I posted this a year ago today. I still like it, so here it is again.

I resolve to

• believe that my child and I are always on the same side.
• trust that my child knows what’s best for her.
• remember that children model better than they listen.
• assume that if an activity is valuable to my child, it is valuable for my child, if I can only see why.
• ask “Why not?” more than I ask “Why?”
• believe that my child will do it if she can do it.
• believe, even in the face of short-term evidence, that my support and approval are among my child’s most important goals.
• look at what’s right, not what’s wrong.
• defend my child when his instincts are right; take a stand against any system that is looking more to its goals than to my child’s.
• take a flame thrower to every unworthy homework assignment that crosses my doorstep.

Happy New Year!

Here’s the game:

Spaced Penguin

Here’s some adults playing another version of the same game:

On the Orbit Structure of the Logarithmic Potential

Get it?

DadTalk is a regularly intelligent blog – one of the few I come back to. He had just the same reaction I did to a recent report of “Yet Another ‘Big’ Plan to Reform Education”

I would love to tell you about proposed redesign of the nation’s educational system, but I can’t. Why? Because some boneheads decided to charge $19.95 for a report that is supposed to be a “far-reaching redesign of the American education system,” according to a skimpy New York Times article.

He goes on to critique the report, based on what little he can learn of it (more than I did) as yet another round of “bureaucratic structural changes to America’s educational system.”

I wonder: Do the high-power commissions that generate this sort of dreck believe they’re making a difference? At times, I think reports like this are deliberate subterfuge to avoid the really difficult questions.

This post is half to point back to an interesting August conversation: Rote Memory. We were talking about what facts are worth memorizing and, more generally, why (and whether) kids should learn some things “by heart.”

One of the uncontested areas where the culture agrees that schools should call on rote memory is spelling, represented by the weekly spelling test, so I was intrigued by this comment from James Gleick, in the November 5 New York Times ("Cyber-Neologoliferation” – gotta put that one on next week’s spelling test!)

Yet the very notion of correct and incorrect spelling seems under attack. In Shakespeare’s day, there was no such thing: no right and wrong in spelling, no dictionaries to consult. The word debt could be spelled det, dete, dett, dette or dept, and no one would complain.

Then spelling crystallized, with the spread of printing. Now, with mass communication taking another leap forward, spelling may be diversifying again, spellcheckers notwithstanding.

Things like the weekly spelling test seem to be written in stone – to be the way they always were. Not so. After all, Public education, the idea that nearly all children should be educated at state expense, is a few centuries old, depending on how you define it. The specifics of the current curriculum were written “yesterday.” Shaksper died less than three centuries ago, spelling his name any way he wanted to.

Is standardized spelling one of the pillars of civilization? Can the drive to standardize it withstand cyberneologiferation? Could the time spent on spelling lists be better spent elsewhere? I don’t know. I do think it’s time to be asking fundamental questions about what we teach, and especially about what we ask kids to learn by heart.