Why we keep on trying when it's hopeless

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Carly is an autistic child on the far end of the autistic spectrum, who has learned to communicate.  It turns out that a normal intelligence was locked behind an autistic interface.  It was with persistence and luck that a hole was opened for her to squirt a message to the outside world:  "There's a healthy intelligence in here!"

For me the message is that it's when things look hopeless is when it's time to try to learn the most.  Too often we give up, throw in the towel, and walk away.

There is also a time to take the work off of the loom, discard it, and start again.

I don't have the wisdom to always tell which is which.  Sometimes we CHOOSE to take on a project or person to try to fix up that person.  This might be a bad idea.

But sometimes life hands us a helpless or hopeless situation.  I think that the lesson of Carly is that unless we try, sometimes try a lot, we will miss opportunities to learn.

That's education!

Computers in education, or a stick in the sand?

I'm a big fan of Paul Akers and his Saturday show, the American Innovator, on KGMI. The show is leaving the radio station in a few weeks, but continuing in an internet format.

Today's show, with former educator Dr. Charles Schwahn, made me just cringe. The topic was about increasing kids' eagerness and willingness to learn. Dr. Schwahn's new book is "Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning". His premise is that we have the technology to customize learning for students of all ages, and that by using this technology, we should be able to increase our success rates in education.

I'm here to tell ya, 'Tain't necessarily so!

Dr. Schwahn DOES make the point that we need to meet the student at their point of expertise. Of course! We don't teach calculus to kindergarteners, and for that matter, we don't teach algebra to very many 6th graders. Experience, fluency with the pre-requisite material, and cognitive maturity are all necessary to learning. So is interest in the subject matter on the part of the student, which means there sometimes has to be an expert in front of the student who is passionate about the subject matter.

I'm sorry. That is NOT a computer. Drilling with a computer can kill interest. We HAVE some technology that can be used to diagnose a student's gap in understanding. It does not make learning more enjoyable for everyone, nor does it increase student success rates.

Disclaimer: I'm not going to dig out research and statistics. I'm going to tell you about my experience. Let's see if it corresponds to yours.

I LOVE technology. I wish this stuff worked better than it does. I have an iBook, an iPad, and an iPhone. I own my own video-projector for teaching. I have books on ebook, audio, and text books that can be highlighted and annotated. I'm excited about the possibilities. We bought our first computer in 1984. My husband has diverged into being a PC, out of sheer rebelliousness, I think. I am a Mac.

I've also taught students from pre-K to the graduate level, in a range of settings from public to private, university and community college. I was a substitute teacher in all kinds of classrooms for about 180 days. I currently work at the community college level and with homeschoolers. Their ability to innovate and individualize WILL CHANGE THE FACE OF EDUCATION if the educational community will permit themselves to look at it.

The problem is that we have an industrial manufacturing, conveyor-belt model of doing education. As Dr. Schwahn pointed out on the American Innovator show this morning, this method of doing things is exactly geared to getting the results they have always been getting.

What we need is a customer-service model of doing education. "What do you need? How can I help you?"

After all of the innovation, technology, learning styles theory, Bloom's Taxonomy, and training and re-training educators in crowd control and mass learning, education comes down to this: It the ability of one teacher to get in the face of one learner and ask "Which part didn't you understand?"

Students can cycle and recycle through computerized learning and never be asked this question. That is why mass individualized instruction via technology won't, WILL NOT work. Dr. Schwahn acknowledges that an expert teacher is an expert in the use of computer-aided education, that intervention at some point will be necessary, but I'm pretty sure that schools will buy technology with the hope that they will have to depend less on the warm-body instructor. Warm-body instructors are much more expensive than mechanical boxes, and require bennies and pensions.

Why do I think that technology is such an educational dead-end, when I'm so in love with technology?

In 1992 I finished my MA-Ed in instructional resources, or how to use technology in education. Granted, that was using 1990's technology. The color Mac hit the market about 1991. But I love technology, and have voluntarily stayed current with it, as I was when I went into the program.

I went into it hoping to learn how to write great instructional software. I came out thinking it can't be done. (What an expensive lesson that was!)

I spent many hours watching kids using a wide variety of technology. I did learn some things about what interested kids. It most definitely is NOT instructional technology.

