization, recall, comprehension, etc., etc. Gifted kids are usually NOT. They’ll be at the 98th or 99th %ile in mathematical conception or comprehension or reading comprehension and vocabulary but at the 50th or 60th %ile in brute memory recall, computational speed, and the like. Frustration with the comparatively low areas leads gifted kids to compensational strategies and to resistance.) This doesn’t mean that memorizing facts isn’t incredibly useful, however! Memorization allows for greater speed and accuracy when working complex problems, and it also lowers the overall mental overhead. It may be an easy thing to juggle the overhead when you’re doing 6th grade math, but when you move to complex analysis or modern physics or even a very long differential equation, it begins to get very unwieldy. Trust me on this one! Just because a gifted kid can skate by without memorizing his math facts doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

The Bear “taught” me how to read during today’s Bob Books session.

I was an incredibly slow learner–on purpose. I made him repeat all the sounds, and I goofed off and gave the wrong answers. Sort of like a small boy when he’s feeling troublesome. And I enjoyed giving him a taste of his own medicine immensely.

I made the Bear sigh three times, roll his eyes a couple of times, and put his head down in despairing defeat twice. It’s more than a little funny to see my own reactions in him from when he’s being difficult on purpose!

The good news is that we are now more than halfway through Bob Books Level 2 Set A. He’s read 29 of the 48 books in the series, and not only is he getting much better at it, but he’s enjoying it more and more. Yay!

I keep telling the kids that if he WANTS to read, he has to LEARN. For some kids, it comes like a bolt from above. He’s not that lucky. *g* But at least he’s enjoying the process a lot more now, not just wanting the outcome.

…call in the Pinkertons.

We moved the study into the guesthouse, and my monitor magically healed itself, I guess because something was jostled back into place. BUT…

My bios has now decided that it is hosed. It was flakey earlier, but now it is hosed. NO COMPUTER. And my DH lost his work computer on his last week at his old job. I do still have my 1998 computer, though, from my freshman year in college. But its monitor is completely dead.

DH is a computer scientist and my dad (now visiting) is a senior systems analyst, so we’ll see if they can get my new computer to work again. Or if they’ll utterly annihilate it. I’m figuring chances are about 50/50…

(I’m using Dad’s computer right now.)

when I post a link to a page of information, don’t send me a link virulently attacking the publisher of the page for completely unassociated issues–like, say, if I say that The History Channel has a good webpage on the Texas Rangers, don’t send a barrage of links about how the owners of The History Channel support Al Qaeda, banning religious expression, and destroying the rainforests. Especially don’t say that they can’t be reliable on the issue of Texas Rangers because if their support for any and/or all of the above. And then really, really don’t fail to A) find any inaccuracies in the content provided and B) also fail to provide any relevant information from ANYWHERE about the Texas Rangers.

Because I will think that you are an idiot and a nutjob and will have the utmost contempt for you.

Thank you.

And as a side note…why are so many unschoolers complete lunatics? Not more than 10%, mind you, but 10% is a REALLY high percentage. More unschoolers are lunatics than authors. And authors are a pretty crazy bunch.

I get a LOT of spam on my blog. Most are nonspecific back-pats, and a few are nonspecific insults–on one entry where I told a story about going somewhere, I got a spam once that said, “Did you condiser anyone else’s point of view before you wrote this?” *rolls eyes* Yeah. I asked my CAR where it thought it had driven, and it agreed that I really had gone those places…

Anyhow, for the first time, I got a spam that actually was somewhat relevant. Not to the entry–the entry was about Google Earth!–but to at least the fact that I’m a romance author:

Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t
agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope
to see more interesting articles in the future

The site linked to? Romantic singles. I guess I had to get SOMETHING other than Cialis links at some point.

They’re some of the highest paid teachers in the state, making more money than the average industrial engineer and about as much as the average mechanical engineer while only working 190 days a year.

They’re some of the crappiest teachers in the state, with some of the lowest test scores in a state with less than impressie educational levels, anyway. (I went to college at Purdue. Many, many of the in-state students were woefully unprepared for college-level work.)

But that doesn’t prevent these shameless, greedy money-grubbers from going on strike.

Gotta love teacher’s unions. They do it for the kids, you know?

I say fire all of them. Whoever you replace them with won’t be worse. Pretty hard to do a worse job than the teachers in Gary, Indiana, are already doing.

If they could institute an individual tracking program for students (tracing their previous years’ scores and the expected performance for this year controlled for socioeconomics/disability status/etc), states could not only evaluate schools but individual teachers. And maybe fire the ones who SUCK. It has to be discouraging to the good teachers in crappy school districts to see the kids who have come so far with them stall completely once they leave their classrooms. And to receive horribly unprepared kids into their classes every year.

