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Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Friday, September 26, 2008

Learnin' 'bout bizness

My head is spinning from the crazy headlines in the paper yesterday, not just words on the screen but actual insanity in the world. There may or may not be a presidential debate, the government just seized WaMu in the biggest bank seizure in our history, the longest-running senator in the senate (from Alaska of course!) is being prosecuted for accepting $188,000 in home renovations as a gift, the U.S. troops and Pakistan are shooting at each other, the settlers in the West Bank have decided to crank up the violence, North Korea has basically put itself back at the top of the terrorist list (in an apparent attempt to get some f'ing attention around here), and Sarah Palin has managed to make herself look ten times more clueless this week than she was last week. And yet, the thing that horrified me the most was an article about a school program, in California of all places (god help us) where teenagers get to make ads for milk.

In a time when our country is fighting a war in two countries, our economy hovers on collapse, civil liberties are being curiously erased under our noses and we're two months away from one of the most critical presidential votes in decades, our kids are being taught "business" by learning how to sell milk to each other. Goodby, the ad agency behind this stroke of genius, will undoubtedly still collect their multimillion dollar fee while the kids do their work for free. The justification for this hideous waste of the student's time is that they're learning about business even though ad people are notoriously clueless in business matters. One teacher reports that her kids were "surprised to find that the executives they met this week are in the business world but 'had no business degrees.'" The "business world"? What is that, the place where people have jobs?

The milk board doesn't have any qualms about describing what they get out of the deal. They want more teenagers to drink milk and why not use our schools as a medium to disseminate product propoganda? The executive director explains that “They are a mysterious demographic and we want to reach them with an authentic voice in an authentic way.” And teach them about business, right?

Al Gore says in his book The Assault on Reason that since the prevalence of television over reading and the radio, in this country, the national debate has ceased to exist (although is arguably on the rise via the Internet). Communication now happens in one direction, from those who have millions of dollars to the rest of us, through the television. Watching on average over four hours a day of TV, Americans are stimulating the part of the brain that experiences instead of the part that processes, evalauates and interacts. Images flashing on the TV have a cumulative effect similar to brainwashing. Eckhart Tolle says when people watch TV they're still thinking but they're thinking the thoughts of the television. In Wall-e, we saw a futuristic version of people so focused on watching a world that didn't exist that they became obsolete. At the same time, the trend in advertising is for brands to be more interactive. The article calls it a move "from a top-down lecture into a two-way conversation." So the discourse about issues like war and economics and international relations is being replaced by 30-second ads while brands are managing to create conversations about their products?

In the film, The 11th Hour, a study is referenced that found college kids could identify 1,000 corporate logos but could not name 10 plants or animals native to their area. The film's interviewees all seem to agree on one seemingly radical idea. In a recent evaluation, it was determined that the earth provides goods and services worth $35 trillion a year, yet the combined economies of the world produced only half that at $18 trillion in 2006. That means the earth is twice as valuable to us as our economies and yet, every policy decision we make is to benefit the economy, not the earth. Even if it were possible to exist without nature or replace nature with technology, it would still cost us more than we have. Here's another radical idea. Wouldn't we be better off teaching our kids about how our planet works than blurring the lines between learning and selling, education and consumerism?

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Learning through the songs of America

This is just plain cool! Another example of how individuals can change the way we do just things. In this case, Janet Reno (the former US Attorney General) is hoping to change the way that U.S. history is taught and increase interest in learning history by young people. She's just released a three-disc album, Song of America, (that's only $20 on Amazon!) of music from America's 400+ year history.

Her hope is that young people, for whom music is extremely important, will be inspired by the songs and be able to better understand the men and women who shaped the country that we live in and the integral role that music has always played. It took nine years for her to complete the project in collaboration with her niece's husband, a tour manager for a punk band, and so far it's getting rave reviews. Let's hope others take the torch and run with it!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

No child left behind (and none up ahead either)

I came across an article in Time today, while looking for something else, that's so good I'm going to encourage you to read it for yourself instead of trying to elucidate on it. The US government spends 10 times more money on educating retarded children than it does educating gifted children. Those with IQs 55 and below are just as likely (5%) as kids with genius IQs 145 and over, to drop out of high school. The kids who could grow up to cure cancer, stop global warming or become the next world leaders, are being ignored, neglected and otherwise squandered in pursuit of the "thoroughly American notion that if most just try hard enough, we could all be talented."

I feel like I've been talking around this issue for months, but can now pinpoint how this problem starts in our schools. In my old job (the one that "inspired" this blog), I was kept from doing what I did best in order to help less qualified colleagues learn something new. The entire company suffered because management believed anyone could do anything. I've written that I need to be challenged in a job and that I need to be afraid of not being smart enough. I've written about how this President's administration values loyalty over ability. And I've written that most marketing is aimed at the lowest common denominator, completely alienating the smart and savvy core customer.

As a gifted child who skipped two grades, my status was debated each time I transferred to a new school. School administrators agreed that as long as I was well-adjusted, being intellectually stimulated was important enough to keep me advanced. The article states, however, that since the "mid-1980s, schools have often forced gifted students to stay in age-assigned grades--even though a 160-IQ kid trying to learn at the pace of average, 100-IQ kids is akin to an average girl trying to learn at the pace of a retarded girl with an IQ of 40." I'm not a genius and my IQ was at the more "socially optimal" level between 125 and 155, but I am aware, even today, of how I was formed by experiences in those gifted classes.

There's a perception that smart people are just smart and don't need help, so we should focus our help on those that need it. We've all heard the story about Albert Einstein leaving school at 15, but like anyone with a gift, athletic, musical or otherwise, without proper nurturing, may not achieve what they are capable of. A study conducted in Australia showed that gifted kids not allowed to skip grades had a jaded and negative view of education, had few friends, dropped out of school early and were treated for depression as adults. By contrast, the kids in the group that skipped at least three grades were socially adjusted and had gone on to earn Ph.D.s. In this country, the rate of growth in students earning Ph.D.s has dropped dramatically as funding is cut for gifted students and more social stigma is attached to being smart.

Despite my early years in gifted classes, I was not challenged for most of high school where honors meant more "busy work" (as we called it) and less actual teaching and understanding. My physics teacher used to read the newspaper in class while we were supposed to be teaching ourselves. I had more than a few hostile run-ins with my teachers. I remember one incident where I had received a B on a paper in English, a well-written and thoughtful piece on a book we'd read. My neighbor got an A and I asked to read her paper.

I scanned it and then raised my hand during class to ask my teacher (who lectured to a mirror on the opposite wall of the classroom by the way - I swear to god!) why I received a B for original thinking and clear understanding of the material while my classmate got an A for merely regurgitating his lecture. I was sent to the Principal's office and told by my counselor that with my grades and "attitude" I wouldn't even make it to a UC school. No longer in a gifted-only environment, I defended my young age to my peers by insisting that I wasn't smarter than them, I had just started reading early. But after hearing them talk about what they were learning in their English class, I transferred out of honors English and into standard English with Mrs. Pecht, the only teacher in four years who taught me anything. I loved her.

Instead of special schools and classes, why can't we just have a way for kids to learn at the level they're at, for every subject? That's how it was done when I was in first grade. I went to a fifth grade class for reading, a third grade class for math. No, I wasn't popular and the other kids didn't like this tiny girl sitting in their classes answering questions but what if I wasn't the only one? What if we didn't have grades and instead all kids were learning at their pace and making their way through a curriculum, excelling at some subjects and struggling in others? We'd have a system that much more closely resembles a free-market work place, which is exactly where we need these genius kids.