Lies About Public Education: Socialization

Lies About Public Education: Socialization

Many people believe one of the virtues of sending children to public school is their socialization. This article claims this is not necessarily a good thing.

Home schoolers have known for years that life in the real world does not consist primarily in dealing with people the same age you are. I had a public junior high school teacher tell me that he has little influence over his students — that the real influence on them is the peer pressure from the other students. When my daughter was in fourth grade her elementary school principal told me there wasn’t much that could be done about the sexual harassment Sarah got from the older boys on the playground, since the teachers couldn’t see everything that happened during recess periods. That was the last year my children attended public schools. The next year I discovered that some private schools also have problems with socialization that’s not well supervised.

It’s my opinion that no student should be forced to go to an unsafe school when there are alternatives parents could choose. No student should have to face cruel peers for months on end because a law meant to be a blessing has become a curse for many children and their parents. Public education used to be a privilege and students and their parents could choose to drop in and out of according to their families needs. It would be interesting to see how many of today’s public school students believe getting their education is a privilege.

The River as an Educational Resource

Whether you are a home educator or a classroom teacher, if you have a river nearby, you have a wonderful educational resource. I live near the Salinas River and often hike the Salinas River Trail in Larry Moore Park in Paso Robles. It normally has water only a few months of the year, and only if there’s a normal amount of rain. Most of the year the Salinas River is subterranean. You don’t see the water. The river normally appears during winter, and I usually start searching for water around January. This year, though, we had our heavy rains start earlier than usual. So I went out in search of the river today, December 28, 2012. I found it.

Water in Salinas River flowing north toward Niblick Bridge, Paso Robles

I followed the river bed for some distance, since I always get excited about what I see. Today it struck me how much science there is to investigate in the river and the riverbed.

Is there a story under this willow?

As I walked along the edge of the river, I saw these small clumps of willows everywhere. Those closest to the west channel, which always stays full of water the longest, seemed to live on top of brush piles. Let’s take a closer look at one of these. Do you think a child might wonder how all this material happened to be under this willow? Might one try identifying different types of trees from what’s in these piles? What might one learn about a river by observing this small tree?

What’s under this willow?

Although the overall impression as one walks along the river in late December is colorless brown and tan branches and dead leaves, some plants show they are very much alive, or host things that are. On the ground beneath are new weed seedlings. There are red buds on some of the twigs. Moss and lichens also add color. Children turned loose with a hand-held microscope would have fun discovering this variety of mosses and lichens of different colors and identifying the new weed seedlings.

Do you see all the colors here?

Children would also be fascinated at all they can see growing on a rock.

What grows on a rock in winter?

Not all growing on this rock is moss or lichen. We also see green seedlings. They need soil. How did soil get on this rock? How about the weed seeds? Is soil created on the rock itself? Or does it all blow into crevices? And why does the rock itself look the way it does? How was it created? There is geology as well as life science to be learned. All these questions can be answered through research and observation. As a teacher, you can inspire the curiosity that will make students want to solve the mysteries.

If you aren’t in a position to take your students on a field trip, you can at least make the trip to the river yourself with a camera. Take the pictures that will arouse interest in what you want students to learn. And don’t forget the videos. Watch the river’s current. Study the rocks in the riverbed to try to understand how they became what they are. You can even collect a few rocks to bring into the classroom. Here are some specimens I found.

Egg-Shaped Rock and Some Other River Rocks

Interesting River Rocks and Milk Thistle Seedlings

Getting Your Students Off to a Good Start in the New Year with Goals

 Perhaps you’ve made New Year’s Resolutions. But have you made measurable goals for your students this year beyond the objectives for individual lesson plans?  How about this for a starter? I will challenge each student to write down what  he want to be doing with his life when he is 22 and /or make a visual page for it.

