Category: Education

Can we make our schools safer?

Posted on by Suki

I sat in recently on a conversation about school safety that was sparked by the school shooting in Connecticut. Administrators, principals, and parents sat around a table talking about security and what it means to them.

The most striking aspect of the conversation was how personally each one of these people who work in our public schools took this tragedy. For the rest of us, this was a horrific event. For them, each death could have been a life they had been in charge of caring for. They would have been the teachers sheltering kids behind them. They would have been the principal running to help.

That’s why I can’t fault them for wanting to make sure that they had the safest schools possible. And I can’t fault them at all for how they talked about it: there was no suggestion that we make our local schools, known for their laid-back feel and friendly atmosphere, into locked down facilities where parents aren’t welcome.

But I can’t help but think that when talking about school shootings, we are having the wrong conversation. When you take the problem of school security to its logical extremes, it’s clear that the problem is not so simple as “making schools safer” sounds. First of all, all of us—from superintendents through principals down to teachers, parents, and students—have no interest in making schools unhappy places. Current research just confirms what anyone who has worked with kids and really paid attention knows instinctively: kids learn best when they’re happy. In fact, when you teach a specific skill to someone who is unhappy and experiencing stress, the likelihood is that they’ll learn nothing at all.

So we try to figure out how to stop the violence in reasonable ways. But people who enter schools with the intention of killing children are well beyond any state of mind that a reasonable, sane person is able to access. People who kill children just because they can are in a mental state that no school official can match. They are willing to do things that no parent can fathom.

Certainly, we could fortify our schools, send teachers to school with guns, raise our kids in a state of fear where they instinctively dive for a closet at any loud noise. But no reasonable person wants this. We don’t want our kids going to school in a hermetically sealed environment where everyone is under suspicion—some kids in this country do in fact experience this every day, and no one involved is happy about it. (And, not surprisingly, these schools are the ones where kids are learning the least.)

So when it comes down to it, we have to admit that we are not willing to go to the lengths we’d need to go to in order to “secure” our schools. We might lock our doors, but the guy with the gun feels no hesitation at blowing the lock off the door. We might require background checks for everyone we allow into a school, but the guy with the gun isn’t going to bother to show any credentials. We can train staff and parents to question anyone who looks suspicious, but the guy with the gun isn’t going to hesitate just because someone says, “Can I help you?”

There’s also the matter of how increased security actually escalates violence. This is from security expert Bruce Schneier:

“We defend airplanes against certain terrorist tactics: shoe bombs, liquid bombs, underwear bombs. These measures have limited value because the number of potential terrorist tactics and targets is much greater than the ones we have recently observed. Does it really make sense to spend a gazillion dollars just to force terrorists to switch tactics? Or drive to a different target? In the face of modern society’s ambiguous dangers, it is flexibility that makes security effective.”

In other words, escalating security just tempts the bad guys to be more ingenious in their methods. In fact, no one has any solid data that unreasonable airport security is making us any safer.

Translated to school security, you can see where we’d be headed. Yes, we can turn all our schools into locked facilities. But Sandy Hook was locked. Yes, we could make the glass in the front door bulletproof, but what about the football field? What about the school auditorium that has a back door? What about the schools in my local community that are largely built as collections of small buildings all open to the outside?

Someone who is already insane enough to want to shoot up a school is not going to be stopped by reasonable security measures. And unreasonable security measures make our public schools even less inviting, in a time when many parents are trying to get their kids out of the public schools that are failing them in other ways.

Reasonable school security is fine. But at what point are we going to descend to asking 500 parents to take off their shoes and be frisked by an expensive machine so they can go see a school play? At what point are we going to see that no reasonable measure is going to stop an unreasonable person from finding a way around what we’ve done?

I believe that most of us are reasonable, and rational, and we know that this sort of security will not make our children safer. But if we’re not going to lock our children in padded cells, how do we solve this problem?

Perhaps we need to take a good, long look in a mirror held up to our culture and finally have serious conversations about who we really are and what we want as a nation. School security comes from our culture at large, not from a lock on the door.

Next: How strengthening our social ties will improve our schools and make them safer.

First, do no harm

Posted on by Suki

Last weekend I went to an educational conference held by the California Association for the Gifted. The conference is for educators, psychologists, and parents of gifted children. It’s heavily weighted toward public school teachers, but in general there’s something for everyone in the field.

One morning I sat down with my wonderful publishers, Jim Webb and Janet Gore, to chat, and we ended up sitting next to a teacher who struck up a conversation with us. I didn’t get her name or the district she works in, but her story is, right now in California, a very common one.

