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Maybe they need to read Outliers over again
If Alberta schools are looking for a way to lose their first place in Canadian school achievement, maybe this is how they will do it. This National Post article reports on a new program at an Airdrie, Alberta elementary school that would see grade two students picking their own major, essentially streaming young students into areas of their own interest. According the the school’s principal, the goal of the program is to improve classroom engagement. If they need to do this in grade two, they have a bigger problem.
Apparently someone read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and thinks that this is how you go about getting 10,000 hours of practice. The problem is that the school has totally misunderstood the concept.
Children will be surveyed in kindergarten and grade 1, and along with parental and teacher input, will be placed in their area of interest. Frankly, from what I read in the Post article, this amounts to 10,000 hours of social indoctrination rather than making sure kids get 10,000 of reading and/or math practice. For instance:
“For the humanitarian/environment stream, for example, Grade 3 teacher Carla Pierce plans to teach graphing from a humanitarian perspective by having students chart various countries’ wealth. A math class might involve an assignment in which children calculate waste accumulation, while a big-picture view will be provided by such guest speakers as the social-change organization Me to We.”
As you would expect, parents are not happy with the proposed changes.
For homework, I’m assigning the school administration the task of re-reading Gladwell’s Outliers chapter, Rice Paddies and Math Tests, about Asian students’ math achievement. Success comes from hard work and 10,000 hours of practice, practice, practice in an extended school day, week, and year so that by middle school Asian students are ahead of their North American counterparts by at least a year.