What age would I enjoy teaching?

I was talking to a teacher recently, who came to teaching after two other careers - one in Law. She said that she was finally drawn to working with children, as she put it, at the early end of the spectrum, rather than when they encountered the judicial system as adults.

Hearing her put it that way suddenly set of a sequence of associations in my head.

Exhibit 1.

Whenever I think about the health-care system, especially in developed countries, it seems so skewed. Huge amounts of money are spent on care of acute illnesses. In comparison, a lot less is spent on preventative medicine. [e.g. How much do we spend on promoting exercise and preventing obesity, compared to treating diabetes, heart disease, etc.] And, sadly, developing countries tend to copy the rich countries in this regard.

Okay, that is just the way I feel.

Exhibit 2.

When ever I need to explain something, I find it very difficult not to start at the very beginning. I think I get this from my father.

Here are two examples. When my son asked me to tell him the story of Passover, I had to begin with Abraham. If you don't know who Abraham is, how can understand Jacob, and his 12 sons. And if don't get that, then you won't understand the context of the Israelite slavery in Egypt.

Today the same son wanted to know what the equivalent to an architect is for other (non-Civil) branches of engineering; specifically car design.

I see no logic in my answer now, but I began by explaining how in the beginning all engineering was Military Engineering, and how the first branch from this was Civil Engineering, and how things like Mechanical Engineering are much newer, so the corresponding design specializations are also much newer, and some are not yet well-established.

Anyway, it is just me - I need to start at the very beginning for every little thing.

Exhibit 3.

I argue, from a theoretical perspective, that I am drawn to teaching Math, and maybe Science, in middle school (6th-8th).

Why?

I am an engineer and scientist by training and profession. So I would be much more at home teaching science. So why teach math?

I argue that you can't be a good scientist if you are scared of math. Also, I believe that math taught alongside physics makes the math more interesting, and the physics much easier.

Why middle school?

I have this bias that elementary math education is only about arithmetic. I want to catch the children at the point that they realize that math is more than just arithmetic. That is where I feel the excitement kicks in. That's the best time to catch them.

Both these ideas may be valid or not.

Exhibit 4.

My wife and I have a discussion once - If you believe that independent/private schools are better than you local public school, and if you have the money for only 3-4 years of private school, which 3-4 years would you choose?

One valid school of thought is that it is all about college, so sink you money into a good college preparatory high school.

But then you could argue, that if you don't have your study habits and academic foundation formed in middle school, then however good the high school, you are not going to be able to take advantage of it.

I personally argued for the first 4 years of elementary school. My argument was that children have to like school - and elementary school decides that. If your child does not like school, then everything else after that is wasted.

Maybe true, maybe not.

What I realized today is that all this seems to point to my wanting to get to the root of every chain of events, or of every 'problem.'

This suggests that I'd probably be happiest teaching the youngest group of children that I can enjoy working with. 3rd-5th?

MIT Open House - musings.

A local university held an information session specifically for those interested in a MIT (Master in Teaching) in Secondary Math and Science.

I was quite surprised how well it was attended. Probably close to 50 people showed up. (I wonder if this is related in anyway to application to AmeriCorp being up 200%). Even the organizers seemed surprised by the turnout.

The good part of the evening was that the School of Education had brought back three recent graduates from their MIT program to share their experiences.

Some random thoughts from that session.

1.
Sitting next to me was a lady who currently subs in high school math. She was complaining about a lack of arithmetic fluency among her students.

This reminded me about a slew of lay-articles a few years ago arguing for more cursive writing in high-school. (e.g. The Handwriting Is on the Wall). The SATs had just added an essay section, and only a small proportion of students wrote in cursive, but they tended to have higher scores. The logic being that if you have an appropriate vocabulary and an adequate writing speed, then the complexity of your expression goes up, and with that the complexity of the ideas you are talking about. A poor vocabulary and slow handwriting stunts your ideation. [Of course, hopefully the next generation will find voice-recognition ubiquitous, and the writing speed part of this may be moot. On the other hand, Twitter's successor may reduce all meaningful comment to 80 characters - a sort of modern Haiku.]

This got me wondering what the equivalent fluency in math was? All I could come up with was being able to do mental arithmetic without pencil and paper or a calculator.

Math is hardly only about numbers, but magnitudes are what make it tangible and concrete in most instances. To get to more complex ideas in math, as a child you need to be reasonably facile in numbers. In my upbringing, this meant that there was a certain body of computation that you could quickly do in your head.