It’s easy to make a page to visually represent a goal in life, short or longterm, using pictures from newspapers or old magazines. If those aren’t available, students could draw their own pictures or be invited to do this as homework or a first week project after coming back from the winter break. The information in the article  How to Set Goals with Pictures will give you some how-to’s and some inspiration you can adapt for any sort of goal-setting project.

Part of the reason our students don’t get where they’d like to be in life and have trouble breaking out of old family patterns is because they can’t visualize anything better. Even if they may secretly dream of going beyond where their parents have been in life, they may have no idea of how school might relate to getting there, or what baby steps or short-term goals they need to set to climb the ladder to where they’d like to be.

One of the most important things you need to do as a school or home educator is to inspire your students to aim high and help them begin to see what is possible for them in life.  If they are proactive in setting short term goals to achieve long term goals, they have a target to aim at and the arrows to shoot at that target.

If taking some time to do this exercise with your students this week will help even one to break out of old thought patterns and a tendency to just drift toward the future, you will have given your students more than any math, social studies or science lesson could. Those who at nothing will achieve it.

What will you do to inspire your students toward a better future when this break is over?

One-to-One-Instruction

One-to-One-Instruction

A lot has been said about the importance of parents in a child’s education, but today I found an article that shows we were using the right approach in our homeschooling –Learning from Explaining: Does it Matter if Mom is Listening?

I’ve written a lot about the need to read aloud to young children often and in past posts we’ve given a lot of hints on how to to that, especially in When You Read Aloud, Ham it Up. I haven’t said as much about the other technique we used to see how much the children understood. That method was to ask the children to explain something to us or to put something they had read into their own words.

Now in the article referenced above,  a study suggests that explaining something to Mom (and I think the same would be true of Dad) is the best way to fix the  problem solving method a child uses in his brain so that the information will transfer to a different situation. The study used four and five-year-old children and gave them some classification problems to solve. Some were instructed to just solve the problems and repeat the solutions. Others were asked to solve the problems and explain to themselves how they did it (while recording), and the third group was asked to explain to their moms how they solved the problems. (The article will give you several pages of details on this experiment and the data generated.)

The results showed that those who explained the solution to themselves or their moms did much better at retaining the information than those that just repeated the solution. But those who explained to their moms did better than the other two groups at transferring what they had learned to solving different problems.

Explaining a solution forces a child to think critically about his method. Explaining to a parent is even more helpful. I would imagine that this would also extend to explaining to a teacher or tutor, but it illustrated once again how important  verbal interaction with significant adults is in student learning. It’s not just important to get an answer correct, but also to know the process of getting that correct answer.  Remembering that process is much easier if the student has explained it to an adult.

 

New Consumer Math Series for Adolescents and Adults

The Mathematics of Banking and Credit

I am happy to announce that Steck-Vaughn has finally published a series of six  consumer math workbooks that go into detail on math subjects of great interest to teens and adults. These books are designed for classroom use in high schools, job training centers, and even junior colleges. The books can also be used for self-instruction at home.

Each 160-page book begins with instruction in basic math operations and concepts with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, and percents. There is also help with solving real-life problems and interpreting data from tables and graphs.  The books also teach how to not only use a calculator, but also how to compute mentally and estimate — all necessary skills in the world of work.  The instruction pages at the beginning section of each book are the same, but the practice problems and tests are different. All student pages are reproducible for classroom use and answers for exercises are provided at the back of each book.

Once the student has finished the first section on basic math, each book has distinctly different instruction and practice in line with its title topic. Topics of books in the series include

• Housing and Taxes
• Banking and Credit
• Work
• Automobiles and Transportation
• Personal Finance and Investments
• Trades and Professions

Because each book is so specialized, a general class in consumer math might need to use all of them, whereas classes built around a special interest might only need one or two books to fit a math module into a unit study for a  class focused on learning what’s involved with car ownership, math in the workplace, or some other narrow topic.

