A Teachers Value

Recently Ms L, J's 4th grade teacher got engaged. The girls were a flurry of excitement over her sparkling diamond ring. J and friends attended her class last year but continue to swing by to say hello during recess. Not surprising considering how much they loved her. Ms L is in her late twenties, very pretty and has a million watt smile. That in addition to being a wonderful teacher. I was happy for her when J told me she was getting married to her former doctor. 

A few weeks later J told me that she and her friend M were concerned for Ms L. Apparently, she looked sad and did not smile anymore. She cheered up for a bit when the girls stopped to say hello so they made it a point to do so more regularly than they had done before. I was curious to know what a bunch of ten year olds made of the change in Ms L. They had figured she was sad because of the engagement and it burst their bubble a little - looking forward to marriage is supposed to be a happy time. They were doing their part to restore the magic to her special time. 

There is a human aspect to a teacher student relationship that goes beyond teaching and grades. These girls adore Ms L - she combines competence and femininity that they would be well served to emulate. She always took the time to enhance and personalize a boiler-plate lesson plan. Just like her, the kids in her charge were energized and wanted to exceed expectations from them. 

That her former students would treat putting a smile on her face as their recess priority would not count in any evaluation of her as teacher, but that is the highest score a teacher could aspire for. Reading this article by a teacher prompted this post about Ms L.

Saving For J

I was chatting with another mom about saving for kids to go to college. "Have you already started a college fund for J ?" she asked. I did not know how to answer that question honestly. I don't have a fund started for her and will likely never have one. Both DB and I agree that it is a bad idea to give children the idea that their parents will bankroll their education. I tell J that she can go to any college that she can get a full tuition ride to.

The final outcome depends on the amount of hard work she is willing to put in. We will support her in every way possible but she is already getting the message that we will not pay her way to a school of her choice.

So, I may never really put aside money for her college tuition. I would also never allow J to take out a big loan to attend some pricey school. DB is willing to let her work part-time to pay for school. I am not sure I can get behind that idea fully. I'd rather she spent that time and energy to secure a tuition waiver - and focus on getting an education while at school. The other mom sounded skeptical about my idea but admitted it was a bold one. Time will tell if I can walk the talk.

Thwarted Education

The events that lead up to my request for a meeting with J's teachers usually have me anxious even before the meeting. At the conference itself, I find it difficult to stick to my rehearsed talking points and before five minutes are up, I am rambling way off topic at furious pace trying to cover all that I have to say in the twenty minutes I have alloted. My frustration levels run so high, that I can't keep it coherent anymore. Each time, I feel like I failed and should have handled it a lot better than I did. This year for the first time, I had DB to accompany me and that was comforting. We had agreed, if I wandered off-course, he would nudge me so I'd come back on track.

I had wanted the time to understand why J's motivation was diminishing. Why it was that she refused to apply herself to do anything beyond "minimally required" to make a decent grade. It took a while for me to even get them to see that there was a problem, that I was interested in whether my child loved learning and found happiness in accomplishing results through hard work. I was not interested in her grades - good, bad or ugly they did not to me indicate how her education was progressing. The moment of truth came when in response to me saying "I don't want my child to become the kid who learns how to make the grades and loses the love and joy of learning. That is what I am afraid is happening to her", the teacher said "This is ultimately not about what you want, but what she wants"

That left me so non-plussed that I could not summon any kind of response. DB was caught off-guard as well. For a teacher with some twenty odd years of experience to say that the course of a nine year old's education and therefore her life is not up to the parent to decide was so stunning that I had nothing left to say. Would she be advocating for J's voting rights next ? Surely, if she can make such significant decisions about her life, she would be well qualified to elect a leader to represent her. 

I send J to school so she benefits from the social interaction with her peers, learns to work in a structured environment and follow instructions. I don't have any academic expectations from the school at all. What I had not counted on was for this enviornment to diminish her innate strengths, make her less than who she is. So not only is the school failing in its primary goal to "educate" because the teachers equate education to grades, it is also harming her by being the enviornment in which her curiosity, creativity and yen for learning are actively thwarted. And this at what is touted to be one of the best schools in the district. 

