Independent Study
There's an interesting excerpt from Chris Whittle's new book, Crash Course, in this week's TIME Magazine—interesting because it captures what I think I found so frustrating about my K-12 school experience, and why if I could change one thing about the course of my life, it would have been to go to college at 16 rather than 17.
By the sixth grade, let's assume only half of a student's time was spent in what we now think of as a classroom. Finally, by high school, imagine that one-third of a student's time was in a traditional classroom setting. (If you think this is overly radical, consider that many college students are in class fewer than 15 hours a week. They are only a few months older than high school seniors. Did something magically occur to make them more capable of independence?)
[For me the answer to that would be "no"; if independence were the only thing college offered, I would wish I'd gone at age 5. I only wish I'd gone at 16 because I feel like at that age I could have handled all the other stuff that comes with college as well as benefitted from the freedom to choose my classes and how often I attended them.]
The excerpt also underlined for me some of the reasons I'm considering home-schooling Austen. (At the moment it's just an idea; we'll see what he needs—and what I'm capable of—four years from now.) I worry that public schooling these days is all about regulated curricula and standardized testing (or worse, that it will be like it was when I was a kid—not much unsupervised learning, but plenty of unsupervised bullying). Better than home-schooling, I'm thinking (and the excerpt seemed to support) might be something that Val and I were discussing this weekend: namely, a one-room schoolhouse or equivalent, which might provide a way for students of different ages to learn from each other.
Anyway, as you can see, I don't have a clear picture of what the ideal educational system would look like for Austen or any other kid... but this excerpt got me thinking. I'm not super keen on Whittle's writing style, but his ideas are interesting—enough that I'll probably end up picking up his book when it becomes available.
Education's in the Air
The very day that Michele commented about Quaker schools on my Independent Study post, and I responded that the nearby Friends Select School would be at the top of our list, cost permitting, I noticed that the cover story in this month's Philadelphia Magazine was a ranking of the area's top public and private schools. (This is probably no coincidence; what better time of year to write stories about education?) Since I'd failed to find any mention of tuition or fees (other than a few words on how to apply for financial aid, and who's likely to get it) on the Friends Select website, I thought I'd pick up a copy of the magazine in case the school and its tuition were mentioned. They were, and I'm afraid Friends Select is no longer at the top of the list.
I'm as encouraged as ever regarding the quality of the education Austen would get at Friends Select, which is number 28 on PhillyMag's list of top 50 private schools, but the tuition for day students is listed as $18,125. That's 10 times what my annual college tuition cost at the University of Georgia (granted, we're talking 15 years ago), and what a year of grad school at Stanford cost Al back in the mid-90s. There's no way we could afford that and still have money left over to send Austen to college. (I haven't actually run the numbers to see what we'd need to do to afford it—how much we'd need to set aside, what we'd have to do without, etc.—and I probably won't. I just object to K-12 education costs that high on principle.) The one upside to the high cost of Friends Select is that the average of the highest teacher salaries is $74,792, according to PhillyMag. I think of this as an upside because I believe teachers in general are underpaid, and private school teachers are usually paid less than public school teachers. At least some of the tuition money seems to be going to the staff.
Regarding Clem's question about what my home-schooling curriculum would look like, I don't have a specific plan yet, aside from the plan to do a lot of reading on the subject over the next three or four years. I do know that I don't believe in pre-school education per se (though the Montessori* approach mentioned in PhillyMag's "The $12,000-a-Year Pre-School" sounds close to my philosophy that play = learning), so aside from watching Sesame Street, singing everything from Aimee Mann to Ella Fitzgerald, reading books out loud, listening to Harry Potter and other audiobooks, and playing on the floor, I don't plan on educating Austen before age 4 or 5. [*Link goes not to the school mentioned in the article, but to the Montessori school that's just around the corner from our house.] This is actually one of many reasons why home schooling is appealing: If Austen doesn't have to compete to get into a public or private elementary school, I'll be less likely to cave to the prevailing societal pressure to start schooling before Austen is technically school age.
One idea that sounds appealing, either on its own or as a supplement to a home school curriculum, is online learning. More and more K-12 schools, both public and private, are offering courses online, which seems to me to be a good way for students to determine their own pace of learning and to be more self-directed while still getting the benefits of a tested curriculum and the guidance of a qualified educator.
