Taking apart traditional education

Why we keep on trying when it's hopeless

2012-01-26T11:20:00.000-08:00

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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?

2011-09-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-05-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

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

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

2010-12-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

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...

2010-11-13T14:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-06-04T21:12:00.000-07:00

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.

College: Unless you have it paid for, DON'T GO!

2010-03-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

So, the new healthcare reconciliation part of the health care bill includes a *gasp of surprise* large increase in the amount of money made available for students loans. "We're going to make college more affordable," says one congressman.

He's lying.

More money for student loans does NOT make college more affordable. It allows colleges to raise their tuition and fees. More money is available for loans, so colleges can also charge more. Supply and demand. Nothing about this will make college more affordable.

Tuition fees for 2009 and 2010 are rising 14% each year, way out of line for the cost of living. Why? Because more student loan money is available.

Do not think it's a cheap loan. I know veterinarians and other professionals whose education requires 8 years of college who have a student loan payment equal to their mortgage. And both will be paid off in 30 years. This is for folks who graduated several years ago. It's much worse for those who are in college now or considering college soon.

How do we fight this?

If college isn't free, or if you can't pay for it while you're attending, then DON'T GO! If colleges can't get the students they will lower their fees. And be sure to tell them you're turning down their offer of admission because it's just too expensive.

Shelling out 2/3rd of your income to rent and student loan payments means that you'll work, that you'll pay someone else to take care of your family if you decide you can have kids at all, that your job will be providing more tax money to this current legislative climate in which the winds are blowing to spend before there is money to pay for it, and certain disaster for you, the economy, and the country.

Don't do it.

No, it isn't going to change, Part 2

2010-01-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

In my last entry I said that the reason that education isn't going to change in this country is because the primary reason for schools is not education, but babysitting.

Here's another reason: The secondary purpose for schools is social indoctrination.

Ok, schools indoctrinate, and you should send your kids to the school where they get the social indoctrination you want them to have. But putting the purpose of schools as social indoctrination ahead of education? Well, here's the link:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=120622

Yup. You can't be a teacher in our public schools unless you are willing to indoctrinate your students towards certain ideals.

It's one of the reasons I can't teach K-12 anymore. It's perhaps even more pervasive in the colleges and universities, but at least you get to CHOOSE which indoctrination you want to have when you pick one of those.

This is a huge argument for school choice, and explanation for why there isn't much. The educationists want YOU to become one of their disciples for the kind of social change they want to have happen. They will battle for mandatory public schools.

And they don't care about your education.

No, it isn't going to change

2009-12-28T18:25:00.000-08:00

Had a conversation over Christmas with one of those family members who doesn't share my viewpoint on much of what I've written here. (See my disclaimer under 'About Me'.) This person is a veteran educator for whom I have great respect. But having been a member of the educational establishment for a few decades, it became evident to me that the paradigm wasn't going to shift for this person, that educational reform isn't going to happen because of the great numbers of teachers, parents, and community members who believe the following:

A school's first and most important job is to provide daycare for parents. It's the school's job to keep the kids occupied while their parents are at work.

Is there anything in this job description about education? No. But this job description will protect unions without requiring teachers to teach.

It is most definitely about bureaucracy, because it weaves a web of social services around the school that involves family, work for parents and teens, law enforcement, child protective services, health care for kids and their families, and welfare for kids and their families. NONE OF THESE HAVE MUCH TO DO WITH EDUCATION!

It is a job description that will continue to contribute to the breaking apart of kids from their parents, and will give parents less reason to stay committed to each other for the sake of the kids. After all, someone else is looking after the kids and their education.

This person and I have a nephew in common, who is now in his mid-twenties and earning his high school diploma through a community college program. He more or less dropped out of high school in his teens, worked for a local business, then spent three years in Japan on his own, working a few part-time jobs. He has wonderful insights into the workings of that culture.

High school didn't interest him enough to finish while in his teens, but the schools did accomplish their primary purpose of day care. He is skilled at many things, is marvelously articulate and philosophical, and was never angry about his educational experience. His current GPA is perfect, but his interests are still too broad to focus on a particular career, and he is still uncertain about what to choose next. He asks amazing rhetorical questions, can generate them at lightning speed, and yet can allow himself and folks around him the time to come to some conclusions. He would make a tremendous lecturer on almost any topic of his choosing.

I would hold him up as a poster child for my one educational reform: We'll give you twelve years, take it when you're ready. But the current paradigm of education says he's not ready for the world, that he should remain in their care until they can put their stamp of approval upon him.

Cure for the expense of college textbooks

2009-10-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

College textbooks are ridiculously expensive. They are heavy to carry. They are old technology. They use up a lot of trees to print and a lot of energy to transport from printer to student. In the age of Kindle, why can't we have e-versions of them to download, or carry on a CD or flash drive? Why can't we make notes on them electronically?

It's the last part that frightens publishers. A flash drive or CD that contains a textbook could be passed from student to student, and illegal copying would be rampant, especially among college students who are usually starving and wouldn't think twice about passing up the expense of a textbook.

I was complaining to another instructor, Chuck Devange, about the subject of my last blog, and he offered a simple and elegant solution.

Once a textbook has been adopted, the college would charge a fee to every student in the class, and then the student would be allowed to download the text and put it on a CD or flash drive, or just keep it on his/her laptop.

The fee ought to be in the $1 to $35 range. After all, there are no more printing or shipping costs, or buy-back costs. There is no used book market to undercut sales of new texts.

Think of what texts could now contain:

History texts could contain actual news casts from early broadcasting years, or full sized samples of newspapers from whenever they were published. Math texts could contain animated graphs that change based on various parameters that the reader could adjust. Biology texts could contain video that would help identify things under the microscope. Geography texts could contain 360° panoramas of real places. Foreign language texts would, of course, have video dialog by native speakers instead of CD's or DVD's for an extra purchase.

Instructors would have the ability to make their own notes on the text and share them with their students. Texts would be searchable with a 'Find' command. No index would be necessary. Any word in any text could be connected to a dictionary.

Our college operates on quarters, rather than semesters, and we typically use half of a math text in a term. Electronic texts could easily be adjusted in size.

It is time for textbooks and publishers to come into the present. Bound paper is a thing of the past.

The college text book scam

2009-10-10T10:48:00.000-07:00

Textbooks for college are ridiculously expensive.

Textbooks for the math courses I teach cost about $120, new. There can be add-on charges, such as a CD which shows many problems worked out, or access to online help from the company that published the text.

Why so breathtakingly expensive? It has to do with the used book market. If there are plenty of used books available then the publisher doesn't make much money selling new books. So, part of the price of your new text includes funds for the publisher to buy your used book back at the end of the term. A certain number of those used books will be recycled as paper. Some will find their way back to the college bookstore shelf, if the publisher doesn't have enough new copies to sell.

Every three years, a new edition of the text appears. Changes may be superficial, such as moving the review section from the front of the book to the back of the book, changing the order of some of the homework problems, changing the order of a few topics, or changing the size of the page, all causing enough changes so that us instructors must write a new assignment list based on the new text. The original author(s) may or may not have much to do with the new edition. They will likely participate in the first revision, especially if there are substantial changes, but with subsequent editions you'll see more and more names added to the list of authors, and in the end, the work was BASED on the original authors but may not look much like their material at all. Since the publisher will only supply a new text, or in some cases a text one edition previous, colleges have opportunities to re-adopt the new text, or move to other authors.

At the college level, we REALLY DISLIKE this process. Because we teach several levels of math, that adoption process happens nearly every year, generating work for us both with the examination of new texts and in developing new homework assignments. I've stopped including page numbers in my homework assignment lists, which I pass out at the beginning of the term. I only list section numbers anymore. But I still have to sit down with the old text and the new, to see if the problems are the same. Ninety-nine percent are identical, but they may be numbered differently.

If you use the college bookstore's buy-back program then you are contributing to the problem. Buy your books online at sites dedicated to re-selling books. Ebay's division, half.com, allows folks to park a book online until it sells. This is different from their regular auctions in which items appear for about a week. Be careful, some of the books listed as 'New' list for MORE than the publisher/bookstore price. Buy used, and allow for 3-6 weeks delivery.

The textbook scam has another level.

A few years ago I bought several copies of a college-level math text for my homeschooled pre-calculus students. The book covered topics from 2nd year algebra through trigonometry. I bought copies from a few editions back, and because these could no longer be sold at college bookstores because of the situation described above, I got these copies from $0.75 (yes, that's 75 cents) to $5 each. That text is now a decade old, and we still use those copies. I loan them to students for the year. I have all of the supplemental materials, such as test banks and solutions manuals. The word problems are the only part that's really changed or needs updating. We don't talk much about the manufacture of VCR players any more, and the kind of vehicles manufactured has changed some. We get by!

That text was enormously better than the text we were using at the college for second-year algebra. I campaigned vigorously for its adoption, especially since students in that class (Math 99) could also use the text for Math 141 and 142, the pre-calculus sequence at our school. But what prevented its use had to do with a labeling problem associated with the college accreditation process. At our college, Math 99 is not considered college-level math. But other institutions DO label it 'college level', and it's usually called Math 100 or 110. For accreditation purposes, coursework that is UNDER the college level must use a book labeled 'Intermediate Algebra'. Coursework AT college level should use a book labeled 'College Algebra'.

For awhile, the pages in those books with different labels were IDENTICAL if they were from the same author/publisher. To our dismay, at some point in the last decade, the books labeled 'Intermediate Algebra' got dumbed down. The reading level diminished, using simpler words. While that may not be a bad thing, please understand that terminology among authors of math books is already not very standard. This made it worse. In addition, explanations (mathematicians call these 'proofs') were simply left out, leaving the student to take for granted what the instructor was telling them.

So, not only is the textbook of lesser quality, you have to buy more of them.

There ARE publishers out there that use mostly the same material from year to year, but they publish the book in a softcover format for about 40% of new price from other publishers. After a term or two of use, the book is falling apart, so there simply is not much used book market for it. Makes sense to me.

Textbooks are heavy. Are they ever going to go to CD or flash drive, where you just pop it in your laptop or Kindle and read it? Publishers don't like this, because the book can too easily be shared or put online for anyone to download. That would cut into their profits dramatically. For the sake of the student, making electronic notes on your text would be an excellent educational advantage. The ONLY reason why colleges don't demand this from textbook companies is because most instructors aren't tech-savvy enough to make the notes to share with students, and so don't know to ask for (demand!) this capability.

