Comments on: Brain power

By: SuperSub

SuperSub — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:52:54 +0000

Malcolm-
Without the State-monopoly system we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to lose progress because we wouldn’t have made any in the first place.
The decades of lost progress have more to do with the anti-establishment movement of the sixties, where schools effectively lost the power to decide what to teach and instead the power was given to activists, hacks, and parents for the supposed reason of focusing on individual students’ needs.

By: Tweets that mention Brain power « Joanne Jacobs -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Brain power « Joanne Jacobs -- Topsy.com — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:24:44 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19, JoanneLeeJacobs. JoanneLeeJacobs said: Brain power: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2009/12/brain-power/ [...]

By: Deirdre Mundy

Deirdre Mundy — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:50:42 +0000

With my own kids, I’ve found they’re ready for Math at a MUCH younger age than they are ready for reading… I think a big problem is that our schools have it backwards right now…

We push phonics and reading on Pre-K and K kids who may NOT be cognitively ready for them, but neglect math until grade 1 or 2.

Really, I think we’d do better to hold off on reading until their brains have developed a bit more (as per the book “Proust and the Squid”) and start on Math earlier—

By: Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Malcolm Kirkpatrick — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:28:20 +0000

We lost years (decades) of progress because of the State-monopoly school system. “What works?” is an empirical question which only an experiment (in the case of education service, a competitive market) can answer. A State-monopoly school system is like an experiment with one treatment and no controls: a retarded experimental design. As P. J. O’Rourke observed: “evolution doesn’t work on things that don’t die.”

The $500 billion+ that US taxpayers throw down the K-12 rathole every year may be the least cost of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel’s exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers’ education subsidy. Two larger costs are (1) the lost information about education innovation and (2) the opportunity cost of the time students spend in the cartel’s wretched schools. This cost appears as reduced lifetime earnings, reduced life expectancy, losses due to crime, and the cost of prison for the poor minority kids whose lives we trash.

By: Rachel @ Minds in Bloom

Rachel @ Minds in Bloom — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:23:15 +0000

Doesn’t seem like such a big surprise. It is well established that brains grow faster in children – especially young children than in adults. It also seems like many preschool curriculums (as well as parents) already integrate numbers and number concepts into activities. Not really seeing what is unique about this research or this program.

By: Stacy

Stacy — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:48:07 +0000

Sigfried Engelmann’s first book, I think, was Give Your Child a Superior Mind, written in the ’60′s.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:57:05 +0000

One of the interesting things about this article is that they’re recreating what the Direct Instruction guys came up with in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, on triangles, the article reports a researcher as criticising introducing the idea of triangles with the example of a pizza slice, and says that kids get confused because a pizza slice has a rounded end, while mathematical triangles don’t. Instead the guy is introducing kids to a variety of triangles, skinny ones, fat ones, etc. This matches with the Direct Instruction guys’ principle that when introducing a new concept the teacher should provide examples that cover as much of the variation in what is covered by this concept as possible (eg skinny triangles, fat triangles, triangles that are filled in, triangles that are just lines, triangles in different colours).