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In a new book titled Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, the sociologist and popular writer, claims that the best way to achieve expertise is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills. The idea is not new. It has been captured for ages in the old proverb of "practice makes perfect."
Unfortunately, in American education, the move seems to be in the opposite direction. Writing is one of the most important skills that schools can teach. Yet, high schools are going to shorter and shorter assignments, often to the point of requiring no papers at all.
As Jay Mathews reports in the Washington Post, :
"We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this. It isn’t just college students who are hurt. Studies show research skills are vital for high school graduates looking for good jobs or trade school slots.
The leading U.S. proponent of more research work for the nation’s teens is Will Fitzhugh, who has been publishing high school student papers in his Concord Review journal since 1987. In 2002, he persuaded the Albert Shanker Institute to fund a study of research paper writing by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut. The results were ... bleak .... Sixty-two percent of the 400 high school history teachers surveyed never assigned a paper as long as 3,000 words, and 27.percent never assigned anything as long as 2,000 words.
They had no time to assign, monitor, correct and grade such papers, they said. If they assigned long projects, they could not insist on the many revisions needed to teach students the meaning of college-level work. So most new undergraduates check into their freshman courses unclear on the form and language required for academic research.
The colleges aren’t great at filling the gap. A new book by Seton Hall University scholar Rebecca D. Cox, “The College Fear Factor,” painfully exposes students wallowing in ignorance, and professors not understanding why. Only about half survive this torture and graduate."
Despite the talk of higher standards, almost all the focus in on the early primary grades. Little thought or effort goes into developing the more advanced skills in the later school years. So, regardless of how desirable, it is not realistic to expect much change in schools in the near future.
Given this situation, what can committed parents do to overcome the problems? As with many issues, it requires taking matters into one's own hands. It may be surprising but there is an option that can do a lot--and happily at the same time, foster family interaction. It is THOUGHTFUL DISCUSSION. The key is to set regular times for conversations about key issues--in the family, in the nation, in the world. The demands of such conversation are not identical with writing--but they have important similarities. And rules can be put into place that offer the advantages of research. For example, once a mutually agreed upon topic is determined, each person agrees to read at least three articles on the topic. That way, when the conversation takes place, they are prepared and ready to back up the points they raise. Admittedly, this type of discussion is currently fairly rare, but that does not mean, the situation cannot change. The potential gains in family communication, self-expression, and world knowledge are enormous. So with a little effort and no cost, amazing things can be accomplished.
Deborah Szekely is an outstanding woman, long recognized as a, if not the, founder of the modern health and fitness movement. She has served on health and fitness councils under a variety of presidents. Recently she teamed up with Dr. David Kessler, author of The End of Overeating, to write about health care reform. Their ideas --if put into action, will --at little cost--do more for health care than all the versions of the bills now being debated in Congress.
They start from the premise that we'll never control health care costs until we halt the nationwide epidemic of overeating, lack of exercise, and obesity. Currently, among America's children -- nearly one in three youngsters, from age 2 to 19, is overweight, and approximately 17% are dangerously obese.
But that does not mean that things cannot change. And, interestingly, they see children as the ones who can lead the way. They point to some of the great health and environmental movements of the past half century: When children caught the anti-litter bug in the '50s and '60s, they lectured their parents every time a soda can went out the car window. Anti-smoking campaigns in the '60s and '70s succeeded when an entire generation -- the Baby Boomers -- begged their elders to stop. More recently, recycling has become a way of life because children embraced the notion of a more sustainable world. So their premise is simple: if children learn the skills of healthy living, they will lead their parents to healthier habits as well.
Accordingly, they urge the creation of a new national initiative in grade schools -- the Living Skills Semester -- with a curriculum designed specifically to prevent obesity by addressing knowledge and understanding of the human body, nutrition, fitness, and all that is required for a long, healthy, and happy life. They ask this thought-provoking question: What if fifth-grade American children receive an entire semester in which all classes in math, science, geography, language, history and the environment integrated existing fifth-grade educational requirements with studies of how the body functions; its nutritional and physical needs, and proper sources and preparation of healthy, fresh, nutritious foods?
They also urge Congress to enact bipartisan legislation introduced by Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to modernize decades-old nutrition standards in the schools by covering not only student cafeteria meals but also the foods and beverages in the schools' vending machines. Schools should also be required to offer physical education to every student every day.
They also cite several examples of effective programs that can serve as models for the entire nation. For example, at Rutgers in New Jersey, HealthBarn USA offers children the opportunity to work on a farm and learn about nutrition by growing, harvesting, and cooking fresh seasonal food. The University of Massachusetts has developed Strength and Power in Nutrition (SPIN), a program that has been tailored to, and tested, with low-income, culturally diverse adolescents. Similarly, the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center conducts a traveling exhibit called Body Walk that has taken the message of healthy eating and frequent exercise to more than 125,000 children in more than 250 schools.
And if we fail to do this? The costs will be astronomical as an appalling 86% of Americans could be overweight within two decades. Obesity-related medical bills will amount to almost $1 trillion. As they write, "The solution is prevention via education, and it must start now."
If you are familiar with Pilates, yoga and exercise classes, then you are familiar with inflatable balls that let you sit and bounce up and down. Some teachers say they belong in school classrooms too because they sharpen students' attention and improve their posture.
And that's what has been happening in some schools around the nation. One teacher in Chicago checked the Internet for ways to help her restless pupils sit still. She stumbled on a story about exercise balls improving concentration. So she replaced her classroom's chairs with bouncy 21-inch-high balls in colors students chose. And the results are very promising--in terms of focus and attention.