All that having been said, allow me to endorse a high school math text that is likely the ONLY high school text book still in publication since 1979. Harold Jacob's "Elementary Algebra" is still the best-written book on the market for first-year algebra, and it's still in its first edition. There have been a few corrections, but very, very few. The book is carefully and meticulously thought out and presented. There are some cultural references that are pretty old, older than the cultural repertoire of most of the math instructors out there today. The order and presentation of the material was different than most high school texts at the time. Mr. Jacobs led the way to a better path through first-year algebra, and since then most college textbooks have come around to his way of thinking. The homework is just math, and guess what? Math hasn't changed! I have suggestions for a new edition, but it evidently isn't forthcoming. So I supplement in a few places. This book will never be used on the college level because it isn't labeled for college use. Too bad! It's made me a much better math instructor. Mr. Jacobs has wisely kept control of the material so that subsequent editions aren't ruined, and I know that the publisher is still selling many new copies of this text and is making money on it. If they weren't, they would not be printing new copies.

(I'm not getting anything for this endorsement. The book was first brought to my attention by a student who wished to be tutored from it. I began using it with my privately taught math classes after that, and purchased all the copies I own, or they were donated to me by parents whose students were finished with algebra.)

So there you have it, why textbooks are so expensive, why you have to buy so many of them, and why you have to haul them around. I think textbooks publishers should invest in authors like Harold Jacobs, and in delivery methods that don't inflict printing and shipping charges, which HAS to be a huge chunk of the textbook cost. Subsequent editions ought to be available for a download price, like updated software. Paradigms must shift, if we are to have better texts.

The long arm of the state

2009-07-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I had a conversation about paperwork with an official at a Whatcom County Parent Partnership Program (PPP). It doesn't matter which one, because this applies to all of you who use them.

Some of you homeschoolers are using classes from ZLO as part of your 25 weekly hours required to complete the Student Learning Plan (SLP) required by your participation in the PPP. The gist of the phone call was to ask if ZLO would sign paperwork showing that background checks are run on our instructors, because that was necessary for students whose ZLO work is included in the SLP. Each and every instructor used by a PPP student showing on the SLP must have the background check performed by the Washington State Patrol (WSP), and if any instructor on their SLP list is a one-on-one instructor, such as a piano teacher, then that person must be fingerprinted.

I made it very clear that ZLO instructors who choose to tutor anyone one-on-one do so outside of their ZLO work. ZLO does not require fingerprinting for instructors. We do perform the WSP criminal record check. We also make a lot of phone calls to check references and we require our new instructors to teach a lesson to our board of directors.

Let me suggest where this is going.

I KNOW that in writing that SLP that homeschool families dig to make up their 25 hours of educational time. For most students, homeschooling requires much less than 25 hours per week to complete while keeping a child at grade level. I have heard of families recording time spent washing dishes, mowing lawns, cleaning garages, etc. as educational time in order to complete the required time for the SLP. That data is recorded and kept somewhere. What your family does, perhaps how often you wash dishes, is in the hands of state officials somewhere. Could that ever be used against you?

It sounds like a silly question, but the person I spoke to is already referring to the 'risk management team', and that means attorneys at the state level who want no part of being accused of allowing child molestation when all a piano teacher did was sit next to a student playing duets. I'm quite certain the piano teacher is thinking about that when permitting him- or herself to be fingerprinted, and you should also be thinking about it when you fill out that SLP.

The administrator I spoke with endorsed the mound of paperwork for these background checks, claiming that if it protects even one student from abuse then it was worth it. I find it interesting that abuse and molestation in the public schools is on the rise by both male and female instructors, who were fingerprinted prior to beginning teaching. Sounds to me like you had better go and hang out in your child's classroom. You can take any class your child is in for free at ZLO.

Could they come back some day and accuse you of putting your child at risk mowing the lawn? Are you a qualified landscape engineer with a state contractor's license that you could guide your child to properly use power equipment like that? If you were a landscape engineer, would you allow a child under 18 to operate such equipment while in your employ? Could you also be accused under child labor laws of requiring a child to do such labor? Could a rebellious and angry child or a wayward spouse or a nosy neighbor accuse you of any of this at some point in the future and use that paperwork to prove it?

How many of you parents might NOT "pass" a background or fingerprinting check? Would that disqualify you to be homeschoolers? Could the state then come by and require you to enroll your child in a public school classroom?

I'm not interested in "Officials we've spoken to in Olympia say..." because that's their opinion this week. Next week, with a different person seated in that position, it could work out altogether differently. How many of you have had such conversations with folks in a city or county planning department concerning a structure you wanted to build?

SLP's and PPP's might not have been created with the intent of corralling parents into becoming an arm of the state, and extension of the public classroom, but that is becoming the end effect of them.

You do NOT need to fill out an SLP if you are homeschooling. That is not required of you when you fill out homeschooling paperwork at your local school district. You do NOT need to fill out an SLP if you are using classes from ZLO. You hire us like you hire the piano teacher. You're in control. And it should be that way.

As administrator for ZLO, deeply committed to protecting our right to teach from a Christian, Biblically-based viewpoint and our right to teach the best way we know how, I will not sign any paperwork for PPP's, not about what we teach or how we investigate our instructors. What we do is on our website. Click on Our Instructors, and then click on the link at the bottom of that page about knowing more about becoming a ZLO instructor.

I've already been asked by a PPP administrator if a math class isn't just a math class, and couldn't PPP funds be used to pay for that? In my geometry class we talk about how we have 360 degrees in a circle. The story starts with the Babylonians, continues with Daniel in that court and ends with the wise men at the birth of Jesus. If there's a problem with state funds being used while I tell that story then I guess it's not just a math class, is it? All of education should be about opening and soaking our souls in the wonder of our Creator. I will not be muzzled!

Educationists have long sought to disqualify the parent. I remember well the day in one of my university classes on education when they told us that we were the experts, that we knew better than the parents. While I do not believe that the administrators of the PPP's intend destruction any more than does any educator, I do believe that if they choose to not cooperate with the state that control will be ripped out of their hands, and what they thought they built for good will be used to dismantle the families they sought to enrich and support.

I will not be a part of this. I will not fill out or sign any paperwork from PPP's describing or guaranteeing what we teach or who we hire. I will not give them any control, or any leverage that could be used against us in the future. I know that I will be cutting off some of you who maneuver PPP funds to help pay for ZLO classes. They claim they're trying to protect your child from molestation. I'm trying to protect your family from the state.

Respectfully,

Molly Crocker
Administrator, ZLO

Reform, educational or otherwise

2009-06-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

I was given this quote about the time I finished my Master's degree. It fit what I knew then about educational reform, and we were on the verge of implementing the No Child Left Behind Act. That is now largely dismantled, at least in WA and like most reforms is mired in funding issues.

"We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning
to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later
in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing;
and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress
while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

According to Liberty-tree.ca, this quote is falsely attributed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter. Quote is from Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (1911-1998), in Harper's Magazine, "Merrill's Marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure" (Jan 1957)

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/gaius_petronius_arbiter_quote_7108

Parents really do know best!

2009-06-05T16:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, parents who CARE and KNOW their children know best, so make sure the definition of parent is one who really does parent.

In preparation for my first child I read Dr. Spock's (no, not MR. Spock from Star Trek) book on baby care. After the first child I went back and read it again, laughing most of the way. The man was never a mother. But the one piece of advice that was sound was in the preface to the book. I don't have the book any more, I probably threw it away. But the advice was to parents who have had more opportunity to observe their children than anyone else. The gist was that parent sense is the best sense about the child. The folks who spend the most time with the child know the most about the child, and should be confident in their hunches and observations. Parents really do know best.

It's also true about education. Parents really do know best.

But we've grown up in someone else's classroom, and with an attitude by the educationists that the professionals know best. They have spent a lot of time frightening parents into thinking they are inexperienced, unimportant, and detrimental to their child's education, so much so that many parents have given up trying to be effective. Educationists, you cannot expect parents to take their child's education seriously if this is your message to parents.

Parents, you're the ones with the most actual experience with your kids.

So feel free to direct your child's education. It's okay!

Put yourselves in control of your child's education. Be kind to the high school guidance counselor, but be firm. Take your student off 'graduation' track if that's what you need to do to get a better or more appropriate education for your child. Homeschool. You survived the 8th grade, and I'm reasonably certain that what you know is sufficient for teaching your child, AT LEAST through the 8th grade.

Think of how many instructors whose classes you remember for having a positive influence on your education. I'm guessing that, unless you were in an unusual school that there were about five, from K-12. (That's how influential our current educational system is!) Find those people for your kids, and get your kids into their classes. If you're homeschooling, find those adults and get them in front of your kids.

Yes, you're the parent, and you know best!

Educational theory

2009-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

Let's see... In my educational career I've heard these terms thrown around:

ITIP
Direct instruction
Learning Styles
Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives (three categories)
Much discussion on the value of grouping in education, dozens of ways to group, to group or not, group grading, etc.
Distance learning
Whole child education
Multiple intelligences
Artificial intelligences

Ya know, I have two file drawers full of education theory topics.

But it comes down to this:

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

It is not that the rest of it cannot inform instruction. But please differentiate instruction from classroom management.

Ninety percent of what we teach about education is really about crowd control. The other ten percent is actually about LEARNING!

If you really want to know about learning then do it in small groups. Get knee to knee and nose to nose or shoulder to shoulder with your students and WATCH THEM WORK! Listen as much as you talk, and get your student to talk. Get your students to perform.

Groups of about four will maximize your educational effectiveness.

Just how good are those homeschoolers?

2009-05-24T21:56:00.001-07:00

I work with homeschoolers, offering classes a la cart to them, meaning they can take just a math class if they can do everything else at home, or they can take up to 5 classes if they want our organization to do more of the directing of their education.

The most common misconception of homeschooled kids is that they must be socially retarded because they are isolated at home.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

Homeschoolers are often so involved in church youth groups, 4-H, scouting, educational cooperatives, etc. that their tendency is to be on the road much of the day for several days each week. They have to fight the impulse to join another group.

