Pandemic Silver Linings

The pandemic has been horrible in so many ways. Lives have been lost. Jobs and businesses have been lost. Education gaps have widened. Friends and loved ones have been isolated from one another. 

But allow me to call out a few silver linings:

Seeing Heroes: Nurses. Grocery store workers. Truck drivers. Meat packing plant workers. Farmers. Restaurant staff. The list goes on and on. The rank and file is full of under-appreciated heroes who have stepped up during this crisis. These are the heroes who are pulling us through this -- not our venerated athletes or CEOs.

Appreciating Missing Critical People: Many parents now have much better understanding of what every teacher deals with every day. What about people who clean houses and cut hair and so many other tasks that we value, but were put on hold? During the lockdown, we have been living the old adage that you don't properly value what you have until it is taken away from you.

BLM: George Floyd wasn't the first. Black and brown people have been victims of police brutality before, so why did these protests really gain traction? I think we can thank the pandemic. 

1. Logistics: Traffic is light and parking is easy. 
2. Free Time: Movie theaters and gyms and most other athletic/entertainment venues are closed. Plus, unemployment is around 20%.
3. No Distractions: There are no sports or new movies or other distractions to replace it in the news cycle. The BLM movement is flourishing in the open space created by the pandemic.

Inspiring Change: The wheels of progress in education grind incredibly slowly. The pandemic has the potential to add a big jolt of innovation as schools and educators try to figure out how to make virtual and blended learning work. I imagine that necessity is driving innovation in other areas as well. 

Seeing Flaws in Our Systems: People who depend on their low-paying jobs for their healthcare are either showing up when sick (e.g., Smithfield plant) or losing health coverage. Many CEOs and Presidents and other leaders have made it explicitly clear that they care more about money than they do about the health of the people who toil to enrich them. The pandemic is a stressor that helps us see the flaws in our systems. It doesn't point the way to fixing them, but understanding that something is broken is the first step.

None of these silver linings provide succor to those who have lost loved ones or businesses or jobs or security or comfort. As a society, I am hopeful that we will make changes to our mindsets, relationships, and systems so the legacy of the pandemic will include some good outcomes.

Returning to K-12 Schools in the Fall

Over on my professional/education blog Driven to Learn, I just posted some thoughts about how K-12 schools should plan to reopen.

Honestly, it isn't particularly deep or insightful (I'm really selling it well!), but anyone who is interested in K-12 schools should take a look to see the various facets I have called out. Each of us has our own perspective, but K-12 schools are very complicated beasts. 

Please leave comments about what I got wrong or missed.

Higher Ed Reopening Decisions

A lot is going on right now, so I'll spew forth some ideas on various topics in the coming weeks. I've chosen this topic partly because it is relatively easy for me to be dispassionate about it. I am intellectually interested and only somewhat impacted. There are more important things going on in the US, but this is where I'm starting.

As colleges and universities around the country weigh how they will reopen this Fall, various voices are being heard. Here are just two:

• Brown University's Christina Paxson in the New York Times: College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It.
• USC-Beaufort's Deborah J. Cohan in Psychology Today: Pandemic U: What's the price of opening campuses in the fall?

What are some of the factors that schools are weighing (whether they admit them or not)?

Faculty and staff: Students are generally young and have few preexisting conditions. On the other hand, faculty and staff are older, and many have family members with significant risks. Bringing students back puts the faculty, staff, business owners, and all their families at risk. Honestly, this seems like an OSHA issue to me.

Revenue: When I originally looked at the university bill I paid in January, I just focused on the bottom line: How much am I writing a check for? Now, I look at every line and wonder: Will there be an athletic fee if the gym is closed? What about the meal plan? If everything were virtual, the bottom line would be VERY different. For me, all of those are distinct costs, but for the university, they are all important revenue streams.

The higher education value proposition: I'm not going to wade too far into the "is college worth it" debate, but I found this article by Susan Svrluga at the Washington Post particularly interesting: Is college worth it? A Georgetown study measures return on investment — with some surprising results. One thing this points out is that not all schools (even within a particular university) are equal financially. Most vocational schools such as law and business and engineering will survive this regardless. Those departments that can go virtual well probably should. But what about schools of liberal arts? What about those philosophy and religious studies and sociology departments? They are in a tougher spot. Faculty in these areas care about their health, but they also like having jobs. Honestly, this probably requires its own blog posts, but what if I just go with word association: community colleges, gap year, University of Phoenix, the humanities make us human.

