Solvation

The Debate

Recently, NCES/ETS published a paper on public/private correlated data, "Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling" (Braun, Jenkins, Grigg).  It's an extremely technical paper, obviously intended for statisticians, given comments like, "And now I'll make it easier for you, here are the formula:..."

Shortly thereafter, there came along a refutation from Harvard Education Policy faculty, "On the Public-Private School Achievement Debate" (Peterson, Llaudet).

School Selection

The paper examines how it is that conscientious parents make school choices.  She uses a sample set that is deliberately constructed in a high-choice city, and the subjects all are "choosers," i.e. people relatively actively involved with their kids' education. 

Funny in Farsi

Just finished Funny in Farsi.  It's on the sidebar.  If you grew up elsewhere but your kids are growing up in the US, you'll enjoy it, I'm sure.

Good choice for High School kids' biography selection if they need one.  Some younger kids may like it too, but she spends a considerable amount of time talking from enough of an adult perspective that some kids might not be able to relate to it until they're older.

Rapid Prototyping

In my previous post about Math I alleged that part of the point is to train and evaluate the ability to make logical leaps, and because of that tutoring is seen as something to help children catch up but also as something that works against the student if it's used to allow them to "preview material" before the course. 

I decided I needed to elucidate.

My assumptions throughout will be indented in Bold:

1. The idea of having something that the student hasn't seen yet is to encourage them to reach toward the next step or two.  It is actual training for them to make logical leaps.

If a child is eligible for honors classes because they're actually a half-year ahead of everyone else, in other words if they make logical leaps almost always because they've already formally learned the material, they're missing this part of the educational process.

And this leads me to the entire concept of honors, gifted, talented students in the U.S.   

Math

After having an hour-long conversation with a concerned mother from India about her children's education in math, I checked around and have added a few more books to the list.

More on Math and Science

I was a Destination Imagination event last weekend, where I met two engineers from India, one working in the US at IBM, the other at Oracle. In our downtime we discussed differences in math and science education in the US and India.  There were three things of note: