China's Schools Aren't Perfect

China also has an underclass with limited access to good schools.  See this article in the NYTimes, China Takes Aim at Rural Influx.

More on Harriet Ball

We've gone back to deciphering Harriet Ball's meter rap.  Here's another video featuring Harriet Ball:

This is interesting because it's a tutoring situation -- one-on-one with a bright little girl.  But it's still all about memorization, instead of understanding why multiplying with negative numbers must work the way it does.  The rules of mathematics are not arbitrary.

There's some useful explanations of multiplying with negative numbers at Ask Dr. Math.

Spitting Image Explains Religion

First up, Spitting Image visits the famously well-intentioned but woolly Church of England, with "You Couldn't Meet a Nicer Bloke Than God":

Next, an exercise in ecumenism with "Our God's Bigger Than Your God":

By now, you'll be ready to join the Atheist Tabernacle Choir!

A Pox on the Real World

A recent New York Times article, How to Fix Our Math Education, proposes that we should make math teaching less abstract and more relevant to real-world applications.

This strikes me as the same anti-intellectual bias that causes reading teachers to prove "comprehension" by telling kids to find episodes in their own lives that relate to their reading. ("A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic, reminds me of the time I ... " what, exactly?)

The truth is that daily life is dull and boring. That's why we need an interior life. That's why we read books and do puzzles and watch movies and listen to music and write blogs.

Abstract math is beautiful and enjoyable because it is consistent, logical, and clean; in other words, totally unlike the real world.

Progress!

I am happy to report that Younger Daughter read no less than 2 I Spy books this morning.  She's getting much better about looking at all the letters, too.

Younger Daughter was unexpectedly stymied by this page near the end:


I spy two words that start with the letters GL.

boxing glove

glasses

scissors

It turned out that she thought "boxing glove" was one word, beginning with the letter "b".

Me:  "Words are separated by spaces.  Every time you see a space, that means a new word is about to begin."

Younger Daughter:  "Really?  Nobody ever explained that to me before."

Sigh.  Anyway, she's making progress, and I plan to keep cranking.  I hope she can start the upcoming school year with a bang instead of a whimper.

Unlearning Unteaching

One of our ongoing problems in teaching Younger Daughter to read is that we must first unteach the bad habits her teachers got her into.  The worst of these is a strategy that she was actually taught at school:  read the first letter of the word, then look at the picture, then take a guess as to what the word might be.  We are striving with her to get out of the guessing habit, and instead to sound out ALL the letters of the word.

Sainted Husband had a conversation with Younger Daughter that went like this:

Sainted Husband:  No guessing!  That's not what reading is!

Younger Daughter:  But that's what the teacher said.

Sainted Husband:  They taught you wrong.

This morning I was working with Younger Daughter, reading Chester, by Syd Hoff.  She was doing pretty well, with coaching.  She read the title character's name, "Chester", correctly several times, until she suddenly read it as "chicken".  Why?  There was a chicken in the illustration.  She was reading the first letter, looking at the picture, and guessing, just as she was taught at school.  Ugh.

Harry Potter and the Unedited Doorstop

We're having a Harry Potter moment at our house.  Younger Daughter has been watching the movies obsessively, and Sainted Husband read books 1 and 2 out loud to the whole family.  Older Daughter has been plowing through the books.

Book 1, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, is charming and fun.  It deserved to be a best seller.  Rowling's strengths are her sense of humor and perfectly realized wizarding world.  The book isn't especially original -- it's clearly in the tradition of British boarding-school stories -- but it was well done.

Book 2 was also quite good, but starting with Book 3 it all started to go downhill.

Rowling's weakness is that she's basically very conventional.  She's accepting of all kinds of stereotypes that I would like to see her overcome.  Would it have killed her to make the lead character a girl, for instance?  Did she really have to make the Dursleys so loathsome?  I was worried about my adopted daughter being exposed to these images of abusive adoptive parents.  I wish Rowling would ditch the weight stereotypes -- fat people are self-indulgent and lazy (the Dursleys), and skinny people are active and good (Harry).  

Rowling is very British in her attempts to have the birth issue both ways.  On the one hand, she deplores the wizards' prejudice against "mudbloods" (those with no magical parents.)  On the other hand, every quality Harry has is traced back to his birth parents, or more precisely his father.  (Again, would it have killed her to make Harry's mother a more interesting and vital character?)

There were times in some of the later books where the story gets completely bogged down in the adventures of Harry's parents' generation.   Hint to Rowling -- that could be a separate series.

In the later books, Rowling attempts to get deep by killing off her characters.  It doesn't work.  Also, she deals with Harry's adolescence by making him angry all the time.  The books are a lot less fun as a result.

By Book 7, it was all out of control.  Get that writer an editor STAT!  Book 7 could be cut to 1/3 of its present length, and be a much better book for it.  The question everyone was asking before Book 7 was published was -- will Harry live or die?  Rowling had him do both!  Please, just make a decision.  Also, I found the coda, which describes Harry and Ron putting their own children on the train to Hogwarts, unbearably banal and suburban.  Couldn't they be out chasing dragons or something?