Students without privilege: Many students are barely able to afford college. They scrape by thanks to on-campus jobs and scholarships and loans. This upheaval will make the college dream unattainable for many of these students. Without a job in the dining hall or at the athletic center, some students can't afford to live on campus. On the other hand, some students have home lives that aren't compatible with distance learning. Internet access, child care, loud siblings, space, and a plethora of other issues make virtual learning virtually impossible for many students. It's a lose-lose proposition for them.

College towns: There is no Blacksburg without Virginia Tech. What about Ann Arbor without the Univeristy of Michigan? Oberlin, OH? College Station, TX? State College, PA? You get the idea. Hechinger Report has Little-noticed victims of the higher education shutdowns: college towns

With students dispersed by the pandemic, towns that depend on them are struggling.

Students with privilege: First of all, I have put students last because they (as a population) are not particularly at risk, and they are resilient. If they all had to live at home and do this virtually, most of them would figure out how to do it well. That said, I'm sure my son is not alone in wanting very desperately to get back to campus (I'm trying not to be hurt). 

Let's be honest and admit that faculty and schools come at this from radically different perspectives. Faculty care about the health of their families, while schools are confronting an existential crisis. Many schools probably worry that going virtual will crush their bottom line, degrade the educational experience, and open themselves up to competition from challengers they never had to worry about before. 

So... what should schools do? 

1. No school or jurisdiction should open without a solid test-trace-isolate strategy. This May 15 article by Alex Tabarrok and Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver at The Washington Post: We could stop the pandemic by July 4 if the government took these steps lays out solid strategies.
2. Blended Learning: The importance of this is two-fold: Blending can help reduce class sizes (which improves safety), and can help prepare for going to more virtual strategies. 
3. Flexibility: How will you deal with a surge in cases on campus? How will you re-imagine your traditional gatherings? 

Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

But Seriously... Is Algebra Necessary?

A friend tagged me in a FB post with a link to a New York Times article by Andrew Hacker Is Algebra Necessary? I need to process this, so here goes....

I saw the article as having two distinct parts. Here are my reactions to each part.

Part The First: Math Is a Useless Pain

The first half or so of the article indicates that math causes high dropout rates and is basically useless to everyone not bound for MIT or Caltech. Well, if math causes high dropout rates, then I think there is a reasonable discussion to be had about how we address the issue. What should we do?

1. Prepare students more effectively from the beginning. That is, should we fix our elementary and middle school math programs so that students can have more success later in their math careers.
2. Fix the high school math curriculum so more students can find success and gain the math skills they need for life and for later mathematical study.
3. Give up. Stop requiring so much math.

The eye-grabbing headline and some of the arguments in this first part seem to imply that Hacker is suggesting a focus on option 3, but after reading the second half of the article, I think he is making more of an argument for option 2. I believe that we need to focus on options 1 and 2.

By the way, the Common Core standards should  help with option 1. A coherent curriculum that focuses on important mathematical practices and covering fewer topics, but with more depth is a great place to start. It isn't a panacea, but spending more time on fewer topics can help everyone out. I think the Common Core standards do a pretty good job of mapping out a coherent mathematical progression from elementary school through the end of grade 8. Then, we come to...

Part the Second: The Traditional Algebra 1-Geometry-Algebra 2 High School Math Sequence Is Mostly Useless and Should Be Improved

OK. This is where Hacker and I agree. In an earlier post, I said that we drive too many kids (like cattle) on the pathway that leads to Calculus. As I said in Math Illiteracy, everyone needs to master some math skills and understand some math concepts, but these don't necessarily map well to the cattle drive to calculus that I think is over-enrolled. By pushing just about every kid through the same cattle drive, we are driving kids away from math and putting up barriers to later pursuits that should not be dependent upon relatively esoteric skills such as learning how to factor cubic polynomials.