She told us that she works in a heavily Latino district, and that most of her students are English language learners. Everyone who has studied ELLs knows the facts: On average, they take a few years to come up to speed in English. Their test scores during this period are awful, of course. Then eventually, if given the right educational opportunities, their knowledge of a second language becomes an asset. Please notice the big “if” in that sentence.

This teacher told me a story that I’ve heard in my home district as well. Labeled by No Child Left Behind as a “failing” school, they were put under the ill-named “Program Improvement.” Under PI, all control over what happens in the school is taken over by the state. Teachers have no choice in what to teach when – they actually have to follow a script each day.

These were things that I knew, but here are some more things she told us as we listened, horrified:

Teachers at her school have been ordered to remove all art from the walls. No creative work is to take place in the classrooms. They are directly forbidden from teaching any sort of drama or visual art. They get unannounced visits by the principal and others to ascertain whether they are following the script. Her students, who live in an insulated, Spanish speaking community, come to school knowing not a word of English; yet they are only spoken to in English only.

This teacher told us that she has one goal in her teaching: Not to directly hurt her students. Other teachers in the school, she said, place no such restrictions on themselves. She tries to make her classroom a happy place, and whenever possible, she tries to “sneak” real learning into their day.

She told us with some irony that her students get great test scores – she does her job well. But she knows that she is not able to educate them, just to prepare them to fill in bubbles. For personal reasons, she really needs her job and can’t take the risk of moving. She said that the older teachers in her district are retiring and being replaced by young teachers who have never known anything different than this script-based classroom.

Why, you may ask, was she at a gifted conference? Clearly, although giftedness transcends all racial and socioeconomic barriers, she was going to get no support from her principal to teach to those students.

She said she was gathering ideas that she could “sneak” into her script, things that would look enough like test prep, and wouldn’t resemble creativity in any way, so that she wouldn’t get in trouble with management.

I hardly knew what to say. She spoke very simply and eloquently about her situation.

“You need to start an anonymous blog,” I told her. “People need to hear these things. They need to know what’s being done to children in service of test scores.”

She pondered that, seeming like she was interested in the idea. Then she got the clouded look of someone who lives under Big Brother. “I’m sure our district tech guy would find me out,” she said. “I can’t afford to lose this job.”

And that was that. She went off to gather little bits of inspiration to brighten up the days of her creativity-forbidden students, and I went off to learn more about what we can do to serve all the needs of gifted children. Or rather, what we could do, if we actually cared enough.

Our society doesn’t care enough. Sure, I hear lots of parents complain about the tests. And I know a lot of parents who have escaped testing by choosing private or home school. But I have to wonder why we aren’t doing anything about this in any meaningful way. Why are we allowing politicians to make decisions based on advice from businessmen, faulty assumptions about why children do and do not succeed, and political convenience? This is a democracy. Why aren’t we all complaining about this? Why aren’t we instructing our children to go to the tests, sign their names, and then sit on their hands?

I know the answers: We support the politicians for other reasons. We figure they’re only doing this stuff now, but that they really do agree with us that it has to change. We support our individual schools and our individual teachers because they are, by and large, people like this woman, their hands tied by policy made by non-educators. Sometimes the best you can do is to do no harm. Sometimes the best you can do is crouch in the one corner where the telescreen can’t see you and write in your diary, “Down with Big Brother.”

Another teacher at a different time this weekend said to me, without irony, “We know that No Child Left Behind was designed to destroy our public schools.” She didn’t ask my opinion; she figured that anyone who had looked into the situation had to agree. What other possible reason could there be for it? A hundred years from now, looking back at this period in history, how will students of history be able to construct any other narrative?

It is clear that what is happening in classrooms across our state – and our country – where students don’t perform well on tests is nothing like education. Educators, neurologists, and psychologists actually know what works to create well functioning, educated people, and reading to them from scripts is not it. What’s being done to these students is some sort of peculiar torture that we as a society are accepting, condoning through our silent acceptance.

Shame on us. And thank you to those teachers who are trying, against all odds, to do no harm.

Science and inquiry

Posted on by Suki

Each year, as soon as our county adds its science fair dates, I get them on the calendar and block out the weekend so I’m sure we don’t schedule anything over it. Since my son became eligible, I started blocking out those dates as well. For the last two years, he and I went to L.A. and had a blast.

This year, however, things are turning out a bit different. Neither of my kids is doing the science fair.

