36 Replies to “The Children Are Our Future”

  1. I’ve always believed that there are certain things and certain information that everyone should know about and support. That needs to be taught directly as factual and important.

    It is imperative that all members of a society all have the same knowledge and understanding … only then can problems and challenges be taken on and beaten efficiently.

    We cannot make progress if you have to continually be trying to education people so they at least understand what the problem is.

    Same with social and cultural matters … we use music and movies and TV shows as references as metaphors … if we have not all seen or heard those materials, we lose out on wit and humor and a bond that people of the same culture can share.

  2. The other feature of DI is that it puts responsibility on the student to demonstrate they retained the knowledge.

    The other methods tend to put more emphasis on subjective demonstration. That allows a less than diligent instructor to massage the testing to maintain the bell curve.

    Bottom line here is that a democrat administration buried a report that didn’t align with their solution.

  3. Rote memorization is the way to go. Today, they try to teach kids critical reasoning skills with a brain full of mush – no foundation of facts. From observation, I’m guessing my father’s grade 8 was superior to my kid’s degrees. He sure seemed smarter.

    1. See if you can get a copy of a grade 8 final exam from your father’s time. See if your kids can pass it.

      1. I have some of my grandfather’s and his siblings exams from 1913-1916, grades 8 and 9. And they were taught in a one room school house (rural Alberta) as well. No hope that students from the same grade would pass those today – in fact, I challenge most post-secondary grads to be able to pass them.

      2. That scar would scare the average canadian to death, because none of them could pass it, not even a university grad. I read one tears ago and there were things i could not even attempt.

    2. Without any foundational skills, things like reasoning and critical thinking are impossible.

      Time and time again, I have come across students who haven’t those basic foundational skills and cannot proceed to the next level (not that it really matters as one can not ever fail a student but I digress …).

      Other methods have their place but rote learning must be at the core of things.

  4. I was told that Calculus was taught in Ontario Primary Schools prior to the 1950s. Would it be possible these days ? Education: expect less, get less. But more money for teacher’s pensions.

  5. Any musician or athlete will tell you…..slow, direct and CORRECT repetition of any skill is the quickest way to learn it.
    Eventually, it becomes automatic, and you no longer have to think about it.
    When I was a student, every single one of us learned times tables using this choral, repetitive method. And we learned them well.
    Nowadays, very few students know their times tables at an elementary level – instead of memorization, they are given dozens of cumbersome crutches to help them “discover” what 6 times 7 might be.
    Why?
    When I went to university to become an educator, we were told that even in teaching math, “anything over 5 repetitions is just meaningless number crunching.”
    Those of us who had actually done anything in life knew that was BS.
    Those who had never succeeded at anything lapped it up.
    Guess who became good teachers, and who became administrators.

  6. So … I guess all those flash cards really DID work!

    Please Note that this study was of K-3 children. I suspect, as in all things … once the basics are learned … it is advisable to take the training wheels OFF … and let the kids do more of their own exploration.

    Whether musicians are self-taught, or classically trained … they need to get the BASICS down before their full creative genius can take hold. Without a solid educational base … at the EARLIEST ages … kids educational careers are doomed. Why is there an ever-increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots in our society? Education. The Teachers UNIONS and the Teacher intelligentsia have crippled poor kids by focusing on FALSE self-esteem rather than actual accomplishment.

    1. The Cantonese have a saying, trying to run before learning to walk.
      I agree that at the grade level they were studying about, K-3, there is not much you can do except what is the best way to achieve rote memory of the basics. You cannot be creative about math without knowing the multiplication table and simple rules of arithmetic. And, in the old days at least, kids that age didn’t have much distraction and had fantastic retention. That’s why it’s a great age to learn several languages by forced contact with primary speakers who may only know their one language.
      While Asian cultures are generally good at instilling rote memory, however, they over rely on it through the whole education career. In college and post grad, they do not only not promote individual initiative, they actively discourage it. You have an apt analogy. They never take the training wheels off. They never learn to ride a bike without training wheels as well, let alone learn how to do wheelies or 360’s in the air.
      In a sense, maybe I have lucked into taking advantage of the best education appropriate for each level. I had Asian education in grade school, British public school model in middle school (right mixture of discipline and discovery), and U.S. education in last two years of high school and thereafter. (Remember that was in late 50’s onward, not now!)