Teachers using these books will not have to explain to their students why they might need to learn the skills covered. Everything taught has practical applications in the real world and that is reflceted in both the practice problems and the illustrations. Each book also has practice forms and supporting resources related to its topic. Example: the Trades and Professions book includes a Unit Estimate Sheet and  Job Application. The supporting materials in the book include a chart of  Fraction, Decimal and Percent Equivalents, a chart of Formulas for Perimeter, Area, and Volume, a Conversion Chart of measurements, a chart for Plumbing Measurements and Conversions, an Advertising Rates chart, and a graph of Education and Job Opportunities. Each book also includes a topic-specific Glossary.

For more specific information about what is included in each title, see our new Consumer Math Page, which includes all of our books one can use for consumer math. If you are more interested in books organized by specific math skills that are needed in the workplace, you might also check out the Math Skills for the Workforce books. You can order individual titles at discounted prices by following the title links on our web site to their shopping cart pages on our secure server at tomfolio.com. These books can also be ordered with a school purchase order.

It’s Time to Teach the World Geography in Earnest

Building Skills by Exploring Maps: The World

I remember in high school I took a ninth grade geography class, but it didn’t mean much to me. About all I can recall from that class was that the teacher had a habit of writing on the board and then sitting on her desk with her feet dangling very near the trash can beside it. We spent most of the time as we listened to her talk of products and regions, etc, waiting for the big moment that usually came — the moment the teacher would get off her desk. Very often, on her way to the classroom floor, she would land in the waste basket, and we anticipated it every day. What I don’t remember is if we ever saw a map of the world. We must have, but I don’t remember it.

I inherited a lack of interest in geography from my mother, who told me she used to keep a book she’d rather read inside her geography book in class. I think my first interest in the subject surfaced when I was homeschooling my children. A couple of things happened during those years that rekindled that interest. First we read a lot of books aloud that were set throughout the United States. We found an old AAA map of the USA and put it on the hall wall. As we read each book, we would use a map tack to pin the name of the book in the place it was set in. Later, we actually visited many of the placed we had read about and pinned.That travel helped all of us learn more about the geography of our country. Here’s how we incorporated this travel into our homeschool curriculum.

We got more interested in world geography when Desert Storm, the first war in Iraq took place. We used a globe and a map of the Middle East in a reproducible book we had so that we could follow what was happening as we got the news reports each day. All of a sudden what was happening in that part of the world became very relevant to our lives. We decided it was  a good time to study the Middle East and why it was important.

I’m wondering how many of our young people today would be able to find Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Egypt, or Israel on a map or globe quickly , and how many could give at least one reason why the United States is interested in them.  Perhaps someday soon I will conduct my own student in the street interview and find out.

When your students look back at the geography they learned in your class or at home, what do you think  they will remember?  Parents, do you ever get out the globe or a map after the news and see if your children can find the places the news anchors pointed to or talked about? Do you discuss the news with your children? Could you find these places yourself?

Teachers, do you care about what’s happening in far away countries? Do you know how to make your students understand what those countries  have to do with their lives? Or are they reading a textbook and memorizing population figures or product lists that they will soon forget after they are tested? The future of the world will someday be in the hands of today’s students? Will they know much about that world?  The answer is partly up to you.

The Election Season Seems to Have Started

We just got the results of the Straw Poll in Iowa today, and whatever you think  of them, they are evidence that the presidential campaigns are in full swing. Even some preliminary debates have occurred as candidates vie with each other to look electable.

Educators at home and in schools need to be ready to answer student questions about what they are seeing and hearing in the news. It’s time for students to learn more about the election process. That’s why Barb’s People Builders is ready to help you find just the right resources to help you teach your children or students what elections are all about .

