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Strollerderby
Hooray! It’s finally the first day of summer – officially. If your kids aren’t done with classes yet, chances are they will be this week. Of course your little ones (and maybe you) will want to spend most of the summer having fun, but it’s important not to completely forget about school while you’re enjoying the pool.
Frances Nankin, the Executive Producer of the hit PBS Kids Go cartoon Cyberchase says, “Summer is a time when children are at risk for losing gains in math learning if they are not offered educationally sustaining math activities.” She suggests incorporating simple and entertaining number games during summer vacation to avoid brain drain.
Are your kids old enough to do household chores or yard work for pay? Then help them set a financial goal they’d like to achieve by the end of August and make a chart or graph to track their weekly progress. Nankin says, “Encouraging them to budget an amount for saving as well as spending is another way to engage them with money math.” Suze Orman would approve. (You go, girlfriend!)
Summer road trips can also offer plenty of teachable moments. When your kids whine, “Are we there yet?,” suggest ways for them to estimate how far you’ve gone and how much longer it will take before you arrive at your destination. When my daughter and I get in the car to go anywhere, she immediately asks, “Wanna play 20 Questions?” We never limit our questions to 20, but she loves narrowing down her guesses. Nankin says you can play a similar game while watching America’s favorite passtime. While at the ballpark, “take turns picking a player’s number and making up clues to see if the other person can figure out who it is. For example: “My player’s number is an even number. It is more than 10, less than 15, and is a multiple of 3.” 12! It’s 12! (It’s good to know I’m smarter than a second grader.) Continue reading »
For reasons I have never fully understood, each state in the union is charged with determining what their public school children should learn and when they should learn it. While one state may be teaching kids to add fractions in the third grade, another may not touch that subject until the fourth. In language arts, the timetable for mastering skills varies from state to state as well.
This, of course, results in an inequity in education based solely on where a student happens to live. Why should this be? It shouldn’t. And soon, it won’t. Continue reading »
I remember watching an old movie with my father — I think it starred Jimmy Stewart — about an FBI agent and thinking, as agents slipped into phone booths during a manhunt at a ballgame, about how different the world was given the technological advances we’d seen since the movie was made. No longer are secret agents searching out payphones; even the most humdrum Walter Mitty type has a relatively powerful cell phone. But do such devices really have a place in education? There are those who believe the answer is a decisive “yes”.
When someone has the audacity to suggest that science is for boys or that girls can’t do math, I’ll simply ask them if they own or have ever used a computer. When they say yes, I tell them to thank a woman — specifically, Admiral Grace Hopper who is, in large part, responsible for the proliferation of computers we see today. Sadly, that sort of discussion happens all too often and, according to a new study of existing research, contributes to the lower numbers of women in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
People homeschool for lots of reasons, but the biggest commonality seems to be a deep distrust of the educational system as it is.
Andrew O’Hehir has been documenting his wife’s experience homeschooling their twins, who are almost 6, for Salon. He says their reasons are not religious or a wholesale rejection of mainstream culture — but based on this article,a breathtaking sense of superiority does seem to be a pretty strong motivator. I honestly don’t know how he managed to type this lengthy article, since he must have wrenched his arm patting himself on the back with quotes like this, from Susan Engel, a psychologist who runs the teaching program at Williams College: Continue reading »
This morning, a coalition of governors and school chiefs from 48 states and the District of Columbia issued their proposal for new, national English and math standards for students in grades K-12.
The standards are a move toward ensuring that every student is expected to leave school with the same body of knowledge and abilities no matter where they are from, so that they will be fully prepared for college or work after graduating high school. It would replace the current state standards, which some critics believe states have watered down in response to the high-stakes testing of No Child Left Behind, and which vary wildly. Only Alaska and Texas rejected the standards, which will be available for public comment until April 2.
The standards require, for example, Continue reading »
It’s no secret that our schools, in general, are not doing the best they could be at educating our children. Some blame the teachers, saying they are slackers who only teach because they aren’t qualified to do anything else. Others put the blame on parents who don’t take time to emphasize the importance of education at home and who can’t — or won’t — support teachers by working with their children to reinforce what they have learned in class. In reality, it’s probably some of both. There are certainly a lot of hard-working, dedicated teachers out there, but some are more effective than others — what if we could make every teacher as good as the best teachers? Some researchers think they have the means to do that.
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