This analysis, from New York Times Op-Ed columnist, David Brooks, appearing on May 25, 2006, speaks to the goals and philosophy of Grow With the Flow so directly I felt I couldn’t do better than to excerpt a good hunk of it, without commentary – although I did highlight a few golden lines. The original article is subscription-only.

Let me tell you why I, a scientific imbecile, have spent several weeks trying to understand the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex.

It all started a few years ago as I was plowing through studies on income inequality….

….a child’s home environment — matters more.

Once you acknowledge that there is a basic tear in the way the market economy is evolving, you begin trying to figure out the causes. In declining order of importance, they seem to be:

First, the generally rising education premium. The economy rewards people who can thrive in meetings and adapt to technical change….

When you look at these causes, you keep coming back to one theme: human capital. The people who do well not only possess skills that can be measured on tests, they have self-discipline (which is twice as important as I.Q. in predicting academic achievement, according to a study by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman). They conceive of their lives as following a script, progressing upward through stages. They benefit from inherited cultural traits….

….you discover that while learning is like nutrition (you have to do it every day), earlier is better. That’s because, as James Heckman puts it, learners learn and skill begets skill. Children who’ve developed good brain functions by age 3 have advantages that accumulate through life.

That takes us to where the debate is today. How do we inculcate good brain functions across a wider swath of the 3-year-old population? ….

If there’s one thing that leaps out of all the brain literature, it is that, as Daniel J. Siegel puts it, “emotion serves as a central organizing process within the brain.” Kids learn from people they love. If we want young people to develop the social and self-regulating skills they need to thrive, we need to establish stable long-term relationships between love-hungry children and love-providing adults.

That’s why I’m grappling with these books on psychology and brain function. I started out on this wonk odyssey in the company of economic data, but the closer you get to the core issue, the further you venture into the primitive realm of love.

In a short feature, Keep Math Skills Sharp This Summer, Parents and Kids points out that “According to a study by the Partnership for Learning, an average student can forget 60 percent of the math skills they learned during the school year…”

Read that again: Better than half of the skills we teach for nine months each winter are lost in three months. If you’re mathematically inclined, graph that one: a unit of improvement in nine months, a 60% drop in three months, and reiterate. Seem like a questionable way to turn out top math students?

Anne Collins, Director of Mathematics Programs at Lesley University, offers strategies to keep math skills sharp during summer.

Simple card games can teach and keep multiplication or addition skills fresh; assisting parents with menu planning, or home improvement projects teach and reinforce problem solving; an inexpensive stopwatch can open dozens of doors and questions of time and rate of speed ratios. This summer especially, challenging a child to determine the cost of gasoline for a day or weekend trip can be very instructive - while empowering him or her to find answers to such questions.

Summer is a perfect opportunity for informal education, and helping students practice their math skills in different settings,” Collins said. “It doesn’t have to be a time for math skills review, but instead a time for children to put them to good use.

Grow With the Flow readers know these are just the kind of activities I think are critical to the development of real math ability (as opposed to the acquisition of arithmetic facts). Professor Collins is clearly a dynamite teacher and teacher teacher. I half susupect her of an end run here:

The way we teach math is so deplorable that the majority of the math facts we drill into kids’ heads each year is lost in a few months. So maybe we should teach practical, real-life, empowering, problem-solving, useful math all year long?

It’s a great idea, Professor Collins, and it just might work in Massachusets. But forget it out here in the Wild West – We’re too busy getting our kids ready to take the CSAPs to teach them something useful.

Discuss this article in the Coffee Shop

Negotiating – The Frustration

OK, a famous Paul story. It’s 7:00 p.m., in the second week of Paul’s 7th grade year. I get a phone call from Paul’s math teacher:

“Mr. Cantrell, your son and I made a deal this afternoon, and afterwards, I thought ‘I shouldn’t have done that without talking with his parents!’” The deal was that Paul would sit in the back, listen in on 7th grade algebra, but mostly work in the eighth grade book. And in spite of the teacher’s concerns, I felt like that was exactly what she should have done: She took my kid seriously when he came to her with a problem, treated him like a person who could think and plan and take care of himself. That brief negotiation made a huge difference over the next six years, as the effects reverberated: Paul’s entire schedule became more flexible, less regular, more in his control as a result of the disruption of the sequence in a core subject.

