Although I guess I should have known — it’s my anniversary, and I’m at the computer taking a nerd test.

Hat tip to Chris.

It’s hard to stay awake all day.

I’m never fast enough to make the bed before someone gets comfy

Sunbathing, the favorite summer hobby. Second-favorite: waiting for the sun.

Tags: dog

To our collective detriment, U.S. public education has become so insanely politicized that it’s damn near impossible even to have a reasonable discussion about educating our children, never mind actually do something to improve education. One popular dividing line: reading instruction.

Back in the day, schools used phonics as the primary method for teaching kids to read. But, according to a book I’m reading, “[phonics] was gradually abandoned because of increasingly obvious defects and shortcomings. Nevertheless,” the author continues, “it seems apparent today that in throwing out phonics, the educational theorists threw out the baby with the bath water.”

Familiar, yes? The phonics/anti-phonics debate. The pro-whole language/anti-whole language debate. The desire for some to return to the good old days of reading instruction, which magically — as often happens in distant memories — worked for just about everyone. Or the desire for some to eschew anything from the past and to use only newer methodologies and, as my book points out, “‘reading clinics,’ staffed by ‘reading specialists,’ to attempt to remedy the defects of early instruction.”

The yin and yang of educational theories. The us vs. them mentality. The I win/you lose educational machine. That’s where we are today.

Here We Go ‘Round In Circles

Apparently we were there yesterday, too. The book I referenced above, Learn to Read: A Linguistic Approach, was published in 1961. (The bulk of it was written in the early 1940s, but it wasn’t published — and it’s introduction, which I quoted, wasn’t written — until 1961.) The phonics debate to which it refers was raging in the 1950s, fueled in part by the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch. The introduction to Learn to Read says Flesch “voiced in concrete terms a vaguely felt but widely experienced dissatisfaction with current [aka, 1950s] instruction in reading in the elementary schools of our country.” Flesch advocated “a return to materials and methods long since discarded.”

You know, phonics.

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Tags: educational choice, homeschooling, learning, phonics

CNN has the news that Tennessee is going to make gym mandatory five days per week for its public school students. They’re doing it, they say, to address the rampant obesity among even the youngest students.

I have a simpler solution. It’s called RECESS. How about schools reinstate THAT instead of creating yet another bureaucratic, red tape machine that, in this case, doesn’t really do students any more good than letting them play outside for 30 or 40 minutes a day?

And it wouldn’t hurt if schools stopped selling nutritionally horrid lunches, either. In my local elementary school, pizza is available every day. That means a kid who’s on a subsidized lunch plan or whose parents send her to school with lunch money every day can eat pizza five days a week. And nobody cares.
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Even though I’ve paid my bills by creating online training programs, in a previous post, I objected to laws that would require public school students to take at least one online course.

I still object, even though I know that online courses offer students many benefits: flexibility, variety, a potentially diverse “classroom” population, lower cost, and a high dose of learner control.

That said, online courses aren’t a good fit for everyone. Students uncomfortable with computers may have trouble working online. Others may lack the discipline to complete self-paced courses: in the corporate world, at least, online course drop-out rates are very high. Some students may have learning styles best suited for the classroom’s more personal approach.

And of course, some content does not lend itself well to learning while at a distance from one’s peers or instructor or while using a computer. For example, courses that teach interpersonal skills are usually better suited to face-to-face meetings.

That’s why students shouldn’t be compelled to take even one online course if they don’t want to.

A Pinch of This, A Dash of That

The corporate training industry has come full circle in the past few years: first, trumpets blared that damn near all corporate training should be delivered online. Content is king, they said. Think of the cost savings, they said. Then reality struck, and training professionals realized that any one learning modality won’t fit everyone all the time.

So lately, the corporate training buzzword has been “blended learning,” in which courses are delivered through a variety of learning modalities. What determines the blend? The learning objectives, the content, the student population, students’ purpose(s) and goals, and yes, even the cost of the instruction. Good training programs take all of those factors into consideration.

Shouldn’t public k-12 education do the same thing?
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Why is it that the educrats (hat tip for the term to The Education Wonks) must take something and shove it down everyone’s throats? Michigan allows public school students to take online courses for free, enabling them, if they so choose, to learn subjects not offered in their schools. Of course, rather than leave online learning as an option, Michigan lawmakers want to force ALL students to do it.

Once considered the domain of home-schooled students, K-12 online learning is a fast-growing option for public school students in rural, urban, and suburban areas. Michigan lawmakers are likely to pass legislation soon that will require high school students to take one course online before they graduate.

Why can’t lawmakers just let students have some damn choice in the matter? Why must they always force students to do something the lawmakers think is good for them, regardless of what students want to do? What is so very wrong with some students taking online courses and other students NOT?

Hey, lawmakers, leave those kids alone.