I wrote some little programs to test my skills and my theory. One helped kids match the uppercase letter with the lower case letter. One helped them sound out or guess 3-letter words like 'run' or 'cat'. I also gathered up a few pieces of software that were already in publication and put them all in front of kids. They would get about eight screens (or pages) into the software, turn and look at me and ask, "What else do you have?" They. just. weren't. interested. Not any of them. Some of the kids saw my disappointment and humored me and went a little farther. None, not any of them completed any of the instructional packages, however short they were.

The software that DID catch their attention was the software that let them explore. Kid Pix is (a version still exists) to Adobe Illustrator what a tricycle is to a Porsche. You don't need instruction. You can't fall off. Kids would play with that for HOURS on end, but sometimes it was 15 or more hours of playing before they had a picture they wanted to print. In a school computer lab at that time, at a half-hour of lab time per week, that could be 30 weeks, or most of the school year, before something was produced. Not very efficient use of educational time.

Another piece I designed made use of a laser disc, which functioned like a CD but was the size of the old vinyl records. It had hundreds of digital photos and some video clips of animals. I created a piece of software that sorted these alphabetically, and titled the piece "Alphabet Animals". A page would be presented with a list of animals that started with a particular letter of the alphabet, for which there were photos or video on the laser disc. The student would click on the thumbnail, hear a pronunciation of the name of the animal, and the disc (hooked up to a separate TV monitor) would show the photo or play the clip. Kids went through EVERY ONE of those animals from A to Z. There wasn't any way to measure what they'd learned, however.

Research and reading I went through showed a similar experience with older students. Instructional technology worked best with adults, and when the subject matter was VERY narrow. But everyone liked to explore. A very few games were somewhat successful, like Number Munchers, which had a Pac-Man format. But nearly every year in the '90's there would be a new piece of software to help students learn Algebra. These would last a year and then disappear. Friends who were homeschooling tried them, and discarded them, and came to me for math help.

I got myself evicted from the computer lab at the school my kids attended. There was a very expensive and very awful program by the Josten's company, designed to teach lessons in math and English to kids from K to grade 8. I observed about 90 minutes over my kids' and their classmates shoulders, and wrote a lengthy critique of the software. The district decided I should not be in the computer lab because I might sabotage the software. I didn't have to do anything. It was really, really awful! And taxpayers in the district had spent a lot of money on the software. This is how instructional software is implemented in conveyor-belt education.

Not much has improved since then. Learning software packages have uniformly come and gone. But what has survived and grown is the software that lets people explore. Google. And you can't measure what is learned! (Do you have to, to create a life-long learner?)

On the adult level, completion rates for distance learning courses are typically about 50%. Not all who complete a course pass the course. That's much worse than our current educational conveyor belt. Typically about one-third of students fall off that conveyor belt and fail to finish high school in a K-12 setting.

Distance-learning courses are often no more than a syllabus online, where students slog through lectures posted online, complete exercises from a book, and perform as individuals much the way they would in a large college lecture hall scenario. Not much online learning is student-interactive. Getting students to interact is a challenge, even to interact with each other in an online course. Many choose online learning because they prefer anonymity. We find, however, that they do better in online courses when they can collaborate, and we design tasks to get them to collaborate. Many students balk at that, preferring their Facebook page for that activity. Hmm.

I teach a distance-learning pre-calculus course, using an online software delivery system called ALEKS. It is absolutely as good as it gets. ALEKS is VERY good at diagnosing what a student doesn't know and making a student learn it. Students must perform a task three times in a row, perfectly. The company is doing an excellent job of diversifying the delivery of their product, filling in gaps, making the product as complete as possible. It really is a great way to refresh and polish math you may have taken years ago.

However, after four terms of teaching a course with ALEKS I find that my completion rates are no better than for any other distance learning course, and not all who complete pass the course. Students who collaborate online and offline do better. I have learned to make students go do the free, 3-hour trial that the company offers to see if they can learn this way. About half turn away. Still, only about half of the students who begin the course finish, and not all pass. I think this is as good as it gets for computerized instructional technology. If you absolutely must take one more math course, then ALEKS might be a good way to get that course out of the way. That's the best recommendation I can give the best instructional delivery system I have found.

This raises all kinds of questions about the best way to use instructional technology. I can sit back and listen to all of the arguments, all of the ways that the institutionalized conveyor-belt educators are trying to implement instructional strategies, and it still comes down to this:

Education happens when one teacher gets in the face of one learner and asks "Which part didn't you understand?"

That's a very low student-teacher ratio. It can happen in class sizes of less than a dozen students. I find my personal limit is about eight.