What was most surreal about the experience was the hubris of the two teachers we met. They were completely convinced that they were doing an outstanding job educating the kids in their charge, that their tools and methods were absolutely the best. If the kid was not thriving, it was up to the kid to figure out how they could do better. Their process was simply perfect and would not be tuned. I realized when people get to that point in their profession when they turn deaf to unfamiliar ideas, there is no hope for them or those whose life their methods impact. So it is with J's teachers and J. In the private sector, dinosaurs such as these teachers are often let go when organizations restructure and get an infusion of fresh blood from elsewhere in the industry or university campuses.

I have come to the sobering realization that along with educating J at home, I am also responsible for making sure that I undo the damage that the school is doing to her before it is too late.

Work Not Pleasure

For the first time this year, J had to study for a test and the we discovered she had no idea how to study for one. This came as a revelation to me and my first instinct was to panic. DB was a little bemused by the whole situation and asked the obvious "How would you expect her to know what to do when you've never showed her how ?" By the time I was J's age, I was veteran test taker. In India a nine year old does not remember a time when they did not take tests. I must have been taught in my time too but was so young that I have no recollection of it - I thought that test taking is instinctive not much different from breathing. We are now working with J, teaching her some basic skills she will need to succeed as a student.

Reading this article about how the educational crisis in America is a moral and not a monetary one, struck a deep chord in the context of my recent challenges. J's complete unpreparedness for test taking in fourth grade is a telling example of schools making the "mildest demands" on students.

We have gone from a culture where real demands were made on students at home and in school to one where homes and schools make only the mildest demands on children. Instead adults have become eager providers of their children’s natural, but endless, appetite for pleasure. 

The point is not that kids are rotten and teachers are lazy and parents are idiots. Rather, that we have created the wrong child-raising culture and the results are clearly confirming that.  

For parents who are trying to correct course at home, the task is a daunting one. The social expectation of us is to be providers of entertainment and pleasure to the kids.When we do very little of that and try to fill the gaping voids in their education instead, our efforts are met with a lot of resistance. J may appreciate my efforts in later life, but right now Mommy is a mostly an insufferable nag, a demanding task master and just does not know how to have fun. Unfortunately for me, most of my peers are exceptionally good at being entertainers to their kids. Sadly for J, she will grow up feeling she did not have nearly as much fun as most other kids she knows.

PTA Blues

This is J’s fifth year in elementary school and for the first time this year I became a PTA member. As a single parent, I lacked  the capacity to take on any volunteer responsibilities that took time away from my never ending list of  to-dos. I figured with DB in the picture, I might have more latitude and dove in to the deep end of the pool when I announced my desire to take on some work to help as a PTA volunteer. I have to admit, I received a warm welcome as the PTA is always scrounging for volunteers. Back home, J and  DB were excited for me.

My first assignment was to do the monthly newsletter. Seemed like a walk in the park – I would get inserts from about six sources, I could pick out a template and combine the material. Since there was no editing involved, I was toying with the idea of an  Macro to pull the pieces and assemble the newsletter. The work would be a matter of few clicks I had a whole month to do this. 

At the risk of getting ahead of myself I was wondering if I could get one of the geeks at work to set me up with something like Silverstripe so that the contributors of the inserts could post their content online have the newsletter be generated automatically that the print shop could then print off of.

A day after I had been assigned my duties, another lady whom I will refer to as F volunteered for the same job and to spare us both any hurt feelings, the volunteer coordinator asked that we work on this gig as a team. In the first email, F wrote the following :

I also volunteered for the newsletter :). How would you like to work it out? We can alternate months...When I was in the Army I did the FRG newsletter and loved it. Please give me a call if you have time and we can talk more :)

When I read that note, my sense was that F really wanted this job to herself and wanted me out of her business. Against my better judgment, I decided to call her and work out how we could work on this thing together. In what would later prove to be a  career limiting move, I told her that I was impressed by her prior experience with newsletters and would love to learn from her on the job. F had at that point already picked out a template in some obscure publishing software that believed would be perfect for the job at hand. Sadly it could not be converted into something conventional like Word – but she’d be glad to give it a shot.

Within days she had produced a top-notch newsletter, taken it to the printer’s shop and had copies made for the entire school. The speed and the level of efficiency was astounding to say the least. There was no way I was going to pull off something even close the next month. I could now see the error of my hide-bound ways – foolishly trying to empower the users with open source content management software when they had this formidable human newsletter generator going at a hundred miles a minute and delighting in the experience.

Almost masochistically at this point, I tried to convert F’s  template and find something like it in Word and when all failed , in a final act of desperation reached out to her for help. She had in the meanwhile left me a voice mail message advising me to begin work on the next month’s newsletter as time was running out. I realized at this point she had taken the leadership role very seriously. A few days later, I had to throw in the towel and wrote this to the volunteer coordinator

F  has a great format for the Newsletter that requires software that I do not have  - we have not been able to convert her template to Word. I think it will work out best if F does the newsletters going forward.
I would love to volunteer for anything else that I have the skills to help out with.

I had forgotten what it feels like to be kicked out of the proverbial sand-box and my first foray into the world of PTA brought back memories of grade school. I am beginning to realize it is a certain type of person that makes a great volunteer like F and I just do not fit the profile. I lack the intensity, don’t derive a huge amount of satisfaction by doing this job and finally don’t believe in the agenda of this PTA.

I am an outsider who tried to step into the magic circle and had my hand resoundingly slapped. As for the volunteer coordinator, she continues to preserve an icy silence that I can only take to mean that I have been banished from the playground and not just the sandbox. Thanks to me, F must have moved a few notches up the PTA totem pole and for that I am very happy – she definitely deserves it.

Two Million Minutes

As a parent who was educated in India and is now raising a child in America, the subject of Robert Compton's 2 Million Minutes is something I can relate to effortlessly. It is well documented how American kids are falling behind when compared to their peers elsewhere in the world. Compton brings those statistics to life, takes viewers into the lives of six above-average high school students from America, China and India.

The film depicts how kids from India and China spend the entirety of their high school years (two million minutes) preparing for the entrance exams to get into one of the premier institutes of learning. They have no life outside that and a decision about career is locked in at seventeen. What is more, that decision is most often made for them by their parents.

In both India and China students grow up in society that emphasizes academic success almost to the exclusion of anything else in a young person's life. Xiaoyuan, the Chinese girl in the movie, studies music but making a career out of it would be considered inconceivable. The boy from India, Rohit kicks a ball around when he is able to - in lieu of being coached professionally for football as his peer in America might be.

The American kids are a lot more self-assured - they have a full life outside the classroom and books. The social emphasis on academic success is almost absent. To that end, a community's spending on sports frequently exceeds that on education; parents don't expect kids to give everything they have into scholastic achievement. On the positive side, they are not required to know who they will be for the rest of their lives at seventeen. Trying several different things before they find their true calling is completely acceptable.

While Compton's exploration of what ails the American education system maybe a little one dimensional, he is certainly not off base. It is generally true that American kids (when compared to their peers around the world) don't work hard enough, they are not challenged enough and they are not nearly as ambitious. The expert commentators in the movie tackle the reasons why.The lack of cultural expectation in America for kids to excel academically is possibly the biggest contributor and that is not emphasized enough. The kids in India and China are a product of their enviornment, take them out of it and they would be no different from their American counterparts.

I am a product of the Indian education system and have an appreciation of where it has helped and how it has hurt me. I am now learning about the American system even if by proxy through my daughter. Two Million Minutes is aimed at shaking Americans out of their complacence about their assured preeminence  in a globalized world.

