The bonepile

The idea behind grading assignments in school is to show what a person has made in comparison with others.  Ideally, grading happens to show progress to the individual, but that was only true in the beginning of grading.  It's really never been true since the 1800s, however, in America.  And I'm not sure it was true before then.  I just don't have any grading examples from that far back.

Oh, you thought grading was to show mastery?  Well, now, that is a laughable notion.  No one can really determine what mastery is.  I guess in today's terms, it is the minimum score required to show "Y" for scoring at least the minimum "scale score."   But the formula to derive a scale score is only in comparison to all the other scores in the state.  In a classroom, mastery is really a "soft" idea because teachers count off points differently, weight questions on tests differently (therefore, what is deemed important for a subject is different), and give "participation" grades differently and for different types of assignments.  With national standardized tests, the tests are normed, usually for each year it is given separate from the year before and the year after.  The norms are usually in percentiles or stanines.  So, does a student master a standardized test when scoring the 51st percentile, the 75th percentile, or the 98th percentile?  Is the 7th stanine ranking as good as the 8th stanine ranking when both rankings are above the idea of "passing?"

Perhaps if people could agree on what mastery is, then measuring it would be easier, but the definition eludes those who would try to capture it.  Knowing information definitely comes into the mastery picture, but how much information should be known?  And, for how long should people know the information?  Should mastery include knowledge that has been regurgitated in the amount of a particular percentage?  Should knowledge be tested immediately following its presentation and 6 months later?  Perhaps the average of retention of information is a better measure of mastery.  Perhaps mastery should include some real world application of knowledge or some problem in which manipulation of knowledge takes place.  Maybe mastery should not be a term used at all.  Only experience with knowledge can yield mastery.

If an idea exists, it can be defined.  If it can be defined, then it can be measured.  And if it can be measured, then we can talk intelligently about the various divisions and portions of its measurement.  On the other hand, we cannot talk intelligently about the various divisions and portions of mastery if there is no standard method of measuring it.  And, we cannot measure mastery if we cannot define it.  And, what makes us think mastery even exists in schools if we cannot define it.

And all of this gets back to grading somehow.  Everyone expects it.  Somehow teachers are not worth their salt if they are not telling students what they think of their work in some quantitative way.  And somehow students don't feel the need to turn anything in to a teacher unless they can expect a comparison to other people (so they can feel ashamed, average, or esteemed).  And somehow parents and students earn bragging rights for the number 70 or higher even if that number is mainly for participation or the number is against the backdrop of a field of 50 points rather than 100 points, or the number represents 60 points by the student and 10 points as a gift from the teacher.

Grading should have seen its last day.  It has certainly outlived its usefulness.  It has no consistency of meaning.  It needs to be placed in the bonepile alongside the sun dial, the gyroscope, the slide rule, the Polaroid camera, the black and white TV, and silent films.  If we ever come to an understanding of mastery, then maybe we can resurrect grading from the bonepile.  Then again, bonepile items are there because what is new, modern, and meaningful has replaced them for good.

Tailor designed

I would like to know about how government works. I use one of many search engines.  I can get overviews of my own government or the government of others.  Actually now, there are many YouTube explanations, complete with graphs, of varying lengths to fit the amount of time I have available and mood I am in.  So, I click on the ones I want, or all of them, put them on a playlist, set a time for being finished with them, and presto... I know about government.

And that is just one way.  Maybe I want to study modern film or television.  I can use a cable or satellite service and get on-demand movies of television series, documentaries, etc.  I can go to a website such as Hulu and see what is free or see what is subscription and see the variety of film and television series that I need for my study.

And that's just one way.  Maybe I want a foreign language.  Many courses are available for free off the internet, like Coffee House Spanish, and off of YouTube with native speakers.  But maybe I want to follow a Spanish blog or belong to a small group of people learning with one native speaker.  I can join the group.  I have a friend who is learning Greek with a small group. It is a group of 5.  None of the five lives in the same country and my friend lives in Nigeria.  What an authentic way to learn.  Virtual immersion.

And that's just one way.  I can learn labs for science a variety of ways.  The internet has many experiments to try.  However, one really neat method is to go to sites like Second Life, visit a virtual school or world that has been built for science, and see actual exhibits or 3D graphic designs of many different kinds of physics, chemistry, astonomy labs.  It works much the same way as a video game where you have a character and visit certain "rooms," learning what is available in each room as you go.

