Having young children memorize facts detrimental to their educational growth?
You would think the answer would be an obvious “yes”, but tragically that in not the case.
From: the-scholars.com
One of my professors got indignant. "That's just so sad!" she said, "I would never make my kids memorize facts. That is so useless -- especially since now you can look the facts up somewhere, in a book, online, or something. Memorization of knowledge is a worthless education tool."
This is a common misconception.
From: poets.org
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the invention of writing, in which the Egyptian god Thoth shows his written characters to another god, Ammon, who rebukes him: "This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves."
Before the invention of radio, television, video games and the internet philosophers and educators were worried about the mind losing its ability. Obviously the written word would eventually allow everyone to be educated and educators listened to the concern of Socrates and Plato and memorization was an important part of that education. That is until modern history and education methods found it boring and tedious and it is no longer an important part of being human. How much more do we need to focus on memorization today!
Have you ever been paying a bill and the cashier cannot figure out your change? They never memorized the grammar of adding and subtracting. Can an education system be considered successful if a 15-16 year old (minimum age of most state for working) cannot do math they should have learned in elementary school? Yet this memorization is consider not helpful for the student when they get to the real world.
If you ever have played a sport or read about an exceptional athlete you have heard the term muscle memory. Did the coach show you how to do a motion properly (swinging a tennis racket, golf club, bat) and you absorbed that into your muscle and did it correct the first time and every time after that? Of course that did not happen. You practiced, practiced, practiced until it was engrained in your body and you still occasionally fail. Yet we expect our student to learn how to do reading, writing and arithmetic without memorizing the rules and motions of the subject.
Clearly modern education methods of “how do you feel” and “what are you experiencing” questions and methods are not working. Our students are falling behind other countries, other countries who still require memorization. Sure our students feel good about themselves and have a high confidence, unfortunately that confidence and self esteem has not translated into actual learning.
Classical Education requires memorization of grammar as the foundation of learning. A house built without a foundation blows away in the lightest of wind and our students are being blown away by global competition. More and longer education as Arne Duncan is purposing may be helpful, but without anchoring knowledge into our student it will be useless and expensive.
“1st come Augie dog, then the Flintstone Kids, inspector Gadget and Popeye too owe doo daw day” I still know the morning cartoon lineup from when I was a little kid, because I heard it every Saturday morning. Too bad I did not put memorization of important things to the forefront of my education. Why did I memorize it, because I heard it over and over again and it was to a catchy song. Memorization does not have to be boring as many think, we just need to know how to make it fun.
Showing posts with label Arne Duncan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arne Duncan. Show all posts
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Crossfit and Classical Education
I am part of a group called Crossfit that promotes a full body workout and healthy living with trainers. Yesterday there was an interesting conversation about education and crossfit. If you took 120 hours of 100 and 200 level course would know a whole lot, but not really be employable. Crossfit helps you be a good/great overall athlete, but it doesn’t help you excel at necessarily a particular field. I didn’t interject my own opinion into the discussion, but I will here. The only comment I did make was “I’m trying to be good at sports, not exercise” which is clearly a utilitarian perspective of the work we do at the gym.
In Classical Education methods we teach the grammar first, at crossfit they do the same. You can’t do a power snatch until you know what it is and then practice with a plastic light weight tube until you get the motion correct. Then you can get a bar and add some weight. You will start light and slowly add more weight as you master each step. Each time you do a workout, even if you have done it before you still grab the plastic bar and practice the movement. In a Classical school the children will first memorize the facts, and they will practice until it is embedded in their minds. Then slowly they will add more facts (weight) or ideas to those facts (weight) and move on to more when they are ready. Each day they will then review those facts and add more.
