As you know, the various reforms within our education system have been targeted towards STEM (acronym of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Education as United States plays “catch up” with many other developed and developing nations based on global student achievement indexes.
Scientific American has released an interesting infographic based on their research in collaboration with Adam Maltese of Indiana University. The data, which was collected through randomized surveys of men and women throughout colleges as well as online, offers a glimpse of the trigger-points identified by today’s young men and women of science as those that influenced their ultimate and continued pursuit of science, technology, engineering, etc. Based on the data collected, the researchers found strong gender-based differences: women are much more likely than men to credit a teacher or a parent with sparking their scientific interests, while men credit their own tinkering and curiosity. (Although, in my view, the greatest influences upon a person are often those that do so without any conscious sensation or that “aha!” moment, especially in men, who are just so fond of asking for directions and instructions.) A takeaway: buy your sons LEGO and other self discovery science and tech kits and show your daughters inspirational science videos or connect them with exciting mentors and teachers. Perhaps that’s taking the study a bit too literally, but you get the idea. The point here, really, is to inspire. How, in what way, is totally dependent upon the person being inspired.
What we notice here is that passion and early (as early as elementary school) attraction to the fields of STEM are the primary carriers of the these individuals through the long and sometimes bumpy road of the scientific career.
August is that time of the year when students are starting to be reminded of the impending end to their summer vacation. The store windows by now are full of ‘back-to-school’ sales announcements.
The US Census Bureau recently published some numbers from last year’s back-to-school month to set the stage for this year’s school preparation period.
Here’s the gist of it:
Parents and students spent $7.7 billion last August on clothing – best retail sales month after the holiday retail mania period. For book stores, August was actually their strongest sales month of the year, totaling $2.4 billion. Now you know why stores everywhere are all bombarding you with their back-to-school ads, catalogs, discounts, and even giant giveaways like the 1,000 iPads that Abercombie is throwing at their young, and hence school-attending, clientele.
Another interesting number – 79 million children and adults – is the amount of people enrolled in some sort of schooling – from nursery to college and beyond, full time and part time. With so many students, the above sales numbers are around $120 per student spent on clothing and books.
The report also reminds us that staying in school pays off. According to statistics, those that only made it through high school earned on average $23,000 less per year than those that got through college, and those that pursued degrees that are even higher earned another $21,000 more.
The Gifted?!
There was another stat that caught my attention. In 2009, 27% of students ages 12 to 17 were enrolled in some sort of a gifted class. In recent years the movement towards gifted and talented education has made great progress in improving access to better education for many students. But are we now moving into the Lake Wobegon effect “where all children are above average”. Is the ‘gifted’ becoming the new ‘standard’? Are we replacing what used to be called ‘honors’ with the trendier ‘gifted’? Does that muddle the picture of our education system?
On the other hand, one could say (and I believe this to be so) that all students are talented and gifted in some thing or some way, and the job of a good educator is to help the student to discover their unique interests and abilities and to kindle a lifelong passion for these. As such, there is no reason to be surprised by the number of students in the gifted class. In reality, I would wager that it is a bit of both: There is a shift within the education community to include a more diverse range of giftedness as well as some repackaging and renaming of classes to fit the current trend. (Soon we might have to create the ‘Super Gifted’ or perhaps the ‘Uber Gifted’ classes.) It is something to watch as it continues to develop.
Over the course of the summer, I had conversations with dozens of students and parents on various topics related to high school education. These were students and parents with a wide range of backgrounds and academic standing. Overwhelming majority of students and parents, I have found, do not have proper guidance through the sometimes confusing terrain of education.
Like in any other field, the people with the best and up to date information are the ones that are actively engaged in it. There are many good doctors, but the best ones are those that continue to educate themselves, to be enlightened on the latest research and newest techniques through the various channels available to medical professionals. Education is an enterprise like any other, it does not stay static; it continues to develop, grow and innovate. This can make things difficult for the average working parent. It often leaves behind even the best intentioned students and their parents.
