Meantime

Secondo recently finished:

“The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow

By chance, Primo and I got a chance to do a little stunt work in the trailer for Neal Stephenson’s new book “Anathem“.

If you stop at 1:33 you can see me getting put into an arm bar. You can also see half of Primo on the far left edge of the frame – alas, he is only visible for 7 frames of video. Such are the humble beginnings of a show business career.

Can’t wait for my copy of the book to be delivered!

I had to suffer the Northgate Mall today because that’s where the local Radio Shack is located. Upon entering I was overwhelmed by a cacophony of 39 televisions (I counted). Now, I just don’t know how it happened, but by the time that I left the mall, all of those TVs were turned off.

If you’ve ever talked to me about public school reform you know that what I have said is needed is to

• pay teachers 2x to 3x what they make now
• fire ineffective teachers and principals
• have less bureaucracy

Well, that’s just what the new head of DC schools is doing, and she’s not taking any prisoners.  I’m really curious to see where this all ends up a year from now.

…or should.

Someone recently asked me what kinds of grades my homschooled children get. I actually laughed out loud. “Sorry son, I realize you don’t understand predicate nominatives or substantives, but we have to move on or we’ll get behind schedule. So, you’re getting a D in grammar this month. I’ll give you some extra credit work and you can try to bring your grade up next month.” That never happens in a homeschool. So, uhm, duh, my kids get straight As.

But this got me thinking about the nature of grades. What, exactly, do grades represent? I think I’ve boiled it down to its essence. Try this on for size:

Grades represent a student’s short-term recall of a fixed set of material within the context of a) the media used to present the material, b) the teacher who presented it, c) the time allowed, d) the student’s readiness to grasp such material.

If any one of those four factors is not where it should be for a student then there is a good chance that learning will not happen. Remember, students make learning happen. Things need to be right for the student; and as every parent will tell you, their child is a unique snowflake.

Let me give you some real-world examples of these four compass points:

The media used
I’ve spent the past two years trying to teach latin to Primo. It hasn’t been my greatest source of pride. We’d make some progress, then revert, then make some more progress, and then plateau, ad infinitum. It was a lot of work with little gain. I finally tried using a different textbook. Hey! Suddenly everything clicked. Where the first book was very sterile and technical, the new book is fun and engaging. Now he’s getting the concepts and it’s easy, and he’s actually enjoying the work. Heck, he could now easily explain to you that you’d say ad nauseam instead of ad nausea because the preposition ad takes an accusative-case argument, not the ablative.

A lot of people claim that standardized tests are biased toward middle-to-upper-class white children. Maybe they are. But if you believe that, why should that idea of unbalanced materials only apply for minorities? How many B-C-D-F students in schools would become A students if they could just use different materials? Sadly, schools issue whatever book the district’s committees bought for that year. There have been more scandals associated with these purchases over the years than I have time to enumerate.

The teacher
This one should be obvious. Jaime Escalante can teach calculus to inner-city failures and have nearly all of them pass the calculus AP test. He can also teach physics to Peruvian indians. Most teachers can’t work a room that well. Ask anyone with a teaching degree what they learned in teacher school and they’ll tell you that they mostly learned classroom management – not how to teach effectively.

The time allowed
There are many different kinds of homeschooling: unschooling, classical education, school-at-home, independent study under the aegis of a school, mixtures of them all. One thing that they all have in common is time – all the time in the world. If the kids aren’t doing perfect work then we take the time to go over it until real mastery has been achieved. Didn’t do so well on dividing fractions? Ok, we’ll go over it again, and then try again tomorrow, then maybe put it aside for a day or two and try it fresh later. You can’t do that in a school, at least not at most schools.

Student readiness
There have been about a gajillion studies done that show pretty conclusively that children develop at different rates. I don’t believe that anyone credible is arguing this point any more. Yes, your kid actually is a unique snowflake. One thing that comes up over and over again is that, when left to their own devices, girls want to start reading around age 4-5 while with boys it’s perfectly normal for them to show no interest in reading until age 8. Some kids can compose music at 5, some can’t grok a major scale until their teens (hell, music didn’t really click for me until my 30s). Yet, for every student, if they aren’t at “grade level” then they are branded a failure.