Yes, their interactions with other age-peers is much more controlled. Their parents do actually get to choose who they hang out with. You must understand, they DON'T want their kids growing up in a greenhouse, withering at the first incidence of opposition the moment they step out into the 'real' world. They DO want the sun on their faces, the wind in their hair, the rain on their heads. They just want to be able to control what weeds grow up next to them.

Homeschooled kids more often know how to act like adults, because the adult-child ratio of the social circles in which they interact is much higher than with kids in a classroom setting 25 hours each week. They have much more opportunity to have mature behavior modeled for them, and much less opportunity to observe the behavior of classmates intent on disrupting a lesson.

These sorts of homeschooling families, intent on seeing their kids succeed in a classroom setting somewhere, have wonderful students. They often show up in classes at the community college, having been 100% homeschooled prior to taking college level classes at age 16, and they look and act a lot older than they are. I've mistaken a few 16 year olds for being 20 or older, because they are often far more mature than the usual 18 year old who is taking some classes at the community college because s/he just graduated from high school and is trying to find out what s/he wants to do in life.

But just as often, we get homeschoolers who place at the bottom of our placement tests. They come in wanting a job for which they need a GED or a high school diploma, and are using the college to get that, now that they are eligible for Running Start or adult high-school completion. They can barely read, write, or do sums with whole numbers. The folks who run the adult basic education programs sometimes complain that homeschooling is terrible because this is what it does to people. They don't see the students who were homeschooled and placed very well.

There ARE homeschooling families who are homeschooling for the wrong reason. The parents may have had disastrous experiences with schooling, and they have no intention of ever putting their child inside a classroom. They stay at home, helping mom or dad with whatever they do, and sometimes have a lot of spare time. Yes, sometimes the parents are engaged in illegal activities. If the child were in school and spilled the beans, their parents would be jailed.

But some of them just do not care about education. Their kids tend the farm, build treehouses, or play video games.

Before homeschooling was legal in this state, I knew these families in a public school setting. Regular absence was always followed up with an excuse, which often read "Johnny was needed at home on Friday." In my class, Johnny admitted to going fishing every Friday. Needless to say, these kids didn't do well in school, were not required to go to school by their parents, and disappeared by age 16. They're no different as homeschoolers, and who is to say they are doing any better or worse? They'll show up at the community college when they need a job that requires a GED or diploma!

Before they 'need' that GED or diploma, they place just as well on the standardized tests as the kids who have been in public school all their lives. Why? I asked this of someone who offers standardized testing annually to the local homeschooling population. Is it the test, I wondered, or is it how bad our K-12 educational system is? She suggested it is neither, but it is the ability of the student, any student, to figure out what is necessary to know, and to learn it. People who have never been taught to read learn how to read, write, and do math necessary to their lives. Hmm. It's likely that our educational establishment has a highly overrated opinion of itself!

The truth is that on the continuum of academic success, the top is occupied by homeschooled kids, but so is the bottom. They are also sprinkled pretty evenly between the two. Academically, homeschoolers look like the general population. They just have a better chance of reaching their goals without being sideswiped by the thug on the bus or in the lunch room. They are much better to work with, because they haven't learned the distracting behaviors that kids teach each other in a K-12 classroom.

I'll take them, any day, from the bottom or the top of the placement tests.

If you're not a visual, you're learning disabled.

2009-05-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

Before the printing press, there might have been one text book in each subject taught for the entire school. The way the students 'got' the text book was to recite it, line by line, after the instructor. The instructor would repeat the important parts to be sure they were memorized. If a student really wanted a copy for himself, he could make one.

A photocopier was twenty people in a room writing down what one person was reading. Each of those copiers were trained to form their letters exactly the same shape and size as everyone else in the room, and when the reader was done reading, there would be twenty nearly identical copies of the text.

By the way, an error checking method was to stop at the end of a line, count how many characters were in the line, and be sure that everyone in the room had the same number of characters. That would help prevent misspellings or misuse of sound-alike words, like 'rain' and 'reign'. It's an error checking scheme that electronic devices use today to speak with each other.

"I just sent you a packet of 256 characters? Did you get it?"

"No, I only got 248. Send the packet again."

At any rate, when the copying was done, it was easy to tell a 'published' version of a text from one that someone had made for himself or herself. It was just as easy as it would be today, comparing someone's handwriting with a published book. This is what is meant by 'reliable manuscripts'. 'Manu' means 'manually', and 'script' means 'writing', and before the printing press everything was a manuscript, written by hand. But 'published' versions were clean and uniform in appearance, like today's books.

Anyway, the process of recitation was really important. Students wouldn't be writing a lot of papers because paper was a precious, expensive commodity. Teachers would know what a student knew by questioning them and listening to the answers. Students would be preparing speeches much more often than they would be writing papers.

When books were opened, they were read aloud. With the rarity of a book, one could never know who might be interested in hearing what someone else had taken the trouble to publish, and so reading was always aloud. I can see folks in a neighborhood gathering for the reading of a chapter of a book at the end of a day. If you had the funds to buy a book, then sharing it aloud would be a neighborly thing to do. Even after the advent of the printing press, families would gather around the fire at night and have someone reading aloud while everyone performed the small manual tasks necessary to life and survival.

This method of education greatly favors the auditory learner.

There are many definitions of 'auditory learner', but the one I'm going to use is the student who finds that s/he must recite or reiterate the material to be learned before it's solidified in his/her brain. They don't just learn by hearing, but the sound has to come out of their own mouth into their own ear before learning has taken place. They have to find the words to speak what they've heard before they 'know' it.

Somebody told me a story about St. Augustine, possibly sitting in the library with an array of books around him. He was reading silently to himself, and everyone thought he must be really smart because he could read silently. I don't know if the story is true or not, but it IS an illustration of how far we've moved away from the auditory learning system of the past.

Today, our educational system greatly favors the visual learner. We have kids reading silently for 20-minute stretches. We think that everything can be learned from a book. You must be quiet in our libraries so as not to disturb others.

We do almost nothing for the kinesthetic learner, the student who has to find a way to get the material into their hands before it clicks into place in their brain.

Some auditory learners get enough auditory stimulation through the discussion that goes on in class. If small group work is encouraged, then there is more opportunity for everyone to participate and talk about ideas.

As a math instructor, however, I'm acutely aware that teaching math is almost exclusively a visual exercise. It's true that lots of math is easier done than said. It amuses me that there are symbols in math books that the book itself does not explain how to say aloud. But we tend to work a few examples on the board, turn around to our students, say "There it is. Follow the example." Mathematicians tend to be a visual lot, having been sifted out from among the auditory learners to be mathematicians. Having learned math that way, we tend to teach math that way. We almost NEVER give our students the opportunity to discuss what they're learning. I've found that that means encouraging them to work in pairs and threes in the room, and talk through how they got an answer, or why the problem should be worked this way and not that way.

Let me offer a few more illustrations and observations.

A few years ago, bad weather toward the end of a term knocked out both meetings in a week, of an evening math class I taught. I came to class with a test in my hand. We hadn't had a chance to cover the last lesson of the chapter or do the chapter review. "I need this test score," I told them, and passed out the test. I told them to get with one or two other people in the room, and work the test. It would be open book, as well. I would walk around and teach when I found folks stuck. I would collect it at the end of the hour.

I heard some amazing learning going on that night, people arguing vehemently about how quadratics worked. They taught each other the material, checked each others work, and turned in their tests. I was amazed to find that I had a nice range of scores, and that no one was far off from their average on previous tests. Their learning that night was solid, and showed well on the final exam. The students appreciated the experience.

Although a tiny sample, a young woman I worked with in algebra a few years back was being caught up in both English and math skills. Both subjects poked at her brain in different ways. It was our observation that when we saw her verbal skills improve that her math skills did as well. The math made her think in symbols, a visual skill, and when she learned the skills to explain the symbols, her math skills improved. The work with symbols taught her another way to think about the words, and then her verbal and writing skills improved.

What you need to know is that today's educational methods favor the visual learner almost exclusively. Large lecture halls give students very little opportunity to interact with an instructor. TV is visual. Computer games are mostly visual, with some very narrow kinesthetic skills required. Reading silently is a visual skill. We almost never require a student to recite after the instructor, and talking out in class is bad. I've heard of K-3 instructors who insist that they should have to tell students only once what to do, and that should be enough.

The auditory learner HAS to talk about it!

If you recognize yourself or your child in the 'auditory' category, what can you do? Here are some suggestions.

1. Form a small study group, so that each person has more opportunity to tell what they know, or try to verbalize what they're learning.

2. Record lectures. Stop and start the recording and recite what you heard, verbatim. See if you can learn how to gather longer and longer chunks into memory before you can't repeat what you heard. ITunes has the iTunes University, and there are some fabulous lectures there. TED (www.ted.com) has some amazing lectures that you can watch online and download to your iPod. Google 'lectures online' and find everything. Learn to stop your iPod, repeat what was said, and start it again. Become an auditory learner.

3. Talk with your kids about their lessons. Even visual learners need to learn to communicate what they know.

4. Read aloud. Sit with the child next to you as you read. When they are learning to read they'll be following along beside you, learning vocabulary.

5. Have the child read aloud. If a child has a lot of trouble doing this, find a recording of a book so they can follow while playing the recording. Go back and read aloud sections already played to see if the child can pick up the art of reading aloud. Don't stop this before age 12, and don't stop then if you both enjoy it.

One of the reasons our modern educational system favors visual learners is money. Large lecture halls or even classrooms of 30 deliver learning to large groups of people at the price of a single instructor. This might seem cost effective, but it isn't necessarily educational. Small groups of students enable an instructor to check the knowledge of each student on a daily basis. I find personally that a class of ten on the grade 6 - 12 level is too many. A class of 20 on the adult level is my maximum. I regularly see classes of 35 at the community college. The smaller my classes are, the higher the rating I get as a professor from my students. Hmm. Could be that I actually get a chance to talk to them all. That's an auditory experience.

Another reason why government should NOT be in the business of education

2009-03-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

"The millions of images we have been exposed to through television, movies, magzines, newspaper, and other media have not sharpened but dulled our creative imagination. More than ever, we need to develop and sanctify our imagination, because the truth of Scripture and spiritual experience is, to use Jean Leclercq’s words, 'impregnated with a mysterious light impossible to analyze.' A sanctified imagination will enable us to grasp more than we can see, but we need the lifeline of Scripture to tether us to the truth."

