Sounds great but it sounds more like a math team type development program. As you know I have been doing ACT / SAT Math/Science prep tutoring for over 20 years and the interesting thing I see is that the schools, at least in our area, teach the basic tools of Algebra and Geometry but there is very little evidence of teaching problem solving. In my 3 or 4 one hour sessions with a student I work on problem solving skills - which start with READING the problem and detecting the significance of certain words in the problem itself. Once students start READING the problem, doing the math is not hard. One fact is obvious - the longer the problem description is the more likely students are to give up quickly and not even try. I get them to keep their focus on WHAT ARE THEY ASKING? The problem can be something very basic like:
John is going on a trip and he has been talking to a car rental company and the company explains that for his trip they have two options - Car A gets 22 miles per gallon and costs $50/day to rent and costs $0.25/mile driven. Car B gets 34 miles per gallon and costs $60/day to rent and $0.20/mile driven. John's trip from his home in Houston, TX to Denver, Co will take 2 days and cover 1,500 miles. How much will John save if he chooses the lowest cost option assuming that the cost of gas is the $3.00/gallon for both cars?
The math is basic arithmetic but the test writers add all the extra words to get students lost in the words rather than focusing on the math. So, I suggest that a part of the coursework focus on reading long problems and how to screen out extra information that does not help with the problem.:)
I tell the students that in 3 or 4 hours I can't reteach what they have covered in school over the past 6 or 7 years but if I can help them learn to THINK, then they can figure out any problem the ACT will throw at them and it works. The analogy I use to help people understand what schools are doing is this: Assume you took a mechanics course to learn how to rebuild your car engine and the teacher spent weeks going over each and every tool in the tool box. They show videos on how the tools are made and who has what patent on it. They include a few interviews with the people who invented the tools. They give tests making sure you remembered the %chrome and % iron in each tool and how much stress it can handle and all these kinds of details. THEN, for your final exam they roll in an old car and say - Now rebuild the engine. Not one single thing has been taught about USING the tools or how to use the tools to rebuild the engine or how an engine works. They just focused on teaching the tools. That is what I see from the math students I work with every day.
Mathew, you also know I have done a lot with science - specifically I developed over 30 hands-on science classes for working with elementary school students that focused on combining several levels of hands-on problem solving within the science that all students love. In 25 years of teaching 200 - 300+ students a year my classes we never had even one student that was not interested. All students participated. If your program would be interested in me working with you on that just let me know.
Any other aspects that you come up with that I can help with, let me know. I have all of my math videos on my YouTube channel for AllPencilsDown and I will be developing more but those are specifically about ACT/SAT math.
It is unfortunate that many students in the US lack reading and comprehension skills. My son, as a teenager, would tutor college students (much older than him), teaching them to read and understand the literature in front of them. He's been a voracious reader since he was in elementary school. We both agreed that our educational system has failed millions of kids, especially the underserved community. Thanks to the grotesque amount of corruption, spending more money has made the problem worse. Let the teachers teach instead of focusing on standardized test scores. My daughter's elementary school focused on teaching kids how to take tests, it was a huge battle for us.
1. I am Polish and live in Poland. Polish is a phonic language so the idea of using whole language method has never crossed anybody's mind here. So I doubt there is problem with reading in Poland - at least no one talks about it.
2. Polish schools are now test oriented, too, and moving on to the next level of education most of the time depends on test scores and grades. That's devastating. Hovever, there is a small loophole - olympiads. If you make it to top 100 nationally, roughly, a highschool of your choice/ university program of your choice, , respectively, must accept you. But that's a risky bet for most, though my kids used it.
Thank you thank you thank you! English is my second language yet I am more proficient in it than many native-born Americans. My youngest grandchild is being taught Spanish (my native language) and he's grasping it, he loves switching between English and Spanish. He's a very smart toddler. I will be reading your research and I whole heartedly appreciate your response. Please continue to share your knowledge in this space, I'm sure Mathew and Liam will enjoy reading it as well, both are always willing to learn new techniques. If you're not a member of their Locals channel, I suggest you join. We get to discuss all sorts of interesting subjects and research. (https://roundingtheearth.locals.com) You don't have to pay to become a member. I'm a paying member because I support these two young men who want to make this world a better place - through education.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I am already on Locals so we may cross our paths again. I am interested in spreading my experience to help others, too. :)
Stop believing there are even a large minority of currently employed teachers capable of teaching reading. They didn't learn phonics themselves, they don't read, and they can't teach reading. You can believe the problem is tests, but at least the tests show kids can't read. Schools know this.
