Half Baked Idea for School Reform Part III

The general theme of these last three posts is how we can get more adults involved in the education of our children. More expansively, we are all teachers, right? Or at least we should be, teaching and learning from each other. We should all, in some way, find ways to mentor and teach each other and especially our little ones.

At the company I work, they have recently emphasized the need to strengthen their employees because they feel the employee is among the company's most valuable resource. To that end, they implemented a fairly formal mentor/mentee program and I was encouraged to sign up to do both. Last week, I met my mentor for the first time - who, I'm a little embarrassed to say - is younger than me :-). But that's ok, we should be able to learn from anyone.

But he's also pretty impressive. He started out at my company from college, left for a couple of years to try his shot at a tech startup, and now he's back. He's constantly tinkering with new ideas, submits constantly to our "Lab Rats" - which is an in-company contest where employees submit ideas and prototypes for innovation within the company. He won once.

He gave me some really good advice in our mentoring session, invigorating advice. To that end, I want to get out my last idea for School Reform. In my last post, I used the current traditional school as the starting point for my reform. You have the current system of a relatively large-sized classrooms led by usually a single teacher. If we could get more teacher's aides into the classroom, preferably from the pool of parents, there's a greater opportunity to individualize the learning experience.

Now, I will come at the problem from the opposite spectrum. Let's take the home schooling model and modify it so that it could become a viable alternative to traditional schooling for more families. Here, in my opinion, are some problems with home schooling:

1) It takes a tremendous amount of effort from the parents. We have to come up with the curriculum; we have to prepare each day; we have to individually coax our kids (who are very experienced in opposing our best laid plans for them) into a rigorous school day; and we have to stay consistent day in and day out.

2) It's pretty expensive. Not only are we paying taxes to fund every one else's education, we are refusing societal help in teaching our own kids. We pay for all the books, the lessons, the instruments, the materials, not to mention the time.

3) Our kids lose out on opportunities to learn from a wider array of teachers and, most critically, from their peers. The ideal education is when we build up networks so that we can support each other. Nobody accomplishes anything worth doing by themselves. We need each other and we need to learn and to rely on one another. Home schooling makes this harder as we silo ourselves from others.

These critiques of home schooling can be overcome - we reach out to other home schooling families and have weekly coops. We have signed up for weekly home school PE. My kids are involved in choir, karate, and music with other kids. But its harder and as a result, most parents simply cannot or choose not to embark in it.

But, there's actually another model that's interesting, let's call it the Suzuki model that we're using to get our kids trained on their respective string musical instruments.

One day each week, my wife takes our kids to a lesson from a trained, experienced teacher in the instrument. The teacher gives our child an individual lesson. Actually, my son shares his lesson with his teacher's son who is the same age. My wife listens in on these lessons taking notes. Through the week, she practices with our children based on the material that was covered in the lesson. Additionally, there's a bi-monthly group class with other suzuki kids that provide more opportunities to get exposed to other children at the same level.

Why do we think that learning to master a musical instrument is any different than mastering math, or the English language?

I can easily imagine the classroom working in the same way Suzuki works:

1) You have a teacher (or set of teachers) skilled in child development: language, vocabulary, math, basic history. Really, elementary education seems to be more about child development than it does about being a subject matter expert. But these teachers should also be skilled at dealing with parents and families - almost taking on the role of a social worker.

2) The parent (or another suitable adult) takes their child (or set of children since you probably won't be able to get every parent engaged) to get individual or very small group instruction from the teacher on the relevant subjects - at least once per week, maybe more. And ends the session by assigning a weeks (or less depending on the frequency) worth of material to study and learn from.

3) The teacher tests their knowledge and introduces new material. The parent or adult takes notes.

4) Through the week the parent works with the child individually to make sure the child follows through on their studies.

This is exactly how music training works and the dedicated combination of both parent and child will almost certinaly lead the child to develop some suitable level of instrument mastery (based on the child's own passion for the instrument) over a number of years.

Not every child will excel at math or science or literature, but every child should have a well-rounded basic proficiency in these subjects. As the child gets older they can find their niche and develop mastery in their area of passion. In the meantime, they will be able to go on their own pace having the right amount of individual adult mentoring, and being able to access adult subject matter experts on a regular basis for feedback and assistance. Through the week, children could also have the opportunity to work with each other and learn from one another.

I'm not sure you need grades or formal tests necessarily. In the weekly session, the teacher would assess where the child was through an "oral exam" or by examining the child's work for the week - say the paper they wrote or the project they worked on - or an on the spot ungraded quiz. If the child is struggling, they slow down the progress and focus on it.

All of this happens in music lessons. Our children don't get to progress to the next, slightly harder piece, until they have mastered the current one. There are no grades or exams, but they have recitals.

It seems like this, to me is a much better model than our current one.

UPDATE:

This paper talks about how the traditional school model has grown less efficient over the years. We're spending more money but have not gotten better results. Toward the end, they suggest looking at other models for inspiration, including home schooling and music lessons. Looks like this post is on the right track.


"The second step goes then to other learning systems, to explore what alternative visions of schooling are feasible. Talk of 'schools of the future' is too much in the realm of imagination, and bold visions are often hard for policymakers, educators, and parents to understand and support. In order to begin to consider dramatically different
production processes, such an investigation would examine various forms of organized learning routinely taking place outside public K–12 systems, and include:

• Home schooling


• Distance learning systems


• Foreign language learning


• Franchise tutoring programs


• Summer content camps


• Parent-paid instructional programs (music, swimming lessons, etc.)


• Armed services training }Industry training/development


• Apprentice programs


• Education systems abroad"

Half Baked Idea for School Reform (part II)

My initial idea about school reform is here which basically amounts to nothing more than getting parents in the classroom. I thought about this idea for the past couple of days and now it's time to flush it out a bit more.

I can think of a couple of problems with my idea:

1) What about parents with more than one child - especially when the children are too young for school. These parents would not be easily available to help in the classroom.

2) What about parents who because of work obligations can't get help.

3) What about marginal parents. I am sure there are some parents who would simply not be good in the classroom.

Well, first let's start with the obvious. If in a classroom with say 20 or 30 kids in attendance. Let's say every parent with school age children, that could volunteer as a teacher's aid in the classroom did. My first question, since I simply do not know, would teachers be accepting of this help? My second question is, how many parents could we get in the classroom - certainly we could get at least a few, right - and that would be huge. And even if a parent had multiple school age children and wanted to be in both classrooms, the teacher would at least get this parent a couple of times a week. (By the way, my next door neighbor volunteers at an inner city school in Phoenix once a week - so I know this sort of thing is possible and valued).

Now, if we were sending our kids to publics school, my wife would not be one of those parents (or me certainly) who could easily be in the classroom - with a newborn and a two year-old in toe. But let's increase the numbers slightly. What if (once our newborn got older) we could get a babysitter a couple of times a week - say we split time with another parent who also had young kids. This would increase the level of participation.

Let's expand this idea even more. Let's say the school, in an expansive attempt to get as many parents on the campus as possible, started to accommodate parent volunteers with younger children - say a mother with a slinged newborn could come in the classroom and maybe a day care or pre-school was part of the school where the two year old could be temporarily deposited.