Where’s the frustration in that? That it’s so darned hard to convince most kids to try to negotiate something with a teacher, or even to imagine that they could negotiate. For most kids, the idea seems completely foreign – it’s not so much that they’re unwilling to try, as that they can’t encompass the idea that such a thing is possible.

Negotiating – What’s Possible?

My partners, Tom and Francis, wisely ask: Can kids negotiate with teachers? Maybe the reason kids can’t get my idea is because they know in their hearts it won’t work out. Talking with my partners, we agree, of course, that not every assignment can be negotiated. We feel pretty sure some teachers will be more willing than others. But can a kid negotiate a better deal for herself at school a high enough percentage of the time that it’s worth trying?

On the one hand, with all the talk of teaching executive skills, of empowering kids, it seems like opportunities to negotiate would be part of every curriculum. On the other hand, with the workload most teachers are carrying right now, it’s hard to imagine anyone offering to take on yet another exception, another addition to the overall load.

Notice, however, Paul’s negotiation: He offered to do two courses while others were doing one, and promised the teacher he wouldn’t ask too much of her. She offered her time generously, but that wasn’t one of his conditions, it was her generosity.

Any readers have stories about successful negotiations or failed attempts to negotiate?

Negotiating – A Continuum

Talking with a ninth grader last week, I had an idea. Here are three possible points on a continuum of negotiation possibilities:

1. Your child has an IEP, an Individual Educational Plan. This gives you clout to say to a teacher, “According to our IEP … so I’m hoping you’ll agree to ….”

2. A classic negotiation with a teacher – child carrying on the negotiation solo, parent and child partnering, or parent talking alone with the teacher. This is the one I have so much trouble communicating to kids.

3. A “negotiation” of the student with himself. Last week a ninth grader had an assignment she hated, and was planning to blow off – take the zero. We talked about it, and found a version of the assignment we both thought was super cool – fun instead of work. The best part? There was nothing to negotiate. So far as we could tell, the change was within the limits of the instructions, so there was no need to check with the teacher. (But is this a negotiation? Consider the definition of “to negotiate,” as in “to negotiate the rapids.")

Some day, I hope to get around to a review of The End of Homework – a manifesto for a long-overdue rebellion.

Until then, a haphazard thought: Where do we get off calling it “homework”“?

“Schoolwork” is work you do at school. Homework should mean doing the dishes or raking the yard. Depending on the assignment and your point of view, this thing we mistakenly call “homework” is

• Schoolwork you didn’t get done, and your 504 plan says you have to get recess, so your teacher makes you take it home
• A math worksheet some misguided soul who hasn’t heard about calculators thinks will finally pound the multiplication tables through your thick skull
• An overpressured teacher’s response to “accountability” and the upcoming multiple-guess tests that will determine whether her school is acceptable
• A belief that since a certified professional can’t cover everything he’s required to cover during his work day, maybe parents can do it when they get home from theirs, coupled with an apparent assumption that a six-to-seven-hour work day isn’t long enough for a nine-year-old
• A notion that family dinners, play time, and parent-child relationships are all dangerous activities, best extirpated before they inculcate bad habits
• A theory, based on some Greek myth no one can remember, about a guy named Responsibilius, that homework builds character.

Confucius wrote

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone …. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

From The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3 (James R. Ware, translated in 1980)
(Worth looking at in its fuller form, and with the Chinese )
 

Well, I’m open to suggestions as to a correct name for “homework.”

* School Spill?

* Daily Evening Student Punishment? (DESPerate)?

* “That stuff we used to fight about every night, before we took control of our evenings"?