Some interesting articles related to education and learning.  There’s a whole bunch because they kind of piled up while I took a break from writing here this summer!

Enjoy! 

Study Rethinks Importance of Kindergarten Teachers from The New York Times

Boys failed by education system says Eton headmaster from UK Telegraph

Don’t dock students for missing deadlines from Winnipeg Free Press (Oh. brother.)

Play, Then Eat: Shift May Bring Gains at School from The New York Times (Very interesting)

Denver high school wood stops buck trend of shelving industrial arts classes from Denver Post

Scholars turn their attention to attention from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Strong Debate on Both Sides Over Bill Requiring Dissection Option in Schools from Courant.com

Items of interest in the news…

Attention, Gates: Here’s What Makes a Great Teacher from Education Week

Parents strive to temper screens’ pull from Boston.com

Union warns teachers not to break up playground fights from The Independent

We Need Less School, Not More by John Taylor Gatto

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Do It from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Enjoy!

Photo credit

Growing up I was a voracious reader.  But as I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m not in any danger of being labeled a literary snob.  I’m not much into reading all the classics that everyone says you have to read.

Frankly, I read for two reasons.  One, I want to learn something about a particular topic.  Two, to escape and relax.

I read for the pleasure of it.  I think that is why I didn’t enjoy AP English very much.  Too much analysis and picking apart what the author meant by this object or this symbolic metaphorical doohickey.

That’s just not really me.

So I found this article quite interesting: The Case for Slow Reading.  From the article (bold mine):

Open any newspaper and you are likely to find a story of some school whose students have read a million, two million—some big number of pages. As a payoff, the teachers wear pajamas for a day, or the principal shaves his head or agrees to eat worms, a reward to the delighted students. Then Pizza Hut or some other franchise that sponsored the event hands out coupons for nonnutritious food to the voracious readers.

It’s all great fun, a good story, a terrific photo op. But something bothers me about this picture—it’s as though reading has become a form of fast food to consume as quickly as possible, just one more cultural celebration of speed.

This association of good reading with speed permeates our schools, from the hugely popular Accelerated Reading Program, to “nonsense word fluency” tests in which young children have to decode “words” at a rate of more than one per second, to standardized tests in which reading is always “on the clock.” To be quick is to be smart; to be slow is to be stupid.

As a confessed slow reader, I would like to make a case for slowness. By slowness, I don’t mean the painful, laborious decoding some students must do or the plodding march through some assigned novels that may take weeks. Any pleasure or success in reading requires fluency and the ability to read with some pace.

But there is real pleasure in downshifting, in slowing down. We can gain some pleasures and meanings no other way. I think of the high-speed trains in Europe that I always wanted to ride, ones that hurtle through the French landscape at more than 200 miles per hour—that is, until I learned that at these high speeds, even the distant scenery becomes a blur. The retina simply can’t take in a clear picture at that rate of movement.

The same thing can happen in reading. I’d like to explore what we miss when we define good reading as fast reading and to argue for what Ellin Keene has called “dwelling” in the texts we read.

Author and media theorist Neil Postman provides a foundation for this argument in his classic book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979). Schools, Postman argues, should act on a thermostatic principle; a thermostat acts to cool when a room is too hot and heat when a room is too cool. According to Postman, schools should act to check—and not to imitate—some tendencies in the wider information environment. “The major role of education in the years immediately ahead,” he writes, “is to help conserve that which is necessary to a humane survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture” (p. 25).

I get the impression Caroline is going to have certain areas where she kind of ambles along at her own pace.  She does not like to be rushed and, unless something changes in the coming years, I can see her as one of the children who is smart as a whip but does not do pressure-packed standardized testing very well.

Pressure-packed reading seems absolutely contradictory to me.  Reading should be pleasurable and enjoyed at a leisurely pace.

So it will be interesting to see how this develops in our home.  We are doing our best to live a quiet, simple life. We have found the pleasure of downshifting and slowing down. How that translates into Caroline’s education has yet to be seen.  But I hope to give her the gift of loving and savoring reading.

I’m starting a new feature here at AQSLL… Education and Learning News.  I’ll be linking to education and learning related news stories, blog posts and generally interesting topics.  I’ll often include a quote as well.

Here is the first installment.  Enjoy! 

Graduates condemned to “coffee shop” jobs from the UK Telegraph:

His comments follow remarks by Lucy Neville-Rolfe, an executive director at Tesco, who said British school leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and have major “attitude problems”.

Mrs Neville-Rolfe, an Oxford graduate and former civil servant, said students’ attitudes to their appearance, work, authority and discipline were poor.

The 56 year-old, one of the most powerful and well paid women in British business, said despite many A Level students and university graduates not being able to read or write or understand maths, more were achieving better results.

She also attacked students who felt that it was their right to gain employment.

“They (students) don’t seem to understand the importance of a tidy appearance and have problems with timekeeping,” she said in a speech to the Institute of Grocery Distribution’s conference on skills on Wednesday.

“Some seem to think that the world owes them a living. The truth is that a certain humility and an ability to work hard are important for success.

“More broadly, a society where people don’t feel the need to work to gain material possessions will not be a stable or successful society.”

The hidden power of play from Boston.com

AT A TIME of great international turmoil, growing globalization, and exploding technological advances, making time for child play seems an unaffordable luxury. Yet, a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics — due out today — makes just the opposite case. It argues for the essential role of play in the healthy mental, physical, and social/emotional development of the child.

Today, many elementary schools have eliminated recess in favor of more time for academics. Even kindergarten children now take tests and are assigned homework. After-school tutoring and organized sports have cut deeply into the time for spontaneous, self-initiated play.

Summer camps devoted to sports, computers or exam preparation are rapidly replacing those that once offered swimming, boating, hiking, campfires, and storytelling. Bike riding is down and computer game playing, which purportedly teaches computer skills, is up.

Even infancy is no longer seen as a time for play as an entire industry now markets a wide variety of computer programs, CDs, and “educational toys” for the infant and toddler set. The not so subtle message here is that play is superfluous; play is for slackers. But this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of play in human life.

Secret millionaire donates fortune to Lake Forest College from Chicago Tribune

Like many people who lived through the Great Depression, Grace Groner was exceptionally restrained with her money.

She got her clothes from rummage sales. She walked everywhere rather than buy a car. And her one-bedroom house in Lake Forest held little more than a few plain pieces of furniture, some mismatched dishes and a hulking TV set that appeared left over from the Johnson administration.

Her one splurge was a small scholarship program she had created for Lake Forest College, her alma mater. She planned to contribute more upon her death, and when she passed away in January, at the age of 100, her attorney informed the college president what that gift added up to.

“Oh, my G**,” the president said.

Groner’s estate, which stemmed from a $180 stock purchase she made in 1935, was worth $7 million.