Finally, what about single parents who have to work? Well, why not hire them to be teacher's aids in the classroom? This is a bit tricky and would only work for marginally paid single parents - since I just can't imagine a scenario where we could pay them very well to do this. And it's tricky because you would want other parents who didn't need to work to do the exact same classroom work for free.

But this used to be the way things were to some extent at least.

Consider this passage in this book about the near poor in America, some of whom have been pushed off of the welfare rolls because of the welfare reform bill passed during the Clinton presidency in the 1990's. This book is a bit dated - now with near 10% unemployment, many of these people have probably been pushed back into the realm of the unemployed and poor.

Here's the passage about a mother, Danielle, who used to volunteer at her children's inner city school:


Danielle used to do much more for her children. Until she started her workfare job, she was the treasurer of their school's PTA and she spent nearly thirty hours a week volunteering there. It was a labor of love but also a cause of frustration. Sometimes only ten people would show up for meetings - in a school of seven hundred kids. Though Danielle found plenty to gripe about, she wasted no time mustering a constructiive response. Making a difference at P.S. 57 became her mission.

Ironically, it was her very freedom from work that allowed Danielle to become a fixture at the school. Because she didn't have to clock in at an office, barely a day went by in the late nineties when she wasn't at the school, working in the library, going over PTA accounts, helping out with playground or lunchroom supervision. She visited with the teachers, became a conspicuous adult presence during dismissal, dropped in on the principal most mornings as kids climbed off the school buses, and made sure that she was present to fight for the cause at every District Five school board meeting. For someone fighting depression, her devotion was impressive.

It was also pragmatic. 'If you're not involved with what's goin' on behind doors, then you don't know what's behind [them],' she reasoned. She has seen teachers yank kids by their clothes, push them against the wall, and scream at the top of their lungs. By inserting herself into the school hierarchy, Danielle made sure she could protect her own.

Danielle's proactive presence at P.S. 57 was not without its detractors. Whenever her name came up, school security guards would roll their eyes skyward. Some of the Latino parents thought she was high-handed. Even the PTA president, someone Danielle worked with fairly closely, denounced her on occasion. 'Are you a crackhead or something?' Yvonne, the president, yelled down the corridor during one of their dramas. When Danielle retored with an equally unpleasant rejoinder, Yvonne told her in no uncertain terms whose ass she could kiss. The whole incident left Danielle so steamed that she considered quitting the PTA and pulling her kids out of P.S. 57. In the end she decided against it. The school had become her avocation. She knew enough about its inner workings to guarantee a certain level of attention for her kids, and she couldn't give up that advantage. Still, the episode taught Danielle that you can't rely on anyone but yourself. Nobody covers your back. On the other hand, nobody covers your kids either. That's a mother's job.

Until welfare reform pushed them into the labor force, mothers on welfare like Danielle were the mainstay of many Harlem elementary schools. They were the helpers whom every school depended on to keep things on track. In middle-class suburban schools, this 'job' falls to nonworking moms (and a few dads) who organize bake sales, publicize the school play, ride along on the bus when kids take field trips, and drum up class representatives for as many grades as they can manage. Principals and teachers depend on these parents to keep the institution running, and in big cities, where budgets are always tight, they have become ever more important for maintaining basic order.

When there is no money for official, paid classroom aides, non-working moms - often on public assistance in poor communities - do what Danielle did. They watch the hallways and the lunchroom and pitch in during bus-boarding time, dismissal, and those Friday afternoons when, to hear Danielle tell it, the whole school goes 'off the hook.' They make sure that kids return the forms that qualify them for free lunches, which provide nutrition that is better than what many families can afford.

Welfare reform put an end to this volunteer workforce. Danielle and thousands of other mothers like her now spend their days toiling at the office or sweeping the city park and struggle to find the energy to get to evening school meetings when they can. Their days as hallway monitors are over."


This is the unintended consequences of welfare reform - it drove single parents out of the schools and weakened their influence over their children's lives. Granted not all parents took advantage of welfare to engage in the community and in their children's schools, but certainly some did.

Why not reform this reform? Pay parents who are willing to volunteer in their children's school. Why not provide society support to keep mother's actively involved in their children's lives. I guess what I'm suggesting is that we as a society should reform our schools in ways that encourage parents to get on the campus and in the classroom of the schools their children attend. Because, really, nobody is motivated to teach a child like that child's mother.

My third and final post on this subject will propose an even more radical idea for school reform.

The Funny Thing About Homeschooling

You end up signing your kids up for a lot of different things to make up for what they aren't getting in regular school - well, at least we do. And I know many people get caught up in this even while sending their child to regular school, so, it's not just home schooling that's driving this. But the cool thing about joining different "schools" - the Suzuki school of string instruments, or the Karate school we just joined, etc., is you get a lot of different takes on education.

Today I took my kids to the Suzuki bi-monthly Saturday morning group classes and they had a special class for parents.

Here's a quote from a flier I received on tips about practicing:

• "Let the child learn at his OWN pace. It allows him to learn each step VERY WELL before going on to a new idea. (Example of rushing a child - is pushing him to memorize a new piece when he is still stumbling over the notes of his last piece.) Definition: Child's own pace -- is speed at which he learns something under optimal conditions.
• Because of lifestyles we have chosen, too often practice sessions are not at an ideal time, or are rushed.
• Because of 'other things' we have scheduled, 'careful repetitions' are not done (poor practice timing, interruptions, or distractions.)

Here's another suggestion:

Let a child practice only as long as he is interested and can cooperate. Once his attention is gone, his learning stops. Practice then becomes a measure of endurance and bad attitudes can develop from it. A few minutes, several times a day may work best at first.

This is focused on instrument training. But I see very little difference, really, in learning how to write or learning math and mastering the violin. These kinds of skills take years to learn well. They also take regular, consistent practice to gain proficiency.

The problem I have with public school is that we expect every child to learn a certain amount every single year (do we expect this from a musical instrument? No, most people just give up.)

Another thing about Suzuki is that the parent should be attentive at the lesson - really focused on how its gong so that the practices can be focused accordingly. The music teacher is training the parent right a long with the student.

So, here's a thought about school reform that has probably no chance of getting implemented. Why not set the expectation that parents should be in the classroom at least part of the time learning and getting guidance from teachers? Instead of turning your children over to the school for most for of the day transferring over to the state (or church, or other private institution) for the education and improvement of your child. Why can't we get to more personalized, individualized training by getting many if not most of the children's parents in the classroom. The school becomes more of a partnership with the family. In that scenario we would need less formally trained teachers, these teachers could then be paid more and parents pick up the slack.

For those families with multiple kids, or families where parents just can't get in there, obviously, getting 1:1 adult to child ratio is not practical - but certainly the ratio could be much lower if the expectation of the parent as the primary child's teacher were more pervasive.

Here's why this is probably unrealistic: "a record 41 percent of all live births were to unmarried women, up 22 percentage points since 1980."

"I’m not the type to get nostalgic about the good old days of patriarchy, but the fact of the matter is that from a strictly economic point of view a married couple household is a much more efficient arrangement than the one-adult alternative"

And borrowing from Tyler Cowen's book The Great Stagnation, he spends a chapter talking about how our education system has gotten less efficient over the last 30 years - we spend more and continue to get worse results.

