Outreach

Over the next few months, I'll be taking the Crickets program on the road. The no-longer-shelved grant is finally getting off the ground and reaching teens in after school programs.

And not a minute too soon.

I met with the director of one of the after school teen clubs I'll be taking the program to, to get a feel for their layout, talk about the requirements, and discuss options for the program. I'll spend 8 hours total at each of the clubs, and it had seemed like enough until I saw this one. In a tiny town in the middle of the mountains, this is a club that barely scrapes by, and offers everything from meals to a place to sleep, games to educational programming. The kind of place that deserves all kinds of support from its community. Not the kind of place that should be broken into to have its new computers stolen. No, not even stolen - gutted. Anything that wasn't traceable. Same as the library and the school that share the parking lot. WHO DOES THAT???

Grr...

I'm taking technology to these kids. I'm bringing them toys that none of them will have access to outside of our 8 hours together. It's not enough. But at least it's something. When I did this with the kids during summer camp, half of the families were talking about getting the kits for their kids after the program. They didn't have to worry about having the computer or the money for the kit. The kids I'll see in this after school program? Maybe 1 of them has a personal computer with internet. They'll be in the workforce a lot sooner than those kids I saw this summer, they'll need the skills for college (if they go). And they don't have access to it outside of a computer class.

We need to overhaul education and the economy. This isn't acceptable.

A Thought-Provoking Article

Hopefully, Gary Stager's recent article in GOOD Magazine does more than provoke thought. I hope it provokes communities into action. Read the whole thing here.

This is how he starts:

Schools are seeing recess eliminated, electives are being cut, and teachers are insulted by the prospect of having their career and income threatened by their students’ scores on a single multiple-choice test. All in the name of No Child Left Behind, a mathematically impossible piece of federal education legislation, which requires all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests by 2014.

And here's how he ends:

...Parents need to be vigilant and take a stand. Parents can go to back-to-school night this fall. If the science lab contains no equipment, they should demand to know why and not wait patiently while the district hopes they forget. If their first grader was excited about going to school, but by the third day cries hysterically and says, “The teacher hates me,” his concerns should be taken seriously. If their kid’s school is test-obsessed, parents should let teachers and administrators know that they expect more of an education. If every parent was vocally fighting for the best public schools for their children—instead of some of the most involved and caring opting out in disgust—the government would be forced to listen.

Because despite their flaws, inequities, and shortcomings, public schools are an American treasure owned by the citizens, and we should treat them as a public trust."

And everything in the middle deserves your attention.

WoW = Science Inquiry?

I love this:

...What is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent -- the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules.<

This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method.

- Clive Thompson, "Games Without Frontiers" Wired.com September 9, 2008

The article goes on to discuss the findings of Constance Steinkuehler, a game academic at the University of Wisconsin, who studied almost 2,000 messages posted on a World of Warcraft discussion board. She found that a majority of these messages were analyzing the game, with posters going back and forth positing hypotheses and responding with experience-based rebuttals - the marks of good science inquiry.

Indeed, the conversations often had the precise flow of a scientific salon, or even a journal series: Someone would pose a question -- like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster -- and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out. - Thompson, "Games Without Frontiers"

In the classroom, it's difficult to inspire student-driven inquiry. How do you get them to ask their own questions and seek out their own research to answer it? We can see that teens will use this method on their own, and do to play games - shouldn't we be able to get that same behavior to test gravity, momentum, chemical reactions, etc? They don't realize they're doing it when the goal is to win the game. How do we get them to try it in the classroom?

Early Ed and Teenage Literacy

In one of those moments of shear, but strange, coincidence, I stumbled upon the following article today, shortly after my kindergarten-teaching mother-in-law asked me if I had found anything interesting in the realm of early ed lately.

Britain has a national curriculum with specific goals, and schools there are rigorously inspected and evaluated. Most kids enter school at 4, instead of 5 as is the case here, and pre-kindergarten programs tend to be more academic than in the United States. American programs are often more play-based than academically structured, and standards vary widely from state-to-state and between public and private settings.

It's not an open-and-shut case as to whether one country's approach is better than another. On a recent international reading test, U.S. fourth-graders and their peers from England had the same results. They weren't all that impressive. Students from the two countries posted lower average scores than students in Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Hungary, Italy and Sweden, along with several Canadian provinces.

In math, kids in the United Kingdom, which includes Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, outperformed their American peers on an international test given to 15-year-olds. - Nancy Zuckerbrod, AP, "Mom finds U.S. lagging in early education" August 25, 2008. CNN.com

The math is especially telling. By requiring 6 year olds to know fractions (well before the Oregon State Standards - 3rd grade (Oregon Math Standards available here)), they get an incredible jump on all future math learning. And it isn't beyond the reach of a Kinder, I've watched my younger cousins determine that their half of the cookie isn't actually half. The games we play with young students to demonstrate halves, thirds and quarters can be comprehended by a 6 year old if done correctly. Why isn't it pushed more, why not include it in the games we play with our preschoolers and kinders? I don't spend all day with kids this age - is there any one out there who disagrees?

The reading is interesting. Britons are pushed to read far and above Americans by the age of 6 - but 4th graders test the same. If they're pushing so hard at the beginning, and developing those skills early, why aren't they continuing to build on them? The following is a quote from a Canadan news network, Globe and Mail but sounds very similar to the things written about American students.

And yet everything conspires against children learning to love books. Ubiquitous electronic devices, whether desk-bound or small enough to fit in their pockets, occupy an alarming proportion of children's days, and seem to shorten attention spans. Organized sports and music take up much of the remaining time. Homework - often mindless rote activities done by one tiny segment of a brain otherwise occupied by television - uses up time better used for reading. School literature courses often seem designed to expunge any traces of love for books. Parents may hector their children to read but tend not to read much in front of their children; children are quick to ignore such lip service. - Editorial, Globe and Mail Staff, "The Reading Habit Forms in Childhood", September 2, 2008.

What can we do, after they have the basic grounding in reading, to continue developing the skills and interest? Or, is the emphasis on reading out-dated? Does it really fit with our culture and world as it once did?

In an article in the New York Times addresses the issue:

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online. - Motoko Rich, "Literacy Debate - Online R U Really Reading?" New York Times, July 27, 2008

The debate will rage on, I'm sure. But what will be our driving force? What's best for our kids and our world, or what gives us the better test scores compared to other countries?

References:

Globe and Mail Staff, "The Reading Habit Forms in Childhood", The Globe and Mail September 2, 2008. CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080902.wereading02/BNStory/specialComment/home

Rich, Mokoto, "Literacy Debate - Online R U Really Reading?" New York Times July 27, 2008. The New York Times Company. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Zuckerbrod, Nancy. "Mom finds U.S. lagging in early education" August 25, 2008. Associated Press. http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/08/25/early.education.ap/index.html#cnnSTCText