You might want a simulation of the election process that your class in grades 4-8 can enact in a week of class time such as Electing the President: The Electoral Process in Action.  If you prefer hands-on activites for students in grades three or over for teaching about the forms of government, voting, and elections in the United States, including the Electoral College, Elections in the U.S.A. Activity Book might be just what you are looking for. It’s companion, Elections in the U.S.A. Photo Activity Cards, provides photos for bulletin boards, as well as research and hands-on activities for groups and individuals on the back.  If you are teaching at the high school level, Cast Your Vote High School , will be one of your best bets. It covers national, state, and local governments, and provides an opportunity for students to elect a student liason between students and the local police department to see how the process works. For additional resources, please check out Barb’s People Builder’s  page on Government and Elections.

How Important is Grammar to a Writer?

I have been reading The 28 Biggest Writing Blunders (And How to Avoid Them), by William Noble, to see what I can learn about improving my writing. He advises writers not to write for their eighth grade English teachers or be slaves to the grammar gurus. He advises writers not to overuse the thesaurus or get tied up in a “sentence straightjacket.” He is against using adverbs and adjectives unless they are absolutely necessary, and cautions again creating a style that does nothing more for your writing than to make it different from other writers. He also warns against trying to imitate writers like Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others  with a distinctive style, because you will never master their styles as well as they did.

As writers, we are urged to develop our own unique writing voices. I found mine at Squidoo.  It’s not a perfect style, but it is in my voice. I’m not trying to imitate anyone, and I normally use the first person when I write about my personal experiences.

It was a relief to read this book, because, as do many writers, I have mental yellow lights go off in my head whenever I’m about to commit a grammatical “sin.” Noble gives me permission to ignore all my mental grammar police if I have a good reason. I can dare to use the passive voice, use a fragment, or end a sentence with a proposition.

I suspect most competent writers already  follow Noble’s suggestions and they probably don’t need this book.  The people who need it most are wannabe writers who haven’t found a unique voice yet. They are the ones most likely to use unnecessary figurative language inappropriately to make their prose more poetic. They are the ones who will deliberately create their own punctuation rules with the hope of being seen as another e.e. cummings.

If you are teaching English and some of your students have somehow gotten hold of this book, or another similar to it, be sure to let your students know that the cardinal rule when it comes to breaking the rules is to know why they are there and why you are breaking them. To do that, you first have to know the rules. They are there to help readers understand what you write. Anything that impedes that does not communicate anything except that you don’t care whether your reader can follow you.

If you are a reader, you will understand this. You know what makes you want to put a book down. Maybe it’s unnecessary descriptions that are long and don’t really help you visualize the scene or person being described. Maybe it’s a dangling participle or a comma where there ought to be a period. Anything that confuses a reader for no good reason should be avoided. Any grammar and usage rules which help a reader understand you better should be followed.

If you are still a student, don’t let a book like this convince you that knowing all those rules isn’t necessary. Noble would not agree. He never advocates not learning the rules. You have to know them before you can know why  breaking one will enhance your writing rather than reduce the effectiveness of your writing. If I were your English teacher and you broke a rule, I’d probably ask you why you did it and expect a good answer.

I am often asked to proofread or evaluate the writing of others. My rule of thumb now is this: If  your mistake screams at me as I read, you probably did not have a good reason to break the rules. The grammar police do reside in my brain and they shout at me when I see sentence errors that don’t serve any good purpose.

The average reader is not looking for mistakes and may not instinctively notice them the way an ex-English teacher does. If that reader is aware of your mistake, It is probably because… you have upset the rhythm. of his reading for no good reason. Did you notice my mistakes in that last sentence? That’s what I mean. Your writing should flow smoothly without disturbing your reader, unless it is your intention to disturb your reader for a reason.

So, be diligent in learning all you can about grammar and usage. Practice following the rules in your writing. Don’t depend upon your spell checker or your grammar checker when you write, because they make mistakes. Learn how to spell, especially the homophones — words that sound alike and are usually spelled differently. Know when to use each word. Know when you need a period instead of a comma and vice versa. Your readers will appreciate it as much as your English teacher. Once you have mastered the traditional way to use the English language, you will be in a position to know when you can effectively disregard it.