Th reason why our public schools are not efficient is because our family structures are becoming increasingly inefficient, with more and more of them led by a single adult, or with parents working full time jobs. This is not efficient educationally. It's just not practical to hire enough teachers to get the ratio's down to the ideal (very close to 1 teacher to 1 student) without an enormous amount of help from parents. And parents are increasingly concerned with other things. So, instead, we try our best to lure enough talent through the teacher certification process and into the classroom, paying them marginal salaries and filling up the classroom with 30 or 40 kids per one teacher.

This is not true, of course, for the well off, who earn enough money to divert a larger percentage of this constrained education resource their way, leaving less of those resources available for other children.

The answer is getting more people involved in education and parents are a natural resource we are vastly under-utilizing.

Good Kindergartend Teachers are worth $320,000/year

Wow, just wow.

When I read stuff like this, I want to know what makes a good kindergarten teacher a good kindergarten teacher. Our oldest is already passed that stage and you're hoping she's well on her way, I'm sure she is - Sara was teaching her... But at the time I kinda thought, no big deal, its only kindergarten. But our son is going to be starting kindergarten, and now I really want to know.

Any ideas?

The Death and Life of the American School System

I'm reading The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. I'm not going to say that I have strong opinions on what she says but this book is well worth reading. Its providing me a strong counter-argument to my own attempts to dismiss the public school system. In this book, her main arguments so far suggest that school choice, vouchers, charters and high stakes testing have shown absolutely no evidence of actually improving schools. She makes the obvious point that there is no royal road to learning. Education is a hard road of discipline and consistent effort. How do you help students who don't have the family support or personal desire to take on that road. That's a problem that has no easy solutions. But public education is all about providing education to every single child, both the motivated and the unmotivated. School choice has been more about developing charters and private alternatives that do nothing more than cherry pick the best, most motivated students, leaving the hardest to educate to the public schools. That is the only true explanation why some charters do better with test scores than public schools.

"What lessons can public schools learn from the charter schools? Should they create more selective schools to hold on to motivated students? Should they separate their students ability to prevent the unmotivated from negatively affecting the performance of the motivated? If they have longer hours and weeks, will that cause unmotivated students to become more motivated? How should regular public schools educate those who are not highly motivated and those who are not at all interested in their schoolwork, as well as those who are working hard and want a good education? These are problems that Albert Shanker once imagined would be studied and perhaps even solved by innovative charter schools.

As currently configured, charter schools are havens for the motivated. As more charter schools open, the dilemma of educating all students will grow sharper. The resolution of this dilemma will determine the fate of public education.

The question for the future is whether the continued growth of charter schools in urban districts will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality. If so, we can safely predict that future studies will 'prove' the success of charter schools, because the public schools will have disproportionate numbers of less motivated parents and needier students. As charter schools increase in number and able students enroll them, the regular public schools in the nation's cities will be locked into a downward trajectory. This would be an ominous development for public education and for our nation."

The current trend of trying to apply business models to all of our most pressing problems is frightening. Public education especially (and you can make the same arguments for health care) has been about making efforts in providing an education for every child. This is an impossible goal, but the pursuit of it is what government is all about.

If you privatize education (which is the trend) and deregulate it you'll find that more and more children will be left out. That's what the free market does. There are no guarantees of universal access in the private sector. The free market is not set up that way.

Why We Homeschool Part II

For part I, well, that was written a long, long time ago, right here, but for this post I want to focus on curriculum because that's what got me started on this kick, right after I got married and well before it was time to make these educational decisions, I read this book and it made me ache wishing I had this kind of education I grew up.

And now my wife is following the classical approach to education at home, basically following the outline within this book.

And as we review the material together, I got excited by excerpts like this:

"Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns appeared at the National Press Club in early 1997 to plug his latest project (the life of Thomas Jefferson). Afterward, he took questions. One questioner pointed out that an astronomical percentage of high-school graduates saw no purpose in studying history and asked for a response.

Ken Burns answered: History is the study of everything that has happened until now. Unless you plan to live entirely in the present moment, the study of history is inevitable.

History, in other words, is not a subject. History is the subject. It is the record of human experience, both personal and communal. It is the story of the unfolding of human achievement in every area - science, literature, art, music, and politics. A grasp of historical facts is essential to the rest of the classical curriculum.

When you first introduce the elementary student to history, you must keep one central fact in mind: history is a story.

The logical way to tell a story is to begin (as the King said to Alice) at the beginning and go on till you come to the end. Any story makes less sense when learned in bits and pieces. If you were to tell your five year old the story of Hansel and Gretel, beginning with the house made of candy and cookies (because that's likely to be the most interesting part of the story to the child), then backing up and telling about the woodchopper's unfortunate second marriage, then skipping to the witch's demise, and then scooting backward again and relating the story of Hansel and Gretel's walk in the woods, the story isn't going to form a coherent whole in the child's mind. Even if he listens to the end, you may have lost him long before that.

History is no different. Yet it's too often taught unsystematically - as a series of unrelated bits and pieces: American history this year, ancient history the next, eighteenth-century France the year after that. Think back. By the time you graduated high school or college, you'd studied King Tut and the Trojan war and the Bronze Age; you probably learned about the end of the Athenian monarchy and the rise of the city-state; you may have been taught about the Exodus and the conquest under Joshua or the early history of Ethiopia. Chances are you studied these subjects in different years, in different units, out of different textbooks. You probably have difficulty fitting them together chronologically.

Furthermore, you probably started with American history (which is pretty near the end of the story as we know it) and then spent at least twice as much time studying American history as you did studying the rest of the world. Yes, American history is important for Americans, but this myopic division of curriculum does the Founding Fathers a disservice. Children who plunge into the study of the American Revolution with no knowledge of the classical models used by Jefferson, Washington, and their colleagues can achieve only a partial understanding of American government and ideals. And American history ought to be kept in perspective: the history curriculum covers seventy centuries; America occupies only five of them.

A common assumption found in history curricula seems to be that children can't comprehend (or be interested in) people and events distant from their own experience. So the first-grade history class is renamed Social Studies and begins with what the child knows: first, himself and his family, followed by his community, his state, and only then the rest of the world.

This intensely self-focus pattern of study encourages the student of history to relate everything he studies to himself, to measure the cultures and customs of other people against his own experience. And that's exactly what the classical education fights against - a self-absorbed, self-referential approach to knowledge. History learned this way makes our needs and wants the center of the human endeavor. This attitude is destructive at any time, but it is especially destructive in the present global civilization.

The goal of classical curriculum is multicultural in the true sense of the word: the student learns the proper place of his community, his state, and his country by seeing the broad sweep of history from its beginning and then fitting his own time and place into that great landscape. The systematic study of history in the first four years lays the foundation for the logic stage, when the student will begin to understand the relationships between historical events - between Egypt and Greece, Greece and Rome, Rome and England, England and America."

I heard on the radio recently a brief interview of the author of a book with the provocative title, Why School. The author makes the very good point that an education should be much more than preparing for a career and learning knowledge and developing skills should be much more than a means to a future high salary. And that's why I feel emphasizing history in educational pursuits is so important because they are a better person because of it.