Fish tank
Sometimes science is all about looking into a fishtank and dreaming.

My son is a budding computer scientist, and each year he has to do contortions to make his projects fit the hypothesis-driven focus the science fair requires. Each year, he thinks of a really cool idea and gets very excited. Then I have to ask him the question that causes the air to hiss slowly out of his creative tires:

“What will your hypothesis be?”

I ask the question because I know that our science fair is set up, for better and for worse, to favor hypothesis-driven projects. They do allow for inquiry-driven projects, but word of mouth from other parents is that those projects never win. And although we know winning isn’t everything, it sure is a fun part of the science fair when you’ve done an enormous amount of work to get there. Entering with a project that can’t win seems a bit pointless.

Last year I ended up having the hypothesis problem with my daughter, too. Even though her project was in chemistry, which lends itself more easily to hypothesis-driven experiments, she really couldn’t figure out what her question was. “I just want to do this because it’s cool to find out what will happen,” she said in frustration.

Well knowing what would happen, she submitted her project with a clearly made-up-after-the-fact hypothesis. Not surprisingly, she didn’t even place. This year, in contrast, she came up with a gorgeous, inspired hypothesis. Her project idea was huge, and would have involved much more work than she was willing to put in, so she scrapped it.

I have been talking to Sue Carter, Professor of Physics at UCSC and founder of the new IRIS Science Academy, about her new academy and her approach to teaching science. She had this to say about the way science is taught in schools… and encouraged in our science fair:

The hypothesis approach to science inquiry is pushed in most K-12 school curriculums. While it is certainly a useful thought process to form a hypothesis, it isn’t the only way to approach science and it does have a few flaws. By forming a hypothesis you presume to know an answer and seek to develop a process to prove yourself right or wrong, but in so doing you have just limited the extent of your experiment to the question/hypothesis you formed before you even started the experiment, as well as possibly biasing the answer itself. You may be asking the entirely wrong question. Alot of great science is done without ever forming an initial hypothesis — but keeping an open mind on what the question you want to answer is and taking instead a voyage of discovery which may ultimately lead to a hypothesis. This is known as discovery science and is what many scientific research labs do. So while we may start a lab with a hypothesis-driven approach, we hope the students will evolve throughout he course of the experiment to a discovery-based approach to scientific inquiry led by their own curiosity.

In a sense what she is saying is that my highly creative, science-loving kids are actually behaving less like science students and more like scientists. Instead of formulating a question that would limit what they find, they are interested simply in following a passion and seeing where it leads them. Given that they’re homeschooled, it’s not surprising that they’ve come to science this way. Lucky for them, their dumb mommy forgot to teach science “the right way”!

But much of our current educational system stifles innovation and creativity while encouraging rule-following and safe choices. No wonder so many of the science fair experiments seem lifted directly off Science Buddies—this is what you get rewarded for.

I’m not saying I dislike the science fair—I’m actually very disappointed my kids won’t be taking part. But I think it’s worth questioning what we’re teaching our kids: not just what we actually say, but what message our actions give them. I just had to let my son off from doing the science fair this year, because I think he has a good point. The only hypothesis in most real computer science is “can I do this?”

As for my daughter, she entered an invention contest. And she didn’t get penalized when her major reason for inventing was simply, “I thought it would be cool.”

Stress and learning

Posted on by Suki

I am sort of a “learning research junkie”—I’ll read pretty much anything about all the new research into how our brains learn—and don’t learn. When I was working on my book, my publisher sent me pretty much any book that they thought might be of interest to my audience. I read all of them. I don’t expect other people to have the time or interest to read them all, but I do think that all parents—especially homeschooling parents—should be aware of some of the most important aspects of how the brain learns. (I’ll suggest some resources at the end of this piece.)

It’s important to understand how brains do learn if you want to recognize a situation in which your child can’t learn. First of all, brains are bundles of connections. When we’re very small, our brains suck in everything we experience and set up a scaffolding that everything they learn later is built on. This is why they say that the first few years are so critical.

Our brains are very badly engineered to learn isolated facts. In fact, most people can only remember a string of random words up to about 7 words long. People who make a hobby out of entering memory competitions learn to memorize unconnected pieces of information by connecting them with things already in their memory (see my recommendation for Moonwalking with Einstein below). The result is that no matter what else is learned about how we learn, the most important aspect of learning is connections.