-Kenneth Boa on meditation, The Psalms, a Journal

If YOU don't want the government defining truth for you, then the government should get out of the business of education.

Thank you! I'll have this job forever!

2009-02-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

My deepest, most heartfelt thanks to those committed to making algebra required for 8th graders!

You have guaranteed my job at the local community college until I die.

There are those who believe that we'll be able to teach reading to all 3-year-olds. It's the same group who believe we should be teaching algebra to every 8th grader. They probably also believe that we can start doing some education before the child is born. Perhaps they believe that humankind is on an upward evolutionary path, so of course all kids will be walking by 7 months, reading by age three, and math/science geniuses by age 16.

This is nonsense, of course, evident to anyone who has actually raised a child they bore or adopted. Not many US parents do that these days, so perhaps that's why this fallacy exists.

Anyway, my job here is to teach high school algebra to adults. I really like it! My classes are filled with students who did poorly in math in high school, but now that their brains are older and better, they get it just fine. My part is to help them overcome the math anxiety they learned in algebra in the 8th grade.

So again, my solution to education is to give folks a certain number of years of education, take it when you're ready. Then we won't be stigmatizing folks who don't read when they're three, or do algebra when they're in the 8th grade. They'll be absolutely, perfectly normal, rocket science and all.

Rethinking society and K-12 education

2008-12-30T09:26:00.000-08:00

The book of Deuteronomy is a series of sermons from God, given by Moses just before the nation of Israel crossed the Jordan river into Canaan, the Promised Land. Deuteronomy reviews the history of the nation, reminds the Israelites what they are to do upon entrance into Canaan, and reviews the laws that God gave the Israelites. Moses begs parents:

Deuteronomy 6:4-9 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your hear and with all your sould and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hears. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

Proverbs 2 outlines the benefits of seeking wisdom.

In education, our first goal ought to be the fear of the Lord. Seeking God first, we fit the world to that framework. The scriptures are not the only thing we study. But fitting the two together, we get a more complete picture of God. Knowledge cannot be idolized, as it is in some academic institutions. We also seek to instill wisdom, which grows with knowledge and understanding, with light shed from the scriptures. Those three, fear of God, knowledge, and wisdom, will build the learner. We start with a bit of awe of God, add knowledge, gain wisdom, and we'll end up with more awe of God. It will spiral, and it's an endless cycle. This is the cycle of learning.

I believe that in heaven, it will be like going to school every day with the best teacher in the universe. We'll have eternity to pursue fear of God, knowledge, and wisdom, and we'll frequently be in the concert hall, giving praise to God for His mighty works and thanking Him for being pleased to share His company with us.

How does this suggest we ought to run K-12 education?

First, parents are the primary educators. Their power in this needs to be recognized, understood, cultivated, promoted, and utilized! The focus of the field of education ought to be on the parents, NOT THE KIDS! Get the parents up to speed, and the kids will be just fine.

Second, the focus of society should be on the kids. I've written that there is NO economic reason to have kids any more. A hundred years ago, a large family was an asset. Kids were needed to help run the farm or the business, and it was up to the kids to take care of their aging parents. Today, we have a fairy tale belief that kids should be allowed 16 - 18 years of educational play, it's illegal to put children to work, and that somehow with proper education that they'll know how to show up to work on time, put in eight hours, and do their best work. That costs money! Children aren't required to take care of their aging parents because parents are supposed to have a retirement account to take care of that. If nothing else, there will be social security. (More folks my age believe in visitors from outer space than the likelihood there will be any social security remaining when we get there.)

This isn't bad news for kids. We now can have kids because we just want them. We are at a place right now where we should be able to cultivate every good thing in a child. We have the resources to give them everything they need, except..... time. We're in such pursuit of those resources and maintenance of our possessions that we have forgotten why we're doing this.

Rocket science is great stuff. Cloning tissues and stem cell research will promises to save us from everything except the common cold. All this knowledge, and no fear of the Lord or wisdom, and what do we have? Pursuit of material possessions and knowledge are our idols, and our future is in daycare.

So let's slow down some. We know enough to give everyone on the planet hot running water and a refrigerated drink. The moon and the outer planets can wait. Put the kids first. Run your business and bring your kids. If things don't move any faster than the little ones, then so be it.

Put schools where the parents are, right inside their work place, where parents can see what's going on and provide the object lesson for math and English. Let the kids get their work ethic from their parents, helping out with the business as it is appropriate for them. There will be much more 1:1 contact between adults and kids.

There are a few places we don't want kids. Kids should probably not be around health care, law enforcement and other emergency services. But kids should be allowed to try dangerous things. Gever Tully runs The Tinkering School. See his video about that:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

Third, find time to discuss, discuss, discuss with kids, all of them. The communications skills they learn, the insight they get from other adults, the wisdom that will grow from these discussions will glue together their fear of God and knowledge. Turn off the TV! Get into their faces and help them find out who they are, which is more important than imprinting yourself upon them. You probably can't do that, anyway, because it wasn't you who made that child.

Recognize and cultivate the power of parents. Cultivate the parents. Slow down. Talk.

Stop assaulting family values!

2008-12-28T15:00:00.001-08:00

Let's just start with what human beings do.

From the moment we're conceived, we need to trust the adults around us to be there. Mom in particular at first. A baby grows in her body. Later, if she's nursing, her very body is in tune with the infant, responding to changes in growth patterns, producing more food as the baby demands it.

Any mom will tell you it's a whole lot easier doing this with another adult on the premises, supporting every part of the activity.

Children are made from one man and one woman. It doesn't matter to me what science may be able to change about that. It won't generate possibilities more than it will generate confusion. We'll have a lot of 'splainin' to do to those products of conception, especially if they are smarter than us, because they were scientifically designed that way.

Children thrive when there are two adults committed to looking after them, because one adult cannot do it very well by him or herself. By committed, I mean until death parts them, the adults from each other as well as the child.

From our teen years, we seek the one person with whom we can spend the rest of our lives. Why is that? Is it just a fairy-tale romantic notion that there would be someone out there to whom we could be permanently attached? Or is it something built into us, making it possible for the offspring of that attachment to know that the adults around them will be there, no matter what, barring disaster out of their control? What is there about that security that is so important to a child?

Children need a mom and a dad. And it is arrogant to think that we, individually, have everything a child needs. Dads can't nurse a baby. Moms don't have the power to provide for a child like a dad can if she's nursing a baby. "Oh, excuse me, honey, you're just going to have to put aside those hunger pangs and be quiet while I (shoot, butcher and cook this gazelle) / (am in this business meeting)" No, babies don't do that.

Here's my premise: The most basic family value is a child's ability trust and believe that the adults who brought that child into the world will, barring natural disaster, be there together under the same roof until natural disaster (death) really does part them. The second family value is that those parents will love that child, putting themselves between the child and disaster.

Family values don't come easily. Human beings don't naturally mate for life like some members of the animal kingdom. We have to learn to treat each other well. We have to learn how to be good enough to commit to a life-long relationship. Our example is God Himself, who loves us no matter what, knows EVERYTHING we do, knows that the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak, and did indeed put Himself between us and disaster. We do well to study the words that He wrote to us, the examples that He preserved for us, including the good, bad, and ugly about us. His rules are pretty simple, but not one of us can keep only one of those rules. I'll paraphrase them here for modern readers, and I encourage you to look up the original wording and all the commentary the Bible provides.

1. There are no other gods. There's only God.

2. Don't try to make a god out of anything else.

3. Don't speak evil of God.

4. Let God show you that He can provide for you one day each week. Honor God and take a sabbath off from work, and don't make anyone else work on that day, either.

5. Honor mom and dad. (Specifically named as "father and mother".)

6. Don't murder.

7. Don't have sex with anyone other than your spouse.

8. Don't steal.

9. Don't lie to get someone in trouble, and don't fail to tell the truth when someone is in trouble.

10. Don't want what's not yours.

These rules, combined with wisdom, which is what the rest of the Bible is all about, will keep us safe from most man-made disasters. Those are the ones that destroy people, relationships, and families. God added that if as a society we pursue justice and righteousness, that He would withhold many natural disasters. People would live long, productive lives and be able to celebrate the births of their great-grandkids. I believe this!

Notice there's no commandment to send your child to school. Not anywhere in the Bible is there such a commandment. In fact, the Bible tells PARENTS to raise and teach their kids. It tells kids to seek wisdom.

In some other post I'll discuss why we have schools at all. My last post proposed that schools are places to warehouse children while parents, both of them, are out earning an income, and that the income is more important than the children. Schools will teach what is important to society, and so schools teach both boys and girls how to earn an income.

No, there is nothing wrong with that. Both boys and girls need to learn how to earn an income.

What's wrong is that schools don't support family values. In some cases, schools actively undermine family values. It's what you get when parents fail to direct the child's education.

Schools operate under the premise that they know better than the parent about what's best for the child's education. I was in that education class in college when they told us that WE were the professionals who knew best, and we could tell parents that. Now I will GRANT you that a variety of adults can recognize gifts in children that a parent may not or may not have any experience to recognize, but that is not the same as assuming their knowledge takes precedent over the parents. I often work with kids whose parents have unreal expectations. But my job is to do my job, and teach the best way I know how. I've sat down with parents and said "This isn't working, and this child is NOT ready for this class." I've sat down with parents and said "Please don't hold this child back from that experience." I've sat down with kids and said "The parents you have are the parents you have. How can we make the best of this?" As a parent I've sat with teachers and said "What do you think is going on here?" But I will NEVER tell a parent that I know their child better than they do, because that's just not true.

There are teachers who actively leverage students away from their parents. They ask students to question their parents' beliefs without asking them to question their parents about those beliefs. It sounds like it's a lesson in asking students to think for themselves, but these teachers are really asking students to let teachers think for them.

Drama is a very effective teacher, and TV is full of anti-family values. One could hope that schools would be able to say to students: "What you see on TV is make-believe. It's not real. People can't behave that way in real life and get away with it. Stop watching that. We don't act that way here, we don't dress that way here." But I'm afraid that the values of TV producers have found an audience in teachers, who surprisingly, can't think for themselves.

