I like this, from Linda's Homeschool Weblog:
Aaron was talking to a friend on the phone, "I just finished washing my parents' car," he said. His friend asked if he was getting money for doing it. Aaron said, "No, I just like doing it - I like doing car and bike work .... basically I'm the little work ant of the family."Good description - he's always doing something ... he doesn't care for reading or writing but compensates in so many ways. I'm glad he's learning a good delight-driven work ethic rather than having paperwork forced on him in the public schools.
Aaron speaks for millions of boys. But unlike most of those millions, he's lucky enough to have parents who listen.
Joanne Jacobs links to this item, about the Hogwarts Summer Correspondence course being run by Steph of One Sixteenth.
I'm setting up lessons in Herbology, Care of Magical Creatures, Potions and a special class in Basic Charms and Spells for Muggle Witches.
But of course.
In a rush to do my Education Blog duties I trawled through the National Press, which I try not to do too often, because this can get very boring, especially when it involves the impossible-to-answer question: Are Things Getting Better or Are Things Getting Worse?
Anyway, the most interesting thing I found was undoubtedly this piece from the Guardian:
Some of the most historic names in British education are cropping up all over the far east as public schools begin to tap the vast and lucrative markets of China, Malaysia and Thailand.In two months' time, Shrewsbury School, alma mater to Sir Philip Sidney and Charles Darwin, will open its first international branch in Bangkok. Last week Dulwich College started work on a new Chinese franchise in Shanghai, adding to its Thai branch on the island of Phuket. It may also open up a branch of Dulwich in India. Meanwhile Harrow, whose former pupils include Winston Churchill and Pandit Nehru, has a franchise in Bangkok.
Students from the Pacific rim are also flooding into fee-paying schools and universities in Britain. While British politicians praise the whole-class teaching and high standards they see in Asian classrooms, many in the far east see a British education as offering tradition and status combined with a more liberal, humanistic approach than their own schools and colleges.
Day pupils at Dulwich College International, Shanghai, will have to pay more than £3,000 a term, for example, roughly the same as their peers in south London. Under Chinese law, only ex-patriate British, Taiwanese and Hong Kong citizens can enrol, but the school says it hopes the restrictions will be lifted soon.
This is classic globalisation. Imagine how easy it would (not) have been to run Dulwich College International, Shanghai, in the year 1900. And imagine how much easier it has recently got, now that there are emails and cheap international phone calls and cheap air travel. Ergo, it happens.
What's the betting that in twenty years' time, the best schools in the world (far better than British public schools in Britain) are the British public schools in the Far East? Not at all impossible. After all, the British run Government of Hong Kong was one of the world's best (and much better than the British run Government of Britain), until it was shut down. Why might not the same benign cultural interaction happen again, educationally. Our best teachers will go to these schools, because they will like the eerily good discipline. And their best kids will flock there, because they love the free and easy atmosphere, unlike their local schools where they get beaten to death for Looking At The Teacher In A Funny Way.
I've just done a piece for Ubersportingpundit about the way that statistics loom so large in sport generally, and in cricket in particular. I gave it the same title there as I've used for this posting here. At the end I digressed into mentioning how sport encourages boys (especially) to get better at arithmetic.
That's it really. That's my point.
Take cricket. An enormous amount in cricket depends on, to put it bluntly, sums. Sums like: at what rate (runs per over) must the batting side score to get to their target total. If Steve Waugh makes a century, what will that do to his test match average? If England make 550, and Zimbabwe then make 250, and then followed on and make 200, England win by an innings and … what? (The Zimababwe cricket team, like much else in Zimbabwe these days, has been much weakened lately.)
I remember once explaining fractions to a twelve year old boy by talking about a soccer match the previous night. Man United had beaten some hapless rivals by 8 goals to 2. One Man U player scored 4 goals, so he scored half of the Man U goals. Another Man U guy scored 2 goals, so he scored a quarter of the Man U goals. And so on. The big insight was that this poor kid had never connected those damned "fractions" they tormented him with at school with regular and much used English words like "half" and "quarter". Yes, those are fractions. Four divided by eight, four over eight, is a half. Talking about football brought it all alive. I should imagine that there's many a maths teacher who has used sport in this kind of way.
Over at Samizdata, Gabriel Syme links to cet monsieur (?), and it occurs to me that this could be a fun way to learn French. That's if you like the Dissident Frogman's opinions of course.
D-Day, in French, is "Jour-J". Je ne … I never knew that.
Are there any other Anglo-whatever bilingual blogs out there, done along similar lines?