The second thing to realize is how interconnected the different parts of our brains are. We tend to compartmentalize the brain when we describe it: “this is the part where we feel emotion” and “this is the part where we use logic.” This implies a separation more definitive than is really the case. Researchers have scores of examples of people who have overcome losing an area of their brain due to disease or injury and rewiring other areas of the brain to do what the lost area used to do.

Also, and more importantly, everything you try to do with your brain is affected by the other parts of your brain. So we might try to assert that kids should be able to learn when they are physically or emotionally uncomfortable, because those things “don’t have anything to do with learning.” But in fact, they have everything to do with learning.

I read an excellent article by Judy Willis (author of Inspiring Middle School Minds) on the challenges faced by twice-exceptional learners. But whether or not your child is 2e, Willis offers some important information about stress and its effect on the learning brain. (The full article can be found in this month’s Gifted Education Communicator, which is by subscription only.)

When your child is learning, all input is first filtered through the amygdala, which is in the emotional response center of the brain. Wait: an algebra problem goes through the emotional response center first? Yes: algebra, the color of the water in a pool, the sound of you asking your child to come out of her room, the history of the late Roman Empire, and instructions for when to take out the garbage all get filtered through your child’s emotional center first.

When your child is relaxed and happy, here’s what happens next:

In the absence of high stress, fear, or perceived threat, the amygdala directs incoming information to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). There the information is further evaluated by the brain’s high-order thinking networks as to meaning and relationships to stored memories of previous experiences.

In other words, the information comes into your child’s brain and is connected within existing connections, where it can become part of permanent memory.

But what about when your child is upset and stressed out by what you’re trying to work on? When the amygdala senses stress, it sends all information—no matter what it is—directly into the flight-or-fight center of our brain instead of the areas of the brain that process meaning. According to Willis:

Unfortunately, the human amygdala cannot distinguish between real or imagined threats. Whenever the amygdala is highly activated by negative emotions, it sends incoming information to the lower, involuntary, quick-response brain, where the behavioral reactions are limited to the primitive fight/flight/freeze survival mechanisms. (Gifted Education Communicator, Winter 2012)

I think it’s pretty obvious what this means regarding stress and learning: When you are stressed out, it’s like trying to do a handstand in a straitjacket. You might seem like you’re learning, but the information that’s going in is hitting a wall.

This of course has huge implications for educational policy: no wonder kids in rough neighborhoods aren’t doing well in school. It won’t help to dock the teachers’ pay, fire all the staff, and make stiffer rules. Their friends are getting shot, their parents are AWOL, and their siblings are running with a bad crowd. How do you expect a brain to take in algebra in that situation?

For homeschoolers, the implications are a bit different: We have actual choices each day in what to do. We are not teachers who have to follow a protocol.

I know so many homeschoolers—and I include myself here as well—who forget that we can back off and choose a different way anytime we need to. If math is stressful for your child this week, skip it. If it takes a month before you sense willingness to try again, let that month happen. Watch silly videos about math instead of trying to do problems. Let your child dictate all the math while you write on a whiteboard. Do math while your child is on a swing. Chop your learning times into 15-minute energy windows.

If your child hates to write, don’t force her to write book reports. Dictate silly stories about her darkling beetle. Write limericks. Read, read, read, and read some more. Talk about everything. Ask questions. Answer questions. Take my advice about teaching writing. Take Patricia Zaballos’s advice about teaching writing. But whatever you do, remember that if writing causes your child stress, good writing will not happen.

The beauty of homeschooling is flexibility. In times of homeschooling stress, I hope we all remember that there is always another path to get where we are going. Like water going down a hillside, sometimes the easiest path is the best one to take.

Resources:

  • This book is specific to gifted middle schoolers, but I think its message is applicable to all kids in that age range: Inspiring Middle School Minds by Judy Willis. Willis’s website has further articles: http://www.radteach.com/ Check out her Parent Tips.
  • Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer: Foer explores memory, and destroys the illusion that some people are exceptionally “smart” because of their prodigious memories. As you read, you will really come to understand why “linked” memories are so important to your child’s learning.
  • KidLab: I heard Dr. Kalbfleisch speak at NAGC and was impressed with both the depth and breadth of her knowledge and also her ability to talk to an audience of non-scientists. The site has links to articles and interviews.
  • The Eide Neurolearning Blog is full of great ideas about learning.
  • Find more links on my Gifted Links page.

Facebook thinks I speak Spanish, and other musings about modern life

Posted on by Suki

Hola…

For months now I have been getting e-mails from Facebook, recommending I add as friends people I have never met. People whose first language is Spanish. People who don’t even live in the same country as me.