Today in primary, our ward had a brief, really well-done and appropriate discussion on pornography with the primary children and their parents. The core of the message was to tell the children if they accidently see pornography to stop, run and talk (shut it down, run out of the room, and immediately tell a parent or a trusted adult). Funny because my kids don't really get pornography, but its an important lesson nonetheless because the issue is looming soon for them.

But the point is the woman who presented the lesson did it masterfully, like a trained professional. She is a trained kindergarten teacher, so I'm sure that helps, but she just had this masterful way of presenting a difficult subject to children in a way that was not scary and in a way they understood. How grateful am I that there are adults in my community that support us in that way.

But more than that, you could tell she was educated in a deep way and she used her talents to bless others without a monetary reward. And that's the point I guess.

The author of the book makes the excellent point that when education is too focused on career preparation, it focuses too heavily on math, science and reading and neglects other subjects like art and music. Can you imagine a someone with a highly focused technical training trying to explain the dangers of pornography to young kids? I can't.

But it's one example. And it's why I feel that the classical education curriculum is so cool. It's comprehensive and thorough. The child reads from the original sources as much as possible instead from text book summaries. The pint again is to prepare a child for life in all of its facets. I could go on, and maybe I will in later posts.

But I just felt this explanation of the history curriculum was well done.

How to Learn Math

A while back when our Relief Society was in high gear doing these extremely high frequency enrichment activities, I casually mentioned to my wife how it would be cool to have a session on how to teach math to your kids. Word got back to the person scheduling these sessions, and somehow I was signed up to teach a session. Personal time constraints and a fundamental lack of experience in the area prevented me from pulling anything together, and the thing was ultimately shelved.

But one of the things I did do was go to the library to see what kind of books I could muster up on the subject. In the search I came across the book, Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic, Implications of Piaget's Theory. Its a pretty dense book really meant for classroom teachers and leans heavily on Paiget's theories on how children learn. It has an interesting premise, if I remember correctly, Piaget wanted to discover how human beings discovered knowledge in the first place, and to do so, he studied how children acquired knowledge as they aged.

But what hooked me in to this idea was chapter 4 entitled: "Autonomy: The Aim of Education for Piaget" claiming that obtaining knowledge really is about a child's development toward autonomy.

Here's a quote:

"An unusual example of moral autonomy is the struggle of Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights. King was autonomous enough to take relevant factors into account and to conclude that the laws discriminating against African Americans were unjust and immoral. Convinced of the need to make justice a reality he worked to end the discriminatory laws, in spite of the police, jails, dogs, water hoses, and threats of assassination used to stop to stop him. Morally autonomous people cannot be manipulated with reward and punishment."

The chapter continues with a discussion on how schools are geared to largely manipulate especially in mathematics. Math is pretty unique because there are truly right and wrong answers usually, but there are not necessarily wrong or right ways of coming up with the answer. The point of the book is that its not necessarily as important to get the answer right as it is in the struggle to get to the answer autonomously. To come up with internal methods to find it, and to learn to be sure enough in the answer to defend it to others. If in the process of defending your answer, you discover our methods are wrong, room is provided to reassess and fix the mistakes until the right answer is found.

The danger in our current teaching approach in mathematics is when the student views the teacher as the ultimate source knowledge, rather than learning to search from within. In reality, mathematics is intrinsically true. Numbers and equations that model nature around us existed before humans did. We came up with symbols and ways to represent them, but addition, subtraction, numbers were not invented they were discovered. The process of learning math, in Piaget's view, is to allow a child to go through the process of mathematical discovery in their own way working collaboratively with other children in the classroom using the teacher more as a guide and less as source for truth.

So, obviously this hooked me in. Any book that can use Martin Luther King Jr. to explain mathematical teaching is going to hook me in.

Well, with that book in my head, recently, I read about why programmers (like me) should learn math.

Here are some points:

On learning:
"In fact, I don't think you need to know anything, as long as you can stay alive somehow."

On math education:
"They teach math all wrong in school. Way, WAY wrong. If you teach yourself math the right way, you'll learn faster, remember it longer, and it'll be much more valuable to you as a programmer."

Math is:
"Math is... ummm, please don't tell anyone I said this; I'll never get invited to another party as long as I live. But math, well... I'd better whisper this, so listen up: (it's actually kinda fun.)"

How you should learn math:

"The right way to learn math is to ignore the actual algorithms and proofs, for the most part, and to start by learning a little bit about all the techniques: their names, what they're useful for, approximately how they're computed, how long they've been around, (sometimes) who invented them, what their limitations are, and what they're related to. Think of it as a Liberal Arts degree in mathematics.

Why? Because the first step to applying mathematics is problem identification. If you have a problem to solve, and you have no idea where to start, it could take you a long time to figure it out. But if you know it's a differentiation problem, or a convex optimization problem, or a boolean logic problem, then you at least know where to start looking for the solution."

I think this is more true in high school than in early grades because you need to have the foundations of numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. down solid. You can't understand algebra or geometry if you don't know how numbers relate to one another (the network of numbers as the Piaget book describes it). And you really need to know algebra and geometry.

Finally, I read Outliers and this quote:

"We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have 'it' or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds."

The point is that people who don't get math, don't get it because they give up too early. Math, with its heavy emphasis on confusing-at-first symbols and equations is on the surface one of the most intimidating subjects around. But if you approach it systematically with focus and persistence, it is really not that hard. But it takes a certain kind of mindset, the willingness not to give up, and patient practice. The kind of attributes that translate really nicely in all kinds of other areas.

Summing all of this information together, I want to see my children really getting the basics principles deeply embedded. They need to not just know their math and subtraction tables, they need to understand deeply how numbers relate to each other.

Its why I think doing the repetitiveness of a worksheet is important, but also doing the math games and word problems Piaget would suggest, are even more important. I want to de-emphasize having the correct answers in favor for helping my children learn how to derive answers on their own and be able to defend their results to me, answers they came up with after a struggle. If their answer is wrong, I want them to be able to work through it until they get it right.

As they get older, I like the idea of gaining an overall awareness and an ability to identify problems that have mathematical solutions. I would probably emphasize statistics and probability and linear algebra over calculus. I just think probability and statistics is so important, so relevant in day to day life. Calculus is also cool and important, but maybe not as much so unless a science or engineering degree is pursued (basic calculus should be known, though. Basic calculus is really not that hard and can be learned by most anyone).

We'll see, but my personal goal is that every single one of my kids both enjoy and be good at math.

Spelling Bee's

This past week, our oldest daughter competed in a community spelling bee. It was exciting for me because I believe my daughter is an incredible speller for her age. But I am about as biased as you can be in making this judgment, so I wanted to see how she'd fair in a competition.

But, our daughter loves to spell, and more importantly she loves to read. She reads books well above her grade level unphazed by hard words in those books. Its just something that has come naturally to her. So, I thought it would be exciting to see how she'd fare.

Also, homeschooling puts you in a precarious position. You're basically making the stand that you can do better than any possible school option currently available in the community. And you want to get this decision right, as a parent, you want your kids to have the best opportunities possible, right?

Anyway, the spelling bee matched all the kids against each other no matter what their age or grade level. Each child, though, received a word at their grade level. During sudden death, they would increase the grade level for each child each round.

