Category: Education

Reading Foundations

Education, Homeschooling, Men & Women

Over at Snark & Shotguns comes a timely bit of analysis:

In 2015 a team of researchers walked into German classrooms and asked teachers to rate how good boys and girls are at reading. The average answer was that girls are better. Then they tracked the kids for two years. Boys whose teachers held the strongest stereotype saw their reading self-concept drop measurably, holding actual achievement constant. The teachers weren’t making the boys worse readers. They were making the boys believe they were worse readers, which boys, being human, respond to by reading less.

It gets funnier. A French team in 2016 gave eighty third-graders the same reading task twice. First time it was framed as a reading test. Boys flopped. Second time, same task, framed as a game. Boys beat the girls. And here’s the punchline — the boys most damaged by the “test” framing were the boys who cared most about reading. The ones who’d internalized that reading mattered were the ones whose performance collapsed the moment reading was put in the institutional cage labelled Test.

And then the most telling observation:

Last thought, and this one really matters. Jerrim and Moss, in the biggest international study of its kind, looked at 297,000 fifteen-year-olds across 35 countries and asked which kind of reading develops reading skill.

Answer: fiction.

Only fiction.

Non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, comics… Once you control for fiction, none of those do the work. The gender gap in fiction specifically is larger than the gender gap in any other text type.

Boys are not failing to read. Boys are failing to read the one thing that makes them better readers.

I can attest to this.  When we started homeschooling the Son&Heir, fresh out of Catholic middle school, we tested his reading skills and found them to be around sixth-grade level.

So in addition to whatever else we taught him (Saxon Math, mostly), he had to read for no less than four hours a day.  Every day.  And by “every”, I mean Monday through Sunday.  (We made allowances for family outings and so on, but that as the guideline.)

At first, he kicked and screamed, complaining that he kept falling asleep, to which our response was, “Fine.  If you fall asleep, don’t worry about it.  Just keep reading when you wake up.”  We didn’t really much care what he read, only that it couldn’t be a picture book or comics.  And because he didn’t know what to read, I gave him a series of books from our library to start with.  There were no restrictions about following the list, however;  if he got halfway through a book and it failed to keep his interest, he could quit reading it — but he had to explain to me why he’d done so.

It took about a year.  And then one day he asked me:  “Do we have any more books by Daphne du Maurier?”  He’d found a favorite author.  In the following months, he read her entire body of work.  And then came the real breakthrough:  he discovered fantasy, in the shape of R.A. Salvatore (author of about a jillion titles), and over the next few years read all of his body of work.

All of a sudden, we couldn’t stop him reading.  He moved on to the Great Books — he still has the set — and never looked back.  To this day, he is one of the most well-read men I know.  His B.A., by the way, carries a Philosophy major, which is not a discipline for the non-reader.  (He reads stuff, e.g. Hegel, that makes his father’s brain hurt.)

I know:  the plural of anecdote is not data.  But it certainly supports the Jerrim and Moss experiment.

Now go and read the whole article to see how badly public schools have served our boys.

Lockdown / Shutdown

Education, Plagues and Poxes

I know that this is just stating the obvious, but here it is anyway:

Babies born during the COVID-19 pandemic are ‘falling behind’ on key milestones including talking and crawling because of a lack of social interaction, early learning staff and scientists have warned.

Studies have also revealed children born after March 2020 are less likely to be able to vocalize than their peers were at this age, and are yet to develop social skills such as sharing and waiting their turn — leading to more fights.

Scientists suggest a lack of social contact with family and relatives due to restrictions is behind the shift.

The long-term impact of the pandemic on children is not yet clear, but experts have warned keeping children away from their peers for so long with lockdowns is bound to have harmed their development.

Look, I’m not remotely an expert on this stuff, but it’s a well-known fact that childhood learning (particularly during the early years) requires continuous stimulation — and by “continuous” I mean uninterrupted.

While it is generally acknowledged that children’s brains are absolute sponges when it comes to learning, it is also true (to continue the metaphor) that letting the sponge dry out during the process, even for short periods of time, can affect its absorption capacity.  And once that is lost, there is no recovery of the ability.

So for the (dubious) purpose of saving a few lives, an entire group of children has been irremediably harmed.

A paper published in JAMA in January this year that looked at 225 children born in 2020 revealed babies were less likely to be crawling and smiling at themselves in a mirror within six months. It also showed they had reduced social and problem solving skills.

And a UK-based survey of teachers released last month found those teaching children in the early grades were now seeing more biting and hitting in the classroom than previously.  [New Wife reports the same from her preschool, incidentally]

British-based charity Ofsted has also suggested in a report that after reviewing more than 280 educational settings, children are struggling with basic skills such as writing and speaking in the wake of the pandemic.

They said some teachers even said they had seen youngsters lack confidence in group activities, and struggle to share and take turns.

Similarly, Brown University scientists, who assessed 1,000 children, found there was a 23 percent dive in ‘pandemic’ babies scores in three cognitive tests.

Any time in the future that the Panic Purveyor Set (e.g. Fauci) suggests that we isolate ourselves in the Covid-19 manner, we should set about them with baseball / cricket bats (apply according to national preference).

For the children.

Pretty Much Illiterate

Education, Seen On Campus, Snowflakes

Then there’s this tale of woe (read it all for the full horror):

College students are increasingly unprepared for serious study, with some professors recently reporting they are illiterate, raising significant questions about the overall quality of American education.