I'm watching one of my new digital channels. In the top left corner there is the BBC logo, and wobbling about on top of it a blue and wobbling "C" in a green globule, if that helps at all. The channel is BBC3. I'm watching some things called "Curriculum Bites". This is not it, but it does look like stuff that is supposed to complement what I'm watching.
Two attractive but, it must be said, rather nerdy young people – an older brother and an older sister, you might say – are talking away about the periodic chart of the elements, and they're talking about atoms, outer electrons, sharing of electrons, covalence bonding, and similar things. It's presented as a Socratic dialogue, with a pupil asking instantly intelligent and pertinent questions, and with a teacher (the same age) answering these questions, sometimes preceding his answers with phrases like: "Good question." As the lesson is expounded, the pupil repeats the lesson in slightly different words, to drive the point home. "So, when an electron … blah blah blah." "Yes. That's right. You've got it."
"Hang on . You're going to have to go through that again."
I'm interested that everything is right. These are totally artificial conversations, just begging to be lampooned by the comedians. No mistakes are made, and corrected. I guess that would be confusing, and the viewers might memorise the mistakes. Makes sense.
Behind the young people, the periodic chart itself swirls about, and whenever they have things to say, about, say, all the metals (to the left – I had no idea there were so many) and all the non-metals, the periodic chart emphasises the line dividing the two clumps, and colours change according to what generalisations are being made about which elements. Occasionally, the graphics are replaced by imagery of actual chemical reactions in action. Also, in front of the young people, animated particles swirl about, like magical weightless billiard balls bobbing about in the air, and doing the things that electrons do.
Well, as you can tell, they lost me ten minutes ago. I don't really get all of what they are saying. That I get any of it at all is probably because I was taught some of this stuff forty years ago, by the old fashioned methods not involving TV sets.
Several things impress me about all this.
First, as already said, good use is being made of computer graphics.
Second, thank goodness for the now universal ability of everyone to record material like this, and play it back again and again, with lots of pausing.
Third, making use of the second point, they don't waste time with gobs of dead time. What I have in mind here is the infuriating tendency of more mainstream documentaries to say something, but then to stop for a few seconds and have a stupid picture of our compere driving his car to some important place where someone he wants to talk to lives or works, as if looking at the scenery near where this person lives will somehow help us to understand what he thinks. It won't. This is just slowing things down for the sake of it, in case we get lost.
But in these Curriculum Bites, they don't faff about. They talk, and talk continuously. If you couldn't play it back again, or make these frighteningly well informed and fluent young people pause in their explications, you'd be lost in no time. But of course you can repeat, and you can pause.
The amount of stuff they're getting through per ten minutes is phenomenal. One DVD – and there have to be DVDs – of these Curriculum Bites would contain a vast amount of material. As I've been typing this out there must have been about seven or eight of these little lessons, each of which seems to last about five minutes (and each of which, as I say, communicates as much as the average 45 minute documentary). So if you want to learn chemistry, or science of any kind, it has recently been getting a whole lot easier.
If say, a oldish teenager were to be thoroughly on top of all this stuff, he'd be at least as good at science as I was at that age. If you had all this, and a rather crummy science teacher, that would be the equivalent of having just a good teacher, of the sort I presumably had, but maybe did not. (How do I know?)
It is routine in my part of the blogosphere to denounce the BBC and all its works. But the BBC is a big sprawl of activities and entertainments, many of which are outstanding. Like, it seems to me, these televised Curriculum Bites.
(Instapundit, another favorite of mine for political reasons, made a similar point - but sorry, can't find when - about another Big Media organ much criticised by my favourite pundits, the New York Times. The NYT, said the Big I, has outstanding science and technology coverage.)
Most of the Children's Educational TV I've ever watched until now has been waffly, patronising, uninformative (and probably deeply misleading) nonsense. It's been shot through with the notion that the one thing that teachers should never ever do is teach. But these people are teaching, teaching, teaching, at a rate I've never witnessed before.
I'm very impressed.
According to this (which I got to from here), my spelling age is fourteen and a half, and falling.
To be a bit more serious, I think that putting documents like this (for those who hate following links, this one is a page full of words to test spelling prowess), and while we're on the subject this (which does something similar for reading age), is extremely valuable, and fraught with educational significance. Sooner or later the lowdown on how to teach children the 3Rs will be entirely available for free on the Internet, in the form of a step by step guide of the sort that is commonplace when one is trying to assemble furniture from a box, but which is hard to come by for the trivial matter of teaching children to read and write and add up.
Of course, maybe it's there already and I haven't been informed. You know what to do.