Contrast this to the Modern Education and Globo Gym. Modern Education seeks to make you look good to employees, with little to no guidance. Globo Gym’s seeks to make you look good for the opposite sex, with little to no guidance. Let’s teach the children about being green; let’s do some curls. Let everyone graduate, no child left behind; Let’s go do some bench press, grunt it out. There is no actual substance in either. Sure if you work hard you will look real good, do fine finding a job and the ladies, but you will be at the mercy of others, because you don’t have a good core.
As you grow in crossfit you start adding meat to your workout, you learn to put knowledge from one work out to another. You learn how to apply methods of rowing to sumo deadlift high pull. In the same manner in Classical Education after the child has mastered the basics and has moved into what is now called “middle school” they start logically putting subject matter together and using the basics they know and applying it “logically” to what they are learning. Meanwhile Modern Education is still doing bicep curls.
Finally as you get good at Crossfit in one area you start helping the new people out. You may not be the best at each workout, but you have been there before and you can “model” the workout for others and show them the basics and correct movements. Guess what the Rhetoric stage (high school) is of Classical Education? It is explaining to others what you learned in the Knowledge and Logic stages and Modeling that to younger children. Meanwhile Modern Education is still doing bicep curls.
Another important similarity is that you work at your own pace. If you excel at box jumps, but need help with over head squats there are systems in place for you to move at your own pace and over practice what you need help with. Just because 25 16 year olds are in the same class they aren’t going to be at the same place and trying to treat them like they are is only going to give us the education system we have, which no one is defending according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
So like a Classical Education will teach you how to excel at anything, I can only come to the conclusion that Crossfit will help you excel at any sport or activity. We learn to glorify God, all truth is from God and to learn it is to glorify him even if you don’t use it for some utilitarian purpose. Doing Crossfit for the sake of being in shape and living a better life is just as acceptable – utility shouldn’t be the end. Our goal should be everything pure, wise and beautiful for the sake of being pure, wise and beautiful.
In Classical Education methods we teach the grammar first, at crossfit they do the same. You can’t do a power snatch until you know what it is and then practice with a plastic light weight tube until you get the motion correct. Then you can get a bar and add some weight. You will start light and slowly add more weight as you master each step. Each time you do a workout, even if you have done it before you still grab the plastic bar and practice the movement. In a Classical school the children will first memorize the facts, and they will practice until it is embedded in their minds. Then slowly they will add more facts (weight) or ideas to those facts (weight) and move on to more when they are ready. Each day they will then review those facts and add more.
Contrast this to the Modern Education and Globo Gym. Modern Education seeks to make you look good to employees, with little to no guidance. Globo Gym’s seeks to make you look good for the opposite sex, with little to no guidance. Let’s teach the children about being green; let’s do some curls. Let everyone graduate, no child left behind; Let’s go do some bench press, grunt it out. There is no actual substance in either. Sure if you work hard you will look real good, do fine finding a job and the ladies, but you will be at the mercy of others, because you don’t have a good core.
As you grow in crossfit you start adding meat to your workout, you learn to put knowledge from one work out to another. You learn how to apply methods of rowing to sumo deadlift high pull. In the same manner in Classical Education after the child has mastered the basics and has moved into what is now called “middle school” they start logically putting subject matter together and using the basics they know and applying it “logically” to what they are learning. Meanwhile Modern Education is still doing bicep curls.
Finally as you get good at Crossfit in one area you start helping the new people out. You may not be the best at each workout, but you have been there before and you can “model” the workout for others and show them the basics and correct movements. Guess what the Rhetoric stage (high school) is of Classical Education? It is explaining to others what you learned in the Knowledge and Logic stages and Modeling that to younger children. Meanwhile Modern Education is still doing bicep curls.