Every school of course has a guidance counselor. They are not, however, micromanagers and are limited in the effort that they can allocate per student. I will not and can not judge if the guidance counselors allocate their scarce resources wisely. Some are better than others as some doctors are better than others. But one word of advice to every student and parent interested in cultivating their “education investment portfolio”. Get to know the guidance counselor at your school. I mean continuously pester (in a friendly, pleasant way of course) him or her. No matter how good or not so good the school guidance counselor may be, he or she is probably more plugged into the latest in college admissions, career planning, and other education trends than a parent will ever be. It’s their full time occupation.
This may be one of the greatest benefits of being in a small school. The guidance that each student receives at a small private school is something that can not be overvalued. Regardless which school your son or daughter currently attends, go give your child’s guidance counselor a phone call, set up an appointment, meet to discuss your child’s future. And while you at it, meet up with other staff members there too. Do not wait until your child is a high school senior. Start as early as possible. Put it into your calendar; talk to the folks at the school on regular basis.
Microsoft’s annual Imagine Cup student technology competition in its 10th season held its today in Sydney, Australia. This time the first prize was awarded to a team from Ukraine for their design of sensory gloves that translate sign language into voice.
Here we see a member of team quadSquad from Ukraine showcasing the winning project, Enable Talk, a software solution that transforms sign language into a form of verbal communication through sensor-equipped gloves and a mobile device.
More than 350 students from 75 countries traveled to Sydney after competing in local and online events, representing the best and brightest selected to compete in the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals. Cash prizes totaling approximately US$175,000 were awarded across eight competition categories.
Math is a subject that generally tops the charts of student boredom. Although some students have an easier time with the subject than with other less structured and less “true or false” type of educational exercises, most students think of math with fear and / or general antipathy. Why is it that the queen of sciences gets such a bad rep in the classroom?
I recently stumbled upon a great article that laments the sad state of affairs in our schools when it comes to math education. I highly recommend giving it a read; it is not only poignant but quite amusing as well.
I believe that the make-up of the math curriculum has a lot to do with the age of mathematics. Unlike many other branches of learning which had their renaissance in more recent history, math is as old as the human race and has been developing and growing for thousands of years. As such a student of mathematics in order to be up to date to the contemporary level of knowledge has a greater distance to transverse in the quite short years of schooling. Think about it: a high school student that studies calculus is learning something that was not understood until its discovery by two of the greatest mathematical minds in history, namely Newton and Leibnitz. And yet today it’s only a beginning, an introduction into the many uses and applications of calculus concepts which is basic to so many advanced professions in the world of science, technology, economics and finance.
On the other hand Economics and Psychology are two examples of branches of knowledge that continue to develop even today. There are concepts in these that are named after their discoverers who are still alive today. (Think of the Case – Shiller Index.) Students of Economics, Psychology, and of course the many Technology based subjects which are in midst of their renaissance, feel like they can still create an impact, can express their individual take on an issue and leave a legacy. (The importance of leaving a legacy for students has been the subject of a TED Talk about a year ago here.) Even Literature – a subject that is as old as Math – gives a greater window for self expression. Trillions of trillions of words have been written, and yet trillions and trillions more will continue to be published and widely read. Math discoveries on the other hand are indeed rare. (Although, every once in a while we are encouraged by a massive breakthrough.) Even if in reality, the world of pure mathematics is continuously developing as any other matter of human inquiry; those developments, however, can only truly be appreciated by those already in the inner circle.
Another challenging byproduct of the above is the human obsession with nomenclature. (I call it an obsession simply because calling a thing by a name be it a math concept or a pet, is a basic human need.) Naming a phenomenon is helpful in referring to it without having to describe it over again. Once you understand the concept of gravity, the term “gravity” when you hear it becomes a natural and automatic link to everything you know about it. But note the order: we first discover the concept, understand it well and only then do we crown it with its name. How often in school do we reverse this order? What percentage of a test in any subject consists of definitions and other memorization of nomenclature? Not that nomenclature isn’t important; it most certainly is. In fact it is essential for a well educated person to call a thing by its name. However, rote memorization is synthetic and is often difficult for students who have just touched the surface of new material. Scalene, isosceles triangles; complimentary, supplementary angles – the names are simply conveniences for the underlying math concepts.
The process of name giving should ideally be a natural one. When an idea or a concept is so vivid in ones mind that it begs to be named, when a name simplifies and solidifies the material learned, that’s when it finds its own appropriate place in a student’s mind. When a metaphor and a simile are literary devices as distinct as an apple and an orange or at least as a Granny Smith and a Macintosh, that’s when the two terms are as welcome as a rest stop on a long highway.
