SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Musick has charms to sooth a savage breast

As you may have noticed, the human brain is not a straightforward logic machine. One of its strangest (to me, anyway) quirks is how the brain interacts with music. For example, anyone who has participated in a dance exercise class or jogged to music knows that that music makes it easer to exercise. Here’s an interesting interview about how music helps athletes - including its potential to promote feelings of patriotism and unity.

Now comes a Cambridge study that suggests music promotes empathy as well. Clearly, a better understanding of music’s potential could be very helpful when it comes to education.

Lessons on the Game of Life

I’m not sure what you’re going to make of the following excerpt (I’m not sure what I make of it myself), but it’s taken from a book called Coach by best-selling author Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis basically attributes his sucess in life to his baseball coach, as described in the following passage. Before you read it, I’ll just mention that this coach is now being undermined by many of his athletes’ parents for being too hard on the kids. Here’s what Coach Fitz has to say about this trend: “All this is about a false sense of self-esteem. It’s now bestowed on kids at birth. It’s not earned. If I were to jump all over you today, you would be highly insulted and deeply offended. You would not get that I cared about you.”

The summer of 1976 had been especially uncomfortable. Fitz had entered us in a better league, with bigger schools. Defeat followed listless defeat, until the night of this final Fitz story. We had just lost by some truly spectacular score. Twice at the end of the game he had shouted at our base runners to slide, and, perhaps not seeing the point, when down 15-2, in getting scraped, or even dirty, they’d gone in standing up. Afterward, at eleven o’clock or so, we piled off the bus and into the gym. Before we could undress, Fitz said, ‘We’re going out back.’ Out back of the gym was a sorry excuse for a playing field. The dirt was packed as hard as asphalt and speckled with shell shards, glass, bottle caps, and god knows what else. Fitz lined us up behind first base and explained we were going to practice running to third. When we got there, we were to slide headfirst into the base. This, he said, would teach us to get down when he said to get down. Then he vanished into the darkness. A few moments later we heard his voice, from the general vicinity of third base. One by one, our players took off. In the beginning there was some grumbling, but before long the only sound was of Fitz, spotting a boy coming at him out of the darkness, shouting ‘Hit it!’.

Over and over again we circled the bases, finishing with a headfirst slide onto, in effect, concrete. We ran and slid on that evil field, until we bled and gasped for breath. The boy in front of me, a sophomore new to Fitz, began to cry. I remember thinking, absurdly, ‘you’re too young for this’. Finally, Fitz decided we’d had enough, and ordered us back inside. Back in the light we marveled at the evening’s most visible consequence: ripped, muddy, and bloody uniforms. We undressed and began to throw them into the laundy baskets - untill Fitz stopped us. ‘We’re not washing them’ he said. ‘Not until we win’.

And they didn’t. I’m skipping quite a bit here about the continuing torture of these boys, and here’s the conclusion of this episode.

He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both. What he knew - and I’m not sure he’d ever consciously thought it, but he knew it all the same - was that we’d never conquer the weaknesses within ourselves. We’d never drive the worst of ourselves away for good. We’d never win. The only glory to be had would be in the quality of the struggle.

I never could have explained at the time what he had done for me, but I felt it in my bones all the same. When I came home one day my senior year, and found the letter saying that, somewhat improbably, I had been admitted to Princeton University, I ran right back to school to tell Coach Fitz.

What is the real issue here?

In Mississauga, several teachers in a publicly-funded Catholic school gave their students the option of signing a petition that might lead to the criminalization of abortion in Canada. More here. The president of the Canadian Secular Alliance, a group that supports the abolition of public funding for Ontario Catholic schools, is using the teachers’ actions as more support for his organization’s mission. 

While I agree that these Catholic teachers should not have used their position of power to influence their vulnerable students, I do not agree that this is evidence that public money should be withdrawn from Catholic schools.

After all, many - if not most - teachers are constantly using their positions of power to influence their vulnerable students. Sometimes, the influence is wielded in obviously inappropriate areas, for example during political campaigns or when it comes to religious questions. Not so obviously inappropriately, however, there are campaigns and brain-washing going on in schools all the time - against, for example, global warming, smoking, and bullying, and in favour of, for example, homosexuality, good nutrition, and recycling. 

Some of these campaigns I agree with, some I don’t. And therein lies the rub. Because most likely, your set of approved campaigns is going to be different from mine. And who is to say which of us is right?

The only fair solution I can see is to mandate schools to teach, as far as humanly possible, only the academic skills and knowledge commonly agreed to be essential for success in our 21st-century world. Simply removing funding from publicly-funded Catholic schools is unlikely to make much of a difference one way or another.

Lower-Order Thinking Skills?

Yesterday’s blog elicited a comment from one of our faithful readers along the lines of he rejected the argument because it came from a right-wing organization. Another of our readers kindly warned that citing that organization would forever brand SQE as crazy right-wing and give our enemies all the evidence they need. Both of these readers are or were educators.

Hello?

Intellectual honesty and openness require that every argument be considered on its merits. If the argument is correct, what difference does it make who advanced it?

Are/were these educators teaching our children this sort of closed-minded, prejudicial thinking? I certainly hope not.

Sunday at the Movies (School Choice)

The Heritage Foundation has created a series of videos: Education Unions, Education Spending, Washington’s Role in Education, and School Choice. There is no attempt at nuance (the videos are all stamped “made simple” after all), but nevertheless the videos may make it possible for viewers to look at each issue through a different prism. I have chosen to embed the school choice video, and I encourage you to send it on to non-choir-members. H/T RC

Testing for dummies

Today’s posting is for people who take test results at face value. I have three sites for you to visit.