Oral Comprehension Lays the Foundation for Reading Comprehension

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If a child can’t comprehend spoken language, he’s not likely to understand what he reads, either. We all learn to use spoken language before we learn to read. Almost any parent or teacher has those moments when they are quite sure a child has not understood a word they said, though they also might believe the children did not want to understand and didn’t really listen.

It still follows, though, that if we are trying to improve a child’s reading comprehension, we need to start with oral comprehension, and we should begin this when the child is still just learning to use language. This means parents need to be involved. They are their children’s first teachers, and they lay the foundation for all future learning. One of the first things they teach children is how to talk.

I know few parents who have taken an educational methods course in teaching children to talk. They are able, instead, to zero in on the child’s own desire to interact with them. If the parents talk, the child  will want to talk. If the child wants something, he has to learn the words that will communicate his needs. He also begins to learn what the parent expects of him, and even the meaning of the word “No!” The parents will teach the names of the objects and living beings in the children’s world and some basic concepts such as over, under, through, run, push, and all the rest. By the time the child reaches kindergarten, he’s supposed to have that basic grasp of language.  He will, if the parents have spent enough time interacting with him.

However, many parents are too busy and too tired at the end of a day to meet all the child’s interaction needs. Many children live with a single parent who also works outside the home. At the end of a day, the temptation is to put the child in front of the television or a video game rather than interacting with him. Thus the child has no need to to actively use his brain to understand, but can sit passively and absorb or, in the case of the video game, develop hand/eye coordination, but not improve communication skills.

What’s the solution? Reading enjoyable stories to the child for twenty minutes each night, maybe just before bed, can be a big help. The parent can go to the public library once every couple of weeks and check out books that look not only appropriate for the child’s age and interests, but that also look like they would be fun for the parent to read. Keep these books so the child has access to them at certain times of the day, and then let him pick one of them for you to read to him. There are some good suggestions in this previous post: Choosing the Best Children’s Books, Part 1. Another previous post, When You Read Aloud, Ham it Up, might also inspire you — especially if’s there’s a bit of the actor or actress in you.

We found that our own children looked forward to story time, and when we read stories to them during summer vacation, they would often round up their friends to join in. As we discussed the stories, it was easy to talk about the meanings of words they might not know, ask what they thought might happen next, ask why they thought a character behaved as he did, and so on.

Little Red Hen by Paul Galdone

Let’s  take some examples from a story you may remember from your own childhood : The Little Red Hen.

As you sit with the book in your lap and your child next to you, begin the story. The  process of making bread as it’s described here may be entirely new for your child, so you can talk about what the hen is doing and why. Here are some questions that would be perfectly natural:

• What is the hen doing with the wheat? Why?
• What other jobs does the hen need to do to make the bread?
• What does the hen ask the other animals to do?
• Do they want to help her do any of  the jobs?
• Why do you think they don’t want to help her?
• When the bread is ready to eat, do they want to help her eat it?
• Does she let them? Should she have shared? Why or why not?

These questions will not only help you make sure the child is understanding the facts in the story — what’s happening, but also will let you know what the child is thinking about the story line itself. Does the child think the hen should have shared? Did the child think it wasn’t fair for the hen not to share? Does he see the point that the animals didn’t want to help with the work, but thought they were entitled to the result of the work whether they had helped or not? This involves higher thinking skills than just knowing what happened.

Almost any folk tale lends itself to a good discussion as you read it aloud. If you have a discussion like this several times a week when you read a story together, your child will naturally learn the comprehension skills they will later try to teach in school : main idea, figurative language, context clues, reading for detail, inference, cause and effect, drawing conclusions, fact or opinion, logic and reasoning, and predicting outcomes. If he can figure out the main idea orally, it will be easier to find it in a passage he reads in school, because he will know what a main idea is. He has learned that the main idea in The Little Red Hen is that those who do not want to help with the work should not expect to share in the results of the work. To see if they can apply this to other situations, you might ask them for examples of this same main idea in what they observe from life. (If a child won’t share his toys with others, should  he expect the others to share their toys with him?) You get the idea. Now, if you apply it, your child will be well on his way to improving reading comprehension later on.