As the curriculum bloats, and things get squeezed out, this might be another thing that goes.

2.
One of the faculty talked about Teaching being a Calling. I keep running into this time and again. And while I do agree to this to a large extent, I don't believe a so-called calling should in any way cover for a lack of competence. Other professions don't prefer candidates who are called over those who are better qualified. Deep down it seems to boil down to this - if you give up a potentially lucrative (or at least better-paying) vocation, then it must mean that you are motivated by some concept of social-justice. And the idea of social-justice seems to have extremely deep roots in education.

At the same time a 'good' education seems to be more and more expensive.

Or does it just seem that way because we are so used junk-food compared to locally grown, slow-cooked food?

3.
One of the graduates has been teaching two years after getting he MIT. She's a career-changer, having previously been a chemist. It struck me as strange have lonely she sounded.

I am still trying to get my head around this. But I really have been very surprised how individual the school teaching enterprise is. I am surprised how little I hear the word 'we' compared to 'I' when teachers talk about their work with students. It is not that they don't say "we," I just expected much more of it.

Part of this might be logistics - if you want to maximize a teachers contact time with students, then they are not going to have much time to collaborate. Plus classroom schedules don't allow any mixing and matching of student and teacher contact time.

I have run into rare examples of co-teaching. But that is rare. And even more rare is where more than 2 people are collectively responsible for a group of students.

Okay, so I expected more of a team attitude, and am not feeling it. But what is strange to me is that there is some much buzz these days about collaborative work. How children have to learn to work together, how learning is collaborative, etc. etc. There is a huge push away from a one-to-many delivery style of lecturing. At the same time, I don't see the teachers setting an example of this with their children.

It is like sitting through a 1 hour lecture about inquiry-based learning. 'Do as I say, not as I do.'

I need to explore this much more.

4.
The other two graduates had just finished a few weeks ago, and are currently subbing in local districts. One described himself as first-generation immigrant - his grandparents are from the part of British India that go divided into Pakistan and India. His parents grew up in Delhi.

He said he went into teaching math because it makes him so angry that the current culture makes it okay for adults to say things like "I can't do math."

As he puts it, "You'd be embarrassed to say in public 'I can't read.'

But you say that about arithmetic, and people pat you on the back and say 'Me too. Don't worry I turned out okay, so you can too.' "

He argues that it is a cultural thing, because in his upbringing it was unacceptable to have that attitude.

I really related to this. My version of this story is that parents (especially mothers, but that may be because men will never ever admit that they can't do anything), of 6-year olds feel absolute confident about teaching their child to read and write. And will read a lot to them. These same parents will clamp up when faced with math 'homework.' I hear things like "My husband does that. He's the one who is good at math in our house."

I mean, how hard is it to teach kindergarten math? You could rightly argue that the pedagogy is pretty sophisticated. But the same is true for reading. But that does not stop these parents from 'teaching' their child to read.

'Closing the Achievement Gap.' What is the economic model of education?

I had just spent part of the morning trying to understand the economics of school education, when, over lunch, I came upon Thomas Friedman's column in today's NY Times - Swimming Without a Suit - in which he called attention to the latest McKinsey study, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

As I've said before, all teachers are socialists at heart. So, for anyone actually in a classroom, the rest of this piece may as well be science fiction.

Anyway, pressing on, ..

McKinsey said

If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

As evidence of the so-called 'achievement gap', Friedman cites the United States ranks of 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Such wringing of hands is all very well, as we keep hearing from Friedman and others. But how exactly does anyone propose to close this achievement gap? I can well imagine that there is a substantial industry out there looking for the solution - and probably a 100 doctoral dissertations in preparation too. But for the life of me I just cannot find anything that a lay person can read in 30-60 minutes and feel s/he is beginning to get a grasp of the problem and the range of possible solutions. (We seem to be able to do it for Global Warming, a much newer problem, so why can't we do it for education? If you know of anything, please send it my way.)

[I'm going to throw about a lot of numbers in what follows, without attributing sources. So, for arguments sake, let's assume these numbers. They may be off by 10-20%, but that is not going to affect things by that much]

To put the McKinsey numbers in perspective, the US GDP is about $14 trillion - so we are talking at least a 10% gain ($1.3T). $14 trillion translates to a per-capita income of $45,000. Given the skewed nature of the the income distribution, this is also fairly close to the median household income ($50,000).

Most states seem to spend about $8,000-$10,000 per student. On the low end, for a family with two children, that amounts to $16,000 - or 32% of pre-tax household income - if a median-income family had to go out and buy this education on the open market. (Actually on today's open market you are going to pay 1.5 to 2 times that amount.)

As a way of cross-checking these numbers, let's look at what proportion of the GDP is spent on education. The US come 10th in the world, at a little under 5% of GDP. (The top 5 countries spend more 5%, but no one spends more than 10%. The US being 10th is a sort-of worst-case scenario. Other estimates put us much higher up in the rankings. But then, we spend more on health as a proportion of GDP than any other nation and we all know what that is buying us.). If 20% of the population is of school-going age, then our per-student expenditure is about $11,500. That makes sense, because 'education' in this context probably includes all higher education. - so you'd expect this number to be above the earlier $10,000 per student estimate.

Now the countries that are beating us in the PISA, are not necessarily out-spending us, as a percent of GDP. So spending more money is obviously not the cure. Still, if the consultants at McKinsey are to be believed, doubling our education expenditure (i.e. adding another $0.7T to the pot) is still well worth it, as it pays off in at least $1.3 trillion added to our GDP. (Mind you, these are annual numbers, not one-time expenditures, and you would have to sustain them for 15 years before you are likely to see the results in rising GDP.)

How much would you really need, and what would you do with it? That's what I want to read about.

Teacher compensation makes up about 40%-50% of total education spending, at a student-to-teacher ratio of 16:1. (Does this make sense? Yes. 300M population * 20% = 60M children in school / 16 = 3.75M teachers. 40% of 5% of GDP = $0.28T, divided by 3.75M = $75k compensation per teacher. If you estimate about 50% overhead for benefits and employer taxes, you get an average salary of about $50k. (This seems a bit high, by about 5%-10%).

So on the one hand, you could double teacher pay, and keep the student-teacher ratio the same. Cost $280 billion/year (or 2% of GDP) (Of course, this is not going to happen suddenly, since the number of households with an income of $100-$150k was 11 million in 2005. Imagine pushing another 4 million teachers into that bracket.)

Or, conversely, you could keep teacher pay the same (or even less), and drop the student-teacher ratio to 8:1. Cost $280 billion/year. (This is not quite correct, as the capital and maintenance costs of providing physical teaching space for twice as many teachers will be considerable)

Getting your hands on that sort of money is, of course, unimaginable. In Washington State, about 75% of the non-capital, non-debt portion of K-12 education cost is borne by the state, amounting to 40% of sales, B&O, and property taxes that the state collects. Right now the state is forecasting about $14B in annual revenues. And from what we saw earlier, it costs $8B-$10B to school 1 million children. So increasing the education budget by double-digit percentages is not going to happen.

Incidentally, out of the almost $800 billion that Obama has at his disposal to spend on the stimulus package over the next 10 years, over $100 billion is ostensibly for public education.

Okay, so we are not going to raise teacher salaries by much, or decrease class sizes by much.

What we ought to do then should raise some interesting discussions from Friedman. He would have us believe that all the 'low-wage' jobs are going overseas, and the only way that Americans can hang on to their cushy lifestyles and fat paychecks is to move up the economic food chain. This would imply that in order to continue deserving a $50k salary, 4 million US teachers would have to think up an entire bag of tricks that add value between the ages of 5-18 in a way that China and India cannot hope to.

And if we can't?

Then just like happened for textiles and manufacturing and automobiles, the jobs will go overseas. And teachers won't be that different from the pizza delivery guy - take the ingredients out of the box, assemble, heat, and deliver in 30 minutes. I think that is what Friedman is saying.

Half a Minute

Long ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece in the NewYorker that my wife and I found extremely provocative* (i.e in a thought-provoking sense). It was called the The New-Boy Network: What do job interviews really tell us. (As with much of Gladwell's work, I think this evolved into a book - Blink - although since I have not read Blink, I am not sure.)

In the NewYorker article Gladwell talks about how you could take shorter and shorter video slices of a teacher in a front of a class, and you could even turn the sound off, and for the most part anyone could tell within seconds if the teacher was 'effective' or not.

Well,.... today I was looking for something else, and quite by accident ran into the article (or one of the articles) Gladwell was talking about.

Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness.
Ambady, Nalini; Rosenthal, Robert
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 64(3), Mar 1993, 431-441.

The article (based on Ambady's doctoral research) was a really interesting read. Here is what they say about college teachers.

Specifically, teachers who were rated higher by their students were judged to be significantly more optimistic, confident, dominant, active, enthusiastic, likable, warm, competent, and supportive on the basis of their nonverbal behavior.

What I found most interesting was how this compares with high school teachers (as judged by a principal)

Specifically, teachers who were rated higher were judged to be significantly more supportive, likable, accepting, attentive, enthusiastic, warm, and optimistic on the basis of their nonverbal behavior.

(By the way, if it is any consolation, the correlation between principal evaluation and physical attractiveness was -0.18. )

Notice how "confident" and "dominant" don't appear on the high-school teacher list?

As interesting as all this is, I seriously doubt if any student (esp. a high school student) wants a teacher making a judgement about them on the basis of their first meeting.



*I do, by and large, agree with Gladwell's point of view in the original article. I have worked for a company that takes its job interviews very seriously. A successful candidate must run a gauntlet of 6 or more 1-on-1 interviews, each lasting an hour. My experience has been that good candidates draw you into a love-bubble within the first 5 minutes. The next 55 minutes is really you, as the interviewer, doing your due-diligence to make sure your initial impressions are well founded. Very occasionally, it is the other way around - an interview starts badly, and your last 55 minutes is spent changing your mind. But that usually requires another 30 minutes pondering over the interview, often in conversation with someone else, before you are willing to give up your initial judgement.

What pushes your buttons

Understand your own responses. What are your
buttons, and what do you do when they are pushed?

If you find yourself giving up on a child, ask yourself
'In what way is s/he pushing my buttons so that my
response is to stop caring for her/him anymore?'

Getting back to my angst about 'liking children,' I asked "Can you like all children? Or do you end up liking some and not liking others?" Above is a response that made a lot of sense to me.

Estimation and Questions

Estimating, and asking the right questions: These are two things I feel we can get children doing earlier.






Regarding questions, I believe that all good science is about asking the right questions. Entire academic careers are built on just one or two appropriately chosen questions. Of course we encourage all children to be curious scientists. But I feel we hold off too long on giving them a qualitative sense of what a good question is.





But today I am more intersted in estimation.




Estimation: Of course, Math is precise, and there tends to be only one 'correct' answer - however you may arrive at it.




But once you get around to using math in the real world, I feel that one of the most important skills is being able to tell whether you are headed in the right direction, or is your answer way off. (In my undergraduate civil engineering, the professor who taught us design of steel structures would not let us start a calculation until we had first estimated an answer. Your building doesn't collapse because you got a few decimal places wrong. They collapse when you are off by an order of magnitude.)


My own feeling is that in early education children pick up this feeling that math is about exact answers. As they grow older many of them then have difficulty accepting that magnitudes in the real world have uncertainity, and more importantly have trouble being able to determine what level of uncertainity is important in a particular situation.


I was in this frame of mind when I saw that the 3/31 issue of the NY Times Science section had an article/review by Natalie Angier on estimation, calling attention to this book - Guesstimation: Solving the world's problems on the back of a cocktail napkin (by Lawrence Weinstein.) For example, "What is the total volume of human blood on earth?"


I have always enjoyed such estimation problems (going so far as to say you should be able to do them in the shower, without access to paper or google). This interest got a further boost when I found books suggesting that Microsoft commonly used this in their interviews. (I am not that sure this is true anymore.) Going through some of those books/websites certainly made it easier to start rolling-my-own problems from everyday life around me.


Here is an example that popped out at me in yesterday's newspaper, which I think is more relevant to 'the world's problems' than the total volume of human blood.





Report Says Small-Car Buyers Sacrifice Safety for Fuel Economy ... If you crash a mini-size (i.e. fuel efficient) car into a mid-size sedan (head-on, each going at 40 mph), the mini car comes out much worse. The Insurance Institue of Highway Safety, quite rightly, recommends reducing the speed limit and horsepower of cars. (Both politically unpalatable.)


[I can't get blogger to display the graphic below correctly. I think if you click on it you will be able to see it better.]

