I‘ve been so bloggedy-blog-blog busy that I haven’t had time to, um, blog in the past several weeks. How sad that it’s almost summer and I haven’t finished writing about spring. I’ll never get all the details down now, but trust me when I say we had a lot of fun this spring, what with the 5,000 field trips I registered us for and the general whoopin’ it up we do on a daily basis.

Okay, we don’t whoop all that much, but when we do, we really whoop like nobody’s business. In a nerdy sort of way.

Take, for instance, March 14, otherwise known as the day before the Ides of March or Pi Day (3.14 - get it?). Plus, it’s someone’s birthday. Of all people, Albert Einstein had the good sense to be born on Pi Day. How fortuitous for Albert and for me! I have kids, so I now have an excuse to celebrate Einstein’s birthday, which is something that never occurred to me to do when I was young. Can’t imagine why. Now, of course, I’m all for adding more birthday celebrations to our calendar, especially if they s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the time until my next birthday.

The Einstein birthday party was actually my daughter’s idea. She was mad that I didn’t tell her it was Einstein’s birthday until 9 o’clock that evening. “Now I missed it!” she complained. But I assured her that she could have an impromptu party the next day, and none of the kids on the block were likely to know or care that we were a day late. After all, she had no idea about Einstein’s birthday until I told her, right? So in the morning she created the invitations and helped me with the party activities. When one of her friends arrived for the party, we explained what the party was and what we’d be doing, to which he replied, “I thought this was going to be a normal party.”

Normal, schmormal. Some party highlights:

The Einstein Quiz
In which we asked truly trivial questions about Albert Einstein’s life that none of the kids could answer correctly. Can you believe none of them even knew he was German? Sheesh, take an educated guess, people! (NB: The oldest kid at the party was 10.)

If I Only Had a Brain
In which art imitated life. Look at the photo of Albert. Something’s missing — his brain! No wonder his hair is always a mess.

I bet he has a splitting headache.
(Note the awesomeness of my Photoshop skillz.)

Luckily, the kids stepped in and played Pin the Brain on Einstein, with one child actually sticking a brain in the hole in the astrophysicist’s head. Nice job!

I wish it were this easy for me to get another brain or two.

Let Them Eat Pi
In which a 9-year-old used a pie (and whipped cream) to explain pi. Pie humbly and doubly serves humanity by being both a math manipulative and a dessert, while pi serves as the shortest mathematical term with the longest value (more than a trillion digits and counting!).

Mathematically good!

Tags: Albert Einstein's birthday, Pi Day

My family spent Saturday afternoon at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Family Day in Boston, where we saw all kinds of great stuff. I’ll post more about the expo a little later, but I want to tell you first about one particularly outstanding product we learned about while there: a free programming interface for kids called Alice.

I’m excited about this program because my 9-year-old has said she wants to learn how to make her own computer games, and we’ve been looking for a child-friendly application to help her learn how to do that. We couldn’t find anything that looked like a 9-year-old programming novice would be able to learn quickly and easily. Half the battle with helping young kids maintain their excitement is to enable them to complete a project in a short period of time (like two hours on the first try). Everything we looked at either had a huge learning curve or would have probably been too difficult for our daughter right now.

And then, Saturday, we just stumbled upon Alice by accident.

Carnegie Mellon developed Alice, a drag-and-drop programming interface that allows you to create 3D worlds in a Java-like language. Sometime this year, a new version (3.0) of Alice will be released which will enable actual Java programming, not Java-like programming.

In the meantime, two versions are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, standard Alice, designed for high school and college-aged “kids” and Storytelling Alice, for middle school-aged kids. I think even some younger kids will be able to use Storytelling Alice, given that my 7-year-old son sat on my lap this morning and explained to me how he thought it worked. After watching me for a few minutes, he definitely understood the basic idea behind how to build a world and make the characters in it do what we wanted them to do.

Both versions of Alice come with a library of scenes and characters; each character has a handful (or more) of ready-to-use methods (actions), so that if you want your character to walk, run, talk, turn, smile, cry, think, etc., you can just drag that method from a list and drop it into your program. You can also create new methods.

I took the 30-minute tutorial for Storytelling Alice and then spent another 30 minutes playing with the software. In that hour, I learned how to create a new world, add characters to it, and program those characters to do what I wanted them to do. I also learned some programming terminology, like what a method is. I finished a brief movie in about 30 minutes. Not too shabby!