I want schools to tell kids that teens shouldn't be dating, that dating is reserved for adults who have something to offer another person, including the means to pay rent on a place of their own and transportation to get there after a failed date. I want K-12 schools to tell students they are much too young to be worrying about their sexuality, that they have to get many more parts of their lives in order before they can worry about having sex. I want schools to tell kids that the first person they have sex with ought to be the last person they have sex with, barring the death of a life partner. I want schools to tell students that sex produces children, and that a marriage built to love and protect children should precede sex.

That's the ideal, and that's what we should be teaching. If you don't think this is a topic for public education, that it belongs in churches and homes, then you're right. Parents SHOULD be the primary educators of their children. I have written elsewhere that K-12 education should be directed by parents who choose which philosophy they want their kids to have, and that it's impossible to teach from a values-neutral viewpoint. Every church should have a K-12 educational program. Parents should be able to choose which ones educate their kids.

Go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRGZLSVph3A to view the call to withdraw your children from public schools.

How to get an educational reform

2008-12-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

We will not, CANNOT get an educational reform without a societal reform that gives the parents back to the kids.

If we can get the societal reform, we will not need the educational reform.

Busted families and education - the 'need' to warehouse kids under age 18.

2008-12-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

Part of the reason for my meandering educational career is a paper I wrote for a graduate level philosphy-of-education class about 1991. The paper explored who should have the final say about a child's education, the parents or the state. It wasn't a very good paper, and I only got a B- on it. My ideas were pretty raw, and despite trying to look at situations with a choice-and-consequences kind of view (rather than 'right or wrong'), I ended up dumping lots of personal feelings into the paper.

In 1991, my oldest child began Kindergarten. Despite urgings from family and friends, I resisted pre-school. I had a college degree, was finishing a Master's, had taught successfully for several years, we had a play group and cousins. I didn't see the need to clutter up our lives with another commitment to be somewhere at a particular time when the parent-child ratio was so much better than the teacher-student ratio at any pre-school. I liked doing things with my kids. I could do them just fine, thanks.

But writing the paper opened my eyes to what people think about the need for public education. By that, I mean that people believe that schools are a necessary part of a childhood experience, and also believe that schools are necessary to a functioning society. We've also been taught that the school knows better than the parent.

Well, given our current, peculiarly American view on work, schools perform an important function for our society. But are they the right functions? Are they good functions? Will they protect our society or contribute to tearing it down?

In America, there is a buck to be made! In this land of opportunity, absolutely anyone can become a millionaire with hard work and a bit of good fortune. You don't have to win the lottery or be on a game show. Opportunity plus instinct equals profits on everything from Beanie Babies to iPhones. Among the parade of aliens in the Star Trek series, the Ferengi were the mercenary merchants of anything. If there was a market anywhere in the universe, they would find it. They had 285 Rules of Acquisition which their children learned like the Pledge of Allegiance. Here are a selection of them, from http://www.sjtrek.com/trek/rules/.

Once you have their money ... never give it back.
Never pay more for an acquisition than you have to.
Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
A man is only worth the sum of his possessions.
Small print leads to large risk.
Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.
Greed is eternal.
Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
A deal is a deal ... until a better one comes along.
A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Never place friendship above profit.
A wise man can hear profit in the wind.
Peace is good for business.
War is good for business

Doesn't this sound like US? We ARE the Ferengi! And we've failed unless we own the 3500 square foot house, have a student loan to match our mortgage, two cars and an RV in the 1200-square foot garage and a third car when the kids get a driver's license.

Which brings me to the topic of this post.

Somewhere in the last 100 years, children lost their status as economic asset and in this country are now 100% economic liabilities. There's no financial reason to have a child whatsoever. Children only cost money, they don't make money. People with large families (more than 3 kids) are condemned for putting a strain on the earth's resources.

Since children cost money, that means that to afford them we have to make more money. Where are we going to put the kids when we're out making money? Daycare, from the earliest possible moment. Pre-school, because the word sounds so much better and more productive than 'daycare'. Then school, starting when the child is four or five, whether the child is ready for it or not, and not because the child needs to learn (you will hardly be able to stop that from happening), but in school because the parents need to work. We tell ourselves we're putting them there to learn, but I propose that in our society, that's only a secondary reason, and only one of them.

Financial strain is a leading cause of divorce. Divorce is a leading cause of financial strain. Never-married and single parents are the heads of most households that are below the poverty level. And then our school system preps kids to enter the job market and become Ferengi, and does zero, absolutely nothing to prepare kids to commit to and maintain lifelong relationships.

Is it any wonder that it's so hard to do school? Perhaps we're raising kids for the wrong reason. Maybe deep down inside we all understand that acquisition is pointless. Are we hoarding because we don't have lives worth sharing? If we have lives worth sharing, worth risking the economic liability of having kids for, why do we warehouse them so that we can work to give them more opportunities? More electronic games? A bigger house? We're never there, so it's not like they can have their friends over.

Here we sit, in the most prosperous society the world has ever known. We know how to make money. We know how to make luxuries for everyone of which the emperors of the past could not even conceive. We don't have a clue why we've acquired so many things. We can't stay married until death parts us. We can't make the world a better place for everyone. We aren't even allowed to be the parents and primary educators of our kids. And we can give them anything except a family.

Education and the family, Part 2, K-12 buildings

2008-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

It is no secret that the MAIN indicator of student success is the parents' involvement in the child's education. That is, if the parent is on top of things, if the parent is pushing for better performance, checking up on homework, showing up to school, etc. then it is far more likely that the child will succeed in school.

That's primarily why home schooled students do so well in higher education.

So why is our educational system so adamant about breaking up the family? That is, we want to rip the toddlers away from their parents and put them in preschool. In some local schools, the K-3 kids go to one building, the 4-6 to another, the 7-8th graders to a third, and the high schoolers to a fourth building. If families have even two children spaced a few years apart, it gets crazy for parents to attend very many functions at all of those different schools.

We tend to think that bigger is better, that bigger is more economical. But having taught in a K-12 school where all of the buildings shared the same parking lot, and there were only 350 kids K-12, I can tell you that there was a much better family atmosphere in that environment than in the schools I attended growing up, or have taught in elsewhere. Not only was the holiday program attended by the entire family, it was attended by the entire community. Parents didn't have to divide up the responsibilities of so many nights out because there was only one event for all of the kids. They went to events as families. They got to know their kids' teachers, because the kids would probably have that teacher more than once. Excellent teachers got the benefit of lots of affirmation, and the community worked to keep them there. Poor teachers left after a year, because the word got around about them. Educators had important stakes in how things were done, because their kids were also students in the school.

My gut feeling is that a K-12 school should have no more than 400 kids attending. Everyone can actually know the names of everyone in the building if that is the limit, and we'll know who their siblings and parents are as well.

If the main indicator of student success is family involvement, then we should not make it difficult for the family to be involved in the child's education. We should be thinking through school structure and activities with the family in mind.

I would like to propose that school districts offer both kinds of education, large buildings divided by age, and small neighborhood buildings, more like one-room school houses for K-8 or even K-12 kids. Some folks actually think that changing schools as a child grows is a way to get them ready to transition to high school. I don't know what's so special about high school that we need to 'transition' to it. I also don't know what moving to a new building has to do with education.

My experience says that smaller is better, and families are happier that way.

Education and the family

2008-11-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

Topics in this series will include:

K-12 buildings

Busted families and education - the 'need' to warehouse kids under age 18.

Busted families and education - How much can you expect?

Stop assaulting family values!

Re-thinking society and K-12 education

The family and education, Part 1

2008-11-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

Watched the 1968 version of "Yours, Mine and Ours" with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda this evening. Helen North is a widow with eight children. Frank Beardsley is a widower with ten children. Of course, they meet, marry, and begin to raise 18 children together. This is the 'Aha' moment of the script:

Frank Beardsley (to eldest daughter, who is complaining that boyfriend Larry wants her to 'prove she loves him'): "I've got a message for Larry. You tell him this is what it's all about. This is the real happening!... And if you want to know what love really is, take a look around you... And take a good look at your mother."

Helen: "Not now!"

All 18 children are present, rushing her down the steps into the car. She is in labor with her 9th child, which with their blended family, will make 19 children.

Frank: "Yes, now! It's giving life that counts, and until you're ready for it, all the rest is just a big fraud. All the crazy haircuts in the world won't keep it turning. Life isn't a love-in, it's the dishes and the orthodontist and the shoe repairman and the ground round instead of roast beef, and I'll tell you something else. It's not going to bed with a man that proves you're in love with him - it's getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts...I suppose having nineteen kids is carrying it a bit too far, but if we had it to do over, who would we skip... You?"

Coming out

2008-11-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

It's time to take a stand. I'd hoped to contribute to discussion on education and cause folks to think and question their long and closely held views, without exposing my specific experience. I thought this would protect the little school I administrate and current and former students.

But the persecution of the church in America has begun following this November, 2008 election, and I am no longer willing to hide behind any electronic wall and avoid confrontation. Be assured, the most aggressive thing I'm going to do to you is pray for you, and vote. And ask you to think about behavior, yours and mine. Educate me, if that's what I need. After all, that's the business I'm in.

Today my real name goes on my blog, and you can find me. I'll entertain any civil comments. Name calling will not survive comment screening.

Student loans are EVIL!

2008-10-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

There have been many who have called into question the financial return that a college education gives the American wage earner.

I'm going on record as stating that WHATEVER the returns might be, they will be grossly offset by any student loans the graduate has to pay back.

First, let's establish that colleges don't loan money. Colleges often have nice grant money that one does NOT have to pay back, but they don't usually loan money longer than the term the student is enrolled, meaning the money is paid back by the end of the term or the student cannot enroll for the next term. Student loans are not the fault of any college.

But our US government has guaranteed money for banks to loan to students. That means that the bank doesn't have to pay back the money they got from the government to loan to the student if the student defaults on the loan. (Does this sound like the foundation for the current housing loan crisis?)

Most banks won't loan to a student without a co-signer, which means that a parent is usually responsible if the student can't meet the payments, but the good news is that most students feel obligated enough to establish their good credit and they do pay back their student loans. Most of them. A student who defaults, becomes ill, or dies can bankrupt the entire family with those loans.

Student loans have a long payback period, often 30 years. Students who have achieved a Master's degree or Doctoral degree are going to have a student loan payment equivalent to a mortgage on a decent house.

Yes, you really need to think through the implications of a student loan, and if your college education is worth the payments you'll be making for that education after college.