Another important similarity is that you work at your own pace. If you excel at box jumps, but need help with over head squats there are systems in place for you to move at your own pace and over practice what you need help with. Just because 25 16 year olds are in the same class they aren’t going to be at the same place and trying to treat them like they are is only going to give us the education system we have, which no one is defending according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
So like a Classical Education will teach you how to excel at anything, I can only come to the conclusion that Crossfit will help you excel at any sport or activity. We learn to glorify God, all truth is from God and to learn it is to glorify him even if you don’t use it for some utilitarian purpose. Doing Crossfit for the sake of being in shape and living a better life is just as acceptable – utility shouldn’t be the end. Our goal should be everything pure, wise and beautiful for the sake of being pure, wise and beautiful.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Fight Teacher Burnout
I misspoke when I said tomorrow on Thursday, but I will make it up to you today!
A couple of other interesting points from the Arne Duncan interview that I would like to discuss today and offer viable solutions. If a student has 3 good teachers in a row they will be a year to a year and half ahead of their peers, 3 bad teachers in a row they will be a year behind. 33% of teachers will be out the profession within 3 years of becoming a teacher and 1 million children a year are dropping out of school. Teacher burnout is one of the leading causes.
I believe that a classical education system would eliminate a number of the problems. Teachers have a new set of students 4-6 times a day and those groups change every year. So that means a teacher is going to see somewhere between a 100-150 students a day and only for 1 hour each of which according to government studies only 20-30 minutes of that time is actually being used to teach. That is going to be a lot of different personalities and issue to deal with for that teacher. No wonder they get burnt out. Instead a teacher, especially in elementary (formerly grammar) school should teach all subjects to the students. This would allow them to deal with 20-30 students through the day. They would be better prepared to deal with certain children’s issues because they would have a chance to form the teacher-student bond more effectively. It would also allow the child to spend significant time with an adult that would increase the chances that they would take their school work seriously. A true classical education setting would mix ages and grades to allow proper demonstration of skills from the older children to younger children. This is the ideal setting for gaining social skills as well, since people will eventually work with people from a variety of ages and not just people there exact same age. This leap is probably too much to ask the school system to do at this time, so I will refrain from that if they will go to the 1 teacher model that worked for so long.
This system would reduce the number of teachers burning out and decrease the number of drop outs of our school system. The issue with this system would be the “bad” teachers. If a child had one of those they would drop behind in every subject instead of maybe being good at one with a “good” teacher and being bad at ones with a “bad” teacher. While this may be a temporary issue the proposed system would reduce the number of good teachers leaving and would reduce the number of “bad” teachers because there wouldn’t be so many burned out. I don’t believe anyone in the teaching profession goes into it without good intentions of helping the children learn, so “bad” teachers are a product of our education system.
Practice, practice, practice is the motto of classical education. You cannot become good at something until you gain experience at it. A typical job takes 8mo-1year to learn how to do. So if we are turning our teachers over 33% a year due to drop out how can they ever get good at it? They have no one modeling how to be a good teacher. This turnover allows the “bad” teachers to stay in the system because the administration is just happy to have a warm body.
Rearranging of class setting and schedule to a classical model is an easy first step for the public school system to take in order to save itself and our country.
A couple of other interesting points from the Arne Duncan interview that I would like to discuss today and offer viable solutions. If a student has 3 good teachers in a row they will be a year to a year and half ahead of their peers, 3 bad teachers in a row they will be a year behind. 33% of teachers will be out the profession within 3 years of becoming a teacher and 1 million children a year are dropping out of school. Teacher burnout is one of the leading causes.
I believe that a classical education system would eliminate a number of the problems. Teachers have a new set of students 4-6 times a day and those groups change every year. So that means a teacher is going to see somewhere between a 100-150 students a day and only for 1 hour each of which according to government studies only 20-30 minutes of that time is actually being used to teach. That is going to be a lot of different personalities and issue to deal with for that teacher. No wonder they get burnt out. Instead a teacher, especially in elementary (formerly grammar) school should teach all subjects to the students. This would allow them to deal with 20-30 students through the day. They would be better prepared to deal with certain children’s issues because they would have a chance to form the teacher-student bond more effectively. It would also allow the child to spend significant time with an adult that would increase the chances that they would take their school work seriously. A true classical education setting would mix ages and grades to allow proper demonstration of skills from the older children to younger children. This is the ideal setting for gaining social skills as well, since people will eventually work with people from a variety of ages and not just people there exact same age. This leap is probably too much to ask the school system to do at this time, so I will refrain from that if they will go to the 1 teacher model that worked for so long.
