bsaxberg's blog

Student blog: Go green this summer!

bsaxberg — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:03:34 -0400

Jessica's back! She's a ninth grader from South Carolina who's been with us since fifth grade, and writes occasional blogs about her experiences and what's on her mind.

She's been thinking about the environment as summer approaches, and has some ideas for how to help out.

One of the great points she makes is that kids who are working in flexible learning environments like those using K12 have the ability to take on interesting projects because of the flexibility.

Worth thinking about! All of you have plans for the summer, no doubt – what can be done to make those plans help the environment?

Take it away, Jessica!

Best –

Bror

-----------------------------

Hello again! Summer is almost here and for most of us that means a little more free time. In past summers, I have enjoyed having a little more unstructured time, and haven’t tried to accomplish a lot in my spare time other than visiting with friends and reading for fun. This summer, I will be away for much of the summer in summer dance and music programs, but I would like to do something else. Every day I hear of the declining condition of our planet: oil spills, endangered animals, the loss of rain forests, the melting north, global warming. This summer I have made a resolution to do something for the environment.

What can we as students do to help the environment? In our homeschooling, we have many opportunities to do our part to conserve resources and make ecologically sound decisions. First, by schooling at home we are not required to use fuel to be transported to a school. My family is very conscientious about recycling, and puts about four times the quantity of recycling at the curb than the quantity in the trash can each week. We also have two compost bins outside, which may have been what has attracted a coyote to live in our neighborhood! We save extra printed pages and other papers to use as scrap paper, and try to reuse our materials whenever we can. My family also adjusts our thermostats to save energy each season and we use our fireplace to add warmth in the winter and ceiling fans to feel cooler in the summer. We try to remember to turn off lights and fans when we leave rooms, but it is easy to forget! As students, we have many opportunities to help conserve our planet’s resources.

Here are a few ideas to have a great summer while doing your part to help the environment:

Recycle, recycle, recycle!

Recycling helps reduce the amount of garbage that ends up in landfills. Make sure to put all recyclable items (glass, plastic, paper, and cardboard) in your recycling bin or take them to a recycling center. My mother is constantly finding new things to recycle, and pushing us to follow her good example to always recycle. Make a compost pile to put your family’s left over food scraps. The compost will eventually become dirt, which you can use to make a garden or plant a tree.

Turn off your light!

Every time you leave a room, make a concerted effort to remember to turn off the light and the ceiling fan. Use rechargeable batteries rather than regular batteries, and be sure to dispose of used batteries properly. Turn off all electronics, such as computers, iPod chargers, printers, phones, phone chargers, etc., when they are not in use. Every little bit helps!

Save or plant a tree!

Lately, I have become increasingly aware of the immense number of trees taken down to make way for more development in my area. This tree loss has contributed to many health and environmental issues. Trees are photosynthetic. They, along with plants, provide much of the air that is essential for human existence by converting C02 into oxygen. Cars and factories produce so much C02 that the trees can’t convert it all, possibly leaving us with global warming! Next time you see a large construction site, I encourage you to find a place at home or in your community to plant a tree or other plant. Also, instead of throwing out all those extra pieces of paper, put them away and save them as scrap paper. At my house, we keep an entire drawer full of scrap paper.

Never litter – and help clean up after others who do!

Of course, we all know not to litter! But next time you see trash lying around, pick it up and throw it out or recycle it.

Walk, don't ride – unless you are on a bicycle!

Need to go to a neighbor’s house? Instead of asking Mom or Dad for a ride, ride your bike or walk. It is great exercise, refreshing, and it saves fuel. Going to extracurricular activities? Plan to carpool with friends!

Plan an event or an educational program!

If you really want a project, organize an event to help the environment. Homeschooling allows us the flexibility to plan our time and incorporate all the interesting things we would like to do. You can use your extra time in the summer to plan an event or a series of activities that you’d like to continue through the next school year. For example, you could have a bake sale or a lemonade or slushee stand and donate all proceeds to a wildlife or environmental fund. You could organize a walk or run through your neighborhood. The objective is not who finishes first, but who picks up the most trash! You could start a gardening club. The local extension services are often eager to help with this, and we have had an ongoing homeschool garden class in my community in the past. You may be able to work with your neighborhood or community to establish a wildlife habitat or conservation area, which will provide additional space for our animal friends and a great place for people to enjoy and experience nature.