What I was surprised by, was how incredible these kids could spell, especially the first graders. Our daughter got tripped up by the first grade word, "stir". Which is pretty hard word. Nothing about the word gives you a clue on the spelling, why not "stur", "ster", etc. You basically have to know the word, and our daughter didn't.

But there were three other first graders, that literally breezed through every first grade word they came across. Then the lightening round came, (every child was allowed to stay in the competition until the lightening round - they were nice). Our daughter spelled a second grade word correctly - vase, phew.. But these three first graders breezed past their second grade words, no problem .

Then our daughter got the third grade word - "fulfill", and she tripped up on it. Again, a hard word. Why one "l" in the first syllable and two in the second? But again those three first graders breezed.

On to the fourth grade words, again no sweat. Then fifth grade, I think one of them got knocked out. The other two kept going. Then sixth.. I think finally, they missed the words.

One of the families sat at our table. I looked at them in amazement... They were nice and congratulated our daughter...

But then, yesterday, I brought our kids to bring your child to work day. And before the activities began, I had a stack of books that my kids were reading while I sat in a meeting. One of my colleagues not yet four year old, pre-school education son, asked to read the books, which I let him do.. And he read them without any trouble.

What's happening in our public schools? Are they suddenly kicking butt? Maybe we need to re-evaluate this whole homeschooling thing.

10,000 Hour Theory Part IV

Just liked this rebuttal to Malcolm Gladwell...

Good quote:

"This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it's Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me."

The 10,000 Hour Theory part III

As you can probably tell by now, I've been obsessing about this. For one, my oldest daughter is six years old, for two, this is something I also wanted to shoot for myself but the opportunities were not there for me. But there are so many thoughts that go into this. Is it worthwhile, even, for a person to pursue this level of specialization? As a parent, is it healthy to encourage my children to pursue this level of specialization. Is 10,000 hours even enough for everyone? Is it just quantity, not quantity, does inborn talent, outside of our control, play any factor?

Personally, I think it is healthy, fulfilling, ultimately rewarding, a way to maximize your experience on this planet earth to pursue a mastery in a specific field. I think when trying to measure the amount of hours you personally have put into a specific field, I think quality does matter. I think, for the most part, any hour spent improving yourself (not just doing it) in an area count. Talking to my wife, she emphasizes with her students the importance of really truly practicing the piano and not just playing it. In other words, your continuously pushing yourself into harder and harder pieces and not content to just play what you already know.

Looking back on my basketball experience. I was inordinately small for my age, getting most of my adult size late in life. I lacked confidence, most coaches never took me as someone worth as much of their investment time as someone more physically mature. Although I did push myself to some degree, I also held myself back quite a bit, and I suffered from lack of quality coaching and mentoring. But, despite my physical limitations, with the right mentoring and parental (or otherwise) encouragement, I think I could have mastered basketball. Even still, it would not have propelled me into the NBA. The game is a tall man's game, and I'm not really tall enough.

Thinking of NBA stars, Shaquille O'Neal probably still hasn't gotten to 10,000 hours, the guy still can't hit a free throw, but how many people grow to 7'2" tall and have that much bulk. But I guarantee that every single one of the guards in the NBA have, and many who didn't make the NBA have. That's why you see a lot of seven foot stiffs playing in the NBA, but guys like Tim Duncan, someone whose both tall and incredibly skilled, has mastered it.

But looking back, I wish I would have went for it anyway. I think if things would have went slightly differently for me, I could have gotten to 5,000 to 6,000 hours of basketball practice though high school. Then another 4,000 hours through my twenties would have been reasonable. It would have been an incredibly fun and rewarding hobby. I would have been extremely skilled in the sport, and well positioned to mentor or coach kids for the rest of my life.

Take another look at the table I laid out in part II. You don't have to pick an area too early. When a child is young, they can practice pretty lightly, and with my daughter, violin is obviously not the only thing she's doing. She's reading books well in excess of a half hour a day. She's writing a half hour a day (or so), she's learning science. She's positioned, based on interest to push the hours of practice in any number of different things as she ages. And she can change her mind without too much trouble. The older she gets, though, the harder it becomes.

I think by high school, an area of emphasis is really ideal. I think picking one thing to really focus on, to work 2-3 hours a day on, is not that unreasonable. You still have time for breadth, but you also gain the experience of really honing a skill in one area. By 18, you should have around 5,000 hours under your belt. College and early career years are a time to really crank the hours up and get the second half of the 10,000 hours done in a much more compressed time. You can then enjoy the fruits of your labor the rest of your life.

What about less obvious fields like teaching or parenting. I certainly remember teachers in high school that have been doing it for a long time. They probably easily had 10,000 hours in the classroom, but they were still dismal teachers. Again, just showing up and doing something doesn't count. You have to be pushing yourself. I can't comment much on teaching, I do have teaching experience though. Maybe a few hundred hours of tutoring in my life, but not nearly enough to comment on it.

Its really hard for me to really push toward 10,000 hours of parenting, since I spend so many more hours than my wife away from my kids at work. I can still get there though, but again, I need to push it, and not just be in the same room with them. But I need to recognize that my wife will get there a lot earlier than I will and respect her abilities.

The 10,000 hour theory

A colleague of mine and I had an interesting discussion today. He just got through reading The Outliers. In the book, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, makes the claim that a person has to spend 10,000 hours on something before they truly master it.

My colleague made some claims from the book to make the case:

To reach 10,000 hours, you have to spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year for almost 5 years. Almost nobody spends that much time really working toward perfecting their craft. The ones that do ultimately become among the best in their field. This has some profound consequences, one of the most profound being that what matters is dedication and drive, not so much so in-born natural talent.

Some examples he used: Mozart is often touted as a child prodigy because he composed music at such an early age. But the stuff he produced at a young age is not that good. It was only later in life, say in his late teens, when he produced his masterworks, and by then he had already put in 10,000 hours in perfecting his craft.

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. But he had access to computers (through lucky coincidence) and basically put in roughly 10,000 programming hours of his own time before he even dreamed of starting Microsoft.

The difference between a musician who goes on to becoming a classical performer and one who decides to teach the instrument instead of perform is the first tends to spend over 10,000 hours of practice. (Did the latter instead spend 10,000 hours teaching? Probably not, there's a market out there for less than masterful music teachers, there's no market for substandard performers, but I know there are music teachers who have mastered the craft of teaching out there).

My colleague also mentioned how as a parent, he wants to nurture his children toward mastering a craft, to work toward getting 10,000 hours of practice time on a specific skill.

The key is to pick one thing, an area of emphasis, the earlier the better. Because there is literally not enough time available to become a master in two things. The longer you wait, the harder it is to get there. Really, when you're young, still living at home, still enjoying an almost 100% parent subsidy, that's the ideal time to get a big chunk of those 10,000 hours under your belt.

I'm not sure, maybe its me, but there's something oddly reassuring about this idea of this too easy to remember little formula that's available to practically anyone with enough desire to become masterful.

One more caveat, I haven't read the book yet, but now I will, so I guess I probably need to actually read it for myself before I get too excited about the idea.