At ZLO, where I meet with homeschoolers for classes, we find we can actually deliver a year's worth of curriculum in two, 75-minute meetings per week, for 36 weeks. We use warm-body instructors, and we've learned that technology must be what instructors know how to use. It's up to the instructor to discover, learn, purchase and use devices and software they think can improve their educational delivery. Most K-12, well, probably K - university instructors would feel like they've died and gone to heaven in this setting. It really does work.

Summary: Don't dictate technology to education. It's not the technology that's important at all. What makes education soar for a student is an instructor who is passionate about what s/he knows, is eager to make it accessible to students, with the freedom to teach the best way s/he knows how, whether it's a stick in the sand or a projected image.

Nope, college may not pay, AT ALL!

Here's a pretty dismal article about how much college is really worth:

Is a Bachelor's degree worth it?

Bottom line:
College is expensive.
Consider working for a few years BEFORE you go, to help clarify WHY you want to go.
Don't go to find out what you want to do with your life.
Go when you have a clear idea of what college will get you, as in "I need to have a ___ degree in order to be a ___"
Don't go unless you have it paid for.
Don't pay for college with student loans.

Teachers Unions Explained

I don't think I have much to add to this!

It's the wrong goal, and it's wreaking havoc.

Again, a disclaimer. This is about K-12 education, not about education as it applies to colleges and universities.

In July of '08 I wrote about how a degree in education is about equivalent to a degree in conjuring. There is not a core body of knowledge that is included in all university teacher preparation programs, like there is for medicine, engineering, or even psychology.

There certainly could be. There certainly ought to be. But why does it not exist?

It's because the goal of K-12 public education isn't about how students learn. It's a conveyor belt designed to spit out a college-ready student at age 18.

While there are many things about learning that apply to this goal, the goal is really nearly impossible.

First, only about 70% of the population actually graduates from high school. Then, only about 32% of THESE are actually qualified to go to college. Perhaps more actually go to college, because colleges complain loudly about the amount of remedial work they have to do before their students can take college level courses. Google the question about how much of the general population actually graduates from college and you get a lot of nebulous answers. Many try college, fewer finish.

K-12 education is laid out on the industrial-manufacturing-conveyor-belt model. It should be on the customer service model. "What do you need? How can we help you?" But "college-ready by 18" is the tail wagging the dog.

So in education we poke and tweak and fall heir to the latest educational fads, trying to figure out why our model does not work. K-12 educators are required to get certified in all kinds of nonsense. The worst one while I was working on my MA-Ed degree was Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner never meant it to be a model for educating, and I saw it implemented in stupid, ghastly ways based on zero research. It mostly became a reason for a student to not do his/her homework, as in "According to Multiple Intelligences, I'm no good at math, and you can't expect me to do this." A lot of garbage was written and a lot books were sold, and money was made, but now all that has given way to something else. Several times have we given way to something else. The central body of knowledge about education gets more and more nebulous.

How DO people learn? What do we intend to achieve by sending them all to school? When we actually have good answers to that question, when we stop trying to use 'education' to force a template on the student, when we stop trying to force the model onto the student, then we will be able to observe the student rather than the outcome. We'll have several models, a bigger toolbox filled with real tools rather than magic wands and spells that sometimes work and we don't know why.

But it won't be a teacher preparation program that distributes it. It will be people with skills who will want to learn how to teach them to others. Notice the order. You have skills first. Then you want to find out how to teach those skills.

Now about that disclaimer. Some of the BEST teacher preparation programs are found in grad schools who use graduate students to teach undergraduate classes in all kinds of subjects. Those grad students are given a crash course in how to design and manage a course, grade fairly, and deal with whiny students. Notice they are given a specific set of skills to impart to their students, then they become teachers, usually of students who want those skills. And that works much better.

In K-12 education, we think we need to make students want to learn. Perhaps we should re-examine that notion!

It's not cheating, it's coaching...

Well, decide for yourself. The link below is for an article about a writer who writes papers for students. I find what he says about college quite interesting. Also note what he says about libraries, Google, and Amazon. Hmm.

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

I'm starting to dislike Running Start

Up until recently, Running Start (RS hereafter) was a pretty good idea for homeschooled students who wanted to knock off two years of college at state expense. Now, new restrictions that let the local high school decide eligibility have pretty much trashed the program, and I'm going to advise you homeschoolers in WA to think carefully about your participation.