Raise awareness!

Be sure to tell people about your goal and they are certain to follow. Help raise awareness so everyone does their part!

I hope this blog inspires everyone to do their part to help our planet! Write back about your ideas for helping our environment!

Teacher reconsiders her opposition to standardized tests

bsaxberg — Fri, 9 May 2008 01:25:09 -0400

Many of you have either just finished state testing, or will soon do so. Folks may wonder, given how artificial the format seems compared to any real-world work, whether these things really do any good.

A teacher’s commentary on NPR last weekend gave me a new perspective on why they help – and reinforces how important they are for K12 as well.

The commentator, Chela Delgado, was an inner-city Philadelphia humanities high school teacher. Her initial attitude about state tests was hostile – her students knew more, she felt, than was reflected on the tests.

One day, a parent came in wondering why her daughter had scored so poorly on the state test, but received good grades from the teacher's class.

“I assured her that her daughter was a strong writer. . . ‘Your daughter simply hasn’t learned to fold her intelligence into a test-taking box. That’s the problem with NCLB. There’s nothing wrong with your daughter.’”

The parent’s response was unexpected.

“I expected some solidarity, that the mom would be relieved, pleased, even, that I was trying to make space for her daughter’s talents. Instead, the Mom said, ‘Before NCLB, no one believed my daughter could pass these tests. They didn’t have to believe in her, and so they didn’t.’

“And I began to get it.”

These tests hold up a light, however shaky, to the problems our system has in bringing students in difficult neighborhoods the education they need. The light stays on, year after year – there’s no way to hide from the continuing difficulty serving these kids. And the kids can be served. Schools like KIPP Academies and Amistad schools show "It's Being Done.

Ms. Delgado again:

“While educators like me talk about multiple forms of intelligence and structural racism, NCLB’s rhetoric tells parents of color, ‘This country believes in your kids.’”

As Ms. Delgado relates, this does not mean the correct answer is more “drill and kill” practice on test-taking for inner-city kids.

“Forcing our students to pencil in bubbles on ScanTron sheets while kids in private schools debate and write essays is not a strategy for achieving racial equity.”

The data from state (and national) tests should inspire actions. Many groups of kids are tremendously underserved, not because of insufficient test-prep compared with other groups of kids, but because they’re not getting core communication and analytic skills they need. Not merely for success taking tests – for success in life!

Perhaps NCLB has put too much emphasis on a single, state-defined, test metric, instead of multiple objective measures of learning. Perhaps NCLB has erred by not incorporating measures of growth in deciding if schools and districts are making Adequate Yearly Progress. Yet the evidence we now have shows where our system is weak – and it is up to the professionals in the field to take actions that get at the root causes, not mere surface symptoms, of the problems.

Is this hard? You bet. Is it too much to expect? Not at all - the stakes, internationally, are enormous, and there is a lot of unused information waiting to be deployed. And, as with health care, we should be suspicious of quick-fix peddlers - literally generations of the view that "We don't have TIME to do this systematically - let's act now!" have led us to where we are today.

As many of you know, we at K12 are strongly in favor of objective assessment of learning performance, as long as the results are used correctly – as evidence about learning, not as the definition of learning itself. We’re hard at work to change our learning environments to help all our students learn more, more efficiently – and the objective measures you all participate in giving us help us find where we’re weak, and how we are making progress.

Thank you all for your help – every year we make these programs better. What you do to help us, quickly helps thousands of kids to come as well as your own!

"The Cognitive Age" - A great editorial by David Brooks!

bsaxberg — Tue, 6 May 2008 10:36:02 -0400

David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote a fascinating piece on globalization that struck a chord with me in part because of my recent blog about schools in Korea that are designed to get kids to high-end American universities, but also because of what we’re trying to do with K12’s approach to learning environments.

Here’s the note I wrote him back.

Your recent column, "The Cognitive Age" was spot on. There's no question thinking, creating, analyzing, understanding, and the learning that underpins all of this is increasingly critical to success at whatever grouping level of people you choose to examine - individuals, organizations, cultural sub-groups, nations, national blocs.