Yet Another Education Post

Well, I just wanted to point you to interesting essay about education.

He starts off the essay describing some countries where the university entrance exam has an incredible effect on how the rest of your life goes. And the university you graduated from becomes your credential that affects how you are treated for the rest of your career:

"The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next."

A cram school is a sort of college preparatory school that enables parents with money to drill their kids into getting into a credentialed school. An easy way to transfer power and influence from one generation to another.

But this is not good for society:

"History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly—for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children's qualities"

But America is ahead of this game (not completely) but especially in my field:

"In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization. The reason credentials have such prestige is that for so long the large organizations in a society tended to be the most powerful. But in the US at least they don't have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely because they can't measure (and thus reward) individual performance. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can get rewarded directly by the market?"

This is exacerbated in the high-tech world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to start your own software business, and start-ups abound. And largely, its very much merit based. Many large companies still require a college degree, but you can do very well without one. Again, its based on what you can do not what piece of paper you have in your hand.

Another cool thing about our country (and I am ripping this idea off from an article I read a while back but would have a hard time finding now) is that we are literally the land of second, third, fourth, and fifth chances. You messed around in high school and didn't get into college. Not a problem. There is always time and opportunity to get a degree, to get educated. And access to university education is getting easier and easier in many important ways.

And this is a good thing. We have a very dynamic economy in this free country of ours and its getting more dynamic all the time.

There are two sides to this coin. Say you worked your tail off to get into an Ivy league school, you expect that once you entered that door, the rest of your life should be smooth sailing. There's still some truth to that.

But, largely, and I think this is a good thing, there is room for many more of us to really, truly excel, and I believe that most of us are more capable than we realize.

Obama has picked a Secretary of Education

And his name is Arne Duncan.

In this post I talked about the great debate between two movements in the education system between the reformers and the traditionalists. Duncan, apparently, is both. He has a record of reform but has worked well and is supported by the Teacher's Union.

You know, Barack Obama, is really building up his cabinet with the emphasis of pragmatism and centrism. We'll see how all of this plays out, but I think it was pretty smart of Obama to pick someone without a strong ideological bent. They also know each other, both are from Chicago, and they play hoops with each other.

At this moment, I'm listening to a Diane Rehm interview with Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of education in Washington DC one of the worst, if not the worst, public school districts in the country. Rhee is a strong reformer and she wants to toss out tenure, double the salary of the best teachers and fire the worst. She's also a supporter of standardized tests as an important but not exclusive way to measure teachers effectiveness.

At this moment, I fall in the reformer camp, although its probably smarter to have someone like Duncan as the head of education nationally, since the worst thing we can do is enter into a situation of deadlock that can happen if he gets too ideologically bent. Pragmatism, centrism, and unification was what Obama ran on, and it appears that's also how he's going to govern.

Two more thoughts listening to Rhee: That we need a public school system that acts as the great equalizer, that all students have the opportunity to get high quality education so when they graduate they can go seemlessly into the university without remediation, or they can enter the work force immediately and be effective.

This hits home with me. Right now there's a growing trend that to get almost any decent paid job now a days, you have to have a college education. Why? College education is really expensive, and is only arguably necessary to do a vast majority of the jobs in the work force. I believe that for many students, our high schools are just not doing enough to prepare their students for life.

Way too many kids graduate with no clues on their career, and no confidence in their life skills.

That's a damn tragedy. Just yesterday, my colleague was talking about a speech given by Joel Spoelsky whose a big time computer software blogger and owner and founder of a software company. Somebody asked him how important experience was in hiring a computer programmer, for example, how much better is a programmer with 20 years of experience to one just out of college.

His answer is significant and has all kinds of implications on our school system. He said that the best programmers started programming at age 10, so those kind of programmers already have significant experience coming out of college, and the difference between someone with 10, 20, or 30 years of experience is probably not significant enough to matter, so a company should focus on hiring good programmers, not programmers with a lot of experience.

I think that's an extreme point of view, but still the underlying message is clear. That our kids should have the opportunity to explore their interests and passions from an early age. That high school should be a time for students to both firm up foundational knowledge, but also to explore and discover interests, and passions. So that they enter the work force ready, or they enter university system ready.

Also, Rhee has another good point, that the interest of the students should always take priority over whether adults get a long. And in that spirit she is making some serious waves, especially with the teacher's union.

Again, it will be interesting to see how effective Obama as well as the number of grass roots reformers and education advocates that exist throughout our country will be.

Another Education Post

Lately, I've read some really interesting articles on education. Not surprisingly because education was one of Obama's priorities coming in and there's a debate waging among the Democratic party on how to fix it. The Republicans have been largely out of the discussion because they are still stuck on ideas that don't really work like vouchers, which apparently don't really work at improving academic achievement for low income schools.

In the Democratic party, the debate is between educational reformers and the traditionalists, and the front lines recently has been about Obama's choice for Education Secretarty. David Brooks talks about this debate here.

The reformers, according to Brooks, include the celebrities like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee who support teacher's pay for performance and charter schools. Michelle Rhee's name is significant because I've heard of her :-), because of the Atlantic's articles here and here.

Here's a quote from those articles:

"Many people believe that teachers and the classroom are only one part of a vast web of relationships and environments that determine educational success. … In [Rhee’s] opinion, external factors simply underline the need for better educators. … “As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles,” she told me. “You can’t say, ‘My students didn’t get any breakfast today,’ or ‘No one put them to bed last night,’ or ‘Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.’” This sort of moral certitude is exactly what turns off many veteran teachers in Washington. Even if Rhee is right, she seems to be asking for superhuman efforts, consistently, for decades to come. Making missionary zeal a job requirement is a tough way to build morale, not to mention support, among the teachers who have to confront the D.C. ghetto every day."

In reading about Rhee and advocate and a graduate of Teach for America is a type A personality who literally works constantly and is not afraid of ruffling feathers.

But here's a quote from Rhee that resonated with me in the second link:

"One of the things I’ve been talking about a lot is time and how you treat time. In so many of the classrooms I go into, it’s like people are just biding time until the end of the day. They’re just passing it."

and

"Yes, or saying to the kids, “OK, let’s just get through 20 more minutes, we only have 20 more minutes and then you can go.” And that just sends kids the wrong message. Great teachers squeeze every second they can out of the school day and they don’t waste a single moment."

In my memory it seems like most of my teachers were just passing time, I had some notably good teachers, but the majority of them...

But an article I just read in the New Yorker was particularly profound. It's here.

In this article, Gladwell talks about how its impossible to rate college quarterbacks on how well they would perform in the NFL because success college tells you nothing about how they would perform in the NFL because the jobs are so completely different. And that teaching has a quarterback problem. You cannot tell if a teacher is going to be good until they are actually in the classroom.

Some quotes:

"This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching."

"Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers."

"Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. The preschool teacher with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students’ needs and knew how to let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or she were getting his personal attention. But these aren’t cognitive skills."

A solution for reform:

"In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward."

And that sounds really good to me.

Whatever It Takes

Just heard a really fascinating interview on Fresh Air with Geoffrey Canada and the author of Whatever It Takes written by a reporter who gained access for five years in Canada's schools.

The interview is here.