It is definitely a very timely wake-up call but to take away an all gloom and doom message for American kids is probably unwise. The ideal system of education would be somewhere between the Indian/Chinese and the American ones. It would emphasize academic rigor along with social skills, creativity, team work while nurturing emotional intelligence and an entrepreneurial spirit. With that combination, any kid would be set up for success in the world of the future.

Delayed Knowledge

Reading this article about naps and dreams being able to boost learning would be ever so helpful in my teens when day dreaming came very easy as did napping for hours on summer afternoons where the only respite from the heat was somnolence. That was also when I had mastered the fine art of zoning out during the most boring classes with my eyes wide open while sitting at the desk closest to the teacher. It was more typical for the malcontents, troublemakers and such to cluster as far away from her as possible.

This I realized was poor strategy. If you wanted to sleep right through a class, you had locate yourself in the general vicinity of the most irreproachable kids. The enterprising neighbor who sat at the desk next to mine, put her time to good use by snacking out of the lunch boxes of the kids who actually paid attention to the teacher and took copious notes that the rest of us would soon borrow. Like me she no use for what was been taught and had been astute about choosing her desk. It paid rich dividends. At the end of forty minutes I would have no idea what had been taught or what if anything I was expected to have learned. My thoughts might have been one of many interesting places all highly unrelated to education and self-improvement.

I did suffer from occasional pangs of guilt for not having learned anything at school and having no desire to remedy the situation at home. Had I know then what I know now, I may have felt better about falling asleep on my text book the night before the test knowing fully well that I had squandered my last opportunity to familiarize myself with the material.

To remember something in particular -- say, the lines of a play or formulas for an exam -- it might help to study right before dozing, whether that means studying late at night or napping directly after a cram session, Stickgold said.

And if you can get yourself to dream about the material, you are at a particular advantage. Unfortunately, "dream content is notoriously hard to control," Stickgold said. The non-conscious brain "has its own rules," and focuses on whatever it deems most important, he added.

Eco Friendly Programming

I received a note from J's school a few weeks ago with instructions to go on a certain website where kids can practice taking a computerized test - a skill they will need to have learned before the upcoming assessment tests. When I went there and realized that I would need to download a 50 MB application that would then launch the sample tests, I completely forgot to gripe about the school's insistence on communicating everything in printed paper instead of  email -even the face of steep budget cuts this year, that has not changed.

Surely, it is possible to write a lighter weight application or better still deliver the material on the web directly.Each time, I download something for work or personal use I can't but help wonder about the huge footprints of the executable files. When and how did things get so out of hand ? And these are fairly simple applications - I am just the average PC user with fairly limited needs.

Just because processing power and memory is cheap, folks have apparently dispensed with making any effort to prevent code bloat. Back in the day, you had to keep things under control simply there was no horsepower to support  anything giganormous. Maybe it's time that programmers were provided incentives to be eco-friendly.

Case Against Adolescence

The idea of ending adolescence is not entirely without merit. Specially like the practical implications (if this can ever become reality) because it would be such a blessing both for the jaded high-schooler who is ready for bigger challenges and for the all of often cash-strapped parents.

The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children. So consider this simple proposal: High school students who can graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to attend. If they graduate two years early, they get two years of scholarships. At no added cost to taxpayers, we would give students an incentive to study as hard as they can and maximize the speed at which they learn.

While the devil may well be in the details, the utter simplicty of the solution is definitely attractive.

Status

Read this interesting article on the psychology of social status. Both observations and conclusions seem to make sense but the author does not clarify whether status (high or low) is as it is perceived by the individual or as they are appear to be in the eyes of the world.

Status is inherently relative. A high in a one social milieu could end up ranking low in another. Would that then increase their propensity for negative low-status behavior ? Also if status is achieved or conferred for reasons other than material success what might an interaction between two high status individuals look like if their status is based on account of very different things. Who decides the relative status of these two individuals ?

Apparently, low-status behavior can be remedied : Finally, in an experiment with both high- and low-SES college students, Henry demonstrated that boosting people’s sense of self-worth diminished aggressive tendencies amongst low-status individuals.