Curiously, one of the things I've noticed is how rare it is that any of us involved in education, at any level, actually apply careful thinking, creating, analyzing, and understanding to this critical process of learning itself.

There is a lot known from the last 40 years of cognitive science research. Yet look at how rarely schools, even schools of education, or textbook publishers, which should be the equivalents of hospitals, schools of medicine, and pharmaceutical companies, actually reach to the science of learning as a backbone for new innovation. Think how different that is from the last 70 years of medical innovation - and how different the rates of progress.

The more you look, the odder it seems: Even overseas, in places we all write about as exceeding U.S. educational levels like Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, or Korea, their success has little to do with deeper understanding and better application of what's known about learning.

Much useful work is already out there, even as far more awaits discovery as new technologies are applied to learning and the mind.

But even what's already published lies fallow: Who will first understand and then apply the great insights summarized by our own National Math Advisory Panel, for example?

Some nation-state somewhere will "get it," and begin investing seriously in applying what's known about minds to their own citizens' learning. When that happens, watch out.

[. . .]

We at K12 are doing our part to build terrific learning environments for kids that take into account as much as we are able - the latest research on how kids learn, their misconceptions, and the key enabling skills and concepts that let them move forward.

Rest assured, we’re doing our best to make sure your kids have what they need to succeed in this complex, integrated, competitive world!

Korean ambition - Come to a U.S. school!

bsaxberg — Fri, 2 May 2008 14:33:38 -0400

I saw a mention in the New York Times about elite schools in Korea whose sole purpose is to get kids ready to come to American high-end universities. It’s worth remembering that even though we’ve got educational challenges here in America, we still have some of the most desirable learning environments in the world, right here at home!

I hope K12 (perhaps through the new K12 International Academy?) will become as desirable one day – world-renowned and respected for where it brings families who take on the challenge, whether college-bound or career-bound or any mix.

It’s fascinating to realize how hard folks around the world will work to take advantage of some of our educational resources here in the United States. They find out about the difference with their own universities, and suddenly they have a new goal:

“Ms. Kim’s highest aspiration was to attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in her bedroom: 'I’m going to an Ivy League!'”

They work their students VERY hard in pursuit of this goal.

“[T]he schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects.”

And maybe the students are a little obsessed with what they’re doing (in a good way, I hope!). At Daewon, kids are on the bus by 7 a.m., and work and study right through to almost 11 p.m. before getting on another bus to come home.

“'Even my worst students are great,' said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. 'They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.'”

Now, this sort of grueling regimen is clearly not for everyone. It actually sounds more like young Olympic hopefuls’ schedules, where everything in their lives (almost – they have a rock band at one of the schools!) is subordinated to a supreme dream. Not, ultimately, a sporting Olympics, but a college admissions Olympics!

Their target, though, is not China (where, of course, the summer Olympic games are being held this year). They want to come to the United States, which has a world-wide reputation for higher education excellence.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating if some American K–12 education environment could wind up with the same reputation? Hey, you know where I’m going with this – I think K12 should try out for it! After all, we’ve just launched the K12 International Academy – why shouldn’t the world’s students who’re up for a great education think of K12 as the best around, hmmm?

Maybe we've got our own Olympian dream to chase. . .

Excelsior!

Teenagers' views of writing - It matters!

bsaxberg — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:07:29 -0400

A fascinating survey of teenagers about their views of writing and technology was recently completed by the College Board, the National Commission on Writing, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Far from thinking “21st Century Skills” mean bagging “all that old writing stuff,” what’s great is how realistic kids are about the limits of their informal writing, the importance of formal writing, and the need for more and better writing instruction in their lives.

The report was based on eight focus groups, which led to the development of a phone survey given to 700 teenagers and parents across the United States late last year. It gives a fascinating picture of how kids view technology and writing.

85% of kids do some kind of electronic text-based personal communication (on social networking web-sites, text messages, and e-mail), but 60% of the kids doing this don’t view it as “writing.” As one student in a focus group put it:

“You’re not writing enough for it to be called writing. Unless you’re, I don’t know, unless you’re like describing something, if you want to tell your whole life story, or you’re saying what happened . . . but it’s got to be long for it to be considered writing.”