Most of these same studies go on to show that pushing things on kids before they are developmentally ready for them can actually cause damage, and prevent future success.

Are grades useful for comparing students?
Yes, no, and maybe. It all depends.

A common grading structure is to have the mid-term and final worth 25% each; and attendance, effort, daily assignments, etc. make up the other 50%.

Timmy is struggling in some subject. He’s doing D work so far, and is having to work really hard just to do that. When the mid-term comes up he gets so anxious and confused that he gets a 60%. But Timmy sticks it out. During Christmas break he goes skiiing with an uncle who, during the long lift rides, explains the subject in a slightly different way. After that Timmy totally understands what is going on. He spends the rest of his break going over the first semester’s work and actually learns it. He produces perfect work and test scores during the second semester. It is clear to everyone that he has totally mastered this subject.

But due to his first semester work the best grade he can possibly get for the year is a B-. A B- doesn’t get you into Stanford, or into a job interview at a Fortune 500 company. Now, a good teacher would recognize Timmy’s mastery and give him a better grade anyway, but this rarely actually happens.

Is Timmy’s B- really a useful metric to use when comparing him to other students? In this case, absolutely not.

Conclusion
So, where has this gotten us? Well, this was my round-about way of advocating homeschooling. Grades may not be the best tool possible for measuring student success, but it’s what we have. Why wouldn’t you take the route that practically guarantees a 4.0 – if you let it. Granted, homeschooling is not for everyone. However, I believe that most parents can effectively homeschool their children. I strongly believe that all children can learn well from their parents, or on their own.

If you’d like more info from someone who is wiser, and more eloquent than I am, try the book “Learning All The Time” by John Holt. Mr. Holt (RIP) was an award-winning public school teacher, and ended up one of the most vocal advocates of home education.

It must have been about five years ago that I bought this book at Green Apple. I don’t know why I waited so long to read it. Anyway, loved it. It’s a short novel full of geeks, big business, double-dealings, and real page-turner plot twists.

For me this was extra fun because it takes place in and around all the places I used to work in Silicon Valley. Some of the characters even eat at one of my old lunch haunts (which freakily doesn’t have a working web site).

It is a technology story, and some of the stuff is pretty dated, yet it doesn’t seem so old as to be like a fairy story from “the olden times” (as my kids would say).

“The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest: A Silicon Valley Novel” by Po Bronson

Let’s say you go to a restaurant, or bar, and order something, and it isn’t good. You mention it to your water/waitress and the get it taken off the bill. Good etiquette demands that you tip that person as if the item had not been removed. It isn’t their fault that the item wasn’t satisfactory, and they shouldn’t be penalized for the good service they gave you.

I bring this up because someone told me that they just learned this recently. I asked around and most people I know hadn’t ever heard of it. Has basic etiquette really become such an arcane art?

Anyway, you no longer have an excuse for not knowing. For other related issues, I recommend referring to:

“Emily Post’s Etiquette” 17th edition by Peggy Post

Secondo just finished:

“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card

Just like every other teen boy on the planet, he loved it.

I finished:

“The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute” by Michael Ruhlman

I like Michael Ruhlman a lot, I’m a devoted fan of his blog. When I saw this book at the library I got really excited because I love reading books about people’s experiences learning to cook.

Although I enjoyed this book, it wasn’t exactly all that I had hoped for. I just don’t feel that Mr. Ruhlman fully expressed the truly frenetic atmosphere of a working kitchen. Also, I think of him as having a great sense of humor but it just didn’t come out that strongly in this book.

Still, it was a really enjoyable read. I’m certainly going to read the couple of follow-on books he wrote after this.

Primo started his blacksmithing class at the Pratt Fine Art Center tonight. I’m pretty damn impressed with the results of his first night’s work.

His first piece is an iron poker for the fireplace.

Note the artistic choice to do a reverse twist.

And the end hand-hammered to a deadly point!

Can’t wait to see what he makes at the next class.