Of course, Austen could turn out to be more like his dad, who enjoyed classroom learning far more than I ever did, than like me, and thus he might tell us when he's 5 or 7 or 10 that he *wants* to go to a regular school. There's a brief profile of a student who decided to attend public high school "after feeling he'd hit a wall with homeschooling" in the "Tales Out of School" story in PhillyMag, and I don't doubt that this would be likely with Austen as well—even if he turns out to be more like me—given that I'm probably unqualified to teach most subjects beyond the elementary level. I know I'll be relying on Al to give Austen an introduction to physics, for example, and I'll probably need someone else to handle biology, which I suck at. (For some reason I don't find botany nearly as confounding as biology, so I could probably cover that, if necessary).
I'm probably getting a little ahead of myself here; I know that Austen will need to learn how to add and subtract before he learns algebra and calculus, so I probably shouldn't worry that my math skills are a little rusty. This is where downloading or purchasing some established home schooling curricula will really help, since I'm not exactly sure at this point what kids are expected to be learning at each grade level. To a certain extent, a little ignorance of expectations is a good thing—expectations can as often limit growth as encourage it—but I don't want my first mistake to be to overwhelm my child with too much information.
ANYWAY! As usual, I'm overthinking this, I think. :)
One more thought on education before I conclude this post: I'm still not entirely clear on how the Philadelphia school system works, but I got a little information about it from two cashiers at Whole Foods and the woman behind me in line this morning. Apparently kids are assigned to schools by district, but there's also a certain amount of choice: My cashier said that there are special (magnet?) schools that kids can get into based on good grades, good attendance, or good behavior, and these are in addition to charter schools, which the woman behind me in line clarified are funded with public school money. You apparently apply to them (the charter schools, I mean) like private schools—and some have waiting lists a mile long—but they don't cost extra. I obviously need to find out more if we're going to stay in Philadelphia for more than a few years, but that's a start.
I Couldn't Agree More
From School Monitor, an interview with Jonathan Kosol in today's NYT Magazine:
You also suggest that our current system of locally financed schools be abolished, claiming that it perpetuates inequality by allowing suburbs like Scarsdale and Manhasset to spend twice as much on each student as less affluent cities do.
Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.
...
Seriously, why would Republicans, who have traditionally opposed big government, encumber schools with the testing requirements attached to No Child Left Behind?
The kind of testing we are doing today is sociopathic in its repetitive and punitive nature. [Emphasis added.] Its driving motive is to highlight failure in inner-city schools as dramatically as possible in order to create a ground swell of support for private vouchers or other privatizing schemes.
From How Bingeing Became the New College Sport, an essay by Barrett Seaman in the August 29, 2005 issue of TIME Magazine:
What would happen if the drinking age was rolled back to 18 or 19? Initially, there would be a surge in binge drinking as young adults savored their newfound freedom. But over time, I predict, U.S. college students would settle into the saner approach to alcohol I saw on the one campus I visited where the legal drinking age is 18: Montreal's McGill University, which enrolls about 2,000 American undergraduates a year. Many, when they first arrive, go overboard, exploiting their ability to drink legally. But by midterms, when McGill's demanding academic standards must be met, the vast majority have put drinking into its practical place among their priorities.
A culture like that is achievable at U.S. colleges if Congress can muster the fortitude to reverse a bad policy. If lawmakers want to reduce drunk driving, they should do what the Norwegians do: throw the book at offenders no matter what their age. Meanwhile, we should let the pregamers come out of their dorm rooms so that they can learn to handle alcohol like the adults we hope and expect them to be.
Yet Another Reason to Hate No Child Left Behind
If you had any doubt that No Child Left Behind would make things worse instead of better, consider this:
In Mississippi, 89 percent of fourth graders performed at or above proficiency on state reading tests, while only 18 percent of fourth graders demonstrated proficiency on the federal test. Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Alaska, Texas and more than a dozen other states all showed students doing far better on their own reading and math tests than on the federal one.
The chasm is significant because of the compromises behind the No Child Left Behind law. The law requires states to participate in the National Assessment - known to educators as NAEP (pronounced nape) - the most important federal measure of student proficiency.
But in a bow to states' rights, states are allowed to use their own tests in meeting the law's central mandate - that schools increase the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency each year. The law requires 100 percent of the nation's students to reach proficiency - as each state defines it - by 2014.
I was already worried about educators "teaching to the test" instead of teaching kids how to think and how to learn. But if the test they're teaching to is crap, that's even worse. If this keeps up, no one American child will be left behind in the global economy; all of them will.