Maybe most kids should take a (perhaps more applications-oriented) course in Algebra, but maybe fewer kids need to take geometry and Algebra 2. Maybe a course in Practical Math (the actual title of a course on which I am working) could help. This sort of course can help students see how math can be a tool for solving problems. It can still be a pretty rigorous course, though it certainly wouldn't prepare anyone for calculus. But then again, not everyone needs to take calculus.

From my perspective, the tricky part centers around mobility. If we have a math pathway that prepares potential engineers, scientists, and mathematicians with the math skills they need, and we create a separate pathway that helps the general non-mathy population acquire the skills they need, then how do we ensure that a student who starts on a less rigorous pathway can change his or her mind and switch to the mathy pathway? How do we make sure that the less rigorous pathway doesn't become a dumping ground for students who are ill-prepared for the more rigorous pathway? These are very real concerns. Perhaps I'm being a paranoid Black man, but I know that this sort of dumping ground mentality has been wide-spread in the past, and I'd hate to create a two-tiered curriculum that institutionalizes it.

The Bottom Line

As Hacker says:

Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.

Here, he is talking about how medical schools (and other post-graduate programs) use calculus as a way to identify students who have the right academic stuff. Honestly, I can't see that changing any time soon. Also, I'd be interested in a study about this. Maybe being able to learn calculus has a high correlation with the ability to survive and thrive in medical school. Maybe this extends to undergraduate studies as well. As the author of the A Mind for Madness blog says in Thoughts on Nicholson Baker’s Case Against Algebra II:

... if a high school diploma is meant to indicate some level of readiness for college, then algebra is probably a good indicator. This does not mean that you will use it, but will just point out that you have some ability to do some abstract things. I’m not saying it is the only way to test this, but it is probably a pretty good one.

Regardless, I think we need to:

• Prepare more students for success in mathematics more effectively. We shouldn't focus solely on the cattle drive to calculus, but then again, we shouldn't ignore it either.
• Do a better job of creating math courses that engage all students. We need to have students wrestle with more authentic real-world applications and see how math can help solve real problems.
• Help students see the beauty in math in addition to the utility it affords in problem-solving contexts.

Luddites: Fearing Technology's Impacts for a Long, Long Time

I've been reading "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick, and in it, he has a quote that I had to dig a little deeper on. Here is a slightly longer version of something Gleick quoted:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in [this technology] will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom,....

So, who was this Luddite railing against technology? Though this could easily be my mother or father, it was actually Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus. He was warning of the perils of written language, just as others would eventually complain about the printing press and then radio, film, TV, and every other transformative information technology.

What's funny is that I had already captured this quote and saved it in a blog draft when I read a FB post by one of my fraternity brothers in which he said:

"He seemed to think that [...] statements might be accepted without the test of dialogue -- of people asking ʻIs this really true?ʻ" Some Luddite skeptical of the Internet/Google/Wikipedia? No, Plato skeptical of literacy. (Quote from Joan Acocellaʻs piece on the history of female literacy, in "The New Yorker" 10/15/12 issue.)

Anyway, I had connected this thought to my thoughts about My Life, My Crutch, but this issue is broader. This isn't just about how each of us do or don't use technology to manage our daily lives. This is also about education. What skills do we need to teach? What does it mean to be educated, and how does that definition change over time? 

In Plato's time, you could be considered educated even if you were illiterate. In the 1970's you needed to know how to read, but could still be considered well-educated if you had no clue about how to use a computer. What about now? More importantly, what about 10, 20, or 30 years from now?

Note: I am not trying to wade out into the depths of the battles about whether technology is making kids worse students. New York Times has Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say, which does wade out into those scary waters. I just think the changing nature of what it means to be educated is an interesting thing to keep an eye on.

Khaaaaaaaaaan!

A friend at work sent me this link to a 60 Minutes article Khan Academy: The Future of Education?

I haven’t seen the 60 Minutes piece, but have tired of the idea conveyed by the title. I have blogged about Khan before, so I'll keep this short.

• Mathalicious's blog has a nice article Khan Academy: It's Different this Time. 
• On his MAA blog Devlin's Angle, Professor Keith Devlin brings us The Difference Between Teaching and Instruction. 