Here's why student loans are evil:

1. College graduates need to be able to go to where their new job opportunities are going to take them, to be able to apply those newly learned skills. If they have a loan equivalent to a mortgage, they aren't going to be able to buy a house when they get there. Many of these expensive college graduates end up living at home with mom and/or dad until that college loan is significantly reduced. Then they have the freedom to move about, but that can be years after graduation.

2. Student loans may well be one of the reasons for the rise in college costs. Banks love to loan money, the more the better. If college costs go up, so what? That means the return the banks earn will be greater. There's no reason for colleges to curtail costs if students can get the loans to pay for them. This is probably the reason that college costs in recent years have risen far faster than inflation.

3. Who would want to marry $40,000 - $100,000 or more in student loans? Love isn't the same as money, and a warm feeling won't pay the rent or a mortgage. Debt obligation can limit a choice of spouse, or your own debt obligation can limit who will choose you.

4. Women with significant college loans may well have to choose between staying home with a family and work. If her loans are equivalent to a mortgage, then circumstances are going to require her to work. If she wants a family, then the burden of the loan payback becomes the wage-earner's burden in that family. If the wage earner also has student loans, the wage earner may well be paying both husband and wife student loans as well as the mortgage. If your mortgage is 1/3rd of your income, and husband and wife student loans are both equivalent to that mortgage, then you don't eat. If you want one parent to stay home with your kids, then don't take out those loans.

5. Student loans (as well as mortgage loans) make you a slave to someone. You will be obligated to the job that pays those loans back. If there's a cause somewhere in the world to which you would like to lend your assistance and expertise, then you're stuck paying those loans back instead. If God would like to use you somewhere else, you will be unable to go.

6. Your student loan will make someone rich. Over a 30 year period at 5%, you could well be paying that loan back almost twice. You'll pay back the full amount of the loan, and the interest you will have paid will amount to about 93% MORE than your loan. If your interest is 7%, your payback will be about 139% MORE than your loan. Couldn't YOU use that money?

In general, an educated population is a tax-paying population. It's in a government's interests to encourage education and research that not only makes life better for its citizens but also protects those citizens (military). Tax payers in countries such as ours, where the government is by the people and for the people, need to decide how much education is worth, and need to discern if we're getting the return we expected, or are just getting a population burdened with unnecessary debt. Debt will immobilize a nation, as we're seeing with the current loan crisis. Debt can even obligate one nation to another. The US may well be the biggest lender to other nations, but that CAN change. Keeping American citizens out of debt is in our national best interests.

If your college education will guarantee you 50% more income then it may be worth it to do that. ('Guarantee' is a funny word in this context!) But you will have more flexibility and more choices after college if you have no loans. You can take some time and see the world. You can use your education to help folks in out-of-the-way places. The money you earn will be yours to do as you please. But if you take those loans, you may well be stuck with a job that earns your loan payment and leaves you with little else.

Don't do student loans!

Pre-school. PRE-SCHOOL?

2008-09-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

What film was it years ago, in which the couple moves to NY city and the neighbors start asking about which pre-school they'll be sending their kids to? Then we see the mad rush to get the kids into the 'best' pre-school, which is the guarantee to get them into the best grammar school, which will get them into the best high school... You see where this is going.

Schools are institutions, and somehow we've come to believe that what happens inside those four walls will be much more important than what happens in the world. Please don't institutionalize your child too soon!

My kids were born in the mid-80's, which today makes them 20-somethings. We participated in a play group, organized by the local tech college as a class, open to the general community. It wasn't for credit and no grades were awarded. Moms with toddlers showed up, watched the interaction with the kids on different kinds of play equipment each week, then a couple of us would watch all the kids while the rest of the moms had some discussion time on a parenting topic with an early childhood expert for about 30 minutes. It was a nice time to compare notes with each other and talk about fussy eaters, fussy dressers, sibling rivalry and potty training. We learned our kids were normal, that we were doing fine, and we taught each other the finer points of frugal living and shopping with stay-at-home moms and limited incomes. The kids played hard with each other for 90 minutes, had a snack and went home and took a nap. It was really a time for parents as much as the kids.

But what is pre-school?

It really doesn't make sense to start kids to school much before they are cognitively ready to read. If you do, all you really accomplish is to get them to line up and follow each other to the rest room, drinking fountain, and bus to go home. Or as my daughter answered after she finished kindergarten "We learned to sit in a circle with our feet crossed and our hands folded in our laps." And I thought, at the time, that she had a pretty good kindergarten teacher whom she enjoyed. That answer was unsolicited and caught me by surprise. It was one of the things that led to my rebellion about public education.

What if we just started school later, like eight years old when almost all kids are able to learn to read easily? Would we really be losing valuable time?

At the community college where I teach we have classes for adults that begin with 1-2-3 and A-B-C. It takes us about two years to get the completely illiterate adult through an 8th grade education, and about two more years to get them through a high school education. Then we plop them into college level classes, and they perform.

So why would we want to spend more of our public funds on pre-school, when we could just wait and do it later in a short amount of time? Very, very few 3-year olds will learn to read. I haven't seen any data that suggests that kids who learn to read at 3 and kids who learn to read at 7 are very different from each other by age 12.

And if a parent can't handle the pre-school curriculum, then perhaps we should be educating the parents and not the children!

Pre-school has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with education. The pre-school movement is about placating the consciences of parents who choose their careers over their children. Even assuming for ONE moment that the parents MUST work to put food on the table and a roof over the heads of their kids, our education dollars would be better spent teaching these parents to get a better job rather than teaching their kids to sit in a circle with their feet crossed and their hands folded in their laps.

Kids need their parents to be their parents during their early years. Rather than sitting in a circle, take your kids for a walk. Read a book together. Visit the grandparents and get their stories. Bake some cookies or a pie and take them to your neighbor as an excuse to get to know them. Make mudpies in the dirt. Rub leaves through newsprint with a crayon and look at all the different patterns. Google "what to do with a pre-schooler" and see what comes up.

Slow Down High School

2008-08-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

We seem to think that humans are on an upward evolutionary path. We keep raising high school graduation requirements, thinking we are raising the bar for basic achievement (after all, everyone needs a high school diploma, right?), when all that accomplishes is more students dropped out of high school.

I don't have a problem with offering more education to high schoolers. I have a problem with requiring them all to achieve at the same level at the same time.

There are lots of high schoolers out there who need more time to do well in high school. In my work at the local community college I hear from them every term. These are kids who were perhaps not quite ready, cognitively, or they may be kids who just never had a chance to do very well. By that, I mean that their home lives were so disrupted that they didn't get a chance to do their homework. Parents may have been divorced or their families disrupted in other ways, and it may just have not been possible for these kids to get homework done.

Some kids just need more time to absorb their learning and do homework, and six classes (or eight in some of the block scheduling patterns) may just be too many for these kids. Our industrial manufacturing, conveyor belt model of doing education emphasizes getting to the end of the conveyor belt over developing a quality product along the way.

For lots of high school kids, we should just slow down their education. This is true even for homeschooled kids who have the best families in the world.

Doing well is more important than getting high school done on time.

The benefits of slowing down high school for some kids is tremendous. Their grade point average increases. Their ability to take tougher classes increases. These two items are the most important part of college entrance decisions. A good score on the SAT or the ACT tests only confirms what the track record shows. Scores don't have to be superlative, just good.

A student who has a good track record and has demonstrated ability to do well in tough classes has more doors open, both in colleges that student might attend and in scholarship possibilities.

It's a paradigm shift for high school guidance counselors, but if you have a child who would benefit from taking 3 to 5 classes instead of the usual 6, then ask the counselor if s/he would be willing to allow your child to do this. You'll have to acknowledge that graduation won't happen 'on time', but again, the track record is more important than the finish date.

You may well find that a year or two of cognitive maturing can make a huge difference later on. That student who was behind in their second year of high school, because s/he only took four classes, may well be able to pour on the heat and make up the difference as a senior with a supplemental class from a local community college evenings or summers. The brain matures, and magic happens. It's not necessary to finish on time in this way, but it can happen. (I would rather just allow the student to finish in his/her merry time rather than push for the finish line to graduate with age peers.)

Kids who slowed down and stayed at that slower level may be finishing high school outside of the K-12 public school system, but there isn't anything wrong with that. It may cost money, but this is why we should implement my "Twelve years, take it when you're ready" reform. These students could get partial credit for one year and be able to have the state pay for it elsewhere during another year.

For the student who may well be cognitively ready but lives with a disrupted home life, slowing school down to two-thirds pace or half pace allows that kid to get a job outside of high school. This isn't a bad idea for any kid. But for that kid struggling with drama at home, a job can give that kid a little more power with his or her own money to spend. The need to be at work on Saturday can have a huge influence on choices for Friday night activities. There may be a boss or another adult coworker who becomes an advocate for the child both at home and in school.

I would not worry about the child who becomes deeply involved in work to the point where it postpones school. We have many mechanisms in this country for making up lost school time. There is NOTHING wrong becoming so good at something that people pay you for it, even at age 16 or 17. Personal achievement comes in lots of ways. The level of education is only one of them.

I see these postponed students at the local community college, which is usually a great place to remedy a track record or build a new one. I love our community college system for this. These folks show up in my 'remedial' (high school level) math classes, sometimes frightened to death. They did poorly in the subject the first time, or couldn't do the homework, or perhaps blew off school in high school. They could have had poor instruction the first time around. But they begin to soar, and they're amazed at their ability. It's not that I'm magical, although sometimes they tell me that, but now their brains are better. They conquer high school algebra, which usually takes a full year in the ninth grade, in two quarters (six months).

It's really fun when these folks tag me a couple of years later, and tell me that they've just finished the calculus sequence. They are adults of all ages, and now doors everywhere are open to them.

If your child is struggling in high school, consider slowing down high school for your child. Doors will open later on. You're the parent. Come on, you can take control.

No! Not a Master's in Education!

2008-07-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

If you're thinking about acquiring a Master's degree in education, please allow me to discourage that thought. Outside of K-12 public education, it will be completely worthless. Inside K-12 public education, it will only get you a modest pay raise, and it will be unlikely to make you a better teacher.

I acquired mine back in 1992. The focus for my degree was on how technology could assist in education. Back then, I owned a Macintosh LC. It had a 15 MHz CPU, 2 whole MB (that's MB, not GB) RAM, and a 40 MB (not GB) hard drive.