It's Reunion Time
I graduated high school in 1986—in other words, 20 years ago. I'm still not sure if I'm interested in going to my high school reunion, but it's been fun learning about where my former classmates from Sanderson High School in Raleigh, North Carolina are now via a Yahoo! group set up for that purpose. I wish there were a similar group for Needham High School Class of 1986; while I didn't graduate from NHS, the kids I knew there were the ones I grew up with, and therefore they're the ones I'm most curious about now.
I should make it clear that I know of no reunion plans for NHS '86, aside from the fact that NHS reunions in general usually take place on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I'm just posting this so that anyone else who happens to Google "Needham High School Class of 1986" or "Needham High Class of 1986" will get something other than registration-only reunion sites and irrelevant references to other high schools in the results. Maybe I'll even find a long-lost classmate or two.
No More Homework
My mom didn't believe in homework. If I ever probed beyond this simple declaration to discover the reasons behind her belief, I don't remember it specifically, but I do seem to recall that she felt that reading and undirected play were hugely important.
Of course, as with so many of my mom's declarations, I took it as gospel—and license not to work very hard. I know that despite her disagreement with common educational practice, my mom did still inquire as to whether I had any homework; since I didn't like carrying books home from school, "don't you have any homework?" was actually a pretty common query, to which I always answered, "I did it at school." (Once in a while this was even true.)
Unlike so many of my mom's declarations, I kept "I don't believe in homework" as my own. We are more unalike than similar now that we are both adults and mothers, but I think we're in agreement that homework is a soul killer, a stealer of childhood, and usually a waste of time. It is with great dismay that I've read over the years about the increasing homework burden on children as young as 5. I've seen with my own eyes second and third graders struggling home under the weight of a backpack bursting at the seams with books. It's just wrong for elementary school children to have back and shoulder pain—not to mention anxiety and depression—because we as parents want them to be able to compete in a global market. If that's what it takes, count me out. (Perhaps one of the reasons I've considered home schooling Austen is becoming clear, eh?)
Now I read that piling on the homework may *not* be what it takes. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times (free subscription required to view) this morning, co-authors of the forthcoming book The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It write:
In fact, there's serious doubt about whether homework has any benefit at all. Most studies have found little or no correlation between homework and achievement (meaning grades and test scores) in elementary school or middle school. According to Harris Cooper of Duke University, the nation's leading researcher on the subject, there is a clear correlation amoung high school students, but he warns that "overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades."
For the record, I did just fine without doing my homework. My grades suffered a bit when homework counted for a significant portion of the grade, of course, but I don't feel like my learning suffered. In fact, I think all that time *not* doing homework probably helped me, not least because I spent a good deal of it reading, writing letters and journals, and daydreaming. I'm all for reinforcing concepts, but I've found throughout my life—in school and especially beyond—that sometimes walking away from a problem is the best way to understand it (and, often, to come up with a solution for it). Let's give kids that same time to mull things over... and, more importantly, to just be kids.
How to Choose a Major
No one seems to want to listen to my assvice around here lately, so I've decided to share some with the broader Internet—and, more specifically, with those college-bound individuals who've yet to choose a major. There are probably many ways to go about this, but I wanted to share the way *I* did it because it's [a] simple, [b] logical, and [c] might surprise you. I know I was surprised by the outcome of this exercise when I did it back in 1986. (Yes, I'm OLD. Doesn't mean this isn't still a good idea.)
There've been a few times in my life where I've embarked on some new adventure without the least bit of planning, without knowing where I'm going, and without even knowing whether I've packed the right clothes. An example of this was the time I worked until 4am the day before leaving for a business trip to LA, called the airport shuttle service before leaving the office to arrange for a pickup "tomorrow" (because I hadn't been to bed yet), finally realized my mistake when the shuttle did not show up at 7am as requested, and then, when I arrived in LA, realized I had no idea where I was staying. Another example of this was the time I went off to orientation at the University of Georgia without any of my paperwork and with only a vague notion that I might want to major in psychology. I eventually thought to call an admin at the office from LAX and got the name of the conference hotel, and I managed at orientation without my paperwork, too, though both experiences probably would have been a lot more enjoyable had I planned ahead a little.
I came back from orientation feeling stupid for not knowing who R.E.M. or The Smiths were, confused about how the bus system worked, wondering what I'd gotten myself into ("goooooo Dawgs, sic 'em, woof woof woof woof"?), and absolutely certain that I didn't want to major in psychology. (It turned out that a major in psychology also required several courses in biology, which I suck at, and sociology, which I'd become rather skeptical of after a less-than-satisfactory experience with it in high school.) Luckily, I also came home with a course catalog, and I decided to try an experiment.