  7. Every Asian country uses the DI method. I know first-hand. I came to Canada when I was in grade 2. I had just turned 8 years old. My knowledge of math and my ability to read and write English were well beyond those of my Canadian grade 2 peers. I sat in with the principal, Mr Stofega, and my parents after he perused my grades and course of study from De La Salle College grade school–included in my school file was the final exam I had to pass in order to pass grade 2 in the Philippines. He told them that my math level was grade five and my reading comprehension was at least at the grade 4 level. He asked my parents if they wanted to put me into grade four so I wouldn’t be bored in class. My parents declined and I would stay in grade two. They reasoned that being the youngest and smallest (8 yrs old vs 10 and 11 yr olds) guy in class would make me a target for bullying–remember that back then kids would still be held back a grade or two if they didn’t meet the required learning for that particular grade so, it wasn’t unusual to have one or two boys who were a year older than the rest of the class (these guys tended to be bitter and angry). My parents’ decision allowed me, for the next three years, to daydream and pretend I was Capt James T. Kirk fighting Klingons while sitting at my desk (remember the ones with the inkwells cut into them?), and playing British Bulldog during recess and lunch breaks–while still achieving straight A’s.

    1. The De La Salle College grade school.
      If it is in the Philippines what it was in Hong Kong, then it was not a usual school, but one for the elite. There were grammar schools teaching entirely in English catering to British children, but admitting some Chinese children at exorbitant fees.
      It won’t be a surprise then the education you received far exceeded the average Canadian child of your age, or an average child in any country. It is due to the particular school you went to, not the educational system in the country as a whole.

      1. We just yelled “BRITISH!!” and the guys who weren’t “it” started their run across the field. The prestige wasn’t in not being pulled down, because everyone eventually would succumb…it was being the last to get pulled down. Interestingly, with all the physically rough and tumble games we played, I don’t remember bullying amongst my classmates. I guess with games like British Bulldog…even the strongest and fastest guys realized that all it took was two or three weaker guys working together to bring them down.

  8. During my time as an educator at Armpit College, I encountered this sort of baloney all the time.

    I often clashed with the educationists at AC about this. I was told that all my students were eager to learn. No, they weren’t. Most didn’t want to there in the first place and simply wanted to pass my courses, get their piece of paper, and get out.

    I was constantly criticized for not making my lectures “participatory” or “interactive”, such as picking someone to come up to the board and work out a solution. For one thing, I didn’t have time to slow down in order to have a student do that. Second, I wanted to avoid any complaints about humiliating that person if they didn’t know how to solve a problem.

    I taught the material the same way I learned it: good and hard. What I didn’t catch on to in my undergrad lectures, I went over on my own time. Then again, I was the one who took responsibility for my learning the material. (In a few cases, though, it was the prof’s fault because he was a lousy lecturer, unwilling to give advice and assistance later on, and, worse, the textbook was terrible and the lecture notes useless. Even I couldn’t overcome all that.)

    After I quit my job at AC, I had an interview with another post-secondary institution. I was criticized by the committee for not using PowerPoint slides. The implication was that I should have made copies of what I was going to show and distributed them to the kiddies, so that they could concentrate on learning the material. Uh, no. In my experience, even during my undergrad days, whenever something like that was done, people would quickly become bored and they certainly didn’t make extensive notes on their handouts. Concentrating on learning the material? Yeah, right.

    The way I was taught my undergrad engineering subjects worked well for me and I openly said so. Ah, but I was supposedly extraordinary, being so smart, so it was so “easy” for me. (Huh? My transcripts were rather messy and I certainly didn’t ace my courses.) Never mind that generations of engineering students learned the same material the same way and went on to have successful careers. (At least three of my undergraduate classmates went on to become corporate vice-presidents.)

    Educational policy and doctrine has been dedicated to making excuses for under-performers. In many cases, that under-performance wasn’t due to a lack of talent but sheer laziness and a belief in getting something for nothing. But that’s one thing educationists and educational administrators don’t want to hear as it is in conflict with their belief that everybody is equal and that everybody automatically deserves to be successful.

    And people wonder why I quit such a “good” job at Armpit College…..

    1. so true! I was shocked when my daughters asked me how I multiplied so fast. Turns out the tables are not taught on Ontario any more!

      1. Who needs times tables when we’ve got calculators, eh?

        A lot of basic skills aren’t taught any more. I inherited all sorts of measuring instruments from my father, but most of them were “analog” without digital displays.