And that is just one way.  I can hear stories from audio.com and many other sites.  I can virtually learn anything I want to learn.  I can also learn things not in the so-called "academic core."  I can learn anything I want about fixing engines or doing body work on a car using schematics or watching people perform a task while they are explaining it.  I can visit any virtual gallery, such as fotosearch.com, and see thousands of actual pictures of any geographical feature in the world, visit every major city, even play games helping me to familiarize myself with  a particular region of the world.  I can study about alien visitation to the earth or walk on Mars alongside the rover Curiosity.  I can learn about dinosaurs, fossils, and extinction.  I can learn about genetics, farming, truck driving, information technology, electronics, plumbing, air conditioning.  I can learn anything, anywhere, anytime.  I can learn when I am ready to learn, when I am the most alert.  I can design my own course of study.

Even at the university level, there are 3 online universities that offer online courses taught by bonafide professors, some of them famous in their fields, in which you can piece together your own courses for your own reasons.  All you need is a particular number of courses.  You can choose the courses you want whether or not they fit some predetermined package of courses.  You may want courses only in a certain field, you may want interdiscplinary courses on a subject.  You may want courses out of your field.  Or you may want to follow one of the pre-designed packages offered.  It's up to you.

I can get so much more and get it in a tailor-designed fashion.  And this is not a vision of the future.  It's education available now.  Why would I want to go to a school, when I can avoid the crowds, the bullying, the indifference of a teacher, or incompetence on occasion, the constant moving from one part of a building to another, the drive to a building not close to my house, and the social games that are associated with present day schooling?   Why would I?

Reading in particular

Many who are 40 and above, basically those teaching new teachers in colleges of education, still think that reading is important and that the method used to teach reading is important.  The method should not be a hodge-podge of methods.

Newsflash...

A study by Mathematica, a research company for all kinds of educational research, from just 4 years ago, shows that reading methods don't matter at all.  The national study of 100 schools scattered across the country, pitted 4 different kinds of methods against each other and a control group using no particular method.  The method that used group techniques for reading had a slight advantage over the others and the control group at the end of one year.  The method that used software to enhance reading skills had a slight advantage over two other methods and the control group after one year.  But, no method had statistical significance over any other method or no method at all.  At the end of two years, even the slight advantage had disappeared.  Thus, any method works and every method works as statistically equally well as the next.

And, it's interesting that the group method came out slightly on top since reading is such a personally developed skill, linked to background readiness, interest, and rapport to the teacher.  That alone should suggest that reading has diminished.  If it takes a group to instill competition, to substitute for personal background, or to provide a small bit of incentive, then the group method will reach its limitations within a short time and tail off completely over the long term.  Thus, 10-year-olds are left with 7-year-old skills, 12-year-olds might reach an  8-year-old's skill level.  There is really not a substitute for personal background and personal incentive.

Besides the need for reading vanishing over the next decade, the currently developed methods used don't increase the level of reading beyond what is presently in place.  The smart phones, smart TVs, and smart houses of the next decade use icons, symbols, or voice command to control them or communicate with them.

As Bill Engvall, the comedian, would say, "Here's your sign...!"

What's 10 percent of...?

Something must be going on that is not very effective.

One of the most misspelled words is the word receive.  The rule is clear:  i before e except after c, or when sounded as a, as in neighbor and weigh, or as sounded like i like in einstein and height.  Neither and weird are exceptions spelled right, and don't let c-i-e-n words make you completely uptight.

One of the easiest multiplications to make is 10 times any number. So, how is it that people will know 10 X 10, but cannot reverse the idea to 1/10th of a hundred?  And percentages? Forget it.  Even if the percentage is 10%.

One would think that the only Civil War in the history of the United States would be an important fact to learn for a number of reasons. Here are two.  There were three amendments to the constitution as a result of it.  And, southerners and northerners disdain each other today because the southern states hated the policies of the northern states during Reconstruction so much that,  even after the policies disappeared, the southerners still called people from the north "damn Yankees."  And how's this possible?  Some people know that Lincoln was the president during the war, but almost 1/2 of adults in their 20s  (recent graduates) don't know this, the date or the cause of the war.

One of the rudiments of recognizing life is knowing what happens at the cellular level.  Every student takes biology at least 3 times in school.  And while most people can  tell you what a cell is and where it is found, they cannot tell you its parts, its importance to medicine or nutrition, its function in bodily processes, nor its communication system.

And English, Math, History, and Science make up the core of what educators think is important in America. We need to find a way to teach what is important to posterity in an effective way.  Perhaps the method is wrong.  (It is.)  Perhaps the subjects are the wrong ones.  (They are.)  Are they outdated?  Does every child need to take every subject?  Perhaps the approach to education is wrong.  (It is.)  Does education need a frame of reference for its teachings?