In addition, only 15% think their informal electronic communication has helped their real writing skills – “It’s just like a conversation,” said one student, not really part of systematic communication.
They do feel that writing, real writing, is important for their futures – 86% felt it was important or essential. As one student said:

“Yeah, you need to write. You need to be able to write, but it’s not a guarantee you will do well. Writing well is a part of doing well.”

Most of them have multiple writing assignments during their week in school – 50% said daily, 35% several times per week. However, most of these pieces are short – 82% reported less than a page, typically – few have more extensive writing assignments at school.
Most (73%) feel that having more writing at school would actually help them improve their writing – and this is felt by even more students in lower socioeconomic levels. Although students are writing frequently, most of what they write is very short – they’re not getting much experience with longer, structured, thinking that evolves into convincing communication. And they want more writing practice and coaching to improve their writing.

This is all very encouraging! Sometimes adults ask why the K12 curriculum spends so much time on writing and Language Arts – two hours per day, nominally, from kindergarten through middle school for most kids, with quite a bit of writing throughout. Learning to write well is challenging, and, as kids themselves recognize, is a key to success in almost any line of work in America. Being clear and convincing about your views on a topic for an audience has tremendous usefulness to make things happen, to plan, to inspire, and more. It’s one of those things that builds, year by year, piece by piece, through practice and feedback – there’s just no simple shortcut to this expertise.

It’s great to see that most kids “get” this, even in our supposedly technology-driven media world. Too often adults seem to think kids generally are way off-course with their priorities. What’s clear from this survey is that most kids (not all!) see clearly what’s important for their futures and what’s not. They still love their abbreviations and FaceBook pages, but they welcome motivating instruction, serious feedback, and serious practice on important skills for their future.

That’s what we aim to provide in our K12 learning environments – sufficient practice, good feedback, focused instruction on the key skills that will help kids succeed for the long haul. These fundamental skills, whether for communication or analysis, qualitative or quantitative, enhance any media they’re deployed in, whether paper and pencil, PowerPoint, blog, or World of Warcraft guildhall wiki.

Writing matters – kids know it – we all need to help them get what they need!

America's worst Mom?

bsaxberg — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:46:26 -0400

“America’s Worst Mom?” relates a newspaper columnist’s experience letting her nine-year-old son find his way home in Manhattan from Bloomingdale’s, at his request. This sparked outrage, television interviews, odd stories – but also memories from many of us about how differently kids were treated when we were growing up, even though risks were not that much lower (if at all).

Would YOU let your under-10 children find their way home (at their request) in the big city you lived in?

I was led to this article by Lenore Skenazy via Joanne Jacobs' most interesting blog. As related in Ms. Skenazy’s original article:

“So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

“No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn't want to lose it. And no, I didn't trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn't do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, ‘Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I'll abduct this adorable child instead.’"

“Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.”

Her follow-up story gives a variety of reactions she’s received – no surprise. For example:

“One lawyer in an upscale suburb of New York, for instance, ‘lets’ his 11-year-old walk one block to her best friend's house — but she has to call the minute she arrives safely, as if she's been dodging sniper fire.

“A mom in Atlanta proudly said that she doesn't let her daughter walk down the block to the mailbox, because there's just too much ‘opportunity’ for her to be snatched and killed. She's keeping her kid prisoner, but to her, I'm the nutty mom.”

And more, pro and con.

Years ago, my wife and I talked about this issue as we were thinking about policies for our kids. Both of us remembered vast freedom to roam when we were kids: Denise grew up in what was then countryside, near Puyallup, in Washington State, and she played in the forests with her dog all the time as a kid. I grew up in Seattle, and I remember saying, “See yah!” to my mom as an elementary school kid, and then going out to ride my bike for miles around our city neighborhood until it was dark, or playing ball on the hillside of a local park with an ever-changing mix of the local kids until it was dark.

Yet Denise and I did set different policies for our own kids, both when we lived in New York and in Los Angeles: playdates were set, kids were accompanied on even the smallest excursion around the block, and, frankly, until we moved to Virginia four years ago, they were never out of sight of one of us or a trusted other adult.

For us, it was not a matter of fearing abduction – we didn’t have to get that far. It was a matter of convention – it’s just how parenting seemed to be done in the big city those days. Plus, too much traffic to “go out and play” it seemed to us.