Sadly there is not enough information in this graphic to extract what I am looking for. But let us just assume that if you drive a mini-sized car, you have a 81 in 1 million chance of dying each year, compared to a 62 in 1 million chance of dying if you drove a mid-size (a difference of about 20 per million registered vehicle years.)

Let us also assume that there about 100 million households in the US (300M population, divided by 3 people per household. I think it is 2.7). Multiply that by 2 cars per household (probably a bit on the high side) and you get something like 200 million cars on US roads. And from there about 70*200=14,000 car fatalities per year, with mini-size cars possibly contributing 4000 more deaths than mid-size cars.

[Sadly, I have no sense how close to the true number 14,000 is. If I am off by a factor of two, then maybe it is 28,000. I seriously doubt if it is more than 50,000.]

Now read on a few more pages in the same issue of the Times until you get to the The American Way in which Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert said, "So what if eight kids are shot to death every day in America. So what if someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes."

So how do these numbers stack up? Car-related deaths vs. gun-related deaths.

60 minutes divided by 17 deaths per minute is about 4. So about 4 gun related deaths per hour, or less than 96 per day, or about 36,000 a year (365*100). (Let's round that down to 30,000 to account for the earlier approximations). Since the population of the USA is about 300M. So we are looking at about 100 gun-related deaths per 1 million persons.

So far I have 30,000 gun-related deaths per year, compared to 14,000 car-related deaths per year (or maybe 28,000 for cars)

A Honda Fit likely costs $15,000. A Honda Accord maybe $20,000. Since 5-year costs are about twice the retail price, you are looking at maybe $10,000 more to drive an Accord compared to a Fit. If you chose the Accord over the Fit primarily for 'safety', then your premium is about $2000/year. This is what you are willing to pay to drop your chances of a fatality by 30%.

Since you are twice as likely to die from a gun-related injury, compared to a car, how much would you be willing to pay per year to lower that 30,000/year number for gun deaths?

Let's say my numbers are wrong, and you are only just as likely to die from a gun-related injury as a car-related one. Still, how much are you willing to spend to lower the death toll from guns?

I know that this discussion could quickly get very political, so I don't care for the exact answer. I am more interested in whether we can use simple powers of estimation to begin comparing such everyday numbers.

Here is another one related to mini-cars.

What does the relative cost of fuel to hourly-wages have to be before it becomes economical for everyone to slow down?

Remember how I said the IIHS recommends lowering the speed limit.... Everyone agrees that lowering the speed of a car improves it fuel efficiency. Lowering the speed of all cars also lowers their weight, since the shell does not have to be so strong to resist a high-speed impact. Right now cars tend to weigh 15-20 times the weight of the driver. So you are burning up a lot of fuel just to move around that protective cage. If you dropped the weight you could improve the fuel efficiency by a lot. [Just imagine what doubling car fuel efficiency would do for global warming?]

But if you mandated a 10% lower highway speed, that means you may spend upto 10% longer to get to your destination.

Of course, it all depends on what your hourly-wage is. But for a professional trucker I am guessing that it is an awfully close trade-off. Let's assume a trucker makes $60,000 per year, divided by 2000 hours worked, = $30 per hour. That sounds a bit too high. I would have expected about $20.

Let's assume a Semi gives a mileage of 6mpg. Which means at 60mph, you are using 10 gallons of diesel per hour, or about $20-$30 on fuel per hour. If slowing down to 54 mph could boost your mileage by 10%, then it seems to me that it just might be economical to do just that. [Of course there are other costs like the loan payments on the truck, the insurance, etc that are not related to mileage that I am not accounting for.]

I googled this a bit to see how close I was. You are definitely better off driving at 60mph compared to 70mph. 55mph vs 60mph was not so clear, although 54 is definitely cheaper than 60, I couldn't tell if it was 10% cheaper*. If gas was $4/gallon, and trucker wages did not go up, my calculation is you'd have more cash in your pocket by driving slower.

*When I searched a second time, I struck gold. Kenworth, the truck company, says "every mph increase above 50 mph reduces fuel mileage by 0.1 mpg" So a change in 6mph results in 0.6mpg, which is exactly 10% of 6mpg. Interestingly, Kenworth used the following numbers. $4.50/gallon for fuel. 100,000 miles per year. 6 mpg. 500-mile day. Engine running time 10 hours. Trip time 12 hours. A GPS unit more than pays for itself in terms of avoiding extra miles when you get lost.