Education will continue in its current state (the state of mediocrity) until something goes on that is very effective.  We  need educators that know how the brain works.  Then a quantum leap will occur.

Driving forces

Personality, like physical traits, appears to be genetic.  Psychology has done a tremendous disservice to the study of personality popularizing tests to make the public think that personality is merely a group of four or five traits that manifest themselves as dominant or passive.  Personality is so much more robust than this that a comparison of such a four-trait personality test to the time when the earth was thought of as flat is absolutely the right comparison.

Personality is a set of driving forces behind the decisions people make when learning anything.  What fields of knowledge people choose to build up for themselves and what fields they choose to discard is ruled by these driving forces.  They determine what motivations are near to people's hearts and which ones are not.  They guide which outside motivations cause people to respond positively to certain learnings and which ones cause people to resist other learnings.  They drive people toward natural proclivities that go beyond interest to form talent bases.  They even help determine which  personalities in other people students want to respect enough to learn from and which they want to ignore.

How much does personality play into the current state of affairs of education? Nothing discernible.  It's part of the level playing field that public schools want to create in the name of equal opportunity.  The schools will educate a person with the same curriculum one step at a time for 13 years regardless of race, gender, creed, socioeconomic status and personality, a view that keeps the dropout rate around 40%.

Personality consists of driving forces, genetically controlled.  Educators controlling the public schools could not be more mistaken.

Fully depreciated

From watching the process of education since 2000, I see a clear trend.  Teachers are trained to dispense information pertinent to a test.  They are expected to only oversee a canned, state-approved, set of standards which can be measured on a specific, state-administered test.   Progress is slow.  Standards add a little information at a time each year without regard to growth spurts in the brain or in the socialization process.  Tests, therefore, are particularly repetitious.  Students who have decided that their education has left their interests out of the equation or has ignored their acumen in an area not tested are viewed in a negative light by the state. If they choose not to understand the information drummed into a classroom's airwaves one year at a time, 13 years in a row, K-12, they are deemed as at-risk and have to endure extra tutoring. In reality, they have chosen not to participate in trying to understand a subject that has no relevance to interest or acumen.

It is so sad to see the schools of education at colleges training students to be guardians of a daycare system for children ages 5-18 instead of training students to teach information pertinent to advancing knowledge in the plethora of fields that make the economy, our health, our technical and scientific prowess, and our rights as a society vibrant and enduring from one generation to another.  What a travesty for the government to create and support a system to spend millions of dollars for the mere rating of school districts and teachers on success as measured by one test based on a set of standards that doesn't have much relation to what makes money, what heals the body, what advances society in technology and science, or what manages our rights.

In case Facebook and Instagram, Flickr and Picasa, Photoshop storyboards, and Facetime and Skype are not wake-up calls to education, then education needs to know it will die a fairly quick death beginning in the year 2017.  Reading and writing will not lead the way to a better life.  Numbers will.  Already, those who know technology and programming make more money than those who know how to read and write.  Those who can understand making an app are much more employable than those who can get the main idea of a written story or who can recount details of a multiparagraph essay.

We need a system that is, first and foremost, relevant to society's needs.  We need a system that pays attention to what happens with the development of the brain.  We need a system that is dynamic, individual, and that gives a true mastery of knowledge (at an 80% level or higher).  We need a system that finishes such mastery in a short period of time rather than extended over a 13-year period for the sake of those who choose not to learn.  A person at 16 can master every subject that is currently in place.  Students aged 18 are not children and should already have begun the integration process into the larger society, not be chaperoned by guardians of a daycare.  We need a system that actively uses available technology and that seeks to move that technology to the next step in its evolution.  We need a system that rewards the accumulation and advancement of knowledge rather than a system that tries to manage socialization equitably and piecemeal knowledge at a pace that dulls the senses.

Of course, these thoughts are at conflict with the current caretakers of public and private education.  But the years of 2020 and beyond will require knowledge of a very different nature from our young people than the current system is capable of offering.

Voices

The 1950s and 60s were good years in education.  Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, and Bruner all began applying knowledge of cognition to theories and methods.  True individualization and interest-governed education began its course.  Steps in the long journey of accumulating knowledge emerged as unified theories.

Education in the public sector ignored these voices.