The boosting of self-worth seems to be an integral part of elementary school curriculum but bullies are a still a problem. Maybe if self-worth boosting was limited to the target population it may have helped. With everyone undergoing a status elevation, the difference between high and low does not disappear - instead you now have to deal with the problem of everyone feeling special and entitled.

Grade School Musicals

I used to be ashamed to admit that I found it very hard to sit through the musicals put up by kids of any grade at J's school. It is an ordeal with few peers specially when being expected as a parent to cheer the kids for their efforts. Be it a kindergarten performance or one by the fifth graders, the results are always below par. Even with J performing, I find it impossible to work up any enthusiasm about the whole thing and long to get it over with and head home. I have shared with much trepidation how I felt about these things with other parents. Most have pointed out that I should scale down my expectations because this is no professional performance - the kids and the music instructor do the best they can given the time and resources they have available. Interestingly enough talent is not mentioned at all.

While I am not expecting a Broadway Kids experience, I would love for the children to be able to hold a tune, keep beat and show some signs of life while on stage. Clearly, that is quite a ways away from a 'professional performance" and yet it is too much to ask for. Reading this old article published in Washington Post about this topic gave me some new insights. I don't know anything about the quality of music produced by high-schoolers and am willing to believe that it is a lot better than what I have seen at the elementary school across the street.

The author is absolutely right about the blandness of the music the kids sing and play. I have tried to look up that stuff on You Tube and never found it. In this day and age, that is quite a feat for a piece of published music. The schools must scrape the bottom of the barrel with great deliberation to select these compositions. Maybe that also explains the lackluster attitude of the performers - it is just not the kind of music that they enjoy performing.

Essays On Math

Recently I read two essays on math. Two very different perspectives - one by PhD in literature , Mark Slouka and the other by a mathematician , Paul Lockhart. The former considers the consequences of math and science trumping frivolous subjects like literature in our education system. The later laments the way math is taught in schools. Both perspectives stand on their own are excellent on their own merits when you read them together, the convergences are fascinating. Slouka says :

The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be.

Lockhart says of math present day math education :

In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural
curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Neither art nor math is winning when they treated as fundamentally different things, meant to serve different objectives. If they did converge as Lockhart suggests - because math is an art form too - then they may both benefit. He quotes G.H Hardy :

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Upping Intelligence

Had this been the month of April, I would have dismissed this article as a joke. The story is, if the Baby Einstein videos did not up your child's IQ, you could get a refund. Since they don't ask for evidence of IQ before and after in order to determine eligibility for refund, it seems as if it is a foregone conclusion that there will be no uptick. Talk about truth in marketing. My first thought was obviously to check if I had any such videos from J's baby days.

I do recall having borrowed some Baby Einstein classical music CDs from the library - I figured, a little bit of Bach or Mozart can only be a good thing for anyone babies included. As it turns out, I don't own any Einstein media and so there will be no refunds for me. That was a little disappointing. Here I was counting my unhatched chickens at $16 a pop. Naturally the article prompted a flurry of reader comments. One which I really liked was :

Any parent who believes that plopping her infant in front of a TV to passively watch a bunch of DVDs could have any positive effect on the child's intellectual development is certainly... no Einstein.

Touche ! Lawyers have apparently found a way to profit from the situation and reward parents who they seem to be suggesting had outsourced child rearing to Disney only to be duped.

Education And Options

I have been reading The New Global Student and am a little overwhelmed by sheer volume of choices to the traditional on-campus university education. The idea of the book as the subtitle states is to allow parents and students to get comfortable with skipping the SAT, saving their money and getting an international education. This Mashable article takes matters to the logical next step - an education that is completely free and available to everyone who is interested in it.