OK, I speak passable caveman Spanish. I can read and understand, but when I go to speak, all I can think is French. Or German. Or how to say “hello” in Thai. I think they call this tongue-tied.

Also, I do have some friends—as well as some “friends”—who speak Spanish. A few whose native language is Spanish. But when Facebook, a mindless machine made by men (and women, except they are not alliterative), keeps sending you recommendations for Spanish speakers you have no connection with, you’ve got to wonder.

What you wonder is up to you.

It’s HOMEschool…

I am just about to start my first online teaching experience. Two (or is it three?) professions ago, I was a college English teacher. I could never decide what to get a PhD in, so I could never get a tenured position, so I eventually gave it up for graphic design. But I never loved graphic design, which paid the bills, the way I loved teaching, which didn’t.

Luckily, I became a homeschooler. The cool thing about homeschooling is that you get to be many of the things that no one would ever pay you to be. Like, once I did dissections of frogs with my kids. Let me assure you, no one would pay me to be a biology teacher. We had fun, though.

So now, into the sixth year of homeschooling, I get to go back to my original love, teaching English. But the cool thing is, I don’t have to find a bunch of people in my same area, find a place for us to meet, and hope that we’ll all get there every week. Instead, I’m renting an online classroom and we’ll see how it goes.

I just had a piece accepted by the wonderful Life Learning Magazine about how homeschoolers can use the Internet with an emphasis more on the HOME than on the SCHOOL. In no way am I going to run my online class like a high school lit class. In fact, high school lit classes were why I decided never to take a literature class as an undergrad. But the cool thing is, we’re all going to be HOME. It’s hopefully going to integrate fun conversation and thoughtful interaction with our home environment. Oh, yes, we’ll probably get together physically if we can once during the year, but the rest of the time, we’ll be able to find each other online.

Internet Day…

OK, online class sounds great, but the other day my son had an experience that is completely new in this day and age. When we were kids, my husband and I had “snow days” when the snow hadn’t been plowed before it was time for the buses to go out. (Me more than him – I remember the thrill of listening to the radio station and hearing the name of my town in the list. Since it was a relatively wealthy town, we had a dismaying number of snow plows ready to get us to school.) Well, once in my son’s life there has been a snow day: when he was attending a school at the top of Mount Madonna in Santa Cruz County.

But now he’s got a claim his dad and I can’t match: He had an Internet Day yesterday! His algebra teacher’s Internet connection was down. Ten minutes after class should have started, I got a phone call (from “Wireless Caller”, doncha just love that caller I.D.?). His teacher asked if we could let all the students know what happened.

And I was brought back to the days of crowding around the radio at breakfast time.

“Yes!! Snow Day!” we’d all yell, and we’d put on our gear to go out sledding or grab a game to play with a sibling or grab that book we thought we were going to have to leave behind all day…

When I told my son, he didn’t react like that. Just a slow smile. “Bonus!” he was probably thinking. “Internet Day.”

Next time he’s waiting for his teacher and the phone rings, it’s going to be like when I was a kid and I woke to a newly quiet and snow-padded world. Fire up that radio. What’s a radio, Mom?

Dr. Who?…

My husband has been initiating our daughter into the world of Dr. Who. Now, between our two kids, you’d probably peg my son as the potential Dr. Who fan. But like his mother, he has too little patience with sitting in front of an image he can’t manipulate. But my daughter is loving it. She and her father are starting to make Dr. Who puns to each other and give each other knowing looks when her brother and I don’t know what they’re talking about.

When my son was younger, a family member of mine accused me of making him a social misfit.

“If he doesn’t watch bad TV, what’s he going to talk to his friends about?” he asked.

I’m proud now to know that at least one of my children will be able to have a conversation about a TV show. Even if it is a TV show that happened before she was even ovulated.

eAvoidance…

Right now, I’m supposed to be balancing our financial records. This is not a task I relish, though each year, it gets easier and easier. Pieces of paper are only occasionally involved in this task nowadays. Magically, I download my credit card charges and they match the ones on the PDF I see on my screen. Magically, money that doesn’t actually exist moves from one account to another, from our account to PG&E.

Being a modern home engineer qualifies one for all sorts of jobs that didn’t exist when we were kids. Perhaps if I need to, I’ll be able to sell my skills for avoiding household accounts while running an online class when the weather report threatens a Comcast outage of extreme proportions.

It’s all in a day in the life.

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