I could go on and on with links to articles that put Khan in some reasonable context, but I’ll spare you the pain. The basic idea is that I am not alone in thinking that if Khan is really the future of education, then we are in deep doodoo. Frankly, I would not really call Khan Academy’s stuff “education,” but rather would consider it “instruction.” If we turn education into nothing but a series of activities that a microchip can perform, then we are on a very dangerous path.

Don't get me wrong. Khan isn't bad. Using it as a way to support struggling students, or as a way to help flip a classroom and allow teachers to focus on engaging with students, it could have great value. The Daily Riff has The Flipped Class Manifest, which provides some insights into how and when flipping a classroom can work, as well as a nice set of links to articles that provide more depth. 

Regardless of its benefits, my concern is that Khan Academy could be used to replace teaching with instruction, and I think that's bad.

Education and Business: A Tough Combo

Achival's Blog brings us Why Education Startups Don't Succeed. It's an interesting read, especially for anyone who has been involved in the online education business over the past decade or so. The entire piece is worthwhile, but I particularly liked the bulleted list of don'ts at the end.

Education: Will Choice Give Us Smarter but Isolated Kids?

I work for a company that does online education stuff. A coworker recently asked me what I think about what we do from the point of view as a former teacher.

First of all, I am in favor of choice.

1. I don't think that one particular type of school is best for every student. For instance, some kids have significant learning or social issues that make a brick and mortar classroom environment a bad fit for them.
2. Choice can lead to some competition. Some schools get so bogged down in just surviving that they lose track of the idea that they are supposed to be educating kids. Most public schools have a monopoly, so they don't have to care about the quality they provide. I understand that most people in public schools are wonderful, caring people who believe that educating children is a calling. My grandfather, mother, aunt, cousin, and I all fall into this group. I am not calling educators lazy or incompetent. All I am saying is that many educators could use a shift of perspective to help focus on what really matters.

On the other hand, a fractured school landscape worries me. I am a public school guy in great part because I believe in heterogeneous social environments that allow students to see different perspectives. We all need to be exposed to diversity. This isn't about having enough black kids or hispanic kids so the class picture looks diverse. This is about having truly diverse perspectives.

• Rich/poor
• Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Hindi/Atheist
• American/Russian/Hispanic/Indian
• smart/mediocre/struggling (each of these in each academic arena)

Choice is great, but so is heterogeneity.

New Math Education Wars: The Wrath of Khan

With their tutorial videos, Khan Academy has made a big splash in the education world. Having Bill Gates sing your praises in a TED Talk is a sure way to get a lot of attention.

Over at Action-Reaction, Frank Noschese has an article Khan Academy: My Final Remarks. I agree with many of his points. Here is a quote from near the end of the post:

Khan Academy is just one tool in a teacher’s arsenal. (If it’s the only tool, that is a HUGE problem.) Khan Academy can be useful for some kids as vehicle (build skills) to help them get to better places (solving complex problems).

On his Quantum Progress blog, John Burk also chimed in with Project Euler vs Khan Academy: The Future of Online Learning. I agree that Project Euler is really, really good, but that is a topic for another post.

Back in 2007 (before I ever heard of Khan Academy), I started developing instructional videos that are somewhat similar to Khan’s work. I think they are great tools, but they are not the be-all and end-all of online education. When placed in the context of a complete course, they can be helpful tools. We need to continue to innovate, but just shouldn't get too carried away by the latest educational fad and think it will solve all our problems. Good teaching isn't about amazing lectures. It's about feedback and engagement and connections.

At their best, instructional videos are pretty sentences. Quality education is a set of engrossing interactive stories.

Brain Calisthenics: Using Perceptual Learning

A friend sent me a link to a New York Times article Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas. The idea is that "playing" with a concept can yield big educational gains. A strictly top-down approach to education (here's the formula, now apply it) is not necessarily the best way to work. This perceptual approach seeks to leverage our ability to build intuition through experience.

Here are some of the games the article references.

Basic Math

Measurements and Graphing: Match the equation to the graph and learn to perceive basic measurement concepts.

