Fanny Harville' s Commonplace Book

A middle-school experiment using fruit flies and organic foods has won publication in a national scientific journal and spurred a debate about the relative benefits of organic eating.

An impressive example of self-directed learning!  Not exactly a “middle-school experiment” as the preview describes above, but an independent project pursued by a girl of middle-school age.

Many of us define success as being extraordinary, but where does that leave the average child who enjoys a pickup basketball game but is far from Olympic material?

“Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when wide-spread, produce social disaster.”

(from Brainpickings.org)

A big, rich, diverse list of articles and videos worth checking out.

Here’s what I would want for my children, if I had young children today.  I would want them to grow up feeling in charge of their own lives.  I would want them to be happy but also to care about the happiness of others. I would want them to be emotionally resilient, so they could bounce back from life’s inevitable stresses and disappointments.  I would want them to feel confident in their ability to learn throughout life and to adapt to a world that is changing faster from year to year than it ever has before.  I would want them to have goals—goals that they feel some passion about.  I would want them to be able to think critically and make rational decisions that help them achieve their goals. I would want them to have moral values that help give meaning and structure to their lives, and I would hope that these would be human values—values having to do with human rights and obligations not to tread on those rights.

What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “narrative nonfiction”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways.

I only discovered the wonderful world of narrative nonfiction late in high school when I began reading the New Yorker, and it was a revelation to me.  I wish I had known about this kind of writing earlier!  While my son loves to have fiction read aloud to him, he is most drawn in his own reading to nonfiction.

But they, and we, hope to continue homeschooling. Meanwhile, when they sit down at the table with protractors or head to a museum, it is college I am thinking about. Not just because a university education is our unquestioned aspiration for our children, but also because it seems to be the closest model for the education we are now trying to provide. Tightly focused class sessions; expert presentations complemented by individual instruction; hands-on learning in areas that vary from day to day and year to year; education undertaken in the wider world—these aspects of our so-called homeschooling are basic to postsecondary learning.

In “How Children Succeed,” Tough argues that simply teaching math and reading — the so-called cognitive skills — isn’t nearly enough, especially for children who have grown up enduring the stresses of poverty. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing. Rather, tapping into a great deal of recent research, Tough writes that the most important things to develop in students are “noncognitive skills,” which Tough labels as “character.”

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What was most surprising to me was Tough’s insistence, bolstered by his reporting, that character is not something you have to learn as a small child, or are born with, but can be instilled even in teenagers who have had extraordinarily difficult lives and had no previous grounding in these traits.

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Tough’s book is utterly convincing that if disadvantaged students can learn the noncognitive skills that will allow them to persist in the face of difficulties — to reach for a goal even though it may off in the distance, to strive for something — they can achieve a better life.

bonnyglen:

Taken together, the evidence we have on the connection between sleep and academic performance suggests that the problem isn’t merely an issue of student behavior, and the solution probably shouldn’t be confined to lecturing kids on how they ought to be getting a full 8 hours of rest. It’s also a systemic problem with the way we do education. Consider when high school starts, for instance. Studies in Minnesota (and elsewhere) have shown that simply shifting first period from 7:20 to 8:30 makes a difference not only in attendance, but also in how well students do once they get to school.

Why we homeschool, in a nutshell: not morning people! 

Yes, you can, “How To Drop Out of High School” rightly explains.  The only point I’d add is that you should research what kind of credit will be given for AP scores by the college(s) you’d like to attend before spending lots of money and time on lots of AP tests.  Many colleges give a limited amount of elective credit toward graduation or allow you to skip introductory required courses with high AP scores, but some colleges require you to take their introductory courses (especially laboratory and literature courses) regardless of your AP score because college courses really are quite different from AP courses and tests. 

“Play is one of the most cognitively stimulating things a child can do,” says Megan McClelland, an early-childhood-development researcher at Oregon State University who has led much of the research.

See also:  An excellent book called Einstein Never Used Flashcards and my and my husband’s opinions about so-called academic approaches to preschool here and here.

In one of the most affecting parts of his book, he reflects on his decision, 27 years ago, to drop out of college. “It hasn’t escaped my attention,” Tough notes ruefully, that many of the researchers he writes about “have identified dropping out of high school or college as a symptom of substandard noncognitive ability: low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills.” And yet this same research helped him realize that he was lucky to be allowed to make his own mistakes. After leaving Columbia in the fall of his freshman year, he bicycled alone from Atlanta to Halifax. Following another aborted attempt at college, he took an internship at Harper’s Magazine and embarked on a successful career as a writer and editor.

Fewer and fewer young people are getting the character-building combination of support and autonomy that Tough was fortunate enough to receive.

A thought-provoking set of lengthy commentaries on why it is still important for Americans to learn foreign languages.  Worth reading in full!

Teach it young and it gets learned fast. But no amount of teaching can supply motivation, which is a far more effective pedagogical tool.

LEGO absolutely had an impact on my career path. In high school, I spent much of my free time designing things like manned missions to the moons of Jupiter in graph paper notebooks. I often drew the designs with LEGO pieces so I could eventually create real models. This was also a great way to learn everything I could about space travel from interesting destinations and past missions to new forms of propulsion and radiation protection. LEGO has also been a great tool for quickly making quick prototypes of various mechanisms and other ideas to see how they worked.

Thomas Edison once said that his greatest blessing in life was his lack of a formal education. Had he been educated, he said, he would have realized that what he accomplished was not possible to do. Beethoven’s teachers told his parents that he was too stupid to be a composer and Isaac Newton’s parents were told by his teachers that he was the most unlikely student they ever had. It seems one commonality that creative geniuses have is their contempt for public education. Following are the thoughts of three of our most highly-acclaimed creative geniuses about school.