Murder in the Ivory Tower
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| Minerva among the Muses. Thinking panty raid? |
What this study primarily demonstrates is that students really don’t learn very much in college: “45 percent of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning during the first two years of college; 36 percent of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning over four years of college.”
The study evaluates only critical thinking and reasoning skills. But the knowledge gains are even worse. Other studies suggest that the typical student at an Ivy League college actually graduates with less general knowledge than when he entered—he forgets more than he learns over the four years.
But notice that there is one bright spot. “Students majoring in liberal arts fields see significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study."
The bad news is, the liberal arts are dying everywhere. They are being taken over or replaced by the social sciences.
So which discipline scores the lowest skills and knowledge gains over four years of college?
You guessed it: social sciences. “Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains.”
Another interesting finding: “Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge -- while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.” So why is it that current educational methods insist on group work at all times and under all circumstances?
It almost seems as though there is a plan to destroy education.
And I suspect that is exactly right. Not a conscious conspiracy. But somehow (and I suspect affirmative action has at least something to do with it), relatively stupid people have been given the reins of the educational establishment, and they have set out over time to destroy anything in it that might reveal their stupidity. It’s a matter of instinctive self-preservation, I suppose; but the effects on the culture are bound to be devastating. They will kill what they do not understand.
ClassRealm
Here’s an idea that looks perfect for a grade six class of boys: doing the entire curriculum as a role-playing game. What a great way to generate enthusiasm.
And it brings up an important point. Why isn’t this the obvious thing to do? Why haven’t we long ago harnessed the same techniques that make role-playing games so popular to improve learning in the classroom? Schools and educational theorists seem to consistently miss out on this very important point: that education is and should be entertainment. If you do not have the students’ attention, nothing else is going to happen.
Fortunately, we have a vast body of knowledge about how to make things entertaining: from the people who put out popular magazines, novels, movies, music, toys, games, public speaking, salesmanship, and advertising. From the people who work in the circus, the amusement park, the theatre, the comics industry. From just about anybody who runs any business that must attract customers. Magazine publishers, for example, know exactly what they can put on their cover to boost sales.
Not only does the educational establishment ignore all this valuable information: they consciously scorn it. It is beneath them. Perhaps it is evil capitalism. There is a perverse idea that in order to be educational, a thing must be dry and dull.
Nothing at all could be further from the truth. Look at small animals at play; or small children, for that matter. They are learning, quite deliberately. All play is educational by nature. Tiger cubs play-pounce, learning to hunt. Little girls play with dolls, learning to mother. Boys compete to learn how to stay on a skateboard, or make a yoyo return.
This is a good rule of thumb: far from being at cross purposes, being entertaining and being educational are the same thing. If it is not entertaining, it is not educational.
And if everyone does not love to go to a school, this is proof that that school is failing. As most schools clearly are. The surest mark of educational success is retention rate: how many students stay on until graduation.
Boundless Learning
A logical next extension from Wikipedia: free textbooks complied from open Web materials.
Movie Segments for Grammar Goals
Great idea well executed. Using movie clips for grammar modelling and practice.
An Article That Gets Most Things Right
Important points made:
- · The best teachers are, obviously enough, the best students. These are the people who know their subject and know how to learn. That means graduates from the best colleges, with the highest SAT scores.
- · Our current system instead draws teachers from the worst students. Our current teachers do not do as well on standardized tests as the students they are supposed to teach. How can teachers teach what they do not know?
“As a group, schools of education are non-selective. Their students post SAT scores at or below the average of all college graduates.”
“A proficient score on NAEP reading or math translates into at least a 600 on the SAT, or about a 1200 overall. The most generous estimate of the aptitude of new U.S. teachers recently estimated SAT scores of 515 in critical reading (formerly verbal) and 506 in math, or 1021 overall.”
“states frequently set Praxis passing scores at levels that translate into SAT reading-math scores of about 1000—well below current expectations for students.”
- · Teachers who graduate from Ed Schools are no better than teachers who do not.
“There is no evidence that licensing or certification creates better teachers or even sets a floor beneath which quality cannot fall.”