Positive and Negative Feedback

Extreme Ball: Time a fan to blow and push a ball attached to rubber bands.

Extreme Population: Help your city reach a population of one million citizens.

Stabilize Ball: Time a fan to blow and stabilize a ball attached to rubber bands.

Stabilize Population: Help your city's population stabilize at 500,000 citizens.

MathEd: New Blog Idea: Real Math Applications

Here is an idea I have had for a few months, but am finally getting around to putting it out there.

How about a new blog that is all about how REAL math solves REAL problems. I am not talking about word problems. I am talking about people documenting ways that math helped them solve real problems. Note that this is not about finding applications for all the math in the course you are teaching or developing right now. This is about finding a way for people who use math to solve problems to share these problems and solutions.

Here is a statistics example from my office:

The Problem: A Project Manager at my company came to me asking how he could present data about variances from planned budgets in a way so that the big variances (both over and under) from budget wouldn't distort the data. When he used means to display the data, a few outliers over stated the degree to which early budgets varied from the final numbers.

The Solution: I first suggested that he look at a trimmed mean, but the solution that ultimately worked was using medians. Medians are less influenced by outliers than the mean, so using them got the job done.

The goal with a blog like I am proposing is to provide a rich repository of ideas for educators and learners to see how math is really used. Note that the problems don't have to come up in office settings. Some might come up at home or in sports or any other context, but in each case, math needs to be used to solve a real problem.

Any interest? Has it already been done? I think we need a set of contributors for this endeavor. I am fine being a contributor, but couldn't take the entire burden on myself.

Web Stuff Friday: Teacher Blogs Worth Reading

I have found a group of math teachers online who have made a really strong online community. Together, they are questioning, innovating, and making positive change happen and then sharing through blogs and tweets. It's incredibly inspiring. Anyone who is a new math or science teacher should read these blogs and follow these folks on Twitter. Get into the discussion.

Honestly, this is the best use of blogs and Twitter I have seen yet. These folks rock the house.

That said, here is a list of some of my favorite math teacher bloggers/twitterers:

Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer)

Blog: dy/dan

Dan has been featured on TED, so lots of people know who he is.

Kate Nowak (@k8nowak)

Blog: f(t)

Hers is the best subtitle out there. I will make you click the link to read it. Go ahead. I'll wait....

Sam Shah (@samjshah)

Blog: Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere

Sam's post on the Blogotwitterversphere is great, and attaining mention on his Favorite Tweets page is a goal for every math teacher tweeter.

Matt Townsley (@mctownsley)

Blog: MeTa Musings and With Students in Mind

Like me, Matt is a former HS math teacher turned curriculum dude. His focus on assessment is a good thing.

Jason Buell (@jybuell)

Blog: Always Formative

Jason's ideas about assessment are important (and by "important" I mean that he and I agree on some key points).

BTW: To get plugged in to the flow of the conversation, check out the mathteachers list maintained by Jackie Ballarini. Great, diverse list of folks.

Note that I have left a ton of people off this list. Check out the blogs and the teacher twitter list and start roaming to find more.

My Favorite High School Teachers, Part 2

Here is the liberal arts part of my stroll down memory lane.

My mother was a math teacher at my high school. In August before my Junior year, my mother looked at the master schedule and decided that she thought I'd have a problem learning from one of the American Civilization (AC was an interdisciplinary English and History class) teachers. As a result, she wanted me to switch to a different course. All my friends were taking AC and it was supposed to be a great course, so this was a tough sell. I agreed to the switch, but only on the condition that I could have Tim Isaacs for English and Dave Roush for History.

My interest in history can be traced directly back to Dave Roush. He was funny and smart and inspired my interest in history enough that I took almost enough history in college for a minor.

When I was in college, writing was never a big problem for me, and now I earn a living writing and reviewing. Still, the dominant legacies Tim Isaacs left me with are 1) my penchant for reading existentialists such as Sartre, Kirkegaard, Camus, etc. and 2) my memory of such minutia as the meanings of litotes and consonance.

Thanks Dave and Tim. You two rocked and the influences of your teaching have stayed with me to this day.

