Schoolhouse Rocks!

This summer, I'm determined to teach Younger Daughter the times tables.  To that end, I downloaded a bunch of Schoolhouse Rocks multiplication songs and made a CD to play in the car.

I also downloaded songs teaching the parts of speech.  It's shocking to see what was considered basic elementary-school fare in the 1970's that is now not taught at all.  Just ask your elementary-school (or even middle-school!) kid what a pronoun is.  Go ahead, I dare you.  After she's fixed you with that dead-halibut look, play her this video:

The Drunk Hook-Up: You Call This Progress?

In the NYTimes, Sex On Campus: She Can Play That Game Too.  This was a truly nauseating article, describing workaholic young women at Penn engaged in the hook-up culture.  I have a sinking feeling that some of these young women are the high achievers of the local schools that Older Daughter won't be attending this fall.

As A. explained her schedule, “If I’m sober, I’m working.” 

The hook-up culture is fundamentally a drinking culture:

Women said universally that hookups could not exist without alcohol, because they were for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk.  

How many of these young women are present or future alcoholics?

The headline is just plain wrong; women are not playing the same game that the men do.  It's obnoxious to try to spin this as sexual equality for women, because women's sexual needs are not addressed by hook-ups.  The hook-up is defined by the male orgasm, and it's over when he's been satisfied:

One girl, explaining why her encounters freshman and sophomore year often ended with fellatio, said that usually by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave. 

Well, you can see what the guy is getting out of this deal, but what's in it for the girl? 

From a comment by dc lambert, nj:

These students think that life is a series of shallow, meaningless competitions on their race to make the most money and buy the most toys, and the only way to cope is to do drugs and avoid intimate relationships.

How do schools factor into this?  High achieving girls are the ones who constantly strive for the A and the high test score.  They're certainly not encouraged to develop their own inner compass or to ask themselves whether this is the game they want to play.  In a very deep sense, these are girls who can't say no, either to the achievement rat race or to boys.

Adult Happiness = Childhood Conformity?

From today's NYTimes Motherlode column (why do I read this tripe?), Don’t Make Your Children the Exception to Every Rule:

When we look at the research on the childhood precursors of adult well-being – the traits we see in children who go on to become happy adults – we find that the driving factor is childhood conscientiousness, not childhood happiness. Children who are industrious, orderly and have good self-control are more likely than their careless or undisciplined peers to grow into happy adults.

It turns out that adult happiness doesn’t arise from parents bending the rules to a child’s advantage; it comes from children learning the rules and conforming to them.

Ugh.

Progressive or Traditional? More Thoughts

From a comment by Chris on his blog, A Blog About School:

FedUpMom -- I hear you. It's easy to imagine some aspects of "student-centered" education (for example, some efforts at "project-based learning") being an utter waste of students' time. In my opinion, it's easy to imagine aspects of old-fashioned ("sage on the stage"?) education being a total waste of time, too.

Despite all the talk about research-based practices, we don't really know much at all about the long-term effects of any particular curricular approach -- especially since so much of what gets "learned" for hour upon hour in school does not get meaningfully retained in adulthood.

My own feeling (which I don't claim to be able to prove empirically) is that people are more likely to benefit educationally from an experience if they've freely chosen that particular subject matter, and that that free choice is more important than whether the instruction is "traditional" or "progressive." The kid who really wants to learn about the space program is going to learn about the space program, but forcing people to learn something they're not interested in and don't need in their lives is always going to be a low-percentage enterprise. That's one reason I'd be in favor of a curriculum that gives kids a lot of autonomy over what they learn: I think it's less likely to be a total waste of their time.

This is starting to look like the old progressive vs. traditional debate, which I have very mixed feelings about.  Here's my current thoughts:

There are certain skills that I believe any educated person should have, and that I'm determined my daughters will have.  These would include, at the very least, the ability to read and write fluently, and enough fluency with math that they will be able to handle their household finances intelligently (for instance, they'll need to understand what a mortgage would actually cost them, and possibly how to invest money.)  When it comes to these skills, I'm with the traditionalists; my daughters will obtain these skills whether they're genuinely interested or not.  Of course, anything I can do to spark their interest, or at least obtain their co-operation, I'll try to do.

With Younger Daughter, learning to read has been a struggle.  Left to her own devices, it might never have happened.  Of course, we haven't left her to her own devices; we've worked hard with her, and will continue to do so.  I've started working her through some Singapore Math this summer, too, since her school uses TERC Investigations.  (I'm teaching her how to "carry" when she adds numbers; I see from this review of TERC that it "attempts to avoid the concepts of carrying, borrowing, and common denominators.")

Older Daughter has reached the point where the structure of school, namely, being made to produce something, and then getting graded on the produced thing, results in major depression.  So, in her case, I'm getting more progressive all the time.  It's vital that she should have some control over what and how she learns.  Her mental health is at stake.

The PREP class that I teach has the least progressive set-up you can imagine:  the kids are only there because their parents signed them up, and the parents only signed them up because they're compelled to if they want their kids to get confirmed in the Church.  It's a class full of impressed sailors, basically.  In this situation, I feel the best thing I can do is make the class as interesting and engaging as possible.  If the kids get to the end of the class feeling that religion can actually be interesting, and not just a tedious chore, I've done my job. 

So, there you have it; my current mixed feelings about traditionalist vs. progressive education.  My ideal education would combine concern for actual content (from the traditionalists) with the most interesting, engaging, and humane approach possible (from the progressives).  Above all, I hope my daughters' education leaves them interested and eager to learn about their world, with the basic skills to do so.

Miters

PREP class is over for the year, but I'm already thinking about next year.  For next year's conclave, I ran up a couple of prototype miters, here shown expertly modeled by my daughters.

Freedom to Quit

From Peter Gray, The Most Basic Freedom is Freedom to Quit:

Children love to learn, but, like all of us, they hate to be coerced, micromanaged, and continuously judged.  They love to learn in their own ways, not in ways that others force on them.

Well, yes. 

At this point, we're just trying to get Older Daughter through the end of the year at Friends Omphalos with passing grades, so there's no chance she'd have to repeat.  Next year, we'll give homeschooling a shot.  As many people have pointed out to me, we couldn't do any worse than the schools have done.

It Ain't What You Know ...

In the NYTimes, How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment.

The article describes how people overwhelmingly get hired through favoritism (that is, they get hired because of help from their social network) and this favoritism winds up discriminating against Blacks.

The great Fran Lebowitz pointed out the same phenomenon many years ago in her excellent essay about race:

... not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with.  White people are the playing field.  The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word "advantage" at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that doesn't exist.

It is now common ... to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars.  And when the interviewer asks,  "Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?" the answer is invariably "Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you've got to perform, you're on your own."  This is ludicrous.  Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game ... That's how advantageous it is to be white.  It's as if all white people were the children of movie stars.  Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at a relatively minimal level.