Geoffrey Canada himself was raised in the Bronx to a single mom and ended up with a masters degree in education from Harvard. He started a "Harlem's Children Zone" that currently serves 8000 children and whose goal is to provide the same sort of comprehensive services that many middle and upper class students receive.

Canada uses a conveyor belt approach to education, where they work with parents and the child before Kindergarten all the way through college, providing both social and educational services the entire time. The goal is to transform not just the school but the entire neighborhood and culture these inner city kids grow up in.

Just a couple of political points made in the interview:

1) Canada is a big believer in the standardized tests component of No Child Left Behind. He says those who are critical of teachers teaching to the test are working with the basic premise that the students are on grade level. If only teachers in inner city schools were teaching to the test. In his schools, 70% of teachers assessments are based on test scores of their students. And Canada believes tests are a fair evaluation of student's and teacher's performance.

2) Canada was highly critical of the symbolism behind Palin's "gun-toting mama", seeing as he has children being murdered and murdering with hand guns. He talks about the hypocritical nature of our culture that steps in with all sorts of social workers when violence occurs in middle class schools, but nobody blinks an eye when it happens in inner city schools.

3) Teacher accountability: In Canada's schools, if you can't get the job done you can't work in his schools. This is at all levels, administrative and teaching. And it is whatever it takes. If you have to work weekends and summers, you work weekend and summers. If you have to show up at the student's home at 6pm, you show up at the student's home at 6pm.

4) Obama's educational plan has been influenced by Canada's successes. McCain's plan mainly involves school vouchers.

One final note: I had a friend tell me that he worries about Obama as president, thinking Obama might focus too much on the black community's needs.

To me, that is a huge plus. Black and minority communities are in trouble and have been for generations. We all suffer when significant portions of our community suffers. Imagine if we could transform black communities, injecting into our work force, thousands if not millions of talented, hard working, contributors to society, people who might otherwise be working in menial jobs or worse in jail.

Imagine the innovation possible having more not fewer people in energy research, in education, the arts. We would all benefit. We would all be richer.

Another article here.

If Everyone is Incredible, Nobody Is

Recognize that quote? It's from "The Incredibles", that absolutely entertaining kids movie that was released a few years back. I'm sure you've seen it. It's about a world with superheroes, except the superheroes are forced to go underground because they were taking too many liberties: too many people were getting hurt, or people were getting saved that didn't want to be saved. Well, the bad guy of the movie, was spurned by the main character, Mr. Incredible, and so he goes on an inventing spree and develops this incredibly invincible robotic monster that knocks off each incredible one after another. His main goal is to rid the world of incredibles, mass market these super weapons so that everyone can be incredible, because in his words, "if every one is incredible, nobody is".

But that's not the way I see it. Because truly, we are all incredible, or at least we have incredibleness embedded in our DNA just waiting to come out. We all sell ourselves way too short, and its easy to do. Life is hard, full of setbacks and missteps. We struggle through ultimately just hoping to provide food, clothing, and shelter for our families over our precarious lifetimes, always feeling slightly on the edge, like one wrong move, and things could slip away. At least that is how I sometimes feel, doesn't everyone else? But even when we feel secure in our most basic needs, tapping into our incredibleness genes is still an incredibly tricky thing to do, there are so many barriers. We have to be absolutely honest with ourselves and our own abilities and talents. We need to be brave, willing to forge our own independent paths, learning from others, sure, but also willing to be fiercely independent in our goals and direction. We also have to be strong and disciplined, able to shed ourselves of the infinite distractions society throws at us, and we have to be willing to tap into the personal inspiration of deity, being willing to tap into a power much bigger than ourselves. All of this is possible for every last one of us, but so few really recognize it and have the confidence to step up to it.

But its true, our world is filled with true blue Incredibles. And I think this is the beauty of democracy and a truly free market. Where the individual has all the opportunity in the world to produce products other people desire. Where the government is run and controlled more by the people at large than by a few selected elite. At least that's the theory. The real world is not so clean. In reality, you tend to have a handful of super stars making all the money, doing all the heavy lifting, and the rest of us are way too dependent of the decisions those folks make.

Some of this is just plain a reality. There are some superbly gifted people out there, while the rest of us toil away with our lives. Only a few people, relatively speaking, are required to churn out Facebook or Google, while the rest of us are just happy consumers. And the economy is based largely on this. Rather than uniquely architected custom homes, most of us are more than content with some half baked template that gets duplicated over and over again. They throw in a few thrills, some archways, some big gothic pillars, some vaulted ceilings. Then they mass produce, and we consume happy to get something so nice, so cheap, and so new.

But it seems like things are starting to turn a little bit. The internet evens the playing field some. It used to be only the small minority could really contribute to the nationwide conversation, those lucky folks working for our newspapers, publishing books selected by the major publishing companies. But right now, I'm publishing my essays for all the world to see, no matter if only five loving readers are actually taking advantage of my generous offerings. But not just me, millions of others are publishing every day of all kinds of quality, some of it quite good. The fact is so many people are contributing, producing, and they are doing it for love and not for money. Intellectual commodities are flooding the market at dirt cheap prices.

And it seems, for some reason, society at large is making a shift. It used to be that a high school education was all that was required, but now advanced degrees are now almost becoming as necessary as high school degrees once were. The strangest jobs are now requiring people who work in them to study Shakespeare and Thoreau, and then to write deep essays on them.

Read this essay. Really, read it. It's absolutely fascinating. The author teaches English at a junior college in the evenings on the side largely to working professionals who are required to get more credits for their jobs.

Consider this quote where the author talks about the possibilities that seem at the taking for each class member as they begin their course work:

Class time passes in a flash—for me, anyway, if not always for my students. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point. When I am at my best, and the students are in an attentive mood—generally, early in the semester—the room crackles with positive energy. Even the cops-to-be feel driven to succeed in the class, to read and love the great books, to explore potent themes, to write well.

The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.

And I can really relate to that. I remember enrolling in a class with an exciting, interesting sounding subject, stepping into class with my text books in hand, clean white notebooks, and an enthusiastic motivated spirit. And for a while, I'm keeping up. But subjects are always harder than they appear. The process of learning something is very tedious, the work is arduous, and those times where I'm not fully prepared with the prerequisite knowledge, or if I just simply doze off one too many lectures, I fall behind, and I'm forever, hopelessly lost, until through my own sheer force of will, manage to catch up (usually when a midterm looms).

For the students of this professor's class, however, the situation is much more dire. These students are so thoroughly unprepared for college, and they lack the time or the means to really catch up. The professor talks about how he just can't pass these students, how he's forced to fail a large percentage of them. Here's another quote:

There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.


Or consider this quote about a student of his who just couldn't cut it writing a term paper:

Her deficits don’t make her a bad person or even unintelligent or unusual. Many people cannot write a research paper, and few have to do so in their workaday life. But let’s be frank: she wasn’t working at anything resembling a college level.


But should our society be so widely educated?

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

I like the point he makes further on (unquoted), that its purely an American idea to provide the highest level of education to anyone in society who wants it. To democratize knowledge is America's legacy to the world.