Once we moved here to McLean, in Virginia, we’ve been able to relax a bit more – and, of course, our kids are getting older. Our two older kids (teenagers) regularly take the subway back from Washington, D.C., and we pick them up from the local station. Does it scare you to hear that we let our youngest son, 12, actually walk home the quarter mile from his suburban school bus stop to our house? Oh my!

As Ms. Skenazy points out:

“Nationally, Justice Department statistics show that the number of kids getting abducted by strangers actually holds pretty steady over the years. In 2006, that number was 115, and 40% of them were killed.

“The killing of any child is a horrible tragedy. It makes my stomach plunge to even think about it. But when the number is about 50 kids killed in a country of 300 million, it's also a very random, rare event. Far more people die from falling off the bed or other furniture. So for safety's sake, should we all start sleeping on the floor?”

Ahh, the challenge of statistics and facts versus perception and fear – none of us hesitate to jump in cars with our kids, yet more than 1,500 children aged 14 and under died in automobile accidents in 2003 – 30 times the death risk from abduction!

And yet – doesn’t it still make you queasy, to let a nine-year old loose in mid-town Manhattan, to find his way home?

What’s it like where you are? What’s your balance of independence and safety for your kids who wish to wander?

Butterfly wings, chaos, and K12

bsaxberg — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:32:55 -0400

I noticed the obituary in the New York Times recently of Edward Lorenz, one of the recent originators of what has come to be a huge field of research in mathematics, physics, biology, and even art: chaos theory. How he came to do this work, and the work itself, has deep insights for science, the world, and perhaps the potential for your own impact on your children.

Dr. Lorenz was a research meteorologist in the early 1960s trying to predict weather patterns using complex equations and simulations of them on the (then new) digital computers. The theory was that if the equations were well enough understood, with accurate enough data, you could predict the weather for extended periods of time through the simulations.

As the article relates, one day Dr. Lorenz decided to re-run one of his simulations starting from the middle (computers back in the early 1960s were very slooowwwww). He worked from print-outs of the original run’s mid-point data, and entered that data into the same simulation. He expected to get the same results.

He did not.

As you can see from the figure above (from another interesting article about chaos theory and fractals), instead of meekly following the track of his original simulation, about mid-way along, the re-run began to deviate – and gave rise to completely different behavior, not remotely close to the original.

While investigating, he discovered that his print-outs only showed three significant digits (e.g., “.0371”) while the data in the computer was actually being kept at six significant digits (“.0371256”). Such small differences in the start of the simulation led to tremendous differences in final outcomes!

The implications of his results were not fully appreciated until a decade later. As quoted in the New York Times article:

“'When it finally penetrated the community, that was what started people to really start to pay attention to this and led to tremendous development,' said Edward Ott, a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. 'He demonstrated a chaotic model in a real situation.'”

Indeed, it is to Lorenz himself we owe one of the best descriptions of the implications:

“At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, he gave a talk with a title that captured the essence of his ideas: ‘Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?’”

What has since emerged from this butterfly of an observation is a tornado of work on how simple equations that model the real world lead to real-world behaviors that cannot be predicted. Even more fascinating, such models are not accidents of very specific choices of constants – it’s not like dividing by zero, where if you only divided by something very close to zero you’d be “OK.” Instead, as you wiggle the parameters in these equations, you still get the same “type” of chaotic behavior.

What? There are “types” of chaotic behavior? Indeed – it turns out there’s a whole menagerie of similar-type chaotic behaviors out there, and research to describe even more of them – sets of equations (often tied to real-world phenomena, like weather, biology, or turbulence) that lead to unpredictable behavior in a predictable way, with predictable features!

This last, confusing, phrase connects directly to the nature of science, I think:

The Newtonian hope for utter predictability based on determined equations just isn’t right, scientifically. Many scientific models cannot be accurate enough to predict all behavior, even for relatively simple systems at macroscopic scales (e.g., even without assuming quantum effects).
This does not mean there is no utility to scientific models of complex systems. What’s fascinating about chaos theory is how much can be known about the characteristics of a specific class of random behavior, even while the individual changes and movements of entities are not predictable over extended periods of time.
This is a way of thinking about what science itself can do – it cannot predict everything, but it can predict useful information (including limits to behavior), even in cases where details are (predictably!) unknowable.

