Category: Education

Darrah’s absence has brought something else into bold relief — our attachment to certain routines.  Without her youthful energy buzzing through the house, some of our longtime habits have deepened — calcified? — into codgerlike rituals.  The one that most amazes and amuses Dan and me takes place after dinner, when we…amble into the living room…put on a CD and pick up our respective books (these days, usually from the library).  We then commence what we call "parallel reading."

…Once in a while, one of us will notice the rutlike quality of this activity and say something to the effect of, "What have we come to?"  Then we’ll chuckle, sip some tea, and go back to our books.

That is from Karen Stabiner’s The Empty Nest: 31 Parents Tell the Truth About Relationships, Love, and Freedom After the Kids Fly the Coop.  For one thing, I don’t drink much tea.

Tiny brain no obstacle to French civil servant.

Hat tip to Winterspeak.

It sounds stupid, but every day I write a new sentence: "Tyler is [fill in the blank]" at the top of the page.  It might just be "Tyler is happy to be home again," or "Tyler is eating Rainier cherries."  Once a day, no more and no less.  It doesn’t matter how few or how many people are reading it.  It feels like an exercise in gratitude, which it is.  It is also an exercise in micro-blogging.

Here is Gretchen Rubin on the one-sentence journal.

For at least the next week, however, I’ll be keeping my sentence the same.

Our results suggest that an increase in the proportion of girls [in school] leads to a significant improvement in students’ cognitive outcomes.

Here is the paper, here are non-gated versions.  The estimated benefits are of similar magnitude for boys and girls.  It seems that girls make the classroom a more civil place.  The implication, I suppose, is that all-girl schools impose a negative externality on boys and I don’t just mean from the side of beauty or fun.

It usually implies even greater self-praise:

Norman Mailer…ruminated on his failure to win the Nobel Prize.

It wasn’t
politics that soured his chances, he declared; it was stabbing his
second wife with a pen knife in 1960. "The Swedes are very intelligent
people and they’re proud of their prize, and they’re damned if they
want to give their prize to a guy who is a wife stabber and as sour and
bitter as I am, and I don’t think I can blame them," he said.

I believe that Mailer has become a quite underrated writer, especially his Harlot’s Ghost.  But wife-stabbing is not the main reason why he has failed to win the prize.

Here is the link and article, which focuses on Gunther Grass, another tricky self-deprecator.

Clever tests are being run:

To knock out sentence context, they changed word order (e.g.
“Contribute others. The of Reading measured”). To knock out whole word
recognition, they alternated capital and lower case (e.g. “ThIs tExT
AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”). And to knock out letter-by-letter decoding, they
substituted letters in such a way that word shape was maintained (e.g.
“Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”).

Letter decoding was found to
account for 62 per cent of reading speed; whole word recognition 16 per
cent; and sentence context 22 per cent.

I wasn’t there for the tests, but I believe that is measuring reading speed at margins other than what we find on the printed page.  "Knowing what is coming" is in my view most important for reading fast.  (I like to say "It took me 45 years to read that book."  If you think you "just started" the book in your hands right now, you are failing to understand the proper marginal unit.)

I find that when I try to read graphic novels, I am not a very fast reader at all.  My eyes get confused from not knowing where the next block of text will appear. 

I am also struck by an incidental remark toward the end of the article; we are getting closer to the truth:

…among the faster readers, predicting words from sentence context made a
bigger contribution to reading speed than among the slower readers.

Addendum: Here is my previous post on reading speed.

A loyal MR reader asks me on Facebook:

…if you were giving advice to someone setting up a private school, what
would you want them to consider, or read?  If you could start your own
school from the ground up — what do you think it would be most
important to do?

I would say be realistic about how much parents will buy into your vision, and realize you need their support to make your school a good one.  Readers, what do you think?

Formal education slows down our process of growing up.  Isn’t that…er…the opposite of what it is supposed to do?  Bruce also notes that this process is more likely to be helpful to women, and harmful to men.  Which may be why, in some big cities, women are now earning more than men are.

From a loyal buyer, this is one of the personalized podcasts, with the requested focus on what I think of Alex, Bryan, Russ, Don Boudreaux, Arnold Kling, and Robin.  Here is the link, don’t worry it is short and to the point.

Eight ways money can buy you happiness.

Your kid is going away to college for the first time (Yana is going to Franklin and Marshall, by the way; boo-hoo but of course we are proud of her).  What advice do you offer her (or is it me?), keeping in mind that all strictures must embody economic reasoning in some form or another?

If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wal-Mart.

That is Jonathan Kozol, writing in the August 2007 issue of Harper’s.  Note that while there are some good (though in my view not decisive) arguments against vouchers, Kozol instead focuses on reminding us that corporations are greedy profit-maximizers.  Nor does he mention that in America’s inner cities, "democratic access" to good french fries far exceeds democratic access to good schools.  And might not Louis Vuitton join Wal-Mart in educating some of our children?

Kozol does (correctly, but without explanation or analysis) describe the results of U.S. voucher experiments to date as "very mixed."  You might think that means our attitude toward vouchers should be "very mixed" but alas not.

Impeach Jonathan Kozol, impeach him now.

Addendum: Believe it or not, this post isn’t Alex.

Alumni with kids are 13 percentage points more likely than alumni without kids to give in any year.  The tendency to give rises slowly–by three more percentage points total–through kids’ early teens.  At about age 14, as mom and dad see their kid’s algebra and composition grades, they decide whether he or she will apply to the alma mater.

Here is much more.