The Alice.org website also offers free instructional materials, a user forum, additional characters and scenes, and other helpful information. When I have time to play with the tool more, I’ll learn how to do programming loops, “while” statements, and other standard programming thingies (pardon my technical language) that will allow my characters to interact more naturally. Eventually, I suppose I’ll let my daughter have a turn. It was her idea to learn how to program, wasn’t it?

And did I mention that Alice is free?

My only disappointment thus far is with the publishing capability. The “publish as movie” function doesn’t work yet (at least not in Storytelling Alice). And if you publish as an HTML page, anyone who wants to view the page has to have Java, Java 3D, and Java Media Console installed on his/her computer.

Otherwise, Alice rocks. Check it out at Alice.org.

Tags: Alice.org, Java, Java programming for kids, Carnegie-Mellon, 3D programming, Java, free programming software

ere’s a good article about unschooling in City on a Hill Press. In it, I found several worthwhile snippets about unschooling, but also some concise and precise explanations about problems with today’s public school model.

Take this tidbit about how schools have changed over the past 100 years or so, for example:

“Before there was all this standardized curriculum and testing — all that began in the late 19th century — there was no such thing as school failure,” Glass said. “People just went to school or they didn’t.”

Now that the curriculum has become more rigid, it has begun to create problems. Glass said, “It’s the system that produces winners, losers, those who pass, those who fail, those who count as somebody and those who count as nobody.”

So true — and definitely something that has contributed to our decision to homeschool.

However, the article also states that “Children with two working parents must attend school,” which is patently false. Many single parents homeschool while holding down a job, and many families with two working parents homeschool. Where there’s a will, there is very often a way.

Tags: unschooling, homeschooling, school failure, City on a Hill Press,

Blogger and homeschooling parent Celeste has written a terrific post, “Show Us the Body,” in which she compares demonstrating the benefits of homeschooling to providing evidence of Big Foot’s existence. She writes:

I still don’t know whether Bigfoot exists, but I do empathize with the poor believers who are struggling to produce evidence. As a homeschooling parent, I’m very familiar with the challenge of working with intangible evidence and trying to convince people that SOMETHING is happening, even though it can’t be seen or measured.

How much do my children know? How much did they learn today? How long did it take them to learn it? Are they ahead or behind? Homeschoolers are constantly being asked questions like these, and it’s really hard to give answers that will convince a skeptic.

Of course, we all know the benefits of homeschooling are real, whereas Bigfoot is just a big hoax.

We do, right?

Celeste’s post resonated with me, not so much because I need to explain homeschooling to others but because I sometimes need to remind myself of our goals. As a new homeschooler (year 1) of children who previously attended day care, preschool, and K-2, I know how hard it can be to trust that homeschooling is “working.” In previous years, I had some level of certainty that the kids would eventually learn to read, write, and do algebra. I was never big on whether they were “on track” with a particular schedule of learning because I believe that kids should move at their own pace and learn when they’re ready. But at least I knew they were being exposed to structured learning opportunities that were covering the basics.

But look who’s supposed to cover the basics now! It’s up to me and my husband to make sure our kids have the opportunity to learn what they need to learn. (Let’s ignore for the moment the huge debate about what kids “need to learn” in the first place. That’s a book-length post.) As I expected I would, I do sometimes panic: Are they learning enough? Am I doing enough and providing everything they need in order to learn? Are they still interested in what we’re doing or am I boring them to tears? Do they still love learning, as they have since they were born, or will I, like so many schools, unintentionally stifle their passion? Are they figuring out who they are and what they enjoy doing with their time?

Taking the Long View

I’m discovering that in the short term — and I consider looking back within a single year the short term — it’s almost impossible to answer those questions. While it’s vital to reflect on the short term and make adjustments to fit the kids’ needs, it’s also important for me to keep it in perspective. These are events or trends that happened during a relatively short, fixed period of time; they don’t necessarily predict future trends or events, nor do they exist in isolation. They exist in the context of everything that came before them and, eventually, everything that will come after them. And they reflect the whole child and all of what he or she was experiencing as a human being during that time, not just subject matter knowledge.
Keep reading… »

Tags: homeschooling, stock market, bigfoot, long-term investing

Over at Blogcritics, where I sometimes cross-post my blog entries, Diana Hartman has written an article about fairness and what it does and doesn’t mean. Or maybe it’s about what it should and shouldn’t mean.

