Category: Education

News Snippets

Education

From various sources:

Georgia Teacher Wore ‘Jesus Loves You’ Sweater in Video
While Having Sex with Student
...wasn’t it Jesus who talked about “suffer the little children to come  into  unto me”?  [/atheist ignorance]

Male Texas Teacher Charged With Grooming 16-year-old with
Talk of ‘Threesomes’ With Other Men
...like all good socialists, he’s sharing the wealth with that kiddie-diddling thang, huh?

New York Teacher Pleads Guilty to Having Child Porn that
Included ‘Infants and Toddlers’
...looking ahead at the “farm” team, no doubt.

Seems like all the states are getting in on the action, so to speak.

Streaming

Education

I’m not talking about downloading movies or anything like that;  I’m talking about the practice of grouping schoolkids into classes according to their abilities — something which has been regarded as doubleplusungood by Big Education for a long time.

As always, Joanne Jacobs brings in da numbers:

“It wasn’t long ago that some educational researchers in the UK and Ireland were calling ability grouping ‘symbolic violence’.”

And yet…

Strong students learn less math in mixed classes, concludes a new Education Endowment Foundation study of English middle schools, reports Richard Adams in The Guardian. Weaker students, as judged by prior math achievement, do about the same whether they’re in mixed classes or lower-track classes, University College London (UCL) researchers found. Furthermore, students placed in lower-track classes were more confident of their math abilities than those in mixed classes.

I can attest to this.  Way back in time, we members of the chalk ‘n slate set were “streamed” in just about every class, from A to D where the numbers supported it (e.g. in Mathematics and English), and from A to C for the elective classes (such as Geography, Biology and History).

I remember starting at St. John’s College in the A class for every course, but by the end of my second year I was moved down to the B classes for Mathematics and Science (Chem and Physics, which were combined into a single discipline).  All the other courses, I remained in the A stream (English, Afrikaans and Latin — our French class was so small that streaming made no sense).

Once I’d got over the shame of being “dropped” — and withstood the anguish of my parents, who couldn’t believe that their “straight A” son was no more — I actually found those two courses less intimidating, because I didn’t have to work with the super-smart Maths and Science geniuses in the A class who regularly got 90%-100% for all their tests, whilst I was lucky to pass.

In the B classes, however, because the teaching was delivered at a much slower pace, I regularly passed all the tests, along the way discovering that my actual problem was that I had no facility for mathematical processing — ironic, really, considering that I ended up being a statistician and data analyst at the Great Big Research Company, and later as a data model algorithm developer as a consultant.

My problem was never getting the thing solved;  I just needed a lot more time than everyone else to get there.  So tests were always going to be difficult for me because of the limited time thereof.  (I proved this when I took the Core Math class at college, yeah in my fifties:  I could barely scrape through tests with a passing grade, but because the final exam was taken in a lab with no time constraints, I ended up with a final “B” grade — my only one in all the courses I took for my B.A. — because while my semester tests were a dismal failure, I actually scored 99% for my final exam, which luckily for me counted for 80% of the total.)

But I wouldn’t have been able to do even that, if my self-confidence hadn’t been bolstered in high school by being able to work at a slower pace in the B class.

So you can put me on the side of people who don’t think that ability grouping / streaming is symbolic violence.

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.