        A machinist who bought some of my father’s tools and equipment from me told me that apprentices nowadays aren’t taught how to read a vernier caliper, and he commented that I might have a hard time selling those devices. Fortunately, a friend of his who works with turbomachinery took them off my hands. He not only recognized good hardware, he preferred the mechanical ones because, in his experience, they tended to remain calibrated longer.

        1. As an old guy who rounds and estimates I would be gone. Looking at something, say a measurement and you have no tape, I have been damn near on the money constantly and my wife always asks, how do you do that? I always say I don’t know but both my grandfathers and father could do it. I guess learning by watching and participating is so passe. By the way, I could estimate a multimillion dollar budget and not be out enough to bug the accountants. Good thing I am no longer in business.

          1. Similar to that, my father was familiar with standard sizes for drills and threads. He could easily convert from a fraction to the decimal equivalent and vice-versa. He also had a small stack of pocket tables, charts, and converters which he sometimes referred to.

            Then again, he apprenticed under the German system of the early 1950s and worked at his trade for more than 50 years, so he worked with those numbers every day he was on the job.

            Some of his mental ability with fractions rubbed off on me. I could easily convert a fraction of an inch in, say, 1/16ths to the equivalent decimal. (Doing it with 1/32s required a bit of thinking.) I’m sure that it terrified some of the students I had in the drafting courses I taught while at Armpit College. Much of it simply came from practice.

  9. There is a charter school in Calgary that uses choral recitation of phonograms and recitation of math facts as the basis for their instruction of young students. They now have the highest ranked high school in the city, third in the province. Teaching method is why I put my kid there.

    The wait list to get a spot is 14,000 long the last time they mentioned it. To get my kid in for kindergarten, we had to apply as soon as we got the birth certificate…and with a birthday late in the year, we had to wait until the actual year he was in kindergarten for enough people ahead of us to move or go elsewhere to get a spot.

    1. America and Canada want to destroy that and are using the whu who flu to do so. Look up, look around.

  10. Les Bewley use to write about this in his weekend Vancouver Sun column. He compared and equated 1920 single room country school grade 10 exams with second year University of the day (late 1970s). I don’t think that the Normal School teachers of the 1920s had to have education degrees. Interesting that the more credentialed teachers become, the poorer the quality of educational outcome.

    1. Interesting that the more credentialed teachers become, the poorer the quality of educational outcome.

      And, the more credentialed teachers become, the higher up in the educational hierarchy they go. Length of experience doesn’t matter as much as the number of “right” letters behind one’s name.

  11. Mother was a teacher in the late 20’s – early 30’s in rural Saskatchewan. Her comment was that she had to be very organized. And she didn’t have four years’ university education. In those days, it was one year at Normal School and you were out teaching.

    1. But she was not indoctrinated in self-hatred, superiority of transsexuals and foreign terrorists, or absolute necessity for her students to become drug addicted psychopaths.
      This is what 4 years of university produces in today’s teachers. I have not yet met a single teacher who was not eager to be an extension of drug cartels and sex change mafia. Knowing them, I am positive that the recent decapitation of Our Lady’s statue was a teacher’s hands making.

  12. I handed my son-in-law a slide rule a couple of years ago. He looked at it and asked what it was.
    He has his PEng, is an electrical engineer and has a Master’s degree, and took a much closer look at the rule after a few minutes of explanation.

    1. Remind him of this gem by Robert Heinlein:

      “Dad says that anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty–a K&E 20-inch Log-log Duplex Decitrig.”

  13. Thanks BAD. Mine was shorter 12″, forget the manufacturer but certainly not Chirese (slide rule!! Okay!)
    The Son-in-law was quite interested in having a closer look at the old way of doing things but still prefers his technology. His math is way beyond mine but I did okay with what I had.

    1. I’ve had several slide rules over the years, but the one I still use once in a while is a foot-long Geotec Versalog, made in Japan from bamboo.

      It’s more than just a calculating engine, it’s a work of art. On one side, I can multiply and divide; I can do squares and cubes, square roots, and multiples of pi; I can look up some values for the exponential function. On the other side, I’ve got trig functions, more exponentials, and base 10 logarithms.

      Tell your son-in-law that devices like that put men on the moon and were used to design the machines to take them there.

  14. The US needs many more Joe McCarty’s and even a single Hillary Clinton is too many.
    Communists buried the US. Finita la comedia.

  15. “Instead, Project Follow Through was declared a failure.”

    On paper, sure. I’m cynical and distrustful enough to suspect it was a success. They identified the best way for the populace at large to learn, then made sure it would never happen.

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