Lorenz's discovery itself illustrates something about science: Things that are unexpected and mysterious often contain the germ of something exciting, important, and knowable. Far from rejecting his initial curious observation, Dr. Lorenz was intrigued, and began to characterize what was unexpected, leading to a whole new domain of inquiry and way of understanding the world.

What about the implications for you, and your children, as you continue your journey within a K12 learning environment? You and your children may not become chaos theorists, but you too may participate in a form of the butterfly effect:

Your family’s choice to work hard within K12 means your students are exposed to all manner of knowledge they might never have come in contact with in other learning environments – medieval history in third grade, or understanding in first grade how important the kelp beds are to the oceans.
The many hours you and your students spend on K12 work are not easy. You never know which hour will fire your child’s imagination now or in the future.
Still, think of all those knowledge-based “butterfly effects” you’re providing that might lead to the wind behind their future success!

Lessons on learning you can use!

bsaxberg — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:20:17 -0400

A magazine writer recently was put in touch with me, with the assignment of finding tips for parents on how they can lift their kids’ performance from average to "A" level. An interesting challenge – cognitive science provides some useful insights. What would your suggestions be?

Whether or not that writer uses these thoughts, it seems worth putting down these general insights from cognitive science work I'm familiar with.

Praise effort, not smarts. It turns out there’s good research (from Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford among others) that focusing on kids’ efforts is far more productive than the usual generic “You did better – you’re so smart!” The reason is straightforward, if you think about it. If your boss praises a piece you do by saying, “You’re so smart!”, what are you going to do tomorrow to make this happen again? It’s not clear – indeed, once you think you’ve been labeled as “smart,” all you can be sure of is that you’re likely to do something boneheaded that will create evidence that you’re NOT smart. Praise about being “smart” tends to make kids averse to challenges, and actually can cause them to choke during tests – they keep thinking about “not being smart.” Praise for working hard works the other way around – all of us, kids and adults, can work hard again!
When you praise for effort, make it be real. Kids are amazingly sensitive to false praise – indeed, it causes kids to discount real praise later on. So pay attention to the work that went into something, and praise that work – that’s how you’ll get true hard work again. You create trust with your child that “you’re really with me – you see when I sweat, for real.”
Expect some things your child is trying to learn to take time, practice, and, indeed, sweat. Learning to read for comprehension, learning to write an argument or essay, a variety of concepts in mathematics (especially fractions) – these are not easy for almost any young mind, and yet can be mastered with time, practice and effort. Don’t focus on how long it’s taking to learn something – focus (again) on the effort. (Spot the theme!)
Don’t bug your kids about their “talents,” or worry too much about where their apparent “talents” might take them (the athletic scholarship trap, for example). Talent for a young person turns out to have very little to do with what they can wind up as experts at. What creates serious expertise is a large amount of deliberate practice – that’s what Tiger Woods does, thinking about his golf swing every time he swings, and trying to make it better, month by month, year by year. Indeed, cognitive scientists who’ve looked at a wide variety of experts finds that early talent is a very small predictor of later expertise; rather, the key thing that is common to almost all experts is 10,000+ hours (roughly 10+ years) of deliberate practice in their area.
This suggests a different approach: if kids are really obsessed by something, even if they’re not very good at it when they start, you may not want to discourage them. It’s the practice that creates the competence, after all – and the key (for a child or an adult) is to have the will and interest to spend the 10,000+ hours of practice to become expert. If they really love something, this can happen – and it is amazing how an interested child can bloom (not just in that area, but in all areas) when given full rein to pursue that interest.
Don’t be afraid to try a new learning environment for your child. If your current school situation isn’t working well for your child, trust your instinct, and start to look around. What may be statistically a terrific school, or school system, may simply not fit your child – you’re raising that specific child, not a statistically average child! And you may well find that what works for one of your children, is a disaster for another. These days, there are many options for education: regular public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, private schools, virtual schools (K12’s specialty, of course, if you have a family that fits this novel approach). For those of you already using K12, don’t be afraid to change the instructional day: shift topics from the morning to the evening, or try doing them upside down, or while bouncing. You’d be amazed how a change in perspective can lift learning!
Related to the above, and may be obvious: your children are likely to be different from each other, and different from you. You may have loved athletics, and your best friends may be teammates from your high school varsity teams – your child may be more comfortable with a few close friends, and solo sports, or simply healthy activities, not back-slapping team sports. “Don’t fight the tape” as stockbrokers would say – if you start to see your child has characteristics different than yours, be the adult: help them achieve their maximum potential, not yours!
[This one I forgot to include for the writer – you get the advantage!] Learn consistently, day by day, not all in a rush. Minds learn more if the same amount of time spent on a topic is split up over several days, compared with “cramming” on one day – so don’t put off all the math lessons for weeks, and then have a math weekend, or put off a paper until the night before, and then do it all in a big crush. Yes, you may get through the task all in one weekend, but it won’t be well cemented (your mind needs sleep to cement things, it seems), and could easily be lost during the next fallow period. Better to take regular, small, bites at complex skills, tasks, and understanding, with time in between.