The Wisconsin company, WittFitt, which sells exercise ball chairs for classroom use reports a increase in customers, from one school in 2004 to more than 300 across the country and abroad.
Subconscious mental activity lies at the core of the science behind the balls' success, experts say. The tiny movements kids make to stay balanced stimulate their brains and help them focus, says Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard University professor and author of "Driven to Distraction" and "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain." Children with attention disorders, he says, have "a sleepy cortex," and exercise combats that mental disengagement. "Just by using their core muscles more, they're flipping [their cortex] on" and increasing their mental activity, Ratey says.
In our fast paced society, sleep deprivation among school age children, particularly adolescents, is a well-known phenomenon. Now a school in Tyneside England has set the schedule so that the school day starts later--at 10AM to be precise. The school has launched a five-month experiment that has the backing of pupils, teachers and parents.
The kids have long championed this idea. But their voices alone did not bring about the change. Before implementing the plan, the headteacher, Dr Paul Kelley, took advice from sleep experts, in particular Russell Foster, a professor of circadian (the 24 hour daily cycle) neuroscience at Brasenose College, Oxford.
In his research, Professor Foster has highlighted studies which suggest that teenagers coping with the onset of puberty need more sleep than the rest of the population. As a result, they are likely to be at their peak performance in the afternoon rather than the morning, and continuous interruption to their sleep patterns is likely to have an impact on their health and mental capacity. The tests conducted thus far appear to confirm the idea that students perform better in the afternoons.
Initially, Dr Kelley wanted to make a more radical change to the school's timetable, pushing back the start time by two hours to 11AM. However, a compromise deal saw it changed to 10AM. Lessons carry on for an extra 30 minutes in the afternoons, with the school staying open for study until 5PM.
At the same time, the school still remain open from 8am until 5pm, so that parents with childcare problems, or families in which both partners have jobs, can still leave their child at school before going to work.
Dr Kelley said several schools in Canada and the United States had put back their starting times – but some had abandoned the idea because it was more difficult to fit in sport schedules with schools sticking to traditional timetables.
Hopefully, this "experiment" will continue to flourish and expand. It's so nice when bureaucracies are open to change that can offer powerful benefits to their "constituents."
A college admissions consultant, Gwyeth Smith, recently published an article in the Washington Post where he has some simple advice for parents and students: WAIT!
For many, this may seem like a wild proposal whose main effect is to raise the anxiety of all concerned. But it takes on a new light when you consider some of the ideas that are behind it. For a start, he suggests that the year can be used for work--and the expanding skills that come from pursuing something other than classroom activities. And lots of time should be spent in "devouring" a stack of great books.
As Smith says, "I've watched too many students get caught up in the admissions arms race and spend their high school years preening for colleges. They rocket through advanced-placement classes; they push their SAT or ACT scores to the 98th percentile. Yet they don't slow down to reflect on who they are and who they want to become. Soon after plunging into their dream engineering or pre-med program, many realize that they aren't cut out to be engineers, doctors and the like."
The potential to take a year off will also ease the stress of the admissions process. Students who don't get into their first- or second-choice school during 12th grade will have another shot. Or maybe -- just maybe -- the extra maturity will allow them to realize that college is about the fit, not the brand.
There are advantages to the families as well. It gives them a better chance to handle the increasingly onerous finances of higher education. While the pay during the year off may not be great, it still can serve to lower the debt that the student is likely to have to take on.
Some colleges are in tune with this idea. For example, Reed College, in Oregon., allows admitted students to defer entrance for a year, after submitting a plan for their activities that year, and nearly 7 percent take up the offer.
H. Keith H. Brodie, a psychiatrist and president emeritus of Duke University, has been quoted as saying that he believes freshmen who delay college for a year tend to be more altruistic and empathetic because brain development continues into late adolescence. He advocates the year off with a key proviso--the student should have a mentor, a plan for intellectual growth and a commitment to do public service.
So productive "waiting" has a lot going for it. In the increasingly pressured atmosphere of modern existence, this idea deserves serious consideration.
In a program known as Race to the Top, the federal government is coaxing states to change policies by offering them chances to get a cut of $5 billion in educational grants. One of the major goals is to tie teacher pay to student performance.
As always, money talks. For example, Wisconsin lawmakers are voting this week to lift a ban on using student test scores to judge teachers. Nine other states have taken similar steps, even though states can't apply for the money yet and only a few states may end up getting grants. All this might make sense if the underlying assumption was valid--namely, that teacher motivation is a key factor in the poor academic results that mark schools across the nation. Ironically, results in from Texas just this week raise serious challenges to this line of reasoning. That state has spent $300 million on merit pay for teachers over the last three years. The plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents hoped for when the program was launched in 2006.
Teacher motivation is important. It is soul destroying to be in a class where the teacher is not fully committed to success. But teacher motivation is not the source of the pandemic of poor performance that achievement scores steadily reveal.
Lots of factors are involved. One of the key ones is found in the field of reading. Effective reading is the foundation for academic success. But reading instruction is marked by inadequate, incomplete and ineffective content and methods. As long as that system continues, reading failure will continue. No matter how committed the teacher, the methods of instruction are going to yield failure.
Unfortunately, the program does not simply represent a waste of valuable money and effort. As long as this line of thinking dominates educational planning, effective change is not going to happen.
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