Posts by Jolisa
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You know, it's really funny you caught Wellington on such a bad day, we had nothing but sun and warmth for weeks.
And you brought it back out for me on Sunday - thank you. I like it when Wellingon plays hard to get.
It's not just money, it's foreign exchange Buying a skirt has never meant more.
I bought one for you too, Russell. Act surprised when Santa delivers it.
Our heroine (who closely resembles Julia Roberts)...
OK, there's my Christmas present right there. Thank you!
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When I finally got glasses I was astonished to see that trees had leaves. I'd never been so blind as to miss the trunks, though. Blimey!
Somewhat related to this thread: an impassioned piece on the sort of words being slowly filleted out of the Oxford Junior Dictionary:
"It is difficult to read the list of words excluded from the new Oxford Junior Dictionary without a sharp sense of regret. Here are some of the words that have been culled: catkin, brook, minnow, acorn, buttercup, heron, almond, marzipan, ash, beetroot, bray, bridle, porpoise, gooseberry, raven, carnation, blackberry, tulip, catkin, porridge and conker. ..."
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And of course there is no research showing that homework enhances learning especially for the under 11's!
Ian, you're so right. Although in our house the evidence suggests that it enhances one's ability to articulate arguments that will eventually get you an A+ in a stage one Education or Sociology paper. So it is educational in a painfully roundabout and redundant sort of way.
This morning's take on things, after I tried explaining how and why the tests exist: "So if they just want to tick the box about whether I can read and write, why don't they just a) come to my house and I'll read them a chapter out of Harry Potter and show them my latest Nobbes and Dobbes detective story, or b) ask my teacher?"
There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine about what makes a good teacher.
Highly relevant link, thanks George. Good old Malcolm Gladwell. I finally read the article this morning and it made me cry: the bit where they're observing the teachers and seeing whether they engage kids or shut them down, and how they manage kid energy in the classroom. It's so easy to get it wrong.
His point on changing the recruiting approach -- a wide funnel and an aggressive winnowing technique -- and the payscale is well-taken, although I'm surprised he used money traders as his example. This is how universities staff themselves: of all the people doing doctorates at a PhD-granting institution, only a small fraction - a quarter at best - will eventually wind up with tenured jobs at a similar institution, and are paid a fairly decent whack for the privilege (although not as much as money traders).
They're not necessarily the best at teaching - that's a whole other argument - but the aim is to offer nothing but the very best at the highest levels of education. It would be great if the same standard held for kiddos at the other end of the sausage machine.
Which is not to say it doesn't, but the figures Gladwell cites on the difference between a crap teacher and an excellent teacher are really sobering. And you put an excellent teacher into a crap situation (test scores above all) and see what happens...
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sagenz, I agree that NCLB is trying to fix a problem; a big one. 13% reading proficiency is horrendous by any standard.
I'm just not convinced it's the way to fix the problem. The only people it's enriching are those who peddle the curriculum and testing materials.
Maybe it is a FUCKING GOOD THING that teaching is focused on core things like Maths and English rather than feeling good about yourself. It is a FUCKING GOOD THING that the policy says NO child left behind.
Jolisa - Do what is right for your child rather than what is politically correct for your political views and circle of friends.
See, I don't think you can have it both ways. Obviously I want to do what's right for my kids. But if I and parents like me bail out of the public system (interesting stats from Paul re NSW, by the way), then we are leaving all those other kids behind, no?
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On Parliament TV they are now debating the Education Amendment Bill. This is surely post modern politics!
Do they have wi-fi in the chamber? Imagine if a few were reading this thread and using our links for rebuttal.. that would be cool.
Ian, agree totally on the heinousness of this homework situation. We maybe be reaching the critical point where we just register as conscientious objectors, and damn the torpedoes.
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Forgot to mention my juku teaching hours: 7.30 - 9.30.
p.m.
Twice a week.
That was just English; the other nights of the week were given over to Maths and other subjects. Eleven year olds. But Japan is a whole other story.
The testing is displacing teaching
Exactly. I didn't realise what "teaching to the test" meant until this year. Last year (the K-1 class) was still relatively freewheeling, albeit heavy on the task of disciplining kids to sit still, walk quietly, raise their hands, etc etc. This year, all teaching is oriented to the impending tests, and anything else that can be squeezed in is gravy (and, incidentally, is lapped up by the kids as if it were genuinely gravy).
The teachers are quite honest about the fact that this is pointless, tiresome hoop-jumping: there are the practise tests, and then the real tests, and it's all a performance. But it does the kids no favours at all.
We'd love to send our little freethinker to a more kid-centred school, if only a) we could afford it and b) I wasn't heavily swayed by Sandra Tsing Loh's eloquent argument that the only thing that can save public schools is an army of pissed off, mouthy, professional-class parents who are mad as hell and won't take it any more.
Another interesting detail is: who gets to design and administer the new educational testing regime.
Caleb, you're so right to be worried. You should see us sitting around the dinner table trying to parse some of the prose on these mass-produced homework worksheets. Two PhDs and a smart cookie, and half the time we still can't figure out what the &^%$ the question is asking. I despair for the kids who are coming at this from other languages, or without parents who can read. It's disempowering and frustrating enough for us, and we've got cultural capital out the wazoo.
