When I was in school, I generally tended to fall in the upper end of the ‘Average Students’. As such, I never received much attention from teachers. I wasn’t a brilliant genius who could make a teacher or a school look good at an academic meet, and I didn’t need any remedial help with my schoolwork. I just showed up. And from my end, that’s about all I bothered to do too. I never had much enthusiasm for school, I skipped when I could, but I at least did the minimum amount of work required to hand in each assignment.

The only year that actually changed for me was in Grade 9. I didn’t get any academic attention that year, but I did find out my teacher enjoyed the same types of fiction as I did. For the entire year, we swapped books and suggested authors to each other. And that was all the attention I needed. Just that little bit of connection between me and one teacher, and my entire attitude toward school changed. I worked harder, cared more, and bumped myself to the top of the class.

The next year, that connection absent, I reverted to the old habits once again.

All this is prelude to my comments on a report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute called “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB”

The report claims that:

Congress was quite clear about NCLB’s objectives. Right on its cover, it’s termed “An Act to close the achievement gap.” Congress followed through with accountability mechanisms that have one clear and explicit purpose: drive up the achievement of low-performing pupils. As for students on either end of the spectrum, indeed all youngsters who could already be termed proficient,  NCLB’s core provisions treat them with benign neglect. Let them fend for themselves. Let someone else worry about them. Let them eat - well, whatever is left over at the bakery when the bread runs out.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the results of the NCLB is that gifted students are gaining little ground. That’s simply a necessary part of the design of the act. After all, the achievement gap can’t close if all groups improve their performace at an equal pace — that’s simply moving the gap up the scale a little, not reducing it.

And while I agree that it’s a travesty to ignore the gifts and talents of advanced students, the statistics seem to show that advanced students have college educated, strongly participatory parents who can lobby for them, or get them outside tutoring if they wish.

I wonder if the greater tragedy is that, now more than ever, those average students with the potential for greatness are being ignored. The average students, by far the largest portion of a class, are the least likely to get any one on one attention from a teacher. After all, they’re doing fine.

Likewise, of the home educators I know, quite a number are homeschooling kids who are either gifted or special needs.  Would those parents have considered homeschooling if their kids were in the ‘average’ range? Would they pull them out of government schools where  “they’re doing just fine?”

Is “just fine” as good as it gets for someone labelled Average?

Maybe they’re the most chronically ‘left behind’ group of all.

This year, our summer project is container gardening. Last year, our gardening attempts failed miserably with snails, slugs, squirrels and chipmunks eating nearly everything we planted before it even ripened.

This year, we’re working on solutions… copper for the slugs and snails, bloodmeal for the rodents. So far, it’s working pretty well. The tomato plants look healthy, and already have a dozen small tomatoes growing, with many more flowers indicating a bumper crop. The green peppers and celery seem to be thriving too.

We’ve been getting a TON of rain lately, which seems to be bothering the carrots, parsnips and onions. Perhaps they weren’t quite big enough to survive the deluge. We’ll cross our fingers and see.

So far the only casualty of the garden pests has been our lettuce, but I’m going to try plant some new in pots and place them higher up in a windowsill instead of near the ground, in hopes that it’ll be more difficult for the rodents to reach.

David’s flowers are doing amazingly well. He’s got poppies, violets and marigolds planted from seeds earlier in the year all over the flower beds. They look amazing.

Last year we learned that he’s got quite a green thumb when the marigolds and delphinium he planted and tended bloomed and thrived when the rest of the garden crashed. This year he’s got a bunch of vegetables too… maybe he’ll be feeding our family with his harvest before long.

Is the Internet making us stupid?

NPR has an interview with Nicholas Carr, who has recently written an article for The Atlantic Monthly called, “”Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr says that even though the Internet allows us access to a vast amount of information very quickly, it imposes on us a new way of thinking. Rather than reading deeply, or contemplating any single subject, we tend to jump around. As a result, our attention spans are shortening, and our ability to read longer articles and books might even be in jeopardy.

Just as the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press helped to make reading universal, in the process ushering in enormous social revolutions, Carr says the Internet is producing a revolution of its own that is once again changing how we structure everything. While much of the revolution is positive, Carr says, he thinks that we should be aware that there might be some casualties, including prolonged reading and time for contemplation.

Listen to it here.

Image via WikipediaI haven’t posted much recently, mostly because we haven’t done a whole lot of homeschooling lately. Mostly just home-playing, which is educational, but playing with Lego for days on end does not a quality blog post make.