My Favorite High School Teachers, Part 1

I meant to post this on Ada Lovelace Day, which I learned about from a colleague who sent me to Finding Ada. I pledged to blog about a woman I admire in the fields of technology or science. Because I am incredibly lame and this Spring got away from me, this post is months late.

Mrs. Rowe was my Algebra II/Trig teacher. My mom was a math teacher, but it was Mrs. Rowe who turned me into some semblance of a mathematician. I still vividly remember the first day of trig when she drew the unit circle on the board. I used that same basic lecture when I taught the course years later. Mrs. Brown (Algebra 1) saved me from mathematical oblivion. Mr. Berry (Geometry and Computer Science) helped me see that learning and teaching math could be fun, but Mrs. Rowe drove it home. She batted cleanup and hit a triple. After her, Mrs. Penkunas (pre-calc and calc) had the easier job of tightening everything up. She did hard work, but all of it would have been for naught if it weren't for the sweet woman with the southern drawl who was affectionately known as "The Crusher."

Of all the courses I ever took (at any level and in any discipline), the one from which I remember the highest percentage is AP Biology. Mrs. Breznick (now Casio) taught me that course and it is thanks to her that I remember such things as rough endoplasmic reticulum (it's the ribosomes that make it rough) and the difference between xylem and phloem. It's really ridiculous. Why is it that I can still remember the cellular respiration handout she gave us that describes how we get ATP from glycolysis and the Krebs cycle? Why do I still remember the roles of FSH and LH? All credit goes to Mrs. Casio.

A heartfelt thanks to all my high school math and science teachers for training me up and (more importantly) for fostering my love of learning and sharing. I was really, really lucky to have you all as teachers.

This was supposed to be just about women in the fields of science and math, but then again, this was supposed to come out months ago. Still, I'll stop here and post tomorrow about the non-math/science teachers (both men) who influenced me the most.

Video Series: Look Around You

I have seen many educational videos in my day, but these are the best. The series is called Look Around You. Here are some examples:

• Maths: The round curve that meets up with itself (if it only had a name)
• Germs: The mitotene germ incubation
• Music: "Number 9 of the series" (nice Beatles reference)
• Iron: "We are working with AC/DC because it's heavy metal"

I am so much smarter now. Other topics include Ghosts, Sulpher, Brain, Calcium, Water, and Computer Games.

Web Stuff Friday: Am I a Gadget Update

Many of us have seen the Did You Know video. It presents a bunch of data about new media versus old media (that's a dramatic oversimplification, but you can judge it for yourself).

Did You Know 4.0 has some new data that are interesting, but it still leads me back to my post Am I a Gadget?

A Vision of K-12 Students Today is supposed to "... inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways...." I'm not a Luddite, but I reject the idea that teachers need to follow every technological fad. I also have solid research on my side when I say that providing instruction in the format that a learner chooses is not necessarily better for the learner. Yes, teachers need to evolve and use technology appropriately. They also need to understand their students and the ways they use technology. That said, it is a foolish teacher who tries to pander to his students' every whim.

Education Today and Tomorrow has interesting tidbits. In some ways, it doesn't seem that different from the previous video, but I like it far better. It seems less preachy and more inspiring.

Seeing the Language of the Universe Through GeoGebra

Galileo once said:

The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.

Good stuff. Think back on the post Math Illiteracy and this becomes pretty distressing.

In all honesty, I was never much of a geometry guy. I like algebra and math modeling, but have generally avoided geometry, which has always seemed like stuff that was either obvious or magic. I never wanted to teach it because I never felt like I had a good enough intuitive feel for the content that I could convey to anyone else.

In the past several years, some software has helped me see the light of Galileo's wisdom. First, I liked Geometer's Sketchpad, but now I am digging some new (and free) software called GeoGebra. I think it is really cool stuff. If I had GeoGebra at my disposal when I was a teacher, I would have begged to teach Geometry. Software like this really makes the ideas of math come alive. Install it and give it a try. When you actually engage with the content, you can see beyond the onerous two-column proofs and begin to understand the language of which Galileo was speaking.