Montessori knew that children ultimately governed their own progress, so she introduced concepts of knowledge to them as they were ready, acknowledging that developmental stages could not be ignored, but  the public schools continued their lock-step, twelve-year approach to student growth.  Dewey and Piaget both knew that students had to be ready for knowledge before they could make it their own.  They formulated theories about taking in knowledge.  Bruner cleaned up the theories showing that learning was a rather ragged adventure and students should be presented with how facts fit a bigger, societal picture.  In no way was learning merely information to be dispensed by a teacher for instant student consumption over an equally distributed twelve-year period of time.

Public schools ignored these voices.

They kept the hard-nosed curriculum dispensed in twelve consecutive steps even though reports of progress in Dewey's schools and Montessori's schools showed that progress made by students surpassed the attempts at education in public schools.

Later voices emerged.  Madeline Hunter, Jane Healey, Marie Clay, Howard Gardner promised to bring education out of the dark ages with ideas about cognition and progress, instructional methodology and progress, reading and progress, and intelligence and progress.  Public schools tried to apply some of the ideas, but poorly, because the stalwarts of the educational system couldn't imagine that their twelve-year lockstep program had failed.  But it had - miserably.  Even the books Savage Inequalities and A Nation at Risk didn't deter the schools from becoming bastions of mediocrity, mistaking equal opportunities to learn  for learning as a function of the brain as the correct response to lack of student progress.

Since the days of Dewey, public schools have ignored and misapplied research to the extent that the public no longer trusts the schools to do their jobs.

The Departments of Education at universities were coaxed into creating their own set of experts to guide education.  But, voices such as Marzano's have produced only misunderstood, misapplied research, because it is nebulous, sloppy, and imprecise.  Not only that, but since the turn of the millennium some really good  and proven voices from technology have tried hard to get schools to use software and smart devices to advance the cause of education.  But, the inability of schools to allocate sufficient funding has limited the resources made available to students, and the world of technology has moved past what the schools have been able to provide.  Schools cannot keep up because of such poor planning, so they don't, opting instead to hold to the extremely outdated, lethargic, and disproved ideas of 12 years of lockstep instruction that leads to an ever-decreasing Bell curve average of knowledge as measured by the NAEP, SAT, and ACT exams, and as evidenced by the amount of money US businesses spend to train young people in deficient areas of communication and quantitative reasoning.

The appeal is clear.  Quit ignoring what is helpful, scientifically validated, theoretical, and individual.  Stop the twelve-year march of uniformity that dulls the mind and open the frontiers of education for the individual.  Use the tools of advancement propeling education a quantum leap ahead of what pen and paper have produced.  Recognize that reading is not the panacea for leading the way from the dismal depths of darkness.  Numbers lead the way.  Organization of visual thoughts are the best form of communication in the lives of young people, not using the imagination resulting from reading material, which is fast becoming an indecipherable and painful exercise and slows the progress of understanding concepts.

Quit turning the deaf ear to the voices that would lead to a more efficient, fuller, richer education!

What if?

Dynamic.

When Socrates tutored/schooled Plato, he gave his knowledge to him all right, but he also gave him a beautiful gift - the strategy of asking the right question when his stored knowledge would not be enough.  Socrates certainly did his part to advance knowledge.  The ability of the brain is built just this way. It stores knowledge, but it also has the ability to ask questions to gain new knowledge and connect knowledge to related ideas. Memories supplying information are seeking ways to be infused into new knowledge.
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Once an observation has been made, the knowledge, or stored memory, is either singular or related to other stored memories. If singular, then the observation's days are numbered before passing out of existence. But, if related then it joins other related memories in a cluster, called a synapse. One bit of knowledge may join as many clusters, or synapses, as it needs to in order to show multiple relationships. So the same memory may be embedded in a number of synapses. The idea is that the more embedding in various synapses an idea has, the more chances it has of reconfiguring old information into new. Embedded information can be recalled and reconfigured if it is pertinent to a new situation.  Information doesn't merely sit around, it is used over and over in both the same situations in which it was originally formed and new contexts in which it finds itself.

It is the time for our schools to become the agency for the modern Socrateses among us. Imagine a school whose teachers know the interests and motivations of her or his students well enough to show how to ask leading questions.  Given the internet's ability to direct someone to articles that inform, knowledge should be multiplying tremendously compared to the restrictions on advancement of knowledge now found in single teacher classrooms of many students.
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How can a teacher teach the information to be embedded in synapses so that it can multiply when new contexts come along? Through supplying the questions required of real-life scenarios in the classroom, used on the internet, encountered with professionals, sometimes other amateurs, or entertained in private, reflective moments of musing.  What an army of thinkers would be created, and the world would take a quantum leap ahead.
 
Dynamic!