But, as many of David’s lessons and group activities close up for the summer, we’ve got a few plans to use the summer learning time.

David’s just finishing up the last 50 pages or so of Mathematical Reasoning Level B, and once that’s done, we’re going to go through the much slimmer Times Tables book from Hodder Home Learning over the summer.

We’re also going to go through Apples, Bubbles and Crystals: Your Science ABCs (published by the American Chemical Society), which has a good mix of outdoor and rainy-day type activities. This spiral bound book combines reading and rhyming with simple science activities that begin with a list of everyday household materials and come with colorfully illustrated step-by-step instructions. Also provided are explanations of the science principles behind the fun. The 26 activities cover everything from making rainbows, rockets, music, fingerprints, and glue while exploring density, thermodynamics, wave transmission, mechanics, shadows and other topics.

We’ll keep reading… Right now David’s only interested in reading books about Batman on his own. Luckily, Scholastic has a fairly good set of Batman readers available, so he should have reading material for most of the summer. We’ve got two more books in the Dragon Detective Agency series to read as read-alouds, and once those are done, I’ll see if he’s ready for Encyclopedia Brown.

A few weeks of day camp, a few fishing trips, camping trips and park time, and lots and lots of Lego ought to fill out our summer nicely.

Yesterday I was surfing the web for Wordpress plug-ins when I stumbled upon PopShops. Its a Web 2.0 way to add a quick affiliate shop to your site in no time flat.

First, sign up with a few big affiliate companies like LinkShare and Commission Junction, then make a free account with PopShops. A free account will let you build ten shops, which seems like enough to start with. You enter your affiliate ID information with each of the affiliate companies you’re a member of when you sign up. You’ll have to join merchant programs separately, though.

The PopShops builder lets you search for any keyword, like Valentine’s Day, and it will produce a list of products that match. Simply click to add the ones you want to your shop, and fiddle with the style, and you’ve a store. They’ve got a widget for Blogger and TypePad, a WordPress plug-in, or you can just plop in the little blob of javascript to put the shop on your site.

I typed “Magic Tree House” and selected Audible as the merchant, then told David to put the audiobooks in order. Once he was done, I created a new page, added a bit of text, and used the plug-in to add the shop. And viola! Here’s his Magic Tree House Audio page.

The store building was so easy, David only needed help when he misplaced one of the books and wanted to remove it. Once I showed him the remove button, he was able to finish the shop on his own.

Seriously easy, and I think it looks pretty neat!

So, this Friday’s meme from Heart of the Matter is to comment on this quote from William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

It sounds nice, which is what you’d expect from a poet, but that’s about the only good thing I’m going to say about it.

Education is certainly not dropping a bunch of knowledge into an empty receptacle, but, if the fire is supposed to be about creating a passionate interest in something, or everything, that’s not education either.

The fire, if we must keep up with the analogy, is already there. I’ve never met a kid who wasn’t curious about practically everything. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t ask ‘why?’

Your average kid has enough to “fire” to consume a parent’s sanity and then some.

So then what? What is an educator supposed to do with the fire?

At first, I suppose, give it new places to go. The fire has lots of interesting places to stretch within what any child knows from his environment, but the stuff outside that sphere contains fuel for a lifetime. A child isn’t going to immediately know that he’s interested in Egyptology, or botany, or architecture. You need to drop a bit of something into the pail before he realizes that’s even a place for his fire to go, so to speak.

So, there is a bit of pail-filling going on. A bit of flame fanning too. But it can’t end there.

You can’t spend the rest of your life helping your child find more fuel. You’ve got to teach him how to find his own too, and explore each path as far as he wants or needs.

And that too requires some pail-filling. Things like learning to read, how to research, and memorizing math facts and formulas are work, and they aren’t always fun to do. They’re not always what the flame wants to do. But without knowing those things, the child’s fire is severely restricted.

And finally, to finish off with this crazy flame idea, an education needs to teach him to focus the main power of his fire on the things he’s most interested in, to eventually use it as a tool (like a flamethrower or torch) to achieve certain ends.

This Friday’s Heart of the Matter meme is homeschooling tips and tricks.

Reading through some of the tips from other bloggers, I begin to realize how different we all are. I am definitely not the person to come to for scheduling and curriculum tips. We can’t even wake up at approximately the same time each day, much less start ’school’ at the crack of dawn. Reading some other homeschooler’s tips and their schedules from last week’s meme makes me feel like a slacker.

