I posted this a year ago today. I still like it, so here it is again.

I resolve to

• believe that my child and I are always on the same side.
• trust that my child knows what’s best for her.
• remember that children model better than they listen.
• assume that if an activity is valuable to my child, it is valuable for my child, if I can only see why.
• ask “Why not?” more than I ask “Why?”
• believe that my child will do it if she can do it.
• believe, even in the face of short-term evidence, that my support and approval are among my child’s most important goals.
• look at what’s right, not what’s wrong.
• defend my child when his instincts are right; take a stand against any system that is looking more to its goals than to my child’s.
• take a flame thrower to every unworthy homework assignment that crosses my doorstep.

Happy New Year!

Here’s the game:

Spaced Penguin

Here’s some adults playing another version of the same game:

On the Orbit Structure of the Logarithmic Potential

Get it?

DadTalk is a regularly intelligent blog – one of the few I come back to. He had just the same reaction I did to a recent report of “Yet Another ‘Big’ Plan to Reform Education”

I would love to tell you about proposed redesign of the nation’s educational system, but I can’t. Why? Because some boneheads decided to charge $19.95 for a report that is supposed to be a “far-reaching redesign of the American education system,” according to a skimpy New York Times article.

He goes on to critique the report, based on what little he can learn of it (more than I did) as yet another round of “bureaucratic structural changes to America’s educational system.”

I wonder: Do the high-power commissions that generate this sort of dreck believe they’re making a difference? At times, I think reports like this are deliberate subterfuge to avoid the really difficult questions.

This post is half to point back to an interesting August conversation: Rote Memory. We were talking about what facts are worth memorizing and, more generally, why (and whether) kids should learn some things “by heart.”

One of the uncontested areas where the culture agrees that schools should call on rote memory is spelling, represented by the weekly spelling test, so I was intrigued by this comment from James Gleick, in the November 5 New York Times ("Cyber-Neologoliferation” – gotta put that one on next week’s spelling test!)

Yet the very notion of correct and incorrect spelling seems under attack. In Shakespeare’s day, there was no such thing: no right and wrong in spelling, no dictionaries to consult. The word debt could be spelled det, dete, dett, dette or dept, and no one would complain.

Then spelling crystallized, with the spread of printing. Now, with mass communication taking another leap forward, spelling may be diversifying again, spellcheckers notwithstanding.

Things like the weekly spelling test seem to be written in stone – to be the way they always were. Not so. After all, Public education, the idea that nearly all children should be educated at state expense, is a few centuries old, depending on how you define it. The specifics of the current curriculum were written “yesterday.” Shaksper died less than three centuries ago, spelling his name any way he wanted to.

Is standardized spelling one of the pillars of civilization? Can the drive to standardize it withstand cyberneologiferation? Could the time spent on spelling lists be better spent elsewhere? I don’t know. I do think it’s time to be asking fundamental questions about what we teach, and especially about what we ask kids to learn by heart.

Some eras (Athenian Greece, Pre-Revolutionary America) were able to develop a fair number of people who were knowledgeable, creative, intellectually active reasoners and innovators. Are we?

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas” – that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

Alfred North Whitehead

Yes!

The ways in which we have been used to learning about the world are becoming less and less effective in terms of making sense of things these days. We need new skills and literacies that our kids and our students are exploring, but we’re not giving them a lot of landmarks to follow to learn those literacies effectively. And the lens that we bring to these shifts is very difficult to change.

Continuing the Conversation–Lake Chautauqua, NY

Whoee! Don’t we all love being right? Back on March 26, I said:

How can I communicate to you that there’s been a huge new discovery – possibly the most important about the human brain in these recent decades of unparalleled discoveries – one that fundamentally advances our understanding of what it is to be human and how it is that we can be human?

That post, Mirror Neurons – 1 will link you to three other posts on the same topic.