How relevant do you think that degree would be for today's educational needs? Yeah. The only thing that piece of paper shows is that I was able to read a lot of papers about other people's thinking on education, and generate my own thinking in another paper. I don't know how many people ever read my field project write up, outside my advisor and perhaps the other two educators who were on my field project committee. I don't think any of them would remember it.

It did have the effect of turning my head around 180 degrees about the uses of technology in education. I went in thinking I would be studying how to write some outstanding software in education, and I wanted to do that. I came out the other end certain that couldn't be done, no matter how wonderful the technology. I have yet to be proven wrong. Computers and software do not teach. Distance learning is for a very few people. Computers and technology are tools in the hands of good educators, they are no substitute for a good educator.

That was a fair bit of funds down the tube to show it couldn't be done. I don't mind spending money to eliminate possibilities, but this degree did not give me a marketable skill.

Education is like that. From the undergraduate to the doctorate level, we study the latest fads in education, educational theory, current problems in education, current trends in education. We can tell you about Bloom's Taxonomy, multiple intelligences, group learning and grading, cycles of learning, direct instruction, the Platonic model, internalizing education, authentic assessment, standardized assessment, diversity, minority education, ESL, theory about teaching reading via phonics, whole word, and whole language, John Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, Vigotsky, etc. etc.

My degree was in 1992. If you've worked on one since then, and recognize almost none of these topics, then I have made my case. Education as a field of study has no body of knowledge that is its foundation.

You won't have a marketable skill in any field outside of education. Your Master's degree in education may not even be any good at the local community college, because they are more and more requiring that degree to be in the field that you are teaching. I'm grandfathered in. For now. That may change.

So if you need a Master's degree, get something in a real field, like a foreign language, or literature, or engineering or biology or math. You'll have more to teach when you return to the classroom, rather than some squishy theories about how we learn and some techniques to control crowds of students.

Teaching in a moral vacuum

2008-07-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

Whoever thought that the education that our kids need can be given in a moral vacuum? Is it possible to actually teach any subject matter at all without bumping up against a moral issue?

I teach math at the local community college, and perhaps this field comes the closest to being value-neutral. That still doesn't eliminate the instructors who have a pretty big ax to grind with their students. I work with bleeding heart liberals who use their time in front of a class to pontificate. It could also happen with us conservatives.

But look at the book! We see endless word problems in math texts in which the females are faster, richer, smarter than the males. Pick up a used college text at any local used book store and you'll see what I mean.

So even in math, women are better than men. All racial groups must be present in the book, or some student will feel left out, and that will be bad.

I rest my case. Education cannot take place in a moral vacuum, because there is no vacuum. Something has seeped inside that sterile seal, or else there never was one.

So whose moral outlook do YOU want represented to YOUR children? If you send them to public schools, then you will see that in the textbooks, all women are smarter than men, and that all racial, ethnic, and now also any group of any sexual orientation must now also be properly represented to your children, just in case that any of THEM fall into those categories, and we don't want anyone to feel left out.

Frankly, I do NOT want my tax dollars telling my kids what to believe.

And if you don't, either, then let's follow this out to the logical conclusion: We need to end public education, because morality is always in education, and we don't want the government picking what you should believe.

Some other time, I'll offer suggestions on what we ought to do instead.

You don't need a diploma to go to college

2008-07-02T21:14:00.000-07:00

Say, what? Come again?

A few years ago I got a call from our local high school in September. It was the attendance office. "Where's your daughter?"

Since she was attending college in another state, I asked, "Why are you expecting her there?"

"We don't show her as having graduated from high school," said the tired voice. She clearly had been making truancy calls all morning, already, on the first day of school.

"She didn't," I said, "but she's in college right now, so I guess she won't be in high school any more."

Silence. Then "How can she be at college if she doesn't have a high school diploma?"

"Well," I answered, "I guess you don't need one to go to college."

Which, my friends, is true. My daughter, the high school drop out, graduated from college after three years. Now, to be fair, she racked up some credits at the local community college, concurrent with her junior and senior year in high school, while still taking some classes of choice at the local high school. But she opted out of high school graduation in the 9th grade when we pulled her out of a required 'transitions' class for 9th graders, designed to ease their path into high school, with such topics as library research and some school and community awareness topics that included knowing where the restrooms and exit doors are, and who did what and ran which club in the school. Oh, and there was a lesson on where the index of a book was and what it was for.

Do we really need 3 - 4.5 hours per week to teach this stuff to 9th graders? Never mind that she was a straight-A student in middle school in the gifted program there as well.

I told them that I wanted her in an academic class. The principal told me that he was NOT opting ANY freshmen out of the transitions class for any reason. So I made her a homeschooler for that hour, with the understanding that since this course was required for graduation that she would then not be graduating from high school. She was fine with that. We cobbled together her high school education using some classes at the high school, some from the local community college in a program our state makes available to high school juniors and seniors with free tuition, and some homeschooling.

As long as that 'transitions' class was a requirement for graduation, and had to be taken in the 9th grade, I guess she would still be eligible for classes at the local high school forever. I wonder if that's a theory worth testing.

So, come her senior year of high school, she researched and picked five colleges, and got accepted to three of them. In August, off she went, to the one that offered her about a 3/5ths scholarship.

I learned later that I was supposed to name a graduation date, so I picked the day she registered to vote.

For a long time, a high school diploma hasn't meant that the student could read or write. For that reason, most colleges DO NOT CARE if the student has been issued a high school diploma from a state-approved school. Their criterion is the student's transcript, SAT or ACT scores, and some application materials that they require. Homeschooled students can write their own transcript. More on that, perhaps, in another blog. Homeschooled students DO need to have a graduation date. So pick one, and be sure to have a party. When you fill out the FAFSA, answer 'yes' for diploma. Your homeschool diploma is completely legitimate. If asked, enter the graduation date you picked.

Know, that when your student gets to college, that there will be placement exams in several subjects. No matter what courses your student has taken in high school or elsewhere, these exams will determine where your students starts in a sequence of courses such as math or English. If remedial work must be done, these exams will identify that.

Once again, let me reiterate, that your job as parent is to get your student the BEST education you can. Local public high schools often have some very strange hoops for kids to jump through, such as silly classes, standardized tests associated with the No Child Left Behind Act, senior projects, etc. These can be worthwhile, or they can be worthless. If your child didn't get a high school diploma because s/he failed to jump through one of these hoops, apply to college anyway.

You don't need a high school diploma to go to college. You DO need a graduation date. Be sure to have a party and take some photos.

If I had one educational reform...

2008-06-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

The corollary to moving to a customer-service model of doing education is matching the pace of education to the child.

If I had only one educational reform, it would be to remove the expectation that a child should be graduated from high school by age 18 or even 19. Let's go ahead and provide twelve years of education, but let's folks take it when they're ready. Mostly this would mean letting a child start school at age 8 or 9, but this could also mean that we give them some time off when their cognitive development doesn't seem to be matching pace with their classmates, or when disruptions that life brings, like illness or a death in the family, can stall their studies for a year.

Notice I'm not saying we change one other thing about the way we do school.

This means we could say to the middle schooler who's just too cool for school to come back some year when s/he's ready to do the work. I proposed this to a middle school administrator once, who asked me what would happen to all the kids on the street. I told him that his job was to run his school, and that the parents should be looking after their kids. I think this shows how far the state has become the parent, and how well we've prepared teachers to think they must be the ones to raise the child.

I see huge variation in the abilities of high schoolers. We could slow down the pace of school for some high schoolers to half the course load for a year or two. They would finish in 5 to 8 years, but we wouldn't have to dumb down the curriculum for them.

It might mean that a well-prepared child educated completely at home, or perhaps at the parents' expense at a private school, who shows up for college, passing entrance exams and placement tests, gets his or her college paid for all the way through their doctoral degree.

Here's what this might affect:

1. Many kids fail in school not because their teachers or the schools aren't doing their jobs, but because their families are so disrupted that they can't do any homework at home. When these kids come home they might have to take care of younger siblings while mom works, dad is absent, or perhaps one or both parents are involved in substance abuse. If there's yelling and screaming going on at home, you really can't expect kids to get much homework done. These kids need some educational space, perhaps the opportunity to get a job which would give them a little power over their lives and some other adults who would be happy to advocate for them. Let them take half the course load as well, and you give them a chance to succeed.

2. It could mean that schools could set entrance requirements, something that makes a whole lot more sense to me than exit requirements, like the state 'standardized' tests that were the result of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. Parents might actually have to help get their child ready to learn and participate in the child's education, rather than handing them off to the state to babysit while they go earn an income. It would mean that we wouldn't be doing potty training in kindergarten.

3. If we start education later, it can also mean that we can get the job done in less time, as well as less expense for the state. The child who is cognitively ready for school can do it quickly. As proof, I offer the fact that we offer the most very basic remedial classes at our local community college, including levels of math that begin with adding and subtracting with whole numbers. Two quarters later, the student is ready for high school algebra. Hmm. K-8 education finished in less than one year. Why DO we want kids in school at age 5?

This reform wouldn't cost a single penny, but it would allow many more students to get a quality high school education, and would allow the best to achieve the highest levels.

The Industrial Manufacturing, Conveyor Belt model of modern education

2008-06-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with most classroom settings, particularly public education settings, is that they use the industrial manufacturing, conveyor belt method of teaching, when they SHOULD be using the customer service model, as in What do you need? How can we help you?

Kids learn to walk on the very day that God has ordained that will happen. As a parent you can do absolutely nothing to hurry that day along. For some, it's 8 or 9 months. For others, it's 14 or 15 months. The last is almost twice the age of the first. Why in the world do we expect them all to be ready for school at 5 years of age?

If you're a parent reading this, and you have one of those kids for whom it makes your stomach knot to think of sending them to school for the first time next fall, then let me assure you as a college instructor:

We like them a little older than 18 when they get here, thank you very much!

That isn't to say an 18 year old can't be ready for college. Some 16 year olds are ready. But my observation is that the older students are much better students. They've been out in the world, sometimes all around the world, and the experience they bring back to the classroom, the maturity, the insight, greatly enriches their education AND the education of the students around them. And me. Even in a math class. Most 18 year olds need to go see the world before college. Colleges love older students, too.