Between the two readings, I feel optimistic about the time when J is ready to go to college - she may have a great deal more choice on how to spend time and money in return for an education that is meaningful to her. It is heartening to know that beyond the narrow confines of a typical American public school education, there are wide open vistas where a young person may run free, go as far as they want to without needing to hock an arm and leg to pursue their dreams.

Alternatives To College

My friend A became father for the second time recently. We were catching up after a while and conversation turned to the cost of college education for our kids. His oldest is a few years younger than J. While I thought that there would be an array of cheaper, more innovative options in education and I may not need to hock an arm and leg to see J through school, A thought that the time-tested conventional way was still going to be the best - today or ten years from now.

That said, I would be wise to start a college fund for J and brace myself for the big expenses when the time came. Having studied in India's government subsidized university system, I am completely unfamiliar with the notion of having to pay for my education.When I hear what my peers who studied in America owe in student loans, I am petrified. There is no way, I would spend that much for a degree which really means little in the real world.

A passport to the job market in a non-specialized field such as the one I work in in should not cost nearly that much. Reading about StraighterLine makes me hopeful that J and her peers will have sensibly priced education options. There seems no reason why this model of $99 a month for any number of courses that you are able to complete in that time will not work. This is a great option for students who are able to work through the material at a fast clip but don't have the ability to pay extra for the accelerated pace.

Good Incentive

Incentives for reading work with kids but they have to be sized and timed right. Up until last year, it was the AR tests at J's school - the bane of my life. The kids were reading a lot but not really expanding their horizons. Each book read and comprehended gave the child a certain number of point and they made a big fuss over the kids who scored the most. J stayed strictly within the comfort zone of her favorite genres. No amount of prodding from me was enough to make her take the leap of faith and venture into unknown territory. Books got rejected without a second thought let alone a good faith effort to try and like them.

This year they are trying something different. Kids will get small prizes if they read books from at least eight different genres and can talk about each book they read. Now J is on a mini-reading spree and is not saying no to anything. The magic number is eight and it takes her quite a distance from what she is most familiar and comfortable with. I like this a whole lot more than the AR tests.

As I consider the effectiveness of this strategy, I wondered why I did not try something similar at home. Chances are it would not have worked both for reasons for size and time. There is no competition at home which can be a huge damper on any incentive scheme. Then there is the matter of timing. She was probably not mature enough to go across eight different genres at less than eight years old.

At any rate I am glad to see my wish for her read what does not appeal to her immediately, stretch her mind and imagination in ways that they haven't been before, being fulfilled.

Speech And Action

J's school principal left us parents a message on the eve of the president's address to school students to let us know the kids would be tuning in to the speech in their classrooms and it would be incorporated into the curriculum over the next couple of days. I thought it was a wonderful speech and if it touched the hearts and minds of some students, it might actually change their lives in a positive way.

Not that this is a barometer for anything but I did have a chance to go out to dinner with a group of folks who have school age children just a couple of days after this speech. The kids in question range from age five to sixteen. I have socialized with groups such as this one many times in the past have noticed that conversation about kids tends to be limited to a few topics - daycare challenges, the last vacation, performance in sports and the funny things kids said or did.

If there was a college bound child the parent may talk about how many campuses they had visited, the long road trips and flights that involved and what they were doing to set them up in their new digs. The field of study would almost be mentioned as an afterthought if at all. You would be hard pressed to remember that these kids actually went to school, were getting an education (or not). The emphasis is so clearly absent that you cannot miss it. Post-speech none of this has changed.

I know several children who are really interested in learning but have completely nonchalant parents. They will gladly take them to Disneyland for vacation but will not drive them down the street to the public library even when the child is craving to read. While it is a great idea to ask children to take responsibility for their education and do their part but it may not go very far if the culture at home does not emphasize the importance of learning and hard-work nearly enough.

There are parents in America who are very involved with their children's education and are making the most of the resources the system has to offer and chipping in where it is lacking. The speech will serve to reinforce the message to the kids of such parents. While that is a good thing, they don't really need the extra reinforcement. The most vulnerable group however is one whose parents just do not value education as much as they do other things. These kids need a helping hand urgently but steering them in the right direction is a far more difficult proposition. It will be interesting to see how much the speech was able to influence them.

