Educational Experimentation, II

[This started as a response to another comment. It tripped the filters, though, since it grew too long. Thus I am putting it up as a separate post.]

@ [Name] -- I appreciate your comment.

1) You are right that my anecdotal stories are not statistically significant. Just because my classmates were ill-prepared, it doesn't mean that all elementary education majors are idiots. I did not mean to imply otherwise, but I can see how it came across that way, and I apologize, less perfunctorily and more sincerely this time.

2) My second grade teacher was amazing. My fifth grade teacher was incompetent. (And I don't mean she couldn't handle me--I mean she couldn't handle the fifth grade spelling words and math problems she was supposed to teach. I rescued her many times with a tactful "question" which steered her in the right direction.)

How did a woman who couldn't do fifth grade math and spelling pass her college classes? How did she get hired to teach the subjects she couldn't do herself?

It is not fair to extrapolate from the above example that all second grade teachers are marvelous and all fifth grade teachers are morons. My specific fifth grade teacher, though, didn't belong in the classroom. Her love of children and her coursework were not enough to prepare her for the realities on the ground.

The previous post was not trying to fix every part of the educational system. I did not address remediation, acceleration, IQ, creativity, social problems, Common Core, standardized testing, disabilities, extracurricular activities, field trips, disciplinary policies, teacher turn-over, vouchers, or charter schools.

I was trying to make a narrow point about our system for recruiting, screening, and training teachers. I don't think I need to prove that our colleges of education are broken; the article and the study it referenced did that for me.

My stories merely illustrate the point.

3) You are also right that my children are outliers. Public schools are generally designed to handle the middle of the population: the mean +/- one (maybe two) standard deviation(s). In most places I've lived, which were admittedly middle- or upper-middle class, they did a reasonable job at that goal.

4) Other than a quick mention that the entire paradigm is ossified, I was not attacking the public school system--at least, not in this post. Again, I was criticizing the way we recruit, screen, and train teachers. That happens primarily in colleges of education and has little to do with the actual public schools. (In fact, the point of the article was that there was such a large disconnect between the two systems.)

You'll note that in my ten points, only the last two deal with what happens after the teacher is in place--and they are supportive of the teacher.

5) I am okay with the idea that middle and high school teachers need to be more specialized than elementary teachers. A second grade teacher may not need to have double-majored in education and another field. (S)he should still be adequately prepared to teach second grade material, though, and have a plan for how to handle exceptional students. (S)he should also have practical skills in classroom management. College education courses could do a much better job of supporting positive outcomes.

6) I don't "repulsively shun" the public schools. Over many years, I have tried public, private, charter, and homeschool options. Some years I have enrolled one child while homeschooling another. There is never a "perfect" answer; I just do the best I can to balance each child's needs each year.

There are many fine schools and excellent teachers out there.

7) In America, we have a myth that we can solve any problem simply by throwing resources at it. For decades, our education budgets have out-spent most other countries per capita without solving some fundamental problems.

Lots of efforts have been made to reform the system from within, to no avail. I believe that real reform will need to start from outside and compete. (Admittedly that hasn't worked very well for charter schools, but then charter schools are still greatly hampered by regulations.)

Here is another illustration. You suggested I put my talents to work for the public schools. I tried, I really did. When one son was in second grade, I held several meetings with the staff of his elementary school about his special needs. (He is profoundly gifted at math and also ADD.)

I didn't expect a second grade teacher to instruct my son in algebra. I got enormously frustrated, though, when the staff at the school (vice principal, psychologist, classroom teacher, and specialist teachers) all assured me that his needs would be met, but then parked him in a corner playing Monopoly. I was even more frustrated when they denied there was a problem--and rejected my repeated offers to be part of the solution.

I suggested that they let him read a book during math time and just trust me to handle his math instruction at home. They declined. I suggested that he could do independent study at his desk. I could send in worksheets and grade them at home. They declined. (Though that suggestion probably would not have worked; he was very distractible and might simply have stared off into space the entire time.)

At one point, I begged them to allow me to come to the school for an hour a day, pull him aside, and handle his math instruction myself. Failing that, I could volunteer in the classroom as a general aide and just try to keep an eye on my son during math time. They declined.

For a variety of social reasons, I wanted very much to keep my son enrolled at the public school. Their refusal to work with me made that impossible. I am not angry at any of the staff, but I recognize that the current paradigm makes internal innovation difficult.