In a certain sense, we can say that all schooling is synthetic. Naturally learned concepts are picked up by students through their own observations or through their own research – questioning their peers or grown ups in their lives. A student need not go to class to learn how to use his or her cell phone. A school’s curriculum in math or in any subject should aim to create synthetically a natural learning environment. We should look back at history to see how our species arrived at the knowledge that we possess today – what were the stepping stones, and structure our curriculum based on this natural progression. We should nudge (and perhaps only lightly push) our students to inquiry and then discovery on their own. It may not always be possible, but this should be our primary strategy.
The discussion regarding coed and non-coed education is in the news once again. It seems more and more public schools are offering gender segregated instruction, Associated Press reports (See article in Washington Post).
The debate over the pros and cons of keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom is a long standing one. Despite the seeming distance on the issue between the two sides, it must be acknowledged that there are pluses and minuses in each method. Girls generally tend to be the more studious, especially in the younger grades as they develop faster than boys, and as such raise the bar for the entire classroom. On the other hand, and especially in older grades, hormone budding distractions can invite unnecessary challenges to the already vulnerable education process.
The ACLU which questions the legality of this new development believes that it does nothing but promote stereotypes and is discriminatory at the core. Proponents of the separated instruction argue that the unique characteristics of each gender is readily accepted by all and as such crafting the curriculum and its delivery to be more gender specific will increase the success and improve the impact of learning.
In the world of private education which includes Jewish and Parochial schools, this debate, although less threatened by the legal actions of such organizations as the ACLU, has been central to the development of the widely varied Jewish school system that we see today. There are coed and non-coed Jewish schools some completely and some partially. Sinai Academy today remains a boys only school. We continue to believe that the benefits of gender specific instruction outweigh the negatives. It also gives a greater flexibility in planning extra-curricular, which are just as important if not more so, activities for the students.
Google docs have been a useful tool for educators and collaborators world over. Its simple word processing and spreadsheet platform is familiar and easy to use, instantly saves your work, gives you access to your docs from any internet-capable device, and lets you collaborate simultaneously with contributors from the comfort of their own home. The latest feature rolled out by Google is the sidebar research tool that lets you search the internet on any topic / keyword about which you are writing. Simply select and right-click the words that you’d like to research and the search results will appear instantly on the right of your document without the need to go from tab to tab. It also has a built in linking ability and allows to instantly create footnotes should you like to cite a specific webpage. And for images, you can drag the image you’d like straight into your document. CTRL + ALT + R is another way to the research tool.
As many high school and college students are hard at work on their end of the year research papers, this nifty tool will offer an added convenience.
Teachers teach, teachers explain, teachers try to give over as much knowledge and as much material as possible.
In truth, a teacher is there only to hand the student keys that unlock the door to the treasure vault of knowledge; the rest is all up to the student.
Most students approach education in the same way they watch movies – sit back, relax and see it unfold. And when the lesson is over so is the student’s involvement in the subject matter. It is understandable in high school; it is tragic in college.
If there’s any learning trait that I wish for our students to acquire as they mature during these years of high school, it is that of learning independence – the ability to take the keys offered by the teachers, to enter the hall of knowledge and make it theirs.
This one is a giant “Duh” type of a study, but it often helps to state the obvious. A survey of many studies by the National Center for Family and Community Connection with Schools of SEDL reports a convincing link between student achievement and parent involvement.
When parents talk to their children about school, expect them to do well, help them plan
for college, and make sure that out-of-school activities are constructive, their children do
better in school. When schools engage families in ways that are linked to improving learning, students make greater gains. When schools build partnerships with families that respond
to their concerns and honor their contributions, they are successful in sustaining connections
that are aimed at improving student achievement. And when families and communities
organize to hold poorly performing schools accountable, studies suggest that school districts
make positive changes in policy, practice, and resources.
The studies point out an additional important factor: the increase in interaction should not just be between parents and students, but also between the school, the teachers and parents. The more we are all involved in the future development of our children, the stronger the signal that their future is truly important and the more we are aware of the many, fine but significant components that play a role in the growth.