This system would reduce the number of teachers burning out and decrease the number of drop outs of our school system. The issue with this system would be the “bad” teachers. If a child had one of those they would drop behind in every subject instead of maybe being good at one with a “good” teacher and being bad at ones with a “bad” teacher. While this may be a temporary issue the proposed system would reduce the number of good teachers leaving and would reduce the number of “bad” teachers because there wouldn’t be so many burned out. I don’t believe anyone in the teaching profession goes into it without good intentions of helping the children learn, so “bad” teachers are a product of our education system.
Practice, practice, practice is the motto of classical education. You cannot become good at something until you gain experience at it. A typical job takes 8mo-1year to learn how to do. So if we are turning our teachers over 33% a year due to drop out how can they ever get good at it? They have no one modeling how to be a good teacher. This turnover allows the “bad” teachers to stay in the system because the administration is just happy to have a warm body.
Rearranging of class setting and schedule to a classical model is an easy first step for the public school system to take in order to save itself and our country.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Arne Duncan talks about Home Centered Education
I listened to NBC interview with secretary of education Arne Duncan this morning and he said a lot that I agree with and he really cares about changing the state of our education and moving away from the status quo “No one is (defending) the status quo.”
“Parents are always going to be their Children’s first teachers and always their most important teachers.” As a home centered education advocate I cannot agree more with this statement. Arne Duncan said they are going to “double our budget in parental involvement.” I’m not sure how money will make parents more involved in their children’s lives unless it involves bribes. I would hope the fact that they are your children you would already be involved; obviously this is not the case. A teacher actually asked him if they are looking at forcing parents be involved under legal penalty. Thankfully parents that are participating in home centered education have already taken responsibility for their child’s education. “Good things happen when families learn together” thank you Arne Duncan – we who educate our children around the home already know this. Learn more at www.homeschool.com and Classical Conversations
Tomorrow I will address some issue with teacher burnout, dropout rates, and other spicier subjects in the interview.
“Parents are always going to be their Children’s first teachers and always their most important teachers.” As a home centered education advocate I cannot agree more with this statement. Arne Duncan said they are going to “double our budget in parental involvement.” I’m not sure how money will make parents more involved in their children’s lives unless it involves bribes. I would hope the fact that they are your children you would already be involved; obviously this is not the case. A teacher actually asked him if they are looking at forcing parents be involved under legal penalty. Thankfully parents that are participating in home centered education have already taken responsibility for their child’s education. “Good things happen when families learn together” thank you Arne Duncan – we who educate our children around the home already know this. Learn more at www.homeschool.com and Classical Conversations
Tomorrow I will address some issue with teacher burnout, dropout rates, and other spicier subjects in the interview.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Education week has started on NBC
Dictionary.com
“Education – The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life”
NBC Education week has started. I am encouraged that we are addressing Education as a national concern. I am a firm believer that if we had a good education system we would not be in the economic turmoil we are today. We would require less government control, which would mean a smaller government, we wouldn’t be in to debt to China who knows how much and we would be experiencing more individual freedom than ever, as opposed to being restricted more than any time in the history of the United States.
Currently we rank “25th in math and 21st in Science out of 30 developed countries” according to data obtained by NBC and their polls show 58% of the public believe we need a complete overhaul and 77% give our public schools a C grade or less. So the public is finally starting to understand how poorly our public schools are doing. My theory is because of the high unemployment and the realizations that they were never educated.
