"Gravity works on everything except the things on Space"

The pain of not understanding gravity. IS IT FRICTION?

Ok.

Long Division

I spent all last night teaching my nine year old long division. There were many tears. Only some were mine.

When your kid asks you how to do long division.

Seriously, he comes home with math homework and then writes random numbers down in the hope I won't check that he can't do it. Then when I walk him through it, he CLEARLY HAS NO IDEA HOW TO DO IT.

I have no idea what they actually do in school, but every time a school voucher program comes on the ballot I vote yes, because I'd rather spend my evenings doing anything else. Everyone gets so excited about how great the elementary school is that Max goes to, but frankly I don't see it. Any school is great if you spend four hours AFTER THE SCHOOL DAY ENDS teaching your kids math.

This weekend I spent two days socializing with a fifteen year old girl who was visiting from Canada. She was super nice! And Super Jewish! She is studying "Talmud" in her school - apparently half her curriculum is Jewish studies, so I asked her about what the Talmud says about slaves. It says a lot, unsurprisingly, none of which she knew, also unsurprisingly! Her dream career is to "mix chemicals to make new make-up." But let me put it to you this way: You go to a madrasa, you are not going to become a chemical engineer.

Racist Comments from a 9yo

I got a call from the guidance councilor at Max's school today (he's 9). Apparently Friday when all the kids were in a line he said "Looks like the white girls are all in front and the black girls are all in the back, like in the olden days." Everyone got offended and today he apologized to the class, although the school was great in that they clearly realized Max is not a racist, just, you know, nine. Also, I love that the counselor doesn't know I'm pretty brown. Max looks like an Aryan poster boy, so having a brown dad is something that will surprise them.

Realistically the only reason he would even know about "the olden days" is we've been watching John Green videos on YouTube, where he has a whole great history session called CrashCourse. WELL WORTH A VIEW. Of course, your kids may end up knowing things about the civil rights movement without any context and make impolitic remarks. So I'm going to have to also have him watch Thank You For Smoking.

Strategy and Tactics

If you've built software, you know the feeling when a project is too large and too old to survive. This is not because your coding or initial design was wrong. It's because your requirements have changed and your understanding of the problem has also changed now that you have experience building your old and busted version 1.0.

Imagine you were still using a computer program built in the 70's. Those computers took us to the moon and back! They can do amazing things. But you do not want to try to compete in today's market with them.

The same is true with current schooling in America. It cannot be fixed by more money, in the same way that throwing more money at a broken engineering project (or a war in Afghanistan) cannot fix it. Watch this video, but start at 8 minutes in:

(https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education)

If you've not watched this video, you're missing out on a great summary of the latest research in education.

Even the BEST SCHOOLS are now outdated, strategically broken in several ways only obvious in retrospect. Sal goes into it a lot better than I can here, but I'll point out things I've personally seen in my kids' (B-graded) school, with even with very good teachers.

1. The teachers have to teach to the lowest common denominator.
2. Even doing that, students don't completely learn one concept when they have to move onto the next. (This is the bike analogy from the video).

People think that that Khan Academy is about the website, which it is not. It is more about proposing a revolutionary way to do education as a whole, with the website as one implementation of the idea, the way Word is just one kind of Word Processor but there are others available, with similar concepts behind them.

There are simple things you can see that they take advantage of from the science. For example, you cannot move forward to take a "mastery challenge" on KA without waiting for a day after you do the practice questions. And you have to get 10 right in a row on the mastery challenge to pass it. You can do one thousand questions, and get the last ten right, or just the first ten. Either way is fine.

Those two simple features are the result of a small advancement in educational science. This is why when teachers prefer i-Ready, I watch my kids do it, and I can tell that i-Ready is inferior. It may have nicer graphics, but it doesn't take as much advantage of the things we know are proven to work.

The apple tree in Eden.

Sal Khan also talks a bit about the "Gifted" program. The key strategic issue he addresses in the video is that your "best" students one month can be the most "behind" the next month, although because learning is a tree structure (see above) even that is a bad abstraction.

In conclusion: Having great teachers is not a solution for a broken system. Working the kids harder and harder with more and more homework is not a solution. A complete revolution in education is what you need, and what you get from your school, no doubt, is excuses. I enjoy watching everyone, teachers and parents, complain about Common Core. But without realistic universal metrics, you can't even see the problem. Stop whining about it, teach the kids better, and you don't have to worry about a once a year automated test.

This is rated "mostly true", but is inspirational either way.

Video example of Headsprout -> Blending.

I've mentioned HeadSprout before, because I think it works (for boys and girls), but I wanted to demonstrate a three year old learning how to blend. WITHOUT PAIN. The goal of this blog is the painless-for-the-parents part of the technique. Boys are hard enough to raise without having to be turned against your own kids by your teachers and society in general.

Anyways. Watch this video, then tell me that's not easier than sitting with them being frustrated because they're looking into space thinking about Minecraft.

People like to think that the major benefit of computer aided learning is that "Kids like being on computers more than they like teachers" but it's not. There's been some real science that's gone into teaching kids, and the phonics we learned is not the modern phonics teachings.

Above, you see he is learning "fl" and "ee" as phenomes. He does not know "e" as a single character yet. Just one example.

Teaching Boys to Read with less Tears

Boys have, in general because I like to make broad generalizations as a hobby, no desire to please or impress you. My friends with girls have the ability to act disappointed, and their daughters will be all sad and actually try to do better next time. This is so foreign to me I don't even know how it would work in practice.

There's two things I think work very well with boys: Headsprout and Comic books.

Headsprout is basically Rosetta Stone but for learning how to read. You just say "You get to play 10 minutes of a video game after you finish your Headsprout" and then you watch them to make sure they are following along and they'll pick up some basic skills. The real magic is after they've learned how to "blend" (combine letter sounds into a word, as opposed to "sight reading" a word). Then Headsprout pumps them all the way up through reading comprehension and gets them into about fifth grade reading level effortlessly.

Click here to sign up: https://www.headsprout.com/

Let me sell you on the 100 bucks with this comment: Headsprout has infinite patience and you don't. As long as you make the child do it every day, it works well.

The second trick that works well is comic books. Not the newer comic books, which are extremely adult in both topics and art. But the older ones that date from even before our generation. The originals. Because they share characters with the modern movies your kids are already aware of them and interested, and because they date from before it was OK to show kissing on TV they are all safe to buy your five year old.

"I'm old. My webs smell like prunes and irony."

Suggestions:
Complete Calvin And Hobbes (Super effective but WILL turn your kid a bit into a monster)
Older X-Men Books Are Always Good
Older Spider Man is Still Great (Don't forget Spider Man is created because his dad dies, like Batman, so you may want to avoid the very first ones)

They even make comics about all the Greek Gods, which are quite good:
Zeus

Once they can read you get them Joss Whedon's X-Men books, which are amazing for both adults and kids and probably the best comic books ever created (he also created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, directed Avengers, etc.):
Book 1 + Book 2