Now that you see how much I like doing these number games, if anything strikes you as you watch the news or read the paper, do send them my way.

Five Minds for the Future - Howard Gardner

These 5 minds are not to confused with the multiple intelligences for which Gardner is famous. Different intelligences are needed to successfully apply these minds.




• The disciplinary mind - mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics and history) and of at least one professional craft




• The synthesizing mind - ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others




• The creating mind - capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena




• The respectful mind - awareness of and appreciation for differences in human beings




• The ethical mind - fulfillment of one's responsibilities as a worker and a citizen

This is not a scholarly work, more of a manifesto or white paper. [Albeit a bit long. Read the first and last chapters to see if you want to read the rest.]

I did not find anything fundamentally new here, which I guess means that I agree with most of his premise. He does say that one could make other lists of minds, but these are the ones he has chosen and is willing to defend the choice. I am willing to defer to his expertise in the field in choosing these particular minds.

What was most striking is how little we seem to know about educating all but the first of the minds. But that is also likely an indication of my ignorance.

The respectful mind is something that really ought to be the province of education (as in, 'education broadens the mind'). But for exactly the same reasons that this mind may not be nurtured at done at home and in the ambient culture, it is also highly charged politically - making it difficult to do with public/tax-payers money.

I was not able to completely understand the difference between synthesis and creation. Even he agrees that they are closely linked. The main thing that I took away is that synthesis can be acknowledged by experts in the field immediately. Creation requires the passage of time, and looking back one can see the point at which the creative act changed the future. (But I think that is true for synthesis too, because not all synthesis live into the future.) Also synthesis works within the disciplinary tradition, creation often seeks to break out of those bonds.

I think Gardner delved too long on synthesis being inter-disciplinary. Yes, it does involve a meta level of thinking about the problem, but that does not necessarily require going out of the domain.

To me synthesis is more about integration, than being inter-disciplinary. It is creative, because it brings together seemingly disparate ideas. The key here is seemingly - because most people do not see the integration until it is pointed out to them. To see what no one else has seen is the creative act.

Anyway, it is not that clear how to teach synthesis, but his point about practising it as much as possible is well taken.

Creation continues to be a black box - we know what can hamper it, but not what fosters it. The best that Gardner could say is that 5 year-olds have it. And all that we can strive for is to keep that 5 year-old alive as long as possible. Sadly most formal education does exactly the opposite. The act of escaping 'schooling' (for those who do) usually leads to a traumatic childhood.

Of course the ethical mind is particularly relevant at present, as we collectively pay for an excess of gluttony (both on the part of individual debt holders and investors). Gardner rightly says that the formal education system comes low down in its influence (or at least ought to). The religious / spiritual framework of societies ought to be taking the lead here. And perhaps because I grew up in a deeply religious community, I have no trouble agreeing with most or all of what he says. Yet, at the same time I worry. Global society is becoming more secular, which in turn propels the organized religions to wraps their cloaks tighter around themselves, becoming more fundamentalist as a result - and with that the shrinking of the respectful mind.

In the context of the ethical mind, it strikes me that educators are fundamentally socialists at heart. (probably ties in in some way with the economics of education). Which raises an interesting tension - because contemporary US society clearly believes in market capitalism and a competitive landscape.

Some quotes:

Science... is not the only ... area of knowledge. ... Because
of its current societal hegemony, the aforementioned fix on science tends to squeeze out these other topics. p14-15.

[Favorite topic of mine] I think the school curriculum is packed as it is. To add anything else, either requires squeezing everything else, or removing something else. I feel the long-term way forward is to take out as much knowledge as is not critically important, and then spend the extra time going deep enough in the remaining topics to solidify the skills and develop the minds.

Quoting Plato, "Through education we need to help students
find pleasure in what they have to learn." p41

Interesting take there - it is not just about adapting to the learners perception of what is likable or fun, but leading the learner to finding the pleasure.

The most common form of synthesis is the narrative - a form
accessible to almost everyone. p53

I feel that there is something about our evolution as a civilized society that makes the narrative the most compelling form of transmitting what is important down through the generations. Teaching of math and science seems to ignore this. Not sure why.

.. an educational system is not worthy of its name unless
its representatives can clearly articulate what the system is striving to
achieve and what is seeks to avoid or curtail. p 166

He mentions this at least a couple of times, both at the very start and the very end. And I agree. As a parent I see too much discussion (at all levels) and energy on what is happening, or not happening, or should be happening, in the classroom. But, apart from the ubiquitous mission statement, next to nothing on what are the present goals at any given stage or level.