Many of you are already taking advantage of one or more of these ideas – indeed, the K12 learning environment is designed to help you get the best from your kids, with real practice available to build real skills, year in, year out. Still, it never hurts to be reminded!

And now, to you: what are your suggestions for lifting kids academic performance, especially in a K12 learning environment?

Sobering statistics on metropolitan center drop out rates

bsaxberg — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:57:26 -0400

A week ago or so a group called America’s Promise Alliance released a report showing a consistent approach to drop-out calculations from high school for our 50 top metropolitan areas. The report makes for bracing reading – and it’s remarkable how what drop-outs themselves say they needed in high-school and perhaps before ties to what K12 is able to support with families.

[This blog is actually a bit of an experiment – I did an audio version of this blog on an Elluminate session a few days ago, essentially a podcast. See which one you prefer! ;-)]

The report, Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation, takes a consistent approach to measuring drop-out rates that allows them to estimate what percentage of kids entering ninth grade are likely to end up with a high school diploma.

Note that there are many challenges with calculations of high school drop-out rates in a nation where we do not have a single academic record that follows kids around wherever they go. Kids can look like drop-outs if:

They actually are: they stayed in the area, but stopped going to school at all. They might go to work, follow their dreams (or not) in other ways, but are not going to any kind of formal school.
They moved out of an area where they were supposed to be counted – if you have a net depopulation, for example, even if those kids wind up getting high school diplomas somewhere else, their numbers end up confused with drop-outs.
They transfer to a private school, or to home schooling – in most metropolitan areas, this means they disappear from the public school counts at the end of the year.
They get a GED instead of a formal high school diploma – I believe some districts track this, but many/most do not.

Even with these limitations (and they are real), looking at the top 50 metropolitan areas with a consistent lens is instructive. According to this report:

Overall, across the country, all demographic groups, about 70 percent of kids who start ninth grade wind up with a high school diploma. This is not far off from other reports.
When you focus on major metropolitan areas only, and look at the main, central, school districts, you see, instead, an average graduation rate of only 52 percent As the report points out, nearly a coin-flip!
Some large urban areas, like Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Baltimore, appear to have much worse graduation rates – fewer than 35 percent of students appear to eventually get a HS diploma from these systems. One in three!
When you compare the central urban areas to the suburban areas, you see a large difference in graduation rates - almost always the suburban graduation rates are higher (theirs mostly hover between 75 to 85 percent). On average, the suburban areas are 17 percentage points higher – and in some cases (e.g., Baltimore) are much higher: 47 percentage points higher!

This is enormously frustrating. As I’ve written about before, the ACT organization has found that these days for a good trade job, one that can support a family of four in America, you need almost the same level of mathematics, reading, and composition skills as you need to do acceptably in college. All jobs have become more complex, so not graduating with skills needed means serious limitations.

I’ve also written about how such high drop-out rates can come to happen. Many of us might think it’s something about the students or families – “they’re not working.” It is more complicated than that, although disordered homes, neighborhoods, and values are all tied up too. There are problems with how instruction is handled, as well as overall policies that wind up punishing schools that do not follow administratively convenient solutions to numbers problems, and communication problems with families with limited English skills that lead to frustration and sub-optimal decisions all around.

