No one reports unhappiness at speaking English in class; on the contrary, they brag that it's easy.

Easy now, when they're children. Study after study has shown that immersion is the best way to learn a language, but adults struggle to learn new languages no matter how they're taught. If we don't teach immigrant kids English while they're in school, odds are high that they'll struggle with the language all their lives. Like my great grandmother, who came to this country at 16 and was multilingual but never added English to her list of languages, or our groundkeeper at work, who's been here since 1978 and still isn't fluent. Or like myself, who excelled in French class in school and was told I had a "flare for languages," but have been unable to learn Spanish as an adult despite trying several methods.

My daughter, Alex, would agree wholeheartedly with the statement about memorization, Amy. While recounting her experiences tutoring students in Chicago with City Year, she described advising one child to spend at least 15 minutes memorizing her times tables each night. Alex asserts "If you don't memorize the simple stuff, have the answers automatically without having to calculate them, you'll never be able to keep up as you learn more complicated math."

It's amazing how all of these educational fads from the last half-century keep crashing and burning. They always come back around to realizing that the previous ways were better -- but they have to ruin the education of several generations of children before they'll admit it.

Have we really not made any real progress at all in primary education since 1960? It sure doesn't seem like it.

oh, and? Go read all of Barb's piece... it has many things to recommend it.

Amy-
Your friend Barb is totally correct. My dd attends an "exemplary" elementary school here in Texas. Exemplary is the school's actual rating and yet, my dd comes home with very little math homework... like a page every two weeks. Trust me, this is no way a lie...I wish it were. She is in the fourth grade and frankly, the whole school is behind where they should be for standard fourth grade math work. We went and spoke to the teacher about our concerns and were told, "Sorry, this is what the state says we have to teach so that the kids can pass the TAKS test." These state tests, (every state has them now thanks to No Child Left Behind), are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

We have become so frustrated with the system, that we now handle math instruction at home. I no longer trust the school system to provide my child with an adequate foundation in the basics of math. This is a story that I know is being replicated in every state in the Union. It really ticks me off, that we as parents have no voice in this process.

I thank God, that we became aware of the problem early enough to head off real problems down the road, but worry for parents who have yet to see a problem. I know lots of parents who are depending on that exemplary rating to do the heavy lifting for them and don't realize what it really means.

Ahh, the never ending ESL/language debate. What has annoyed me for years was having good teachers/professors in Spanish regularly promoting the immersion line to get over the final roadblock to fluency. They were right, and my choosing not to go that route means I don't speak Spanish very well despite years of instruction and I am regressing since I don't practice.

They then turn around and promote ESL for kids completely contradicting themselves all because of PC/multiculturalism.

I hated memorizing math "facts" when I was a kid. Now I do research using information theory, create models of brain networks, and have a list of other upper-level math credentials.

Why did I hate memorizing? Because I understood, in a child-like way, that math made sense and wasn't a set of facts like the state capitols. I was told to stop using "tricks" that I now know are the basis for higher mathematics. Luckily, I didn't listen, and like my other science colleagues I still use those "tricks," and never rely on memorization.

Memorization trains smarter managers and math-savvy consumers, but any scientist trained on "facts" has to relearn the "tricks" that were beaten out of her.

I never took a grammar class. I was a "gifted child," so I went out by myself and labeled trees. I have innate knowledge of grammar, apparently from spending my entire childhood with my face stuck in a book, but I couldn't tell you what a "direct object" is.

This was me in school, too. I was mediocre in what schools were calling "Language Arts." I had no idea how to pull together a sentence diagram, but I was reading and writing at far above my grade level. I didn't want to perform autopsies on sentences; I wanted to read and write them. I didn't start getting good grades in English until high school.

Josh, what percentage of the poulation IS scientists, or mathmeticians? You want to serve them all. Part of it is memorizing the right things, and learning how to use math tools.

Let's not forget the "whole language" scam perpetrated on nearly a whole generation of children. "Educators" decided it would undermine a child's self esteem to actually teach him to read. Coincidentally I'm sure, the new method involved little to no work on the part of the teacher: Just shove some writing into the child's face, and after a while he'll learn how to read it. Unsurprisingly, he didn't.

Although the whole scheme has been completely discredited, the educational system is still littered with holdout teachers. (Thanks NEA! Way to look out for the children.) Our most recent experience was with my daughter's freshman English teacher, who should have been teaching thesis sentences, paragraph construction, essay writing, themes, and the like. Just give 'em pen and paper, and if they make a few marks, call it a "letter essay" (no such thing) and give them an A!