I had a similar experience when another son was enrolled at a charter school. The charter school had been in the works for years, promising innovation, parental involvement, creativity, and a freedom from "teaching to the test." They wanted every family to be involved in building a great educational community.

A week after the school opened, the administration announced that, because of complicated student privacy rules and the expense of running background checks, there could be NO parent volunteers in the classroom.

Throughout the year, they also sent out apologetic notices about how the kids would be completing Yet Another Big Test in compliance with state law.

Yes, these experiences are anecdotal, but they led me to believe that reform from within is virtually impossible.

Khan academy, MOOCs, homeschool movements, and other initiatives are starting to compete with the public school systems. Not all of them will work, but some of them will flourish and effect important changes. (Hence my petri dish analogy.)

I understand that this drives teachers crazy, and I sympathize. Nevertheless, as a matter of conscience, I honestly believe that I will do more good as a "disruptive innovator" from outside the system. In the long run, I think that homeschooling my children and debating educational policy will benefit society more than "supporting" the local school and its accompanying paradigm. This is especially true when the local schools don't court my contributions, merely my compliance.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comments.

Gail

Educational Experimentation

I just read this article about teacher training colleges, and it struck a nerve. I am very opinionated on this topic, and I've felt a blog post brewing for years. This just pushed me over the edge. Apologies to all the education majors I'm about to offend.

There are many problems with U.S. education, and it's not fair to blame everything on the teachers. My post below does not address all of the complicated issues.

That said, I took a few education classes in college and then fled in terror. My fellow students were mostly dunces: they couldn't do research, write a decent essay, or grasp basic statistical principles. (More on that later.) The professors were little better: the curriculum focused on abstract theory and not on anything useful, like "this is how to quell a riot." I actually asked a tenured professor of education about classroom management once. He shrugged and said "Oh, just be consistent, and you'll do fine."

When I say the education majors couldn't grasp basic statistical principles, I'm not talking about "this is how I take a data set of test results and calculate the standard distribution." I'm not even talking about struggling with "this is why it's a lot harder for a kid re-taking the SATs to move from the 95th to the 96th percentile than from the 50th to the 55th percentile." No, I'm talking about problems like not even grasping why "scoring in the 99th percentile on a national achievement test" is different than "getting 99 percent of the answers right." Some of these people couldn't even figure out the difference between a mean and a median, let alone how to find each.

My class in "measurement and assessment in teaching" was actually very helpful. It taught me how to design a good test, the pros and cons of each type of test (essay, multiple choice, etc), and when to use each. Sadly, the material was wasted on most of my classmates.

I took a "Children's Literature" class in which half of the students were English majors and half were education majors. I peer reviewed the most appalling paper ever--three pages of poorly spelled ungrammatical gushing about how much the author just loved children, with nary a research reference in sight.

That semester, I frequently emerged from class shaken to the core. "I never want him to teach my kids math, or her to teach my kids English, or...well, I never want any of them to teach my kids ANYTHING," I told Jon. (This is a testament to just how shaken I was: normally I avoided any mention of hypothetical future children when talking to Jon.)

Don't even get me started with the problems of teachers of middlin' capability dealing with brilliant students who can out-think them at every turn. I was reasonably charitable to my teachers, but I recall sitting in Mrs. N's 5th-grade class, thinking, "If I didn't have a conscience, I could make this woman's life a daily living hell."

For years, I have considered the problem. If I were designing the perfect education system, how would I go about it? The simple answer is that, if I could, I would fix families. Since that isn't an option, here are my next best suggestions:

