Conspiracy Theories and Public Education

I lurk at a wide variety of education-related forums dealing with everything from elementary education to education policy to homeschooling, and one disturbing trend I find is this: a sizable minority of the population on these forums believes some pretty ugly conspiracy theories about public education in the United States.  Perhaps you’ve heard these assertions before:

• The educational system wants to turn out unthinking robots who will work as corporate slaves
• Teachers want to inculcate a morally relativistic outlook into the next generation
• All public schools care about is getting attendance numbers up so they get more tax money

…and so on.

But then, as I see similarly wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. government (Did you know we never really landed on the moon, and they’re covering up evidence of alien visits to Earth?), I’ve come to realize that people, in general, don’t trust large organizations.  (WalMart is evil!  Google is trying to hijack your health information!)

That’s where we as individual teachers come in.  More than ever, our job includes helping families understand that their child will be taught by us — Ms. Mercer, Mr. Pullen, Mr. Fisch — not some mysterious entity that can’t be trusted.  On top of that, we need to encourage parents to come in and be a part of the school community as well, through volunteering, open houses, information nights, and by generally maintaining an open-door policy toward guests.

Nowadays, it seems we can’t just assume that everyone will know that we are real people who genuinely care about each and every student.

Everything Lasts Too Long

I’m convinced that human beings learn more in the first few minutes of something (no matter what that “thing” happens to be) than at any other time.

As I sat in church listening to a half-hour sermon last Sunday, I got the gist of it in three minutes.  I learn more from a five-minute scan of my subscribed feeds — because the posts are concise and on a variety of topics – than I do in an hour of a typical one-topic workshop.  (For example, Monday’s post over at The Big Picture contained just six sentences and 10 heart-rending photographs and made more of an impact on me than a massive tome about famine in Ethiopia ever could have.)

This tendency seems to be even more prevalent among children.  The first math example I share with the students leads to more learning than the fifth example.  The first peer editor finds more meaningful edits than the second one, the first chapter in today’s read-aloud generates more discussion than the third, and the first round of Math Mayhem is way more exciting than the sixth.

So what should we do in light of all this?  I believe a key to successful teaching is to work to create more firsts.  Preschool teachers know that you can’t schedule anything to last for more than about 15 minutes (if you’re lucky!); I believe that all of us who teach, at all grade levels, should take the same approach.  Just because our older students might manage to stay seated throughout a 45-minute lecture (or writing time, or read-aloud, or math lesson) on one topic doesn’t mean they are learning much during the latter two-thirds of that time. 

On a related note, let’s also make sure our students learn the value of concise clarity.  A five-page essay is not necessarily better than a one-page essay; the days of more words being better, if it ever existed, has certainly passed.  To teachers of older grades: Start giving out more assignments with maximum lengths (no more than 200 words!) and fewer with minimum lengths (five pages, double spaced).

And to my pastor: would you ever consider trying two six-to-eight minute mini-sermons instead?

The All-New Online Math League

Rumor has it that some teachers actually take time off for summer vacation.  Not me.  Instead of doing boring things like golfing or actually going outside, I’ve been working on a complete site redesign for my math contest company, the Online Math League (formerly known as the Academic Leagues).

So, whether you’re an active reader of this blog or someone who happened to Google something that led you to this page, please visit www.onlinemathleague.com and then help us by spreading the word to anyone you know who teaches math (or has a child) at any grade level from 2nd grade up through Algebra.  Really cool things we’ve got going for 2008-2009 include:

• Three fun, challenging contests spread throughout the school year
• A vast online practice area that contains thought-provoking questions and multiple layers of instant feedback based on students’ responses
• Instant online results for all of the actual contests throughout the year
• High-quality awards, such as plaques for high-scoring teams, medals to a very large number of individuals, and downloadable certificate templates for everyone

I’ve blogged before about some of the great online resources out there for working on basic math facts, such as TImez Attack at bigbrainz.com and Multiflyer at brainormous.com, and also worksheet generators like edhelper.com and themathworksheetsite.com.  The one thing that’s always been striking to me, though, is the complete lack of interactive online materials that focus on in-depth story problems, multi-step problems, algebra-style problems, and other complex grade-level-specific topics in alignment with state and national standards.

Now there’s a site that does fill that niche, so even if it is my own, I would be remiss in not spreading the word.  Check us out at www.onlinemathleague.com.

What Do You Teach?

What do you teach?

There was a time when my answer to that question would’ve been reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.  I particularly thought of myself as a math teacher, since many years I’ve taught several sections of it during the day.  But as my school year ended yesterday, the most important thing I was reminded of as I spent my final hours with my students was that, at its core, my work as a third grade teacher is really not about teaching content matter at all.

It’s about teaching kids.

When I write it like that, it seems obvious.  But so many forces in education — such as standardized tests, the whole benchmark movement, and scripted lessons from highly standardized programs — are moving us in exactly the opposite direction.  As a result, many teachers are compelled to focus on “covering” subject matter as opposed to teaching children.

Anytime we lose sight of the individual students we teach, the quality of our teaching suffers.

When someone asks you “what” you teach, I hope your first thought is something like, “Paul, Hannah, Chloe, Matt, Victoria, Maria, Stefan, Alejandro…” and so on.

Kids and a “Cognitive Surplus”

I begin with a grateful nod to Clay Shirky’s recent speech about cognitive surplus, in which he talks about the immense quantities of time people have been spending doing passive things like watching television, and how those passive activities are starting to be replaced by Web 2.0-style activities in which people are creating instead of merely consuming.  As Shirky says (from the above link):

“Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One percent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?”

Three years ago, my math company ran a scholarship contest where students could enter a one-page essay about why they loved mathematics.  The best essay was to win $500, and two $250 runner-up prizes were also awarded.  What happened next amazed me: over 25,000 kids submitted essays, and the vast majority of them were thoughtful and had clearly taken significant time and effort.  Even if we assume each essay took just half an hour to write, that’s still 12,500 hours of essay writing that was done to win a grand total of $1000.  That works out to 8 cents an hour, on average, that those essay writers were earning.  I thought to myself at the time that I wished I could somehow channel that same cost-to-work ratio in other meaningful ways.

Now, as Shirky points out, even the 8 cents isn’t necessary.  This blog post is a perfect example: I’m writing this, for free, instead of watching TV right now.  Why?  Shirky’s paragraphs above answer that question: simply because I can.

Let’s turn this same concept back to the main topic of this blog: education.  I believe that children are even more inclined to be producers — to subscribe to Web 2.0 mentality — than adults.  As I write this, there is a vast social surplus for children that is left virtually untapped.  At school, for example, children are too often treated as passive learners rather than active creators.  Summer vacation is by far the most glaring cognitive surplus of all — here is a stretch of 2.5 months out of each and every year where we could be helping kids to develop a mindset of actively creating and inventing (and the topic could be anything: songs, stories, websites, artwork, products to sell, or ways to help others).  Note that I’m not merely talking about signing your kid up for photography camp, soccer camp, and art camp — although these can all be good things — but I’m talking about all of us as parents and educators intentionally helping to speed the Web 2.0 phenomenon of kids seeing themselves as active creators of ideas that matter.

Back to Shirky:

“We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.”

Education emphatically meets exactly those criteria.  How can we tap into the cognitive surplus that exists here, both in and outside of school?