The beginning of sophomore year has been something of a shock to my daughter, as she had to learn in a few weeks what she should have learned last year.

SAD: Do you use math in your daily life? I'm curious, not challenging. Educators are keen on testing and scores, which indicate how well a student is learning. I'm more interested in what an adult retains. There are math-literate group of people who use math in their lives, and my experience with these people is that memorization plays no role in their understanding of math. Then there are the other 95+% of people who don't regularly use math. What do we want them to do? Know what 6*14 is? Or do we want them to be able to look at numbers around them, and judge whether those numbers make sense, know how large or small they are, understand proportions and statistics used in everyday life? The latter understanding is hard to teach, hard to test, but I think it's the only math skills worth having for the majority of people. And it has nothing to do with math facts.

Hey, don't be stupid about this!

When you don't know math, you can't tell when some liar is shining you on about the economy!

For instance: don't you know someone who thinks, "Statistics is bunk"?

Yet every manufacturing process uses stats today. It's not some liar talking about how much less you'll be taxed next year.

If you don't know, you'll be told by someone else what to think.

Yeah, that'll work.

-----

Immersion has been fought by people whose purity of ideas is more important than the real world, and who never sees diversity as presenting obstacles to be overcome. Meanwhile, commonality of purpose beats diversity everywhere it's measured.

If you think diversity is so great, how come you don't force your football, basketball, baseball or other team to impose quotas?

Point this out to a diversity freak, and they'll blink and change the subject.

There is way too much knowledge and too little time to cram it all in. Specialization is the key. I think the entire way we force kids to study is wrong. The emphasis is on passing exams rather then on 100% comprehension of the concepts. Getting As will not enable you to solve real-world problems, but truly understanding the concepts and how to analytically work out solutions will. Unfortunately, exams do not really tell you anything other then who is better under big time pressure.

Radwaste - remember even the idea of achievement, innovation is Eurocentric and racist.

"There is way too much knowledge and too little time to cram it all in. Specialization is the key. I think the entire way we force kids to study is wrong. The emphasis is on passing exams rather then on 100% comprehension of the concepts."

No, no, yes and yes. When concepts and principles are taught - along with some memorization of key values - there isn't "too much" to learn. There are about a hundred key observations, that's all. Four fundamental forces, a few relationships in flat and spherical geometry, basic and derived units, surface area/volume ratio, density, specific gravity, inertia, electromotive force... with practical examples to show that people really use these things, it's not made up by the teacher... you can show this in a couple of weeks and then just do exercises.

(Here's an example. When measured carefully, Galileo was wrong: two iron balls of different sizes, of exactly the same density and shape, dropped the same distance in air do not strike the ground at the same time. Why not?)

That would leave lots of time to claim to have spent the money that doesn't get to the classroom anyway on some self-esteem program.

Of course, there'a fatal flaw: you have to have teachers who understand these things.

Oh, yeah: fallacies. Everybody needs to learn those!

"I think the entire way we force kids to study is wrong. The emphasis is on passing exams rather then on 100% comprehension of the concepts. Getting As will not enable you to solve real-world problems, but truly understanding the concepts and how to analytically work out solutions will. Unfortunately, exams do not really tell you anything other then who is better under big time pressure."

Yeah, but don't forget how we got here. I was in public schools in the 1970s. Want to know what they were doing then? Not a damn thing. They were glorified day care centers. Completely and totally dysfunctional. A few teachers managed to carve out small spheres of order from the chaos, but once the students walked out of their classroom, they were back down in it.

Why does NCLB have all of those testing requirements? Because we needed some quantifiable way of measuring and demonstrating the problem. And I can tell you that when the first NCLB-mandated test scores started coming in, people were shocked. For the first time, they had objective and quantifiable evidence of exactly how bad it was. And it was bad. Worse than bad. It sucked. Our public school system was (and still is, for the most part) Third World. We do not measure up to any other Western nation.

I argue with teachers about this a lot. They say, "Students are only learning what's going to be on the test!" To which I reply, "Well, that's better than not learning anything at all!" Granted, the exams are an imperfect tool in a lot of ways. But no one has come up with anything better. Grades today are worthless -- they have far more to do with the school, and what kind of grades the administration wants to see, than with what the children are actually learning. You can't compare grades between schools; grades tell you absolutely nothing about which schools are doing well and which are bad.

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There is way too much knowledge and too little time to cram it all in. Specialization is the key. I think the entire way we force kids to study.

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Hmm, good point, but how about yesterday's article? Wouldn't it be worth the read too? I'm interested in your opinions, do reply.

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