Hartman rails against scholastic relay races that either let all the kids compete regardless of skill level or that don’t have winners and losers, against the way school awards are given out to students, and against making tests easier in response to complaints that the tests aren’t fair.

She makes a good point with her last example, one from “real life”: the driving test U.S. military and their dependents have to pass in order to obtain a driver’s license when they’re stationed in Germany. Upwards of 45% have been failing the test — leaving military family cars in the holding lot for months at a time — so the military has decided to make the test easier. (Or at least that’s how Hartman sees it. I don’t know anything about the test.)

The problem — and I agree with Hartman on this — is one of safety. If she’s right and the test is being made easier, we now will have a bunch of U.S. drivers over there who don’t have as much knowledge and skill as the German citizenry. How dangerous will those drivers be on the German roads? How smart was it to make the test easier as a matter of convenience for U.S. military families new to Germany? Time will tell.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to lower standards on tests that measure a minimum competency in a skill or a field that impacts someone’s safety or health. I wouldn’t be happy if the state medical board exams suddenly got easier just so more medical school graduates could become licensed doctors, for example. Making tests like these easier does not necessarily make them any more fair, anyway.

The rest of Hartman’s examples come from her family’s K-12 school experiences. She’s apparently drawing a connection between lowered standards in American schools with the lowered driving test standard. “Why should we expect the adult graduates of American schools to work hard to pass a driver’s test when their school experience taught them that everyone should pass life’s tests?” she seems to be asking.

Unfortunately, these school stories don’t help her argument. First, K-12 schools are not “real” life and shouldn’t operate as if they were. And second, the specific anecdotes Hartman relates are cautionary tales about creating competition between students more than they are about lowered standards.
Keep reading… »

Tags: competition in school, teamwork, fairness, bad teaching

What should we do with high school students who skip classes and don’t do the coursework? Fail them? Or let them get credit for the course by completing a study pack provided by an outside vendor?

I say hell yeah to option #2.

The takeaway message from students who say things like, “I want to get done with school the easiest way possible,” is not that the students are lazy or too smart and bored to be bothered with the work. The message is that many high school students don’t see any relevance to their lives and interests in their coursework. They don’t have much, if any, choice in which courses they take, and they certainly don’t have any input into how the school is run. They go to school because they’re compelled to by state law (at least until they’re 16 in most states) and not because they want to.

They’ve lost the desire to learn because the schools aren’t interested in students’ desire to learn. Schools are interested in pushing as many kids through the same program as efficiently as possible, no matter how diverse those kids’ interests may be. For the most part, students are treated the same way and must take the same basic coursework. If you don’t expect some students to be completely uninterested in schools like that, you’re deluding yourself.

In the corporate training world, a basic premise is that whatever training program you’re building had better be relevant to the target audience because that audience seeks out skills and information that are relevant to their careers. They’re extremely tactical in their approach to training, and they don’t suffer foolish training programs gladly.

For some reason, educational theorists assign this premise specifically to “adult learners,” as if relevance and purpose don’t matter to “child learners.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has ever watched a child try new things — like learning to walk or learning to read — knows that children approach everything they do with a purpose. Unfortunately, traditional schools don’t allow children to pursue purposeful activities; all activities are selected by the adults for the children. By the time high school rolls around, who can blame them for wanting to get out of that environment with the least effort required?

Tags: public schools,student choice,course credit,educational theory,purposeful learning,compulsory attendance

When I first saw the headlines saying that Teen People was no longer going to be available in print, I thought, “There is a checkout counter god after all.”

And then I thought, “Finally, no more Teen People used as a source in college research papers.” (Yes, when I was teaching a few semesters ago, more than one paper used that rag as a source.)

And then I realized Teen People was still going to be available on the Web.

The really sad thing: It was probably the only source that the students had held in their hands in the publisher’s printed form. That means they a) may have bought some recreational reading material and b) actually had to type whatever content they were quoting from the magazine.

No more. Future issues will be available in electronic format only, which makes the copy-and-paste “research” method the undisputed king of college paper writing.

Tags: writing, research, college, teens, people