Category: Learning

I just reread this review of Lighting Their Fires by Nat Torkington, which had this very valuable list of “lessons” for children (and their parents). It’s a child-rearing book, which I haven’t read, but that I’ve already benefited from. So:

The lessons for parents and kids:
* punctuality,
* use time valuably,
* care about and learn from the past,
* repeat and repeat the values,
* embrace an art and learn time management, focus, etc.
* put away distractions,
* develop a personal code of behaviour (he uses Kohlberg’s six levels of motivation)
* radio, models, board games, getting good at music and other arts, reading all build focus. TV and games do not.
* the importance of decisions and that they be good ones,
* to recognise that they are making decisions every day,
* spotting and discussing decisions in novels, plays, and movies,
* if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,
* actions have consequences, there are good outcomes and bad, strive for excellence, lose the sense of entitlement,
* consider your alternatives,
* in the arts, try for excellence not adequacy,
* allowances not tied to chores—chores are responsibility, and the reward is the job well done,
* identify substandard work and require it to be done to standard, otherwise there are no standards,
* be self-less,
* work with groups not individuals, so all can recognise and appreciate and celebrate the hard work of others,
* do the right thing for the right reasons,
* be able to do the right thing without acknowledgement or praise (humility),
* to be able to delay gratification.

Along the way, lots of great quotes. Over the library of Thebes: “Medicine for the Soul”. Mark Twain’s alleged line, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” Martin Luther King, Jr: “If it falls to your lot to sweep the streets, Sweep them like Michelangelo painted pictures, Like Shakespeare wrote poetry, Like Beethoven composed music.”

I have been thinking about thinking, and found this useful taxonomy by Benjamin Bloom, who in 1956 devised a taxonomy to discriminate between levels of cognitive thinking. The article notes that although the original intention of the taxonomy was to facilitate communication between educators and psychologists in the area of test construction, research and curriculum development, it has been found to be useful in distinguishing areas of study and classroom activities based on the taxonomy.

Bloom’s Taxonomy consists of six levels:

Knowledge
Recall or recognition of specific information

Comprehension
Understanding of information given

Application
Using methods, concepts, principles and theories in new situations

Analysis
Breaking information down into its constituent elements

Synthesis
Putting together constituent elements or parts to form a whole requiring original, creative thinking.

Evaluation
Judging the value of ideas, materials, and methods by developing and applying standards and criteria

There’s a path from the lower-to-higher level thinking, knowledge to evaluation which can be led by teachers through the use questioning, discussion and tasks.

The article also notes that while students need to be exposed to experiences at all levels of the Taxonomy, opportunities to work at more advanced levels are vital for gifted students. Often their advanced knowledge and comprehension skills enable them to progress more rapidly to higher levels of thinking, such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

I’m happy that Jason Tanz, who has written before about the sharing economy, wrote an article about homeschooling for Wired Magazine: The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids. It gets across the entrepreneurial and DIY nature of the self-taught, and how the future will require us to be more inventive, take responsibility for our own education and be more entrepreneurial in our lives, education and pursuits. We were also happy that our micro-school, Sesat School, was included in the article.

Most of my interview was not included in the article, and unfortunately the one quote that was included made it seem as if I were endorsing an exclusive, privileged education that readers should “feel free to roll [their] eyes” about. Nor am I anti-public school or anti-democratic. This was unfortunate.

My public school education included a love of poetry and classical music–I was not homeschooled, and in the article it is implied that my experience has something to do with homeschooling. It did not. I was speaking in the context of what was good about public school education, and how being different didn’t hurt, but helped me in life.

In the interview with Jason I had said that the “gifted children’s programs”, in which I had participated in public school, were elitist and that all children should be able to participate in them. In many ways it was a reaction against privilege that led me to homeschooling. One of the many reasons I started looking into homeschooling — or independent education, as it is better named — was that I was repelled by the line of limos outside the private schools in the morning.

I was especially happy about this paragraph:

Problems arise, the thinking goes, when kids are pushed into an educational model that treats everyone the same—gives them the same lessons and homework, sets the same expectations, and covers the same subjects. The solution, then, is to come up with exercises and activities that will help each kid flesh out the themes and subjects to which they are naturally drawn.

The best part of the New Jersey public schools “gifted program” was exactly that.

I am grateful that Jason wrote this article. It does a great service to homeschooling in general, and delineates its entrepreneurial and DIY ethos very well. I just don’t want to be the poster child for its “privilege”– the very thing I’m resisting.

David Guterson, a high school teacher, and a homeschooling father of four, questions the validity of standard test-taking in school, which is meant to measure the quantity and quality of a student’s learning during a certain period of time. He writes:

I point to the results of an informal experiment I have conducted five time in a ten-year teaching career. In this experiment I give a test on Friday, an ordinary objective test (true-false, matching, fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice) preceded by a Thursday review session and a week full of reminders that this test is on Friday, don’t forget to reread this or that, to study these notes, to review this handout, to get plenty of rest, to see me if there are questions; I am furthermore explicit all week long about both the form of the test and its subject matter. In short I prepare them to meet the test in the time-honored tradition of high-school teachers.

Friday evenings I take their completed tests home. Over the weekend I grade them. On Monday, with no prior warning of any sort, I give them the same test and ask them to take it again. Monday evening I grade those, staple them to the Friday exam, and hand both back to students.

None–no one–has ever received an equal or higher grade on the test administered on Monday. Most in fact, receive a considerably lower grade, missing, often, twice as many questions on Monday as they missed on Friday.

As I had suspected. 🙂 Now, testing the ability to take tests has some value. It’s some indication of the willingness of a person to study and prepare. It’s some measure of short term memory, though not, obviously, long term memory. Guterson’s point is that learning is a mysterious process, difficult, if not impossible, to measure. And yet homeschoolers repeatedly test higher on these tests than children attending traditional school.

I’ve never understood cheating, probably because I never cared much about my grades. I instinctively knew that the grades didn’t measure anything meaningful — usually just my ability to quickly memorize information I’d just as quickly forget. I was good at this, and so did well on tests when I bothered to try, but I didn’t have any truck with them after a while. My test scores were highly variable as a result, and I didn’t want or need go to Yale. But I loved learning, which was different from doing well in school.

I came across this video in my travels around the web. It is a video of Professor Richard Quinn of University of Central Florida telling his class he has discovered that many — it turns out more than a third! — cheated on their exam. In an article in Inside Higher Ed it says “Experts in cheating and testing security have said the UCF incident is generally no worse than what takes place in many universities” and this doesn’t surprise me.

I’ve said before that entrepreneurship, one of my primary interests, is something that flourishes under an apprenticeship and not a factory model of education. I’m not sure what the business students in the UCF class were aiming for. The lecture usurped by the cheating conversation was meant to be about “Mergers and Acquisitions”.

Quinn was accused by the students of being lazy, and offering a ‘test bank’ test offered by the textbook publishers. Teaching from a textbook is almost always crappy teaching, so the whole system is flawed. It seems to me that cheating is the almost inevitable consequence of test-giving and test-taking. It doesn’t have to be this way. The best method for assessing learning progress is self-assessment, with the input of someone passionate and knowledgeable about the subject. This would require a lot of trust in the student, but also more work on the part of the teacher — who would not really be a teacher at all, in the traditional sense, but a person in love with a certain topic, probably a practitioner of the subject in question, maybe retired, maybe active.

Here’s my idea of what an ideal school would be like, borrowed from David Albert’s book And the Skylark Sings with Me a book about a family’s experience in home and community based education. It’s how I’ve envisioned, but never articulated, my own perfect school.