I went through the course catalog and read the descriptions of every one of the courses on offer. (Well, OK, maybe I skimmed a few of the less interesting ones.) More importantly, I CIRCLED the ones that sounded interesting. When I was finished, I went back and counted up the circled courses under each department. At UGA at the time, one needed 8 courses at a certain level or above (I think it was 300 or 400) to constitute a major. There was only one department under which I'd circled more than 8 courses (more than 8 is important, because not all courses are offered every quarter/semester): English, where I'd circled 14. The runner-up was History, with 6.
Suddenly it was very clear where my interests lay and what my major should be. I even had a good idea that what I was really interested in were language and writing rather than literature. (The few literature courses I'd circled were things like Beowulf in the original Old English and Chaucer in the original Middle English.) Before I performed this exercise, I honestly didn't know that English was a major. I'd taken it every year in high school, obviously, but it never occurred to me that it was anything other than a compulsory step toward one's high school diploma, a requirement analogous to Consumer Ed. Finding out that this was what I was interested in was just cooler than cool. Also? All the other non-English courses that sounded interesting but didn't manage major status could be used to fulfill history, language, humanities, and science requirements, not to mention electives. Suddenly, I had a plan.
As I went through registration each year and tried to find classes with seats left that would fit my plan, I had to make adjustments, of course. Some of the English courses that sounded so interesting never came up during my junior or senior years, when I was eligible to take upper-level classes. I learned from taking one class that I liked the professor or the topic more than I thought, and so I added more like it; the opposite happened, too. It's important to be flexible as you go, and to recognize that what you thought was interesting as an entering freshman may not be what really floats your boat as a junior. Still, knowing what your educational options are before you start your first class will help you figure out where you're going.
So get out that course catalog (you've got one somewhere in that pile of orientation materials), grab a pen, and hunker down for an hour or two. You just might emerge with a major.
More Advice for the College Bound: On Career-Readiness
I'd always planned to follow my How to Choose a Major post with one on the fact that English is not a career-ready major, but thanks to a busy couple days of bugfixing and an even busier weekend of weeding, cleaning, furniture-moving, and toddler-wrangling, Pioneer Woman and Sheryle have managed to give a preview of my point in the comments on the Major post. Sheryle writes:
...just take courses that you like until you've run out of time and are absolutely against the wall to be able to to graduate at all. So what major? Well, of course, the one you took the most courses in, just because they were so interesting and you're running out of time. This works well if you plan to go to graduate school and your major doesn't have to fit exactly or if you want multiple jobs in your life because they're interesting and not because they're part of your life track that included a specific, practical major.
A "specific, practical major" was exactly what I wanted to talk about. If the reason you are going to college is so that you'll be able to get a good job—or a job in a particular field—right out of college, then my method of scanning the course catalog for what interests you (or Sheryle's method of just taking the classes that interest you as they come up, rather than circling your options ahead of time) is probably NOT the best way to go about choosing a major.
It's probably worth noting that not many majors are "career-ready" in the sense that they'll prepare you for a high-paying, high-responsibility job right out of college. Yes, I know it'll come as a shock to many a 22 year-old, but chances are that not many experienced executives are going to give your brilliant insights much credence until you've tempered your enthusiasm with experience and maturity. Graduates of every stripe have to work their way up, no matter how smart they are. (As a matter of fact, the smarter you are, the more you probably need to be told to shut up and listen.) It's less about "paying your dues" than about gaining perspective and learning from those around you. Having said that, though, liberal arts (and even science) majors will likely have a tougher time getting on a career path than, say, computer science or landscape architecture majors.
Why? Because there's a big difference between education and training. As a liberal arts major, you'll have been educated, but you won't have been trained to do anything other than write well and think logically. (Yes, these are skills that everyone should have, and if you're an English, history, or philosophy major, you'll be appalled to find, when you arrive in the work world, how few of your colleagues can write a coherent sentence. At least you've got a leg up there.) The computer science major, on the other hand, has received the same basic education you have (i.e., she probably took the same core classes that you did), but she's also been trained in a specific field. She'll be able to put the programming languages, object-oriented design techniques, or systems design principles she's learned to immediate use somewhere, if she wants to. Yes, she'll start at the bottom, too, but an obvious career path (or at least, several obvious choices of career path) will be open to her.