Facts And Orginal Thought

Recently, I had opportunity to chat with someone who has been involved in elementary school education for well over thirty years. This post is prompted by one of her observations. W said that knowing facts or being well informed is not nearly as important for children as being able to take those facts and learned knowledge and apply it in unconventional ways. In effect she is suggesting there is no room for the average kid who is not particularly creative or original. While such a kid may be able to learn and reproduce the learning in its original context they may not be able to transfer it over to situations where it does not obviously belong.

I was almost prompted to ask if general knowledge and awareness of the world is not important because there is Google and also what percent of the kids she came across in her career were able to do what she thought was important. While creative and original thinking is undeniably important, it does seem like a tough (if not impossible) standard by which to measure every child's success in school. What I find hard to understand as well is how a mastery of the data is not important when success is measured by the ability to slice, dice and analyze it. In the article, I have referenced, Bamber Gascoigne, a well known quiz-master has this to say :

“In many ways modern education is much better, teaching people to think, but there is a disadvantage, which is that time is limited and if you spend time analysing you don’t have time to learn a basic structure or framework of facts.”

Chance Answer

While comparing notes on elementary schools with another mom, I might have stumbled on a possible answer to a question that has bothered me for a while now. I had always thought the the approach that American schools take to early education was wonderfully liberating and creative as compared to what I had experienced in India as a child. In large part it the reason I decided to raise J in America even if it meant I had to do so alone. That said, it is deeply frustrating for me when reality does not even come close to what my expectations. Maybe I held too romantic a notion about the whole thing and so disappointment was inevitable.

The method and style of instruction in the American elementary school requires a very low student to teacher ratio to be successful. The focus is on individuality and the ability to use learning in creative and untutored ways. All the things that I think are very important to a well-rounded education and were completely missing in my own. No amount of rote learning and mastery of process (as required in the Indian system) can replace the value of these skills.

My question had been why am I so disillusioned with a system that is doing just what I had wanted. It maybe because of class size. There are twenty five kids in J's class and have been about that many since her kindergarten days. One teacher is simply not going to be able to provide the one-on-one time to that many children. In as such, the method of instruction is no longer suitable. When the student to teacher ratio gets sufficiently high, there is a need to change it substantially. At the far end of the scale with forty plus kids to a teacher as I had growing up, the only viable way is to get kids to cram and regurgitate so they don't fail in their tests. Anything beyond that is merely nice to have.

As public schools get their budgets slashed and grow over-crowded the old way of teaching in America is probably just not working out. It does not help either to live in a neighborhood with a sizable transient population causing the class size to vary quite a bit over the school year. J's had teachers who love their job and have excellent ideas to make learning fun for children but their style simply does not scale well. They could have worked miracles with ten to twelve kids in their care but such is simply not the case.So we have these pockets of disruptive or jaded kids in the classroom while the rest get a lot less than they deserve from their school.

Information Ocean

J often gets homework assignments that involves researching for information to write a report or complete a project. The topics are fairly straight forward being that the "researchers" are only 6-8 years old. I usually help her find the information from credible sources on the Internet and will check out some books from the local library if time permits.

Watching this video about the role of a school librarian in the 21st century gave me much food for thought. Specially when the librarian featured in it talks about growing up in an information desert whereas kids today are in an information ocean and drowning in it. Information fluency is as she points out is a crucial survival skill in the world that J and her peers are growing up in. It is just as if not more important than learning to read for these kids.

There is just too much information out there and not knowing to navigate successfully can determine whether they will sink or swim in this "ocean". A big take away for me from watching this is to start teaching J to find her way around search engines and be able to tell good information apart from the bad. You can't emphasize to kids soon enough that credibility is not conferred on a piece of information just because it showed up in Google search.The importance of this had not fully registered with me until hearing from a vanguard of library science and its use in elementary schools.