Anyway, here’s my tip: Desecrate an atlas

Buying an atlas to rip out all the pages has been one of my more inspired ideas. We bought a discounted (but still accurate) atlas and an oversized three ring scrapbooking binder. Each atlas page got ripped out (neatly) and put in a plastic sheet that was then placed in the binder. Every time we read a book, we find the atlas page where the story takes place, mark it, and add a page about the book, including  the place and historical period, into our customized atlas.

If a book goes into a lot of detail in one particular city, we print off a Google Map with the general area included, mark off as many landmarks as we can, and put it in our book in the most appropriate place.

We first tried this on a wall map, but found that places like England got lots of marks and became too squished. The ever-expanding atlas is much more functional, even though we can’t hang it on the wall.

It seems there’s a new online magazine for homeschoolers, “Heart of the Matter“, and they’re running a meme asking home schoolers to share a day in the life of their families.

I’m only homeschooling one five year old right now, and because he’s only five we take a pretty relaxed view of what goes on in a day. No day is typical for us, but this is what today was like….

Morning:

Woke up late after staying up a little too late last night. Had breakfast, made a HUGE pot of coffee, and started David on his Mathematical Reasoning book, while his dad and I got ready for a conference call. David worked while we explained to a client why we didn’t spend our Christmas holiday working on their stuff. The call lasted about an hour and a half, after which I checked on David’s progress and saw he’d finished a quarter of the book and covered sections on bar graphs, venn diagrams, and probability along with oodles of review pages.

Feeling guilty for leaving him to work on math for so long by himself, I teach him how to make paper chain people. He tries a few, and once he gets a chain he thinks he likes, he starts turning all the people in the chain into his favorite superheroes. So far he’s got Batman, Robin, and … Santa Claus. Ok, maybe not all superheroes.

Lunch time!

I go downstairs to make lunch. David follows me down and plays with his Crazy Fort in the living room while I cook up some food. I try to do dishes afterward to find out there’s no hot water. Sending Dad down to check it didn’t increase the water temperature at all, so I boiled water for the dishes while he called the repair man and argued that we really need hot water before next week.

After lunch, David practiced his piano. His last lesson was before Christmas so he’s been practicing the same songs for a long time. I think we’re both getting a little tired of them, though they’re sounding really good at this point.

I’ve still got piles of work to do, so David sits down and reads a few of the books we borrowed from the library. He reads out loud, and as long as I can follow with half an ear, I can help him with words he is having problems with from the context.

When he’s tired of reading, he goes back to his paper chain people and makes Superman before I pull him away to go to his piano lesson.

Evening

The piano lesson goes splendidly, and he’s got six new songs to practice for next week. At least the songs are getting a little more interesting now that he’s playing with both hands.

After his lesson, I start making supper while he sorts the recycling into the blue boxes. When he’s done with the blue boxes, he plays his RushHour game for a half an hour while I cook. After supper I take out the garbage and blue boxes and boil more water for dishes.

Once clean-up is done, we head back up to my office where he works on some more chain people while I work and we both listen to Alice in Wonderland. We’re listening to the version from kiddierecords.com this week. Last week we listened to a podcast version from Curiosoft. They are very, very different to listen to. Perhaps we’ll grab a third version from Audible next week.

Since the repair man isn’t coming to fix the hot water heater till tomorrow afternoon, there’s no bathtime tonight, so after brushing his teeth, David writes a line in his daily journal, gets is jammies on, and climbs in bed where I read him a few chapters from his latest book.

It’s another late bedtime, thereby dispelling any hopes I might have had of getting an early start tomorrow.

An interesting video clip from the Cato Institute. Neal McCluskey explains why the very institution that is supposed to unify causes so many arguments.

To illustrate, he quotes Lexington MA Superintendent of Schools Paul Ash as saying, “We couldn’t run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed.”

“In other words”, McCluskey says, “you can’t run a single system of education that upholds the rights and values of all those who pay for it.”

The video is about 12 minutes long, but a worthwhile listen:

Since we’ve gotten back from vacation, things have been very hectic. Just catching up on work has been a huge task, and the process of unpacking, and getting the house ready for winter are adding to the load.

So, David has been on his own for most of the last week. We’ve missed play dates, and I wasn’t even able to get him to his Beavers meeting yesterday.  He’s had no friends over for more than a week, and while he’s not complaining, I feel so guilty it’s driving me nuts.

I can’t figure out why a temporary glitch in the scheduling of our lives is giving me this much anxiety.