You, the liberal arts major, on the other hand, could do just about anything—you just need a little training in a specific area to get started. For some, the thing to do is to put all you've learned about reading, writing, thinking, and studying to good use in graduate school, where, if you're lucky, you'll receive some training in a field as well as further education. For example, an English or philosophy degree is a perfect foundation for law school. You might even be able to go to medical school with such a foundation, provided you also took actual biology and chemistry courses and not just the botany and chemistry-for-non-science-majors courses that I took. You could get an MFA in creative writing, which is a good option if you really have no interest in a career at all, if you have a trust fund, or if you believe it's the best way to coax that million-dollar novel out of you. You could also do what everyone you meet asks if you're going to do—teach—and either get certified with just a B.A. or get an M.Ed. (For what it's worth, most teaching jobs require the Master's now.)
If more schooling is not for you, your next task is to determine what *is* for you. If you opted for Sheryle's method of just taking whatever classes seemed interesting each quarter/semester—or my similar method of determining ahead of time where your interests lay—because it suited your personality, you're probably in for a bit of floundering. That's not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, I'd recommend embracing it as enthusiastically as possible so that the hours spent whining about your shit job are kept to a minimum. (I'd also recommend that you don't move to an expensive apartment in a big city with only $100 in your pocket and get a $99 speeding ticket on the way, as I did. It will severely limit your options.)
My point is, you're not going to be able to walk out of college and hit the ground running with an English degree. Just as you did when you entered college, you're going to need to take some time to discover what suits you. You might even discover that lots of things suit you, or that different things seem perfect at different times. Keep your ears open, be willing to try new things, and if at all possible, don't go deeply into debt. (Also: By all means figure out what your expenses are likely to be and what you'll need to make to cover them, but avoid justifying your salary requirements based on your expenses. Do some research and find out what the starting salary range is for the job for which you are applying, consider your experience and skills, and base your asking price on that. If the prospective employer expresses surprise at the steep request, be prepared to tell him what you can do for the company that makes you worth the money. Never forget that this isn't about what they can do for you, but what you can do for them.)
This is your chance to discover that there are more jobs in the world than teacher, lawyer, doctor, and police officer. For example, it didn't occur to me until my last quarter of school that I could get paid to do something I did anyway, almost unconsciously—copy editing. Maybe you're interested in health care, biotech, or software development but have only your English or history or comparative literature degree. Consider leveraging the skills you already have—research, writing, editing, analysis—to gain the skills you want by applying for a technical editor position at a biotech firm, a documentation writer position at a software company, or an internal communcations specialist position at healthcare company. (Granted, openings like these often require years of experience, but sometimes there are junior positions, contract positions, or internships available as well. The idea is to do something you're qualified for now while working toward the thing you want to try next.)
I'm not sure I'd recommend it, exactly, but another option is to apply for an administrative or receptionist position at one of these companies. I worked as a temp when I first moved to Washington, DC, and although I felt frustrated and pigeonholed most of the time, it also led to an exciting job at the World Bank, where I gained tons of research, multimedia development, and communications skills, and where I discovered my next calling (something called the World Wide Web). A friend of mine started at Macromedia (now Adobe) as an admin, and 15 years later he's still with the company—as a top executive. Think only a man can do that? Another friend who was looking to change careers after leaving the foreign service took a temp position as the CEO's admin while his regular admin was away. The CEO was like, "what the hell are you doing working as an admin?" She answered simply, "I wanted to move into software, and this seemed like a good way to start." When her temp stint was over, she moved into business development at the company—and totally rocked at it. Lesson here? If your resume doesn't have the skills or experience that you want to highlight on it, swallow your pride, start smaller, and show them what you can do.
Why Yes, I Do Take Each and Every One of Them As a Personal Insult. Why Do You Ask?
Short-answer questions from Unit 2 of my online C++ course, and my short answers:
1. What is the size of a class object?
Tell me why this is important, and I might care. Or not.
2. What is the difference between a class and an object?
Yeah. See above.
3. In general, why is it a bad idea to make data members public?
I know, but I have no interest in trying to put my knowledge into words.
4. What are the similarities and differences of structures and classes? When do you use one versus the other in C++?
See answer to #3.
5. What is the primary advantage that C++ classes have over C structures?
Um, clarity? Automatic constructors and destructors? Something else? <shrug>
6. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using defaultable parameters?
Why don't YOU tell ME? That would save us all a lot of time and trouble.
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using name and operator overloading?
See #6.
8. Why might it be hazardous to overload comparison operators?
How about I just promise not to, and we'll call it even, OK? (Ooh! Unintentional humor!)
I am so not cut out for learning this way.