“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”   Wilson described that she is trying new pedagogical methods to convey the same information.  “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson stated. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”

Yeah, I know all about that.  I think I’ve told the story of how Connie (as Global Director of Training at a Great Big Accounting Firm) had occasion to review some of her earlier training materials.  These, she discovered, were about 80% text and the rest graphics.  Only five years later, the ratio had been completely inverted:  80% graphics and the rest text.  (And just so we know who we’re talking about, the trainees all had Masters degrees in either Finance or Business.  Not yer typical Fem Studies or Art History grads, these.)  When she tried to arrest that development and include more text, all that happened was that the training became less effective:  less absorption and poorer retention.

So none of the above are at all surprising to me;  only the extent is somewhat shocking.

At some point, all learning, innovation and civilization itself is going to plateau (or worse, #Muslims) instead of increasing with each generation, as before.

Socrates had it nailed.

Tradition Of Excellence

Education

My alma mater has made the news:

St John’s College in Johannesburg has built a reputation as one of South Africa’s leading boys’ schools, producing pupils who get accepted into top universities in South Africa and around the world, including Harvard University in the United States.

However, I’m still a little peeved that the College outlawed caning punishment back in the 1990s, even though that meant that my record total (124 strokes) will never be surpassed.

Let’s Get Real

Education, The Gun Thing

Apparently this group of schoolkids was on a school-sponsored walk, when a rather unwelcome companion joined them:

A grizzly bear attacked a group of elementary school students and teachers in Canada, leaving 11 people injured.  Two were critically injured and two seriously hurt following the attack while a class was out on a walk in Bella Coola, northwest of Vancouver. 

Veronica Schooner said her ten-year-old son Alvarez, who was in the Year 4-5 group, was so close to the animal ‘he even felt its fur.  He was running for his life,’ she told local media.  Ms Schooner said several people attempted to halt the attack but one male teacher ‘got the whole brunt of it’ and was among the people taken by helicopter from the scene.

Guess that school-issued bear spray didn’t work too well, huh?

Some time ago I watched one of TV shows where realtors took people to find their dream off-the-grid cabins in Alaska.  This generally involved a long trek by road, a trip upriver in a boat, or even getting ferried in by float plane.

Here’s the interesting part:  every single realtor, male or female, was packing what looked like a serious gun — mostly large-framed revolvers, but on at least two occasions, the realtors had a rifle slung over their shoulder.

This is what used to be known as “common sense”:  when you’re in bear country, take a frigging gun with you so that when Ol’ Smokey Tha Bahr is looking for a meal item, you can either disabuse him of the urge or else make it his last trip to the human buffet table.

And if realtors can do it, why not the teachers who are nominally responsible for the safety of pupils under their charge?

Oooh I know, guns are icky and you’re twice as likely to be shot by someone you know (Gun Wussies Bible, Chapter One Verses #3 and #4), but ignoring that lunacy, let’s at least acknowledge that pretty much the whole of northwestern America has a decent population of bears of the several varieties, all of which have no problem with munching on the occasional human if sufficiently hungry.

But lest we forget:  we humans and not the bears are at the top of the food chain — unless, that is, we don’t avail ourselves of the implements that put us there.

And as long as we indulge ourselves in this foolishness, there will be more casualties because bears are not like Baloo in the Jungle Book, no matter how much we tell ourselves they are.

How To Breathe

Education, Seen On Campus

I can only regard with incredulity this new adventure in education:

A renowned Canadian university has launched a bizarre ‘Adulting 101’ crash course for pampered students who can’t perform the most basic life tasks like changing a tire, buying groceries or doing laundry.

In an era dominated by digital innovation, Generation Z – or those born between 1997 and 2012 – are in desperate need of practical knowledge that older generations might otherwise consider ‘common sense’.

Adulting 101 is designed to teach basic life skills that Gen Z often struggles with, including cooking, budgeting, basic nutrition, laundry and even navigating a grocery store.  The course covers everything from maintaining healthy relationships, practicing fire safety in the kitchen and changing a tire.

For many, the course has been a saving grace – not only helping them personally, but also boosting their daily confidence in navigating the ins and outs of adulthood.

Well, I guess that once a university stoops to deliver courses in Remedial English because such basics somehow escaped the grade-, middle- and high school curriculum, why not the equivalent of 8th-grade Home Economics?

The difference is that “life skills” belong not in secondary school education, but squarely in the “parenting” remit, as the article suggests:

Jean Twenge, a researcher and psychology professor at San Diego State University, suggests that prolonged adolescence and ‘helicopter’ parenting have delayed development among Gen Z.

You don’t say.

For all the mud slung by “educators” at homeschoolers, I defy anyone to come up with examples of such helplessness among the homeschooled.  We started giving our kids an allowance as soon as they reached an age we deemed appropriate, said budget to cover their clothing, toiletries and entertainment.  We took them shopping all the time, whether for toiletries, groceries or clothing, but let them make their own decisions, staying well back as they navigated their way through the stores — although we did show them basic stuff like comparative pricing and value judgements.  Hell, I think the Son&Heir learned how to shop for produce from the age of five, because he always accompanied me on the weekly supermarket trip;  and when he bought his first car (at age 19, cash, from his own savings), I showed both him and Daughter the basics of car maintenance — checking the oil, the radiator, how to use a gas pump, and so on.  Their allowance, by the way, ended at age 17 and they all went out to work, at restaurants, movie houses, drugstores and so on, and they were solely responsible for managing their savings and expenditure.

I’m not holding us up as ideal parents, but FFS, any parent who doesn’t do this kind of thing is setting their kids up for failure.

But thank goodness for the universities, who will make up for parental neglect with a course that probably costs $2,500 per quarter.  That cost, by the way, should not be covered by public subsidy or student loans, but by the fucking parents.

Fat chance.