Those who leave regret it, too. The Gates Foundation did a very insightful survey of almost 500 dropouts to understand why these students left, how they view it now, and what they think might have kept them in school.

A few key highlights:

They now recognize what they’re missing. More than 80 percent said they now believe graduating from high school is important to success in life, and almost three-quarters said if they were able to relive the experience, they would have stayed in school
It is not the case that most of these kids were academic failures (at least by their own report): nearly 90 percent said they had passing grades, and 70 percent said they could have graduated if they had tried
Much of the time the failure was tied to expectations and values. Two-thirds said they were not motivated to work hard, and would have worked harder if more had been demanded of them.

What is fascinating is what these students say would have made a difference in the learning environment. Quite a few (more than a third) felt they had too much freedom and not enough rules in their lives, suggesting a need for structure to help guide learning. Three-quarters felt that individualized instruction would have made a difference, and

“71 percent favored better communication between parents and schools and more involvement from parents”

To me, that last one is especially telling: Without a learning environment that stretched from the school to the home and back again, these kids felt lost, without structure, and did not know how to get help for their individual problems with learning.

Compare what these kids who dropped out say they wish they had with the K12 learning environment your children are in. Challenging as it is, it provides personalized feedback, many places to get help, and, ultimately, an integration with family to make sure parents and students are involved together. These are many of the key elements needed to keep students motivated and in school.

No learning environment is ideal for everyone, of course. But it is sad indeed to contemplate the huge numbers of kids who are falling out of high school in our urban centers who would take on more challenges, if only it were expected of them and they were supported in this by the adults in their lives.

Travel and change

bsaxberg — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 15:37:02 -0400

Traveling with kids is another way to make changes happen for them – changes in location, sure, but changes in perspective are even more profound. It’s hard to get there without going there, too.

Can you tell I’ve been away for a bit again with family? This time to the region of Spain near Barcelona.

As I’ve noted before (around trips to Hawaii, France, and Italy), about a year ago, my wife and I decided we needed to invest in building travel memories with our kids before they can refuse to come with us (a highly anticipated future conversation: "Dad, I've been wondering my whole life - why did you think it made sense to take me there?"). My eldest son, Haakon, is within a year or so of heading to college, and so now is the time.

What we’re trying to do is not merely travel. That’s useful (but painful) practice in logistics and finance – a mere geographic displacement. What we’re looking to do is change. Change of location is the least (and the nastiest) of it – we would not be getting enough return on our investment if all we did was move our physical selves around and around, with no internal changes to show for it (and I don't mean nausea!).

Teacups in PortAventura Park, near Barcelona

We’re looking to move other kinds of centers – seeing the world through different eyes, with travel as a whole-body immersion medium.

Take something simple like food. Our family has a familiar approach to food, spearheaded by our magnificent in-house chef, my wife Denise:

The chef in her element

However, Barcelona turns out to have some of the finest innovations in preparing and presenting food in the world, especially easy to sample with the small, Spanish dishes called tapas.

And, yes, our kids (at least the two eldest) were willing to have a go

Ready to pilot test a new dish

. . .even when they weren't quite sure what they were munching down!

Yes, this is a deconstructed and reconstructed beef dish.

What you eat goes inside– where you live and work is outside. Here, too, by traveling you expand your view of living in the world.

Thousands of years may have gone by, but this selection of a glorious site for athletics remains a gorgeous choice.

Roman amphitheater by the Mediterranean in Tarragona, near Barcelona

And yet, what makes for a beautiful (and functional) building can change quite dramatically. The architect Antoni Gaudi, working during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was inspired by natural forms

Natural forms, from Gaudi exhibit in the Casa Mila, Barcelona

to create some of the most remarkable architecture in the world. Fascinating interiors,

Attic roofline, Casa Mila

exteriors,

Casa Mila front

and even rooftops and chimneys

Rooftop and chimneys of Casa Mila

all came from his eye and mind - and all very different from what we have at home!

Yes, you can see these pictures on the web (in an informal blog, even!). But there’s nothing that imprints this change in perspective like being there, and drinking things in yourself, at scale.

All the best for your own travel investments – mental, creative, and physical!

Family in Gratallops, near Barcelona