According to Arne Duncan we have “A lot of money in the reform movement” and we are not giving it to the “status quo.” I think by now we would have figured out the spending money on education was not the answer. We spend more money than anyone on education, and receive significantly less bang for our buck. Our education system is the equivalent to a brand new fully stocked BMW, but without an engine. We have the bells and whistles; the children are entertained, when not sleeping on their desk.
The issue will not be solved by increasing our dependence on Chinese yen (see debt). We must go back to the same teaching methods as the 1 room school house. Where an untrained 16 year old could teach 4-15 year olds how to conquer a country, read and comprehend Greek and Latin. We must teach our children how to be free by giving them the tools to think for themselves. There is a simple solution and it is real inexpensive. 1.) Teach young children to memorize, and how to make it fun. 2.) Teach children in middle school how to think, logic, about the information they are learning and how to relate it to the world around them. 3.) Teach children in high school how to logically think and express their opinions in their unique way.
From Arianna Huffington , Editor-In-Chief, Huffington Post new Book “If America’s Public Education System were a product, it would have been recalled. If it were a politician, it would have been impeached.” In the 1960’s the greatest generation had over 90% prose literacy rate and very little federal government involvement. Schools were run by local school districts and designed to educate, not build up false self esteem. Now when schools are designed to build up self esteem and not to educate prose literacy has dropped to 14%. Our children may feel real good about themselves when there 16, but being unemployed, not having the ability to think, pay bills, vote intelligently is not fun and they will not feel good about themselves when they turn 24 and reality hits them in the face. It’s time to get back to the HARD WORK of learning and teaching the students to teach themselves. It is time to go back to the future: classical education.
“Education – The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life”
NBC Education week has started. I am encouraged that we are addressing Education as a national concern. I am a firm believer that if we had a good education system we would not be in the economic turmoil we are today. We would require less government control, which would mean a smaller government, we wouldn’t be in to debt to China who knows how much and we would be experiencing more individual freedom than ever, as opposed to being restricted more than any time in the history of the United States.
Currently we rank “25th in math and 21st in Science out of 30 developed countries” according to data obtained by NBC and their polls show 58% of the public believe we need a complete overhaul and 77% give our public schools a C grade or less. So the public is finally starting to understand how poorly our public schools are doing. My theory is because of the high unemployment and the realizations that they were never educated.
According to Arne Duncan we have “A lot of money in the reform movement” and we are not giving it to the “status quo.” I think by now we would have figured out the spending money on education was not the answer. We spend more money than anyone on education, and receive significantly less bang for our buck. Our education system is the equivalent to a brand new fully stocked BMW, but without an engine. We have the bells and whistles; the children are entertained, when not sleeping on their desk.
The issue will not be solved by increasing our dependence on Chinese yen (see debt). We must go back to the same teaching methods as the 1 room school house. Where an untrained 16 year old could teach 4-15 year olds how to conquer a country, read and comprehend Greek and Latin. We must teach our children how to be free by giving them the tools to think for themselves. There is a simple solution and it is real inexpensive. 1.) Teach young children to memorize, and how to make it fun. 2.) Teach children in middle school how to think, logic, about the information they are learning and how to relate it to the world around them. 3.) Teach children in high school how to logically think and express their opinions in their unique way.
From Arianna Huffington , Editor-In-Chief, Huffington Post new Book “If America’s Public Education System were a product, it would have been recalled. If it were a politician, it would have been impeached.” In the 1960’s the greatest generation had over 90% prose literacy rate and very little federal government involvement. Schools were run by local school districts and designed to educate, not build up false self esteem. Now when schools are designed to build up self esteem and not to educate prose literacy has dropped to 14%. Our children may feel real good about themselves when there 16, but being unemployed, not having the ability to think, pay bills, vote intelligently is not fun and they will not feel good about themselves when they turn 24 and reality hits them in the face. It’s time to get back to the HARD WORK of learning and teaching the students to teach themselves. It is time to go back to the future: classical education.
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