San Francisco - Milk - Christian America

Juxtapositions / coincidences.

We were in SF for a few days. Happened to be reading Five Minds for the Future. In the mail when we came back was the April 13th Newsweek cover-story The Decline and Fall of Christian America, and, from Netflix Milk.

Two of the five minds are respectful and ethical. Milk explored the former, in the setting of 70's SF. The Newsweek article explored the role of organized religion in the latter.

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated 41 years ago. And this year we elected a 'Black' president - The first to celebrate a Passover seder in the White House.

Stonewall will be 40 years this year. Milk was assassinated 30 years ago. Thirty Novembers later Prop 8 won in California.

So hard to tell which way the tides are moving.

[Of the 306M population of the USA....
Jews - 1.7-2.2%. Muslims - 0.5-0.7%, more or less the same as Buddhists. Hindus maybe 0.3%.
Gays (GLB) may be as high as 4-5%. Same-sex couples are likely 0.5%.
Blacks are definitely above 13%, nationwide, but in the cities with GLB concentrations I am guessing they are outnumbered by gays (except for Atlanta).
]

wrt SF, my undergraduate degree is in Civil Engineering, so just standing and looking at the Golden Gate bridge was awe-inspiring for me. The other high points were a bicycle ride along the marina to the bridge, and the coral reef exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. When I asked the boys for their high points, the older one said "being on a holiday with the three of you," and the younger voted for ice cream sundaes at Ghiradelli's. Life's simple pleasures.


One afternoon while we had lunch on the beach, I saw a professional dog watcher (after a long time), and I got back to thinking about what I said about loving children. I wondered if this man, who obviously loves dogs, prefers their company for adult humans......

"Love children"

"You have to love children," if you want to succeed as a teacher.

I have heard this said in many different ways in the last few months, (even yesterday in mbradford's comment*,) but the first time I heard it, it drew me up short.

[* There is an interesting twist in that particular comment. Love is used as an active verb.]

I had not really thought about that at all until then - "Do I love children?"

I am not being flippant here, but I love Thai food. i.e. When I think of going out for dinner, I am inclined to think "Thai." Of course, I am game to try other cuisines, and I do enjoy others. But my default, without-further-thought, answer would be Thai.

So, if you dropped me into a regular school day, and asked me "Do you want to see some curriculum planning, or go to a conference, or grade some tests (no one I have met has ever liked that part), or create a website, or write a newsletter, or plan a field trip, or present to some parents?" Would I answer "I want to hang out with kids"?

I honestly don't know. That's a really tough one. I guess you only find out after you've tried it. But at 43 do I want to take five years to find that I don't? (Today someone told me that you know much sooner than that.)

I think that I am fairly cerebral. There are a lot of joys to be had hanging out with kids. But I don't think of "cerebral" among them.

Which reminds me of another topic that I hope to get back to later - "Are teachers loners?"

Why blog at all?

I seem to be more preoccupied with the whole idea of getting this blog going, than actually saying anything useful. I guess this points to some deep-seated issue I have with blogging.

So why blog?

1.
In this particular case it is because some educators expressed curiosity about what I am seeing and learning as I explore this terrain. (Ooops, mixed metaphor. Weren't we talking of paths....?)

A number of educators/teachers have been extremely generous in welcoming me into their classrooms to observe what transpires in there and in sharing their thoughts about the profession.. This blog is a way of saying Thank You to them - by sharing what I am seeing/hearing/perceiving.

2.
To me, a blog would be a narcissistic conceit were it not for comments. It would just be the "Here is what I think" part, without the "I am keen to hear what you have to say" part that makes for a conversation.

I hope this blog can, at least for a time, continue the conversations I began in schools I visited. I sincerely hope that you, the reader, will leave comments that extend my thinking, and thus the conversation.

Please do contribute your ideas, recommendations of further reading (blogs, books, websites, movies), quotes you like about children and teaching and the world in general. Anything you care to say, really.

DISCLAIMER: Everything that will appear in this blog is personal opinion. Even when it is in quotations or when it may be obvious to you who the source is, what I write represents the meaning that I chose to extract (colored as it will be with by my own past, where I am at present, and the direction I am looking forward in).