But for those folks in this professor's class, it is a struggle:

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

And really what is college for? I'm not really sure I guess. For so many of us, its just a way to get the door open a little wider for a more lucrative career. I went to engineering school, which is largely, nothing more than a souped up technical college experience. I barely did any writing in college. I took my required English 101/102 courses as a freshman and that was it until I had to take one credit hour (one hour/week) course on technical writing the last semester of my degree. We only had to take to the bare minimum number of humanities courses to give us a "well rounded" education. Largely our course load was filled with math, science, and engineering courses, and nothing more. And even much of this has not been directly useful to my day to day work activities. There are definitely plenty of successful programmers out there who have never set foot on a college campus.

But, what about those jobs referred to in the article I'm so heavily quoting? Why would a hotel manager need a college degree? Or a police officer?

Well, its because Democracy demands it, I suppose. If we are to really, truly to realize the ideal of democracy and of capitalism, we need to democratize brilliance. Despite what this teacher has experienced, I think we have in the large view, a growing sense of this democratization. Just one example, in the old days, there were the superstar poets that everyone knew, those we all studied in school, Yeats, Keats, Wordsworth, I'm sure there were other less talented poets during those days that nobody remembers now, but surely the sheer quantity of poetry writing and publishing now is exponentially larger than was found then. And the quality is better now too. At least thats what I've read.

But, as noted in the article, we have a long way to go before we have reached the ideal. And I think the ideal, the dream, is to make genius ubiquitous. If the market can be flooded with brilliant craftsman, artists, architects, programmers, musicians, actors, scientists, doctors, and nurses, the salaries of those professions would most certainly go down, but then we would all have free or cheap access to it. My dream would be to hire out an architect to custom design my home, have skilled carpenters construct it, have interior designers decorate it and fill it with really nice furniture. Right now, this kind of thing is only reserved for the wealthy. But if labor costs were cheap because talented people were buzzing around like flies, anybody would be able to afford to do this.

In fact, this sort of thing seems to be happening right now to some extent in NY City, my sister lives there, and she is always telling me about how she has attended some local theater production and the talent of the actors were amazing because amazing actors are simply everywhere over there, all congregating in NY City trying to catch a break. She's told me a professional jazz pianists accompanies her daughter's ballet class. And my sister is not rich, its just that this kind of stuff is available to almost anyone who wants it.

So an educated and talented workforce generates wealth, and as this talent is distributed in a relative equal level throughout the citizenry, you would expect wealth to be distributed equally as well. Consider this quote from the book Development As Freedom:

"This approach goes against - and to a great extent undermines - the belief that has been so dominant in many policy circles that 'human development' (as the process of expanding education, health care and other conditions of human life is often called) is really a kind of luxury that only rich countries can afford. Perhaps the most important impact of the type of success that the East Asian economies, beginning with Japan, have had is the total undermining of that implicit prejudice. These economies went comparatively early for massive expansion of education, and later also of health care, and this they did, in many cases, before they broke the restraints of general poverty." (p 41)

And further, the author compares the developmental effects in India and China:

"The contrast between India and China has some illustrative importance in this context. The governments of both China and India have been making efforts for some time now (China from 1979 and India from 1991) to move toward a more open, internationally active, market-oriented economy. While Indian efforts have slowly met with some success, the kind of massive results that China has seen has failed to occur in India. An important factor in this contrast lies in the fact that from the standpoint of social preparedness, China is a great deal ahead of India in being able to make use of the market economy. While pre-reform China was deeply skeptical of markets, it was not skeptical of basic education and widely shared health care. When China turned to marketization in1979, it already had a highly literate people, especially the young, with good schooling facilities across the bulk of the country. In this respect, China was not very far from the basic educational situation in South Korea or Taiwan, where too an educated population had played a major role in seizing the economic opportunities offered by a supportive market system. In contrast, India had a half-literate adult population when it turned to marketization in 1991, and the situation is not much improved today." (p 42)

There has been a ton of discussion (myself included) in how to improve our health care system and educational system, but it should not be difficult. Consider this one final quote form Development as Freedom:

"Surprise may well be expressed about the possibility of financing support-led processes in poor countries, since resources are surely needed to expand public services, including health care and education. In fact, the need for resources is frequently presented as an argument for postponing socially important investments until a country is already richer. Where (as the famous rhetorical question goes) are the poor countries going to find the means for 'supporting' these services? This is indeed a good question, but it also has a good answer, which lies very considerably in the economics of relative costs. The viability of this support-led process is dependent on the fact that the relevant social services (such as health care and basic education) are very labor intensive, and thus are relatively inexpensive in poor- and low-wage - economies. A poor economy may have less money to spend on health care and education, but it also needs less money to spend to provide the same services, which would cost much more in the richer countries. Relative prices and costs are important parameters in determining what a country can afford. Given an appropriate social commitment, the need to take note of the variability of relative costs is particularly important for social services in health and education."

Slight political digression here. Our country is doing well, when compared to many developing countries, in providing general education and health care to its population, and we are doing well, in my view, in educating the population as a whole when compared to any other country in the world. But in health care, we are falling painfully short. Health care costs have risen drastically over the past few years when compared to other goods and services. This shouldn't be, and its directly a result of a system and political failure in our country that must be addressed, and I hope will be addressed once we get a new president.

But the point is, a talented, healthy and motivated population produces wealth.

I do have some more to say on the importance of personal education and the impact we have as smart consumers and not just producers. An intelligent consumer is someone who pays more for quality and thus rewards smart producers. Consuming smart takes about as much skill, effort, and talent as producing smart. Its simply almost as difficult. Smart poets produce great poetry, but how much better would our society be if we had a nation of poetry readers. Great symphonies come from many people willing to spend a lifetime sacrificing their time to hone their talents, but its all for naught, if nobody is around to listen and appreciate it.

In contrast, how much skill does it really take to post naked pictures on the internet. But pornography is a huge industry, but sadly only enslaves those who consume it into painful addictions and often broken families. A prime example where both the producers and the consumers act to make our country poorer.

It's for this and other reasons that the value of an individual sacrificing years to hone a skill is not just valued simply because of the opportunity to have a career. My wife, who I am enormously lucky to have in my life, started piano lessons at age four and half and stuck to it all the way through a Master Degree in piano performance. She entered my life as she was just beginning her Masters degree at ASU. I remember her crying many times as she was trying desperately to prepare for her Masters recital, where she was to memorize and perform an hours worth of intense classical music. She pulled through the experience and did it. But for what? She continued on as a part time piano teacher, charging as much (or maybe marginally more) as many other teachers with less education and experiences. She is now teaching one student, and is relegated to using her piano skills as an accompanist to a church's volunteer choir. Surely she didn't need a Master's degree for that.

But the experience of pushing herself to the absolute peak of her potential, to really understand what it takes to master something at a high level, to appreciate and know music as well as she does now because of that experience, is part of the reason why living on this earth is so enjoyable. The fact that each of us has the potential to pursue some interest, whatever it is, the fact that almost any subject imaginable is wonderfully complex and deep enough to offer a lifetime of study, and the fact that we can with our knowledge, skills and talents, give back both to our economy and our community in ways that can deeply affect each other's lives in real tangible ways, makes each day so exciting (and at times frustrating), but immensely rewarding.

Genius is within our grasp, if only we have the self-awareness to reach out and take it.