The first link is just for fluff - it’s a true story about a silly test item on the New York state English exam for grade 8 students. Its contribution is to call into question the merit of testing in general. I mean really. Why did the animals eat the pineapple? You’ve got to be kidding!

The second link provides sample questions for the PISA test. A brief look at these questions will disabuse anyone of the idea that success on the PISA indicates high scholastic achievement. Rather, PISA is looking at parental support systems as much as anything.

The last link provides sample questions for the TIMSS test. Finally, here’s a test of the value added by schools. And, by the way, the latest round of TIMSS results is due out this fall. 

Test results must be interpreted carefully. Otherwise, it’s like believing that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

GUEST BLOG BY MARJORIE GANN. MARJORIE HAS TAUGHT IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN NEW BRUNSWICK AND ONTARIO, AND IS THE AUTHOR OF A WORKBOOK ON WRITING SKILLS. SHE WROTE THE FOLLOWING LETTER IN RESPONSE TO THE RECENT MACLEAN’S ARTICLE ON FUZZY MATH. HER POINT IS - THE EDUCATION JUGGERNAUT IS STILL RAMPAGING OUT OF CONTROL 14 YEARS ON.

When I saw your March 19 cover (“Why is it your job to teach your kid math?”) I did a double-take. Just fourteen years ago, you ran a photo of me tutoring my eleven-year-old daughter Deborah in math, under the title “The new new math: Long division takes a backseat to creativity” (August 17, 1998).

The frustration I voiced back then (“Deborah just finished Grade 5 and she could not multiply using two-digit multipliers. At school, they had taught her two or three different ways . . . and she was hopelessly confused”) is echoed by the parents in your March story (“I don’t have a problem with alternate strategies,” Stokke says. “But I fear they’re learning so many, that in the end they’re not mastering any.”)

An entire generation of Canadian students has been sacrificed by an educational bureaucracy that prefers its tired mantras about “high-level conceptual work” (Maclean’s, 2012) or “exploration, discovery and teaching students to think” (Maclean’s, 1998) to mastering skills. The parents who can afford private tutoring will ensure that their kids do master those skills outside of school. Meanwhile, children from less advantaged homes will be the losers.

There’s more to full inclusion than meets the eye

On April 7, Educhatter blogged on the education policy “full inclusion” whereby all children, no matter how severe their disabilities, should be integrated into regular classrooms. This story has legs! There is lots of good stuff in the comments, including Educhatter’s report of a public argument in New Brunswick between an advocate for autistic children and the province’s co-chair of the Education Inclusion Review who appears to already have his mind made up in favour of full inclusion.

A full inclusion policy throws a number of balls into the air. Here are a few questions that come to my mind, and I’m sure there are others.

• How can a one-size-fits-all policy like full inclusion be good for every single disabled child?
• Can educational administrators who have never even met individual students be expected to make better decisions than the students’ parents?
• What is the effect on the non-disabled children in classes with disruptive and/or very demanding students?
• What is the effect on the teachers of fully-integrated classes, especially the vast majority of teachers who have no training on how to serve disabled students?
• What are the legal ramifications for school staff when it comes to things like the administration of medication or coping with physical aggression?

While full inclusion advocates mean well and their preferred policy sounds kindly, in fact there are undoubtedly many disabled students who would be better served in segregated settings - and many non-disabled students and teachers who would also be better served.

There are Surveys, Then There are Surveys

There is a twitter message being passed on about an Ontario survey that wants to know what parents, students, and teachers think.  At first I thought it was an effort by the Ontario government to find out what the public actually thought about how they were doing but, when I clicked on the link, lo and behold I see the usual “comrades for edukation” have collaborated:

               A project of the Ontario Student Trustees’ Association. OSTA-AECO has partnered with Student Vote, People for Education, ScholarshipsCanada.com, the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario Principals’ Council, the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association and the Ontario Catholic School Trustees Association to ask students, parents, and educators the same ten questions about school and education.

The questions (the same for teachers, parents and students) run the gamut of earth-shattering controversy (sarcasm here) to downright confusing.  Here’s a sample:  Should plastic water bottles be banned from your school? Would students benefit from shorter vacation and more breaks through the year?  Some questions might generate genuinely interesting answers about whether school uniforms or single gender schools are desireable, but one asking whether the school prepares students to vote in elections was, frankly, disturbing.  Huh? Are students being indoctrinated?   There is space to comment, however.  There is no place to respond as a past parent or general member of the public - so you don’t matter to these “stakeholders”. 

There is not ONE question on whether one thinks that children are learning anything, whether math is being taught effectively, whether you want more alternatives, if you worry about your rural school, etc.  I guess the really tough opinion questions are up to SQE to ask.  If readers want to know what some Ontario parents think—a good start is our SQE-sponsored study here.  Still, if you are interested in the survey above, I suggest you fill it out anyways (pick a role) and make plenty of comments!!  They need to hear from more than the usual suspects.

History is Elementary

If you’re a history teacher or enjoy reading about history and history education, here’s a blog you might like. At the time of writing, the front page of this blog contains chatty and informative essays about FDR and his disability, war and democracy, information overload, historical inaccuracies in the movie of Gone with the Wind, and more. There are indexed archives down the lefthand side, many of which look very tantalizing. So much to read, so little time…....