Sight Words or Phonics?

I just read a blog that discussed some of the virtues of rote memorization and it reminded me of the old question about whether children should learn to read by learning sight words or by learning phonics. Sight words are memorized and often learned by drilling on them. The late Dr. Edward Fry produced a lot of materials that help children learn sight words, but he also wrote materials on teaching phonics and spelling.

He recognized that some of our most often used words in English don’t follow the rules of phonics. He is widely recognized for his list of 1000 Instant Words which are intended for children to recognize by sight after a series of exercises, drills, games, flashcards, and other memorization aids. Some of these words, such as in, on, he, be and fish, also obey phonics rules and can be sounded out, but when a child is first learning to read, it’s discouraging to have to stop and sound out every word and lose track of the meaning. It’s very satisfying to be able to read a complete sentence or story without having to stop often and sound out words. Think what it would do to our adult reading speed and comprehension to have to sound out every word we read? By learning the most common words by sight, a child or illiterate adult can have the satisfaction of really reading, not just decoding words. She will understand “A doll is a toy.” if she reads it at a normal speed instead of struggling over every word.

On the other hand, as a child continues on the path of learning to read, it would be burdensome to have to memorize every single word he will ever need to read. Dr. Fry recognizes that understanding the sounds attached to letters is also necessary for a child to become an and independent and proficient reader. He brings these two approaches together seamlessly in his Spelling Book Grades 1-6: Words Most Needed Plus Phonics.

Let’s look at the first lesson for first grade. Only ten sight (or instant) words are introduced: the, of, and, a, to, boy, girl, man, woman, baby. Though the teacher is given teaching suggestions, this is not a workbook. The student pages may be reproduced for student use, but the teacher decides how to best teach the words.

Under the list of words is a list of phrases using the words so that the students can practice seeing and reading the words in context. Samples of the phrases are man and woman and to the boy and girl. Students could practice reading these aloud and the phrases could also be used for dictation exercises, since this book also teaches spelling.

The last parts of the lessons involve age-appropriate word study. In the first grade lesson we used as an example above, students learn about how the phonogram an is used in man, ran, can, and pan. Then they learn in the phonics section below about the short vowel a. The included notes to the teacher in these sections spell out the rules and explanations, but I seriously doubt that the first graders will have to memorize, “The Closed Syllable Rule states that when the syllable ends in a consonant, the single letter vowel is short.” (Examples are taken from Lesson 1 of the book linked to above. ) At this stage of the game, the student may not know or care about syllables, open or closed.

That's me, with my book at the age of three.

When I learned to read I taught myself in much this fashion. First I memorized a very simple picture book my mother read to me over and over and then I read it back to her. She knew I’d memorized it, but I knew which word was which, so I had learned some sight words that I could recognize in other contexts. My mother would tell me about the sounds that the letters made until I was asking her for the ones I didn’t know yet. I started asking my dad about the letters I saw in the headlines of his newspaper. I was only three, but I could read. By the time I hit first grade, I was sitting in the class library section reading whatever I wanted while the teacher taught reading to all the rest of the class except another student who shared my first and middle name, who could also read.

My mother was a wise woman who realized that although I was reading above grade level, I had holes in my phonics understanding, so she sent me to a private school for a semester to learn phonics in a systematic way. (This was in the late 1940′s, when the “look, say” teaching method was in vogue.) After my phonics instruction, I flew in my reading skills. I think I would have thrived with Dr. Fy’s approach, since I would have learned the sight words in and out of context, as well as the relationships of the sounds to the words I learned every week. Seeing those relationships brings this method of teaching beyond rote memorization to understanding. I think Justin Snider, the author of the blog that inspired this one, could live with this approach. Maybe he will stop by and let us know.