Innate Intelligence Is (mostly) a Crock; Effort Matters

A colleague sent me an article from Edutopia that I found interesting, but far from surprising. Struggling Helps Students Master Math tells of how students got better at math when they were allowed to struggle with it.

So, why was this not surprising? Because it is consistent with some solid research on similar ideas. All of these are really, really important ideas that every parent and teacher should read and re-read until they are second nature.

Po Bronson: How Not to Talk to Your Kids
We don’t do a good job of praising our children and students. We praise too readily and broadly and in the process, we don’t encourage working hard to solve problems.

Malcolm Gladwell: Explains Success: It's Nurture, not Nature
As a society, we praise short term results and brilliance more than we praise effort.

Carol Dweck: Transforming Students’ Motivation to Learn and An Interview
Once students realize that intelligence can grow through effort, they get smarter.

Anyone who is involved in raising or educating children needs to understand how praise and effort relate to each other and to student achievement.

Education Reform

The Post's Outlook section had A Chance to Say Yes that describes the situation for Obama's education reform agenda. Obama's ideas for changing our schools are:

• Merit pay
• Get rid of ineffective teachers
• Try more charters, but with accountability

Full disclosure #1: I am a public school guy. I attended, taught at, and send Boy Kid (and soon Girl Kid) to public schools. I even married a public school woman.

Full disclosure #2: I work for a company that runs virtual charter schools. We also run our own private academy and provide curriculum to some private schools.

Merit pay and getting rid of ineffective teachers are opposite sides of the same coin and are tough challenges. Determining which teachers are getting it done and which are not is easy to talk about, but isn't easy to accomplish. Educating kids is not like building cars or selling widgets or hitting a baseball. Success in the classroom is dependent on many factors.

We need innovation in our schools nand charters provide a reasonable pathway to innovation. As long as each school is held accountable, I am all for charter schools (and have been since before my time working for a company that has skin in the game). On the other hand, I am not a fan of vouchers that allow parents to send their kids to private schools.

My problems with vouchers are two-fold. First, I take the separation of church and state seriously. Having public funds going to support church schools is a big problem. Second, we need to find a way to make our public schools work. Taking money out of public shools and putting it in to private schools seems like giving up.

I hope Obama is able to get some real traction with his ideas. It's a difficult road, but an important one to travel.

My Arguments for Year-Round School

I know I'm tilting at windmills, but.... Ever since I was a teacher, I have wished we had year-round school. When I taught, my main reason was so that I could have a decent snow skiing vacation, but now I have more reasons. I was reminded of the benefits of year-round school when I read Year-Round School? My Kids Love It. Yours Will Too by Brigid Schulte.

I know our traditional school schedule has little hope of changing on a broad scale any time soon, but there are some really good reasons it should:

Less forgetting time: Our summers are too darn long. Kids forget so much over the summer that every school year starts with refreshing kids' memories after the long break. I am not guessing here. There is real research to back this up. For instance, Harris Cooper's paper: Summer Learning Loss: The Problem and Some Solutions. Here is one snippet:

... summer learning loss equaled at least one month of instruction as measured by grade level equivalents on standardized test scores-on average, children's tests scores were at least one month lower when they returned to school in fall than scores were when students left in spring.

A continuous culture of learning: As it is now, kids learn from September to May and play from June to August. Yes, I have excluded June from the "learning" side of this equation because by June, many kids and teachers are so burned out that they have lost energy. There is also a cost at the beginning of the school year. Aside from reminding kids about what they learned, teachers also have to get the kids back into the habit of learning. The gear shift from a long summer to the beginning of the nine-month journey through school can be a jarring one.

More opportunities for help: If a kid is struggling at the end of the first quarter of Algebra, the kid is probably doomed to three quarters of unhappiness. Courses that are progressive in nature (e.g., math, reading, and some sciences) can be miserable for any student who struggles at the beginning. With a year-round schedule, a kid who is struggling at the end of the term has time between terms in which he can catch up and prepare for the next term. There is less need for repeat summer school when kids can be given help along the way.

I have no doubt that year-round school is more expensive than our current agrarian model, but if we are serious about improving education, I think it's a smart investment.

Besides, I want to be able to take my kids to Breckenridge for a week of skiing in March.