“sophisticated statistical analyses have been unable to find any benefit in teacher education for student achievement. Licensed or certified teachers appear to perform no better than teachers without certification”
- · The existence of Ed Schools prevents the best teachers from going into the profession.
“licensing requirements today serve largely as an impediment to attracting high quality”
“The time required for traditional certification through a bachelor’s or master’s degree in education also deters many bright students from even considering teaching.”
- · We would have a better system simply by abolishing Ed Schools and Education degrees, at least as a qualification for teaching.
- · A good way to reduce the costs of education would be simply to raise class sizes. A second way would be to use the educational technology available to us.
Where I disagree:
- · Raising teachers’ salaries would do little or nothing to improve teaching—unless it were incentive pay.
- · Evaluating individual teachers based on student achievement is practically impossible.
- · Teaching really is an art, to which some are born and others are not. It is cited as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, after all.
- · Teaching quality is more than student achievement. A better measure is student satisfaction. The person is more than his achievements in a specific academic subject.
Money Quote
One hundred years ago, it made sense to have a population of well-educated professors spread throughout the country delivering lectures to rooms filled with young learners. This is no longer the case. The Internet and other information technologies make it possible for professors to deliver lectures to tens of thousands of learners, of any age, on any topic, at the learner’s own pace. There are many options. I prefer Khan Academy, supplemented with video lectures from the for-profit Teaching Company, sold under the brand name The Great Courses. The motivated self-learner has no need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to acquire the knowledge and perspective of a liberal arts education.
-- Minnesota Daily
The Forgotten Science of Mnemonics
This is good news. not only is "chunking" being rediscovered by modern science--it's been around at least since Aristotle--but they are beginning to twig to the fact that memorization is a creative activity.
The Cost of an Education
As illustrated by Captain Capitalism. Who asks, why not buy them a house instead?
On Teaching
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| Don John. |
The essence of good teaching, if you stop and think about it, is not mysterious. It is obvious. You need three things: to entertain, to explain, and to help retain. Unfortunately, modern education schools ignore all three.
The biggest problem is the "entertain" part. It is obviously necessary—you need to be able to hold your audience's attention in order to get anywhere with them. And simply screaming "pay attention" is idiotic and an admission of incompetence. A great teacher is a great storyteller plus a stand-up comic, and if he or she can sing and dance, even better. St. John Bosco was a juggler and acrobat. Jesus made all his points in the form of stories, Confucius in aphorisms. Socrates played the fool, and Plato presented ideas in the form of plays. But this is a knack, a gift, a talent. It cannot be taught in an education school, and so it is ignored altogether.
By "explain," I mean the ability when the subject allows it to give concise, clear explanations. What could be more obviously fundamental to teaching? This again was essential to St. John Bosco's famously successful technique. Stands to reason: you need to know the goal in order to have a chance of reaching it. This, too, however, is not within the command of the average lector; the average person giving a ten minute explanation of anything is boring and confusing. Above all, it requires the ability oneself to reason well; which is no doubt why the teaching profession in the past has always been considered a proper occupation for the most intelligent among us, and given the respect this commanded.
Yet, remarkably, even making the attempt to do this is taboo in current teaching theory. Lecturing is out; no more "sage upon the stage." Why? Officially, because this is authoritarian; because the students are supposed to come up with their own reality, their own truths. But God help them if the reality they come up with is not the one the teacher expects. And in the meantime, have they learned anything, by merely saying what they already knew?
I think the true reason clear explanations are discouraged is because the typical individual who signs on to teachers' college is simply not intelligent and articulate enough to do it well; and this cannot be taught. Ergo, by default, it is best if they don't try; it just exposes their deficiency. But look at the popularity of TED Talks on the Internet, or of Glenn Beck's chalk talks on TV. These are lectures, and there is nothing folks like better than a good one. Public lectures used to be a major form of popular entertainment.