1) Raise admission standards to colleges of education. Require prospective teachers to pass some basic exams before they begin their course of study.
2) Require ivory tower college professors to spend a semester "in the trenches" every three years. (After all, we force "in the trenches" teachers to take college classes occasionally to re-certify. Let's reciprocate.) Bonus points for teaching remedial summer school classes in the inner city.
3) Recruit people who have mastered core areas and train them in how to teach. Would you rather have a French teacher who is great at sticking to The Book, or one who is actually fluent in the target language? Would you rather recruit an education major with a 2.0 GPA (from a mediocre school), teach him some rudimentary chemistry, and hope it sticks? Or would you rather grab a person who did R&D for DOW for a few years, give her intensive training for six months, and then shove her in front of a classroom?
4) Hold colleges of education accountable. Look at long-term success rates. Ask graduates to complete surveys after one, two, three, five, and ten years. See how many of them are still teaching. Publish this information to prospective students.
5) Focus more on guided real-world practice teaching and less on abstract educational theory. Most of the people in my classes who could answer questions about Jean Piaget were going to be hopeless at actually managing a classroom.
6) Apprentice new teachers to master teachers. Focus on practical techniques and problem-solving.
7) Start a pilot program to evaluate the "bar exam" idea. It has merit and should be considered. If it works, try to spread its adoption.
8) Raise teacher standards--AND pay. Recruit the best and then pay them well. Let go of our "desperate for warm bodies" model.
9) Once we have actual teachers in place, give them a great deal of leeway. Tell them what results we want, and hold them accountable--but don't micromanage the daily lessons.
10) Recognize that even the best teachers can only do so much with kids from failing homes. Don't expect teachers to be independent social workers. Support them, but don't demand miracles.

Never mind. Most of this is impossible in our current ossified system of politics, teacher's unions, and Tradition. Scrap it all and start over. Or homeschool.

If sea steaders can start petri dishes of sociopoliticaleconomic experimentation, I want to join them. Let's start an educational utopia and see what happens. It probably wouldn't work, but at least we wouldn't be trying to impose our latest teaching fads on the rest of the United States.

My only caveat is that the experiments must be performed by actual scientists and statisticians, not education majors.

Who's with me?

Stoves and Sex, part I

Recently Elizabeth Smart gave a speech about human trafficking at John Hopkins University. Her comments spawned many idiotic headlines about how she had “slammed abstinence education.” I watched the entire speech, and that’s not what I heard her say. I’ll address what she said, the reaction to it, and my reaction to both of the above in part II.

Right now, I want to talk about stoves.

Note: Technically, “oven” refers to the interior space where you bake cookies, cakes, pies, and Thanksgiving turkeys. “Stove” refers to the burners where you boil water and stir fry vegetables. “Range” means both of them combined in a single appliance, which is the norm these days. In my post, I use the three terms interchangeably, since they all involve heat that can be dangerous.

My apologies for blogger's annoying formatting regarding bullet points.

--ed

I have four boys. Two of them have survived toddlerhood. Two of them (ages 1 and 3) still terrify me daily. 

Recently we purchased a new gas range. How can I teach them not to stay away from the shiny stainless steel, the sparkly blue enameled oven, the pretty open orange flames? 

Here are some options:

1.       I shout. Every time a kid gets near the hot stove, I yell “No!” but offer no further explanation. The kid is mystified. Why is the stove bad sometimes and okay other times? Why can Mommy use stoves but not big kids who mostly use the potty? One day when Mommy isn’t looking, he reaches out and touches the stove. Nothing happens. Obviously Mommy is crazy and arbitrary. He shrugs off other “random” versions of “no!” and wanders into the street to play in traffic.

2.      I lie. “If you touch a hot stove, your whole body will catch on fire and you’ll be left with horrible scars and then you’ll be so ugly no one will ever marry you. And you might also die.” I show him a charred piece of toast as an object lesson. Given that my kids lean more towards “anxious” than “fearlessly independent,” he develops a lifelong phobia of kitchens and cooking. He eats fast food for the rest of his life, and dies young of a heart attack.

3.      I punt. When he acts curious about the appliance and asks how it works, I say “Don’t ask questions. All you need to know is that you shouldn’t touch it. When you’re older, I’ll explain everything.” I then act embarrassed and refuse to discuss the matter further. Dissatisfied, my young scientist asks his friends for information. He finds their magical explanations fascinating but contradictory. One day, he decides to figure it all out for himself. As he attempts to disassemble and reverse engineer the oven, he causes a small explosion.

4.      I preach. “Stoves are the spawn of Satan!” I say, and invent scriptures to support my supposition that the technology is evil. The kid gets very confused. As he grows older, he notices that most of his friends—even children from his same church-- think stoves aren’t sinful. He notices that Mommy still uses the stove and he worries for her immortal soul. As an adolescent, he shrugs off Mom’s hypocrisy and rejects all of her teachings. (After all, this is the same woman who lied to him about Santa Claus.) He quits going to church and declares himself to be an atheist.