I teach at a local community college.

I've always had some cautions about RS. Sixteen-year-olds in an adult environment is something you parents need to think carefully about. Assignments can get tossed their way and presentations in class might be something you would wish could wait to have your teen exposed to. And you don't get to ask the instructor how your student is doing, because Federal privacy laws prevent instructors from communicating with anyone but the student about grades. Community college instructors are generally of a liberal bent, and are pretty careless about family and spiritual values. There's a college-wide embrace of rabid environmentalism and Darwinism. Be prepared. In some cases, it's like tossing your kids to the lions. Daniel was about 80 when he got tossed to the lions, and VERY few 16-year-olds (well, let's say I've never met ANY) have the spiritual foundation that Daniel had spent a lifetime accumulating. Don't do it just because Christians should be 'in the world but not of the world'. Your teen will likely get devoured.

But some thrive. They find the good instructors and take more courses from them. They show up in my classes, looking and acting like they are 22 years old. They are focused, wonderful students, and a joy to have in class.

Some don't thrive. I took a phone call recently from a parent of a student who needed RS credits to graduate from a local high school. The student didn't care much about the college classes (not ones I teach) and trashed his GPA. Now the student is stuck with a college transcript that doesn't look too good.

For these reasons, I've advised homeschoolers to wait until the student is at least 17, and even 18 or 19, because RS quarters could be paid for by the state until the student was 21.

That's the rule that's changed.

The local high school, which must sign off on the homeschooler going to RS, determines eligibility. If the parent has registered the 14-year-old with the school district as a freshman, then that child at 16 years old is a junior. Since RS quarters must be taken by the senior year, you must start at 16 if you want the state to pay for those first two years.

Before I make a recommendation, let's look at a statistic.

At the community college where I teach, there are over 800 students enrolled in RS. Half of them should be receiving an Associate's degree this spring term, but the total number of graduates this quarter is 33. That's less than 5% of students who are participating in RS. Generously presuming that there will be RS students graduating each term, and the maximum number is 15%. Not that many students in RS are actually finishing an AA degree in two years. This doesn't surprise me. Despite opinions I've heard, community colleges are NOT glorified high schools. It's harder here. Some high schoolers drown. Some just need from 1 to 3 quarters to finish, but suddenly someone has to pay for those credits, and it won't be the state.

So here's my recommendation.

1. Your focus on using RS should be to get the best education possible for your child. It is one of several educational options you have available, and your focus should be the quality of the education that is appropriate for your child, not the possible cost savings of college, which I will tell you is very expensive these days. Preparing your child to do well in academia is a much more important goal than knocking off two years of college by age 18. A well-prepared student will have doors and scholarships and grants open to them that a student with a lousy track record does not. Do not, DO NOT saddle your student with a bad college track record because their maturity was not up to the work required. Even if you have a gifted student, be cautious and selective about the courses you choose at the community college. Find out who teaches the best classes and take those classes because that's the best education you can find for your student.

2. Do not, DO NOT consider RS as a way to pay for college. As stated above, that less-than-stellar track record accumulated during RS can actually COST you money in the long haul. Those students will have to pay for re-taking classes before they can move on, even if that's years down the road. It would be better to have NO record than a bad record, or even just a moderate record. The university to which the student applies cares nothing for the age of the student at the time s/he earned a C in college chemistry.

3. Four year colleges often have integrated courses of study for freshmen and sophomores designed to help them get to know themselves. At private religious colleges this will include some solid coursework in Biblical studies. If your student comes in as a sophomore or junior, s/he will miss some or all of this very valuable foundation. This is perhaps less important for older students who have a focus on a degree from their experience from work or having traveled or served in the military, but I don't recommend bypassing this for students under age 20. Plan to go to a 4-year college, especially a private college, as a freshman. Spend four years there.

4. Avoid the possibility of that bad college record and use the local public and private high schools more. Again, if you're homeschooling, stay in charge of your child's education, but find the best instructors and get your child in front of them. These folks can inspire students dramatically, and end up setting a life's course for them. You remember who they were from your own education. Even if it's just a single course, get your student in front of that teacher. These can be just as demanding as college courses, but your student won't be stuck with a college transcript if they give a less than stellar performance. They could instead end up gaining the maturity they need to perform in those college classes.

Running Start? Please don't be enchanted by possible dollars saved with this program. Study the possibilities, evaluate your child, and choose wisely.