The November Scientific American agrees: the cover story features two articles, one by the discoverers of this system of neural circuits that seem to explain so much of what it is to be human:
Mirrors in the Mind
(unfortunately, not available online in its entirety)
and one that speculates about what may happen when these circuits don’t work:
Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism

But the point is not simply that there’s interesting theory and rampaging speculation about a newly discovered kind of brain circuitry. The point is: Mirror neurons matter to parents. We need to understand that they exist, how they appear to work, and how they are ready to help us raise our kids. Not that we can say “Hey, Kid-Brain, mirror this!” but that knowing something of this circuitry – how it can help, and how it may be misused – will help us do a better job.

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

I was talking a while ago about Chaperone,the new cell-phone-with-GPS unit that allows parents to know where their kids are. Miriam flicked the spy-phone challenge off her sleeve and noted a really fine parental spy technique – communicating:

As a formerly bad girl, this cell-phone-as-tracking-device strikes me as almost embarrassingly easy to foil. Leave the cell phone where you are supposed to be and go somewhere else. How does Mom know you’re ditching school if your phone is in your locker?
However, I am not against less asinine forms of spying on young teenagers. Asking them how their day was is a great technique. Actually listening to the answer is even better, since thirteen-year-olds tend to be horrible liars.
No amount of technology can subsitute for actual parental involvement. Too often, parents focus on the material things that they can provide for their children and end up working so much that they never see them. 40 hours per week is plenty, and it’s all that most of us are paid for anyway (if we’re on salary). I’m not talking about intense, stay-at-home mommy stuff; getting home at 5pm is plenty. And for most of us, it is financially feasible. Just say no to expensive sneakers, and eat dinner together every night. It worked for us.
-Miriam

The conversation’s at Chaperone.

When I was a brand new school psych (pre-Internet), Dungeons and Dragons was a favorite target for public flogging by schools. Of course some of that was directed at wizards and what not – the same silly hysteria that has gone after Harry Potter. But a surprising amount of the criticism was that D&D led kids into isolation – playing the game all the time, how could they have a normal social life? The paradox? For many kids, D&D was their social life. Many of the kids (mostly boys) who played were bright proto-geeks. At school, they were often isolated, rejected, teased, bullied. D&D was a magnet for other kids like them, and they built a terrific social world around gaming.

I think the same thing still holds, not only with games, but with a lot of Net-based activities. Many kids (not only boys now) find a closer, more supportive, more exciting world online than in class. Can schools recognize that reality, and find ways to work with that rich new social world for the benefit of their students?

I picked up our copy of Mouse Trouble last week, and I was gone! What memories of reading and rereading it! What a story! What a good moral, so simply presented! And the emotional buttons those illustrations push for me – memories of bedtime reading, of talking about the mice and the wonderful old cat they befriend! Even the masking tape one of the kids put on to hold it together is worn out.

So the invitation: Tell us about your most-loved children’s books! Your favorites might be picture books, first readers, chapter books, great reference books – anywhere from the first cloth book to ready-for-adulthood reading. They could be books you remember having read to you, ones you read to yourself when you were a kid, ones you read to your kids, or new ones you can’t wait to read to some deserving child. I’ve started the list off with one of my favorites.

Kids are especially invited to tell everyone about their favorites!

Maybe you’ll see some titles here you want to order. Of course Amazon is only a click away. But if you value independent book stores, call Kathleen at the Erie Book Store (800-480-5671), or your local independent dealer, if you’re still lucky enough to have one.

Down below are some resources to remind you of a few of the officially great children’s books. But your best resource is your memory of the books that mattered to you, and maybe a quick check of the most tattered covers on the shelf. Drop by and tell us about your favorites: Our Favorite Kids’ Books.

Here are two sites to jog your memory:

The Newbery Medal has been awarded annually since 1922 to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

The Caldecott Medal, has been awarded annually since 1938 to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.

If you have other links you think give great lists, please tell us about them!