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| Don Glenn |
Finally, it is not enough to get the students' attention and tell them the thing so that they can understand it. They also have to remember it, or nothing has been accomplished. There is a vast technology of mnemonics, ways to remember effectively, that has been built up over millennia. Remarkably, none of it is taught in schools of education; in my experience, the average teacher does not even know what the word means. The current prescribed format for a “lesson plan” makes no provision for mnemonics or even simple repetition or review. The entire matter is ignored.
Or rather, not ignored. The current teaching is that memorization is bad.
Why is it bad? Because it is not creative.
Perhaps it is true that memorization is not creative—although most cultures believe it is, that it creates new furniture in the soul. If so, so what? Does one good thing drive out all other good things? Isn't it a false alternative to suggest that we need to choose between remembering and creating?
Perhaps it is true that memorization is not creative—although most cultures believe it is, that it creates new furniture in the soul. If so, so what? Does one good thing drive out all other good things? Isn't it a false alternative to suggest that we need to choose between remembering and creating?
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| John Glenn |
My secret suspicion is that memorization is really discounted in modern education schools for a different reason: because it is boring—for the teacher.
So those are my three ingredients for proper teaching: entertain, explain, and retain. Only the last can really be taught, but, to the extent that these things can be taught, they form the ancient discipline of rhetoric. That is surely the proper education for a prospective teacher.
But there is one more thing, more important than all these. A good teacher must love his students. Without this, there is nothing. This again is what Don Bosco taught.
The Great Courses
Formerly called The Learning Company. The article demonstrates that there is a genuine popular demand for courses in the humanities. The reason the humanities are in decline on the conventional college campus, therefore, is simply that they are no longer offered.
Don Bosco's Preventitive System
As presented in brief by Don Boco himself.
"Only a Christian can apply the preventive system with success."
"Only a Christian can apply the preventive system with success."
Don Bosco's Rule for School Discipline
In our family, my wife handles the discipline. She's pretty stern about it. And our children, I note, are exceptionally well-behaved. Our neighbour X, on the other hand, is considerably sterner, and her child is a holy terror.
I point this out to my wife to support my own view that a lot depends on the child's own personality. She, however, has a simple and plausible explanation for why X's efforts are counter-productive.
The problem is that X disciplines her daughter publicly, and complains about her to others. This, my wife holds, is the essence of abuse, and never works. It breaks the bond of trust between parent and child. Whether discipline needs to be heavy or light may depend on the child, but one principle never alters. You never humiliate them.
And she never does.
If you do, they are bound to rebel; their human dignity allows them no other moral choice.
Now that she's pointed it out, I'm sure she is right. This is exactly what Don Bosco says about good teaching: when discipline is necessary, you always do it in private. And the New Testament says the same thing: if you have a quarrel with your neighbour, first you try to work it out one on one.
Unfortunately, instead of this vital moral principle, our society's supposed experts now concentrate on “violence” as the issue in abuse. Has nothing to do with it. Except that avoiding violence in all circumstances is probably itself a form of abuse. As in, “spare the rod and spoil the child...”
TEDEd
TED Talks for el-hi subjects. An interesting addition to the Khan Academy. Each clip comes with a comprehension quiz and suggested discussion topics, making them ideal for listening and speaking exercises.
Ranking Reveals World's Top Countries for Higher Education - Press Release - Digital Journal
Ranking Reveals World's Top Countries for Higher Education - Press Release - Digital Journal:
'via Blog this'
Tagxedo
Forget Wordle--this resource lets you custom design the shape of your word cloud.
101 ways to use it.
101 ways to use it.
Under Ten Minutes
Short videos on the subject of Educational Technology. Just in time training for teachers.
Cueprompter
An online free teleprompter. Ideal for student presentations, or for reading or pronunciation practice.
Cueprompter
How to use it.
Cueprompter
How to use it.
Citelighter
A very comprehensive system for collecting citations and building bibliographies on the web.
Civil War News
This was a set of bubble gums cards familiar to me from my childhood
in Montreal. Strikes me that putting such things on bubble gum cards is a
fantastic way to teach almost any subject.
http://www.bubblegum-cards.com/Civil-War-News/index.html
http://www.bubblegum-cards.com/Civil-War-News/index.html
Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. | TechCrunch
Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. | TechCrunch:
'via Blog this'
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