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What'll be next? Gakushū juku?
Oh god. I used to teach in a juku. Eleven year olds. It was a weirdly interesting job, in its own way. I'll never forget the time I asked if the midnight earthquake the night before had woken them up, and they were all "Nah, I was doing my homework, so I just got under the desk" except for the kid who said "Nah, I was watching TV because I'd finished my homework early, so I got under the desk too."
But I don't see juku catching on in NZ, if only because those who can afford them won't need them, and those who would need them can't afford them. The only thing test scores reliably correlate with is parental income (excluding the occasional boot-strapping Ramanujan). One might almost wonder if school was a sort of mass workforce stratification replication and pacification machine... nah, that would be too obvious.
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Meanwhile at education HQ the folk are now busy deciding teachers will weigh the cow rather than feed it...
Ah, No Child Left Behind, or No Child Left Alone...don't get me started. OK, you started me. Here's how it works round our parts - a purely anecdotal and highly individual account to supplement the excellent links upthread.
Kid #1 has just turned 7, and is officially a few months into 2nd grade. (He's in a mixed-age class and is doing 3rd grade maths and reading with the older kids). The first set of NCLB tests happen in 3rd grade, so the 2nd graders are being trained up for the tests already, and the 3rd graders will be taking them in the new year.
I dunno what the NZ translation would be, age and class-wise, but these are children who've been in school for two or three years. Some can read Harry Potter unassisted; some are still working on picture books. All are being extensively trained in how to succeed in next year's tests.
Just yesterday, homework was two hours of tears, groans, muttered imprecations, and fistfuls of hair. And that was just me.
A typical week's reading comprehension homework includes bringing home a 4-page Scholastic newsletter on some supposedly riveting topic, like the election, or animal conservation, or self-starting child philanthropists, or life on Mars. Pretty basic stuff - toilet reading, basically, like Time or Reader's Digest for the 6-9 age group.
And then the fun-killing begins, with an accompanying sheet of questions that mimic the language of the tests as closely as possible, e.g.: "Use information from the text to explain why the Wuhan Zoo feeds the pandas chicken soup." or "In your own words, explain two facts from the article on page one."
Which is the bit where my literal-lateral thinker starts banging his head on the table, slipping off his chair onto the floor, drilling holes in the paper with his pencil, and, if it's a really bad day, talking about how he wishes he wasn't even born. Because sometimes there are only 1.5 facts in the paragraph. And only one way to say each of them.
It's so dull, so pointless! So trivialising, so excruciating, and so entirely unrelated to how kids think, how they learn, how they are engaged, what they need to know, what they want to know.
But the bit that makes him really flip out is when, after asking the same stupid comprehension question several times from several different angles, the final question is always: "What was the most important thing you learned from reading this article? And why is it important?"
He routinely answers "Nothing" and "It's not, really." Because he doesn't like to lie. I've nudged him towards "[Totally random fact]" and "Because I didn't know that," just to halfway meet expectations. (He's going to have to answer dumbly phrased questions in his life, and I sort of want him to get used to that, depressing as it is.)
Maths is no easier. Many questions come in two parts: the question, and then "How do you know your answer is correct?" Again, he writes "I just do." [His physicist father assures me that "By inspection" is a perfectly respectable equivalent for this at the professional level].
So, yeah. Not a big fan of standards-based testing. Did I also mention that the kids get recess (i.e. outside play) only twice a week, so as to fit in all the test-prep? That the (generally fantastic and committed) teachers hate it as much as the kids do? That the schools live or die by the results, and the schools doing the most innovative pedagogical work -- this is a school whose catchment is city-wide, but would average out at decile 5 if lucky, and its multi-age classrooms are super kid-friendly in most other respects -- are still bound and constrained by the all-powerful test results?
We're thinking of pulling our boy out of school for a day or two a week, just to give him some head-space to be a reading-addict, blueprint-designing, novel-writing mad genius typical 7 year old. We're also thinking of opting out of the testing, although obviously the school is not entirely into this, as it would affect their ranking in an infinitesimal way -- and may become contagious. (It would also disqualify him from future participation in the Talented and Gifted program, a princely one hour a week, but a cherished breathing space).
His teacher is incredibly accommodating, letting him write "book reviews" in paragraph form rather than churning his way through the bean-counting questions that will eventually constitute the test and that, in his own words, weaken him and destroy the happiness of reading... but that's because of our special pleading. Meanwhile, the other children in the class are stoically ticking the boxes and obediently assuming the Foucauldian task of proving that the only thing that tests test is how good you are at taking the test.
I can't imagine why I've got Pink Floyd stuck in my head now...
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After we watched that episode, my older boy has been on the lookout for the forbidden hand signal. Sure enough, he came home from school the other day and told me: "This boy in my class? He did that sign... you know, Flipper the Bird."
Like Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, I guess, only birdier?
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(Homesick sigh). That was lovely, David.
And thanks for the compliment, although I never did get to have breakfast at Tiffany's.