But perhaps you've read the brain studies that say the human brain is just finishing it's formation by 18-22 years of age, which is why an intensive learning setting is so good for them. To which I ask, Why do you think they must be in a classroom to learn?

Perhaps you're afraid your child won't be successful if they don't graduate by 18. Kids aren't cars. If a car falls off the assembly line, we can just junk it. But an assembly line is the wrong model for a kid. You can't junk a human being. They require careful craftsmanship in the hands of a capable craftsman. And would a car that has been twisted into an approximate shape after a manufacturing error be a good one to drive? As a teacher of adults, I can tell you that I spend a lot of time trying to correct those errors. It's sometimes easier if the student stepped off the conveyor belt before the damage was done, rather than "complete" high school with an imperfect understanding.

Let's go back to that 5 year old. Frankly, I don't think 5-year olds ought to be in school anyway. Kids need to be with their parents until they're about 8. It doesn't hurt them to stay with their parents until they're about 21. This notion that we must send them to school has totally overwhelmed the truth that as parents, we need to find the best instructor for that particular child, whoever that is! Early on, it's US, the parents. You'll know when you need to get help, because the child will be asking questions for which you don't have answers.

Don't worry about socializing them. Kids don't have any trouble finding other kids with whom to socialize. If you stay in control of their education, you won't be needing to undo the curriculum of the bus that starts and ends their days, and you won't be having to undo much of the nonsense that passes for curriculum. You can and should be supervising, and you can and should be welcome in any educational setting in which you place your child.

Most state constitutions in the US have a clause about the education of the young being of paramount importance. And so we have legislated ourselves into forcing the state to do the job and make the decisions that belong to parents. We tell ourselves that the state has done the job when the child graduates from high school by age 18, even though the truth of it is that almost 1/3 of students who start high school don't finish. And that forces the state educators to define what a 9th grader looks like, and a 6th grader, and a kindergartner.

So we plop them on the conveyor belt at age 5, roll this part flat there, screw this down here, push this in there, until they all look alike at the end. We're so good at it that they all consent to wearing the oddest hat and the same color gown as all of their other conveyor belt companions, even looking as much alike as possible. I don't know why we think we've made creative thinkers and capable problem solvers when they all look like that in the end. Collective sheep, they are, drones for an industrial manufacturing, conveyor belt society.

I invite you to step off the conveyor belt. If your child has already fallen off the conveyor belt, or if you were one who fell off, then rejoice! You have an opportunity, and plenty of time as well, to step back, observe, figure out what to do next, and go do it. Observe, observe, observe. Be careful not to try to find another conveyor belt to solve the problem. Maybe you need to let your child rest from the treadmill and not do anything but hike in the woods for a time, or dangle their feet in the lake. As a long-time educator, I promise you, as long as you turn off the TV and throw out the computerized game machine and don't engage in substance abuse, that it will be ok! More on what to do instead in a later blog.

I've got 50 year olds in my college classes. So I assure you, there's plenty of time.

What qualifies me to write this blog?

2008-06-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

My birth year is smack in the middle of the baby boomers, which means I started school just after Sputnik. I grew up in a suburb of Seattle. I remember pretty fondly of walking the four very short blocks to school for the first six years, then riding a bus for three terrible years at a Gr 7-9 junior high school, then again riding a bus for three decent years at a Gr. 10 - 12 high school.

Did I get an education out of that? No.

Looking back, it was amazing to me how fast the educational desperation generated by Sputnik deteriorated into the liberal morass of the 60's and 70's. An older sister, five years older than I, got Shakespeare during high school. They were so happy that my group was reading that our teachers did not care what we read. I remember asking for a list of materials required to be covered for the class, and was told there weren't any. Hmm.

Being musically inclined, I started teaching private lessons about age 14 to pay for my own music lessons on piano, guitar, and voice. That was my first foray into teaching. I don't think I was very good at it, but I discovered I loved it. I had a wonderful junior high band director during that time, and an excellent old-school math instructor. It was the band director who made me think I wanted to do that for a living.

I attended two state universities in Washington state and took five years to graduate, partly because my Boeing engineer father, who was footing the bill, wanted me to NOT focus all of my efforts on music, partly because the math minor had course sequences taught only every other year, which delayed a course sequence I needed to be a music ed major, and partly because switching schools caused me to lose some credits toward graduation. I tutored math some during this time, and enjoyed that.

I taught for two years in a school district of some 700 students, where I was the only music educator. I saw every Gr 1-6 student once weekly for general music (get out your Girl Scout songs and have fun singing), and then did bands and choirs on the middle and high school level. I was awful the first year, as every new teacher is. The first year of teaching is kind of like doing puberty again - you're very awkward and do everything wrong. I also moved three times, lost my mother to multiple diseases acquired in a bad blood transfusion (they weren't screening the blood supply when she got that transfusion about 1970), and was nearby when Mt. St. Helens erupted. Regularly seeing students from every grade, from 1-12, was a huge part of my education about education. I got a much better feel for what kids at different ages could do. I also learned that what happened in my classroom wasn't all my fault. Kids bring in baggage, like everyone else.

The second year followed a summer of continuing education required of educators, and I had a much better year. I was hooked.

But after the second year, I married my college sweetheart and moved to where he had a business established. It would be two more years before I had a classroom back again, but I worked in the music field and taught individuals and class guitar. My next job was in a Gr 6 - 8 middle school teaching bands and choirs in one of those up-river communities in WA ("You know you're a redneck when...") and I did NOT belong there. Frank Peretti wrote The Oath based on such a community. I wanted kids to know something about music, just in case there might be some pursuing a career in that field. The community's attitude was that they wanted their kids to have fun. My job was a 1-year replacement contract, and I didn't get it back, thank God!

At the end of the summer, after a few interviews, I got a phone call from one of the island communities in WA. Did I have a job yet? No, so I went and interviewed the very next day. I was actually hired on the 3rd day of school to do some K-6 general music, one class of algebra, beginning band, and a band that combined middle and high school. The islands have a lot of artists in their population, and as an artist in an arts community, I could do no wrong. I loved my job, and the community loved me, especially after I got a 10-member band to play at a football game. Half the band was in the team on the field, which consisted of nearly every boy in the high school. It was a great place and I have many fond memories, even if no one there remembers me.

That was also a one-year replacement contract for a teacher on leave, so my husband didn't plan to move his business to the island. I rented a place on the island, he came to see me in the middle of the week, I took the ferry home on the weekends. But I was hired for a second year, and my first child arrived in December. When I went back to work in February, she went with me. At first we continued our weekend commute, but we found a private pilot working to chalk up hours toward a commercial license, who would fly us back and forth for gas only. Ten bucks each way, in 1986. It was wonderful getting to work that way, but that was pretty much my paycheck. There was a sort of community grandma on the island who was able to bring her to me at lunch. It was lovely, but it was silly.

So the following year, I took a part-time job as the morning teacher at a small local Christian school, doing a classroom of 12 kids that contained grades 4-8. We used the Abeka video school curriculum, which I thought was an excellent curriculum, but was akin to online education today. More about that in a later blog, perhaps.

In November of 1987, my son was born, and for that year I was a stay-at-home mom, the only year I did not work at all.

The following fall I began substitute teaching in local area schools, and began getting regular work because I was a capable music teacher. My sight-singing/reading skills had been well honed in college, and I could actually teach a lesson in the music classrooms. I also substituted math, and most other subject areas, and that was a huge contribution to my education about education. I learned about teachers, how hard they work, which ones I learn from when they're not even in the room.

My kids were 3 and 5 when I started work on my MA Ed, also at the local state university. More on that later. I had a graduate assistantship to do that, so I taught a class on education to pre-service educators as part of that assistantship. Some of them were Master's-level students, acquiring their teaching certificate while getting their MA Ed.

My kids did some pre-school while I was working on that degree, and to help pay for that, I did some work at the pre-school, too.

I began hanging out in my kids' classrooms when they began school. I brought my guitar one day, kinda pushed my way into doing a half-hour of singing, made sure that the songs I brought in also supported what the teachers were trying to teach, and was welcome every week for that half hour. I spent perhaps 4 more hours per week, doing whatever was handy to help those educators. I knew how to run a photocopier, organize a bookshelf, supplement a lesson, and help kids with their lessons.

I tutored math at a local tutoring agency, using a model that would greatly influence my thinking about the way we teach math and science. More blog on that later, as well.

Then I applied for a part-time job actually in the same building with my kids, as the music teacher for that building. When it was awarded to an English major with good piano and vocal skills, I decided that was my last effort at a K-12 job in public education.

That same fall, 1994, some homeschoolers who had seen me at the math tutoring agency requested I do some math classes for their kids. Since the music job in my kids building didn't come through, we began doing that. Twelve kids to start, three levels of math. Twice-weekly classes, for 75 minutes each meeting. I really began to learn about education. I now administrate that group, and we use 13 instructors to teach more than 40 classes to about 125 students. We support home-schooling, and usually pick up the kids where their parents are feeling less competent about the curriculum. Lots more blog on that later.

I was also hired to teach math at the local community college, and I serve as adjunct math faculty there. I do NOT want to be full time there. I want to continue to work with my homeschoolers. There are many good things about working at our community college. It is the institute of second chances, and I love that part about community colleges.

So, I've taught full time and part-time, and I've substitute-taught.

I've taught pre-K to university level.

I've taught privately and in classrooms.

I've been in public and private, secular schools.

I've been the teacher and the administrator, at the same time.

The only thing I haven't done is be a single parent while trying to teach. God help those of you in that situation.

My two children are grown now, both out of the house. My daughter finished college at age 21 with a degree in biology, and works as a veterinary technician while preparing to do her own veterinary program some day. My son is not yet academic material, but is finishing a tech-college program in a trade, is gainfully employed and having a lot of fun with life. He may yet go do something in design or engineering, but has more possibilities in front of him than he can possibly pursue.

I have enough observations about how we do school to fill up this blog. I'll get to them as I get angry enough to post.

Future topics:

The industrial manufacturing model of education.

Technology in education.

If I had one educational reform...

Other reforms I would implement.

You don't need a diploma to go to college.

Visual and auditory learners.

Arts in education.

Teaching in a moral vacuum.

Who should run schools?

Parent directed education.

Homeschoolers at the top and bottom.

More as I think about it.