It’s true that the restrictions of high-stakes testing can cause some level of chafing with those good teachers, and many would like to tweak the content and how it’s done. But notice how many of the best teachers in high school end up with the AP classes, which are ALL taught to specific, high-stakes, and very demanding tests? Notice how the students of the best AP teachers do extremely WELL on those tests? Overall, the good teachers benefit considerably because they’ll no long have to deal with all the students from Mrs. Smith, who learned nothing at all last year, and the students from Mrs. Jones, who did learn something–terrible classroom behavior.

Interestingly enough, though I’ve met a lot of good teachers who have thoughtful approaches to testing and who want to change it in some way, every teacher I’ve met who hates the idea of high-stakes testing, period, has sucked. Really, really sucked. They are the ones who complain that the goals are “impossible”–that their students are too stupid to learn that much, and that it’s ridiculous to think that they could actually TEACH them this much material in a year and who are appalled at the idea that they should be asked to actually make their kids on grade level. What a thought! You know those textbooks? The material in them is developed by unrealistic dreamers! Really! No child can learn all that stuff!

Example: I was talking to one former teacher, and I told a story about a former Florida teacher as a kind of horror story of testing gone wrong–in one school, the principal had copies of a high-stakes test that would be given at the end of the year, and all the teachers COPIED THE QUESTIONS and went over every single one in class to make sure their students would get them right (versus, say, actually teaching the topics!). The former teacher I was talking to greeted the idea enthusiastically–”That’s the only way to do it fairly because that way, we’d KNOW what to teach! ”

Funny. For some reason, my AP Calc teacher had a pass rate of over 70%, and she didn’t have us memorize the questions. (And with AP, the pass rate bar is set much, much higher than in state exams, and the questions are much harder–nationally, the average pass rate for all exams is about 55%.) Maybe because she actually was…teaching? Hmm.

Another teacher declared flatly that her HONORS eigth graders were “too stupid” to understand assonance and that expecting anyone to teach this was ridiculous. We learned what assonance is in my school in 5th grade. A quick search online finds that most regular ed classes teach it by 7th grade, so it’s mor than reasonable to expect rengular, much less honors, eigth graders to know it.

I didn’t go to a terribly great school district. It was slightly more than 50% “minority” (hard to give the label “minority” to a majority population!). Many, many of the teachers were far less than stellar. (Lessee…there were the teachers who threw worksheets at us and called it “teaching.” And then there were the ones who threw fits–spent more time screaming and frothing at the mouth than teaching. And then there were the ones who fell asleep regularly in class. And the ones who didn’t understand the material they were supposed to be teaching–with these, I had no mercy. I had great teachers, but there were many that were terrible.) Now, we’ve had high-stakes testing since I was in elementary school, and I’m actually GLAD of it. Why? Because none of the good teachers I had ever had the least trouble incorporating the test objectives into their class without removing anything of value or interest, and the crappy ones at least felt obliged to try to teach SOMETHING.

I honestly think that a large part of the bellyaching about No Child Left Behind comes from schools and teachers who want to be able to get away with babysitting instead of teaching–who suck at their jobs and don’t like being told that sucking is unacceptable. Schools complain that they aren’t receiving enough funding to implement NCLB, but it’s the most heavily funded national educational law ever passed. And I’m not terribly sympathetic to school districts who have been failing hundreds and thousands of students for decades if not GENERATIONS and who didn’t see a problem with the situation until they are actually held accountable for for their pathetic performance. Whine, whine. Bottom line is this: You suck. People care now. So now you cry, and I don’t care.

People are also angry about the tests high schoolers have to pass to graduate. Novel thought: a high school diploma SHOULD actually carry some meaning other than “I showed up and warmed my desk chair for four years.” If the kids haven’t mastered high school level material, then they should not have a high school diploma. If they can’t do it, then they should try for a GED. If they can’t do that, then they aren’t capable of the kind of work that a high school diploma is supposed to indicate that you can do.

Once the kinks are worked out in NCLB, I’d like to see the bar raised by having schools and teachers responsible for the improvement of students at every level of performance. That means that schools should be responsible not only for educating everyone physically capable of learning the material to a minimally acceptable level, but they should also be responsible for educating those at the 30th %ile to their best level, and the 50th %ile to their best level, and the 70th to their level, and the 90th and 98th, even, for larger school districts. Not only should every child not have a pathetic, deadend educational level, but the achievement of children not in danger of failure should also be judged.

If NCLB is repealed, it will only be a matter of time before dozens MORE countries pass America’s stalled system up. Once, we had the best education in the world, bar none. But once, teaching 80% of your population to read at a fourth grade level and to do simple arithmetic was an unusual feat. High school was for a small minority of students! Times have changed. Education is NECESSARY for a decent standard of living, and much higher levels of education are necessary in order to continue to be relevant in today’s world. If we can’t get our act together and stop failing our kids, we’ll deserve what will happen to us.