5.      I babble. “See, ovens are generally good but sometimes bad. I’d really prefer that you not touch them, at least not when they’re hot, but I’m not going to actually enforce any kind of discernible standard. I personally didn’t use ovens until I was ten, but some families say a kid only needs to be eight and other say twelve…personally I think eight is a little young but I don’t want to judge so I’ll just make vague, weak  suggestions and babble about my own experiences and let my words wash over you meaninglessly…”

6.      I ignore the problem. “He’ll figure it out for himself,” I shrug. “A couple of second degree burns and he’ll teach himself everything he needs to know, right?” One expensive skin graft later, as I’m fending off Child Protective Services threatening to “repo” my child, I think this approach might have been a mistake.

None of those sound like good options, true, but I could try them. There are even worse options involving abuse, which I deliberately omitted. There’s also another choice to consider, though--one which might actually work:

7.      I parent:

·         I install knob covers on the burners. I lock the oven when it’s in use.

·         I seize opportunities to point out things that are “hot” and “cold” to teach him those concepts.

·         I make concrete rules like “Until you are five years old, you must stay in another room when I open the oven door.”

·         I issue warnings. “I’m about to take the pie out!” I beep like a truck backing up, if that helps to remind kids to keep their distance.

·         I enforce rules. “I told you to leave the kitchen and you disobeyed me. I was very dangerous to sneak up behind me and scream while I was leaning into the oven. I don’t care if you were playing “Hansel and Gretel”, it was still a horrible idea. Plus I’m not a wicked witch. I AM a mean mom, though, and you don’t get any of the cake.”

·         I invent teaching songs like this:

“Heat, heat in the range
Means that kid hands (and toys)stay away.

No whining or games:

When you see open flames,

You must find somewhere else for your play.”

·         I explain. When the child gets a minor burn from a cookie sheet, I reinforce my reasons. “Yes, it hurts,” I say, while applying aloe lotion and a bandaid. “That’s why we have a rule about not touching hot things.”

·         As the kid grows older, I allow him to assist in the kitchen, under my direct supervision. When I think he’s old enough, I allow him to make cookies all by himself. I also explain that he must clean up after himself or lose key privileges.

·         After eighteen years of effort, I watch him head off to college, secure in the knowledge that he can at least prepare pasta and potatoes. He has cookies down pat. He might even manage vegetables if he cared enough to try. At any rate, he probably won’t burn his apartment down or die of gas inhalation. Parenting win!

Public schools can have occasional “fire safety” days.  That’s fine. Sunday School teachers can say “obey your parents.” That’s great. Friends and family can demonstrate that they have similar rules. Excellent! The government can issue regulations that all new ranges sold in the U. S. must have child safety features. That’s probably beneficial, on balance.

Those efforts, done properly, could support my efforts at keeping my kids safe.

They could also be done badly. Imagine that the public school holds a “fire awareness” day in which an expert came in and talked to the kids about how pyromaniacs are just misunderstood. Two weeks later, the Sunday School teacher preaches that an interest in the chemistry behind flame is prurient. We visit the relatives, and they say “Rules stifle young children. Let them experiment all they want with the broil setting!” Then the government, concerned by a startling case of a toddler catching his house on fire, passes laws making oven use, even in a private home, akin to driving--with strict age, oversight, and licensing requirements. 

None of those would be helpful at all. The mixed message would be horribly confusing, and the regulations would be a huge and eerie over-reach into my home.

Still, good or bad, these other influences are limited. My guidance will be the single greatest factor in helping my children develop a healthy relationship with the range.  

---

Nothing can replace me modeling appropriate behavior every day in the proper context. There is simply no substitute for good parenting. 

---

The helpful messages are useful, though, and the scary scenarios are terrifying enough that I’d prefer the “support parents” version.

Everyone on board so far?

Great! Now, take everywhere I say “ovens” or “stoves” or “range” and replace it with “sex.”

I believe that our Heavenly Father has issued specific rules about intimacy. Basically, He has said that sex is great—as an expression of love between a man and a woman in a healthy marriage. It is spiritually and emotionally (and sometimes physically) dangerous in the wrong context, though, which is why he has placed restrictions on its use.  

God is not arbitrary; He has reasons for His rules.

I’ll pass this lesson on to my children.  The question is how I teach it, and how everyone else can help or hinder.

More on that in part II.