Kids can't read and then of course, can't do anything else because they cannot follow instructions.
First we have to separate reading into 2 categories - one is what I call pleasure reading where we let the writer(s) transport us to a different place and time and entertain us with their story and the second kind is reading to extract information. Two totally different skills. This is where the confusion comes from. Every school I have been aware of does a great job of promoting the pleasure reading to help kids love reading books. That is great but what I see and deal with every hour of the afternoon in my tutoring is they do not know how to extract information from what they read. That is what I really focus on for both math and science. Reading for information basically means asking yourself questions and searching for the answers. This is a higher level thinking skill and is not really taught in school. Some kids are just better at it than others naturally but I can help all of them get a lot better.
Mr. Mizzell, I don't mean to sound combative, but I don't think you have been in a school in several years if you believe this: "Every school I have been aware of does a great job of promoting the pleasure reading to help kids love reading books. "
Schools don't present books to students anymore for them to enjoy. tlThey present books with agendas. This is most noticeable for boys, for whom there are no books with heroes normal protagonists anymore, no adventures. Books for boys with male role models are gone. All books now are either female leads of only approved races or lbgqtiaaa+++. Almost all books are about ugly and dystopian futures where children suffer. The few others are queered.
The most popular books --hugheat selling--are Dav Pilkey Cat kid and Big Nate comics. Boy books that boys age out of by 10. But part of the sky high demand is because they're comics, and poor readers can guess the story through the pictures.
But the reason you distinguish pleasure and content is really because you're distinguishing simple, comic-heavy, dialogue heavy stories from books that require comprehension.
Boys can't read because there's nothing to read ,but also because they weren't taught reading comprehension. That's because only a handful of schools in the US use synthetic phonics. Without synthetic phonics students are taught to read by guessing a word based on the first letter and the context clues (the picture son the page, the previous sentence.) This is the most common method for reading taught in the US.
Now that may look like reading especially if you're bright and came from a home with much vocabulary spoken and some reading aloud, because you have a good mental model for what words come next and what the words are for the pictures you see. The book shows a farm and a barn and a tractor on the top of a hill, the sky behind it? A bright child may guess correctly "Jamal saw the tractor on the horizon" even if he can't sound out "horizon" or even "tractor."
Books with comics and graphics, heavily dependent on pictures and dialogue, can be guessed-read and enjoyed even while skipping over whole paragraphs.
But reach middle school and that same student can't distinguish "contract" and "constant", can't tell "factor" and "faction." They also have never gotten the sense of grammar, of tense, declensions, phrases and clauses to even infer the next part of speech correctly. Their model fo sentences doesn't exist that means they eapent years, and a majority of their time alive, having writren words be senseless to them. They don't know that sentences comvey ideas. So they literally can't read for content and pull apart the science or math, but they also can't read anything but a low-level dialogue heavy book for fun, either. They can't enjoy literature because it's senseless.
Synthetic phonics fixes that, by teaching sound and spelling patterns to connect words on the page with words known aurally, and teaches the syllabification needed to break words into known subunits. Then Latin and Greek stems come alive to help with meaning in contact as well.
So your issue of reading and asking yourself questions a out what you've read is a metacognitive process that requires more reading comprehension (and vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and rhetoric) than kids are now taught. They aren't really reading for pleasure, either, but they don't know it.
I like it. I am a math grad (Berkeley, 1966) and former math teacher, home schooling my Ukrainian/American kids in Kyiv. My oldest is using the standard 6th grade Ukrainian textbook. What's to like? It is free on line. There is no indoctrination - "rainforest math". Interesting questions, viz "A departing guest hands the bellhop four unmarked keys to the four doors of his suite. What is the maximum number of tries it takes to figure out which key goes with which door?"
Learning is a question of the attitudes of students and society. Here they are serious. Moreover, there is no built-in bias against boys. I think Ukraine would be receptive to your approach.
Almost daily I post several page reports prepared by my friend Bob Homans, now writing from Virginia. Every few days I write about the more mundane aspects of life here. Home-schooling, shopping, the folks in the neighborhood.
Bottom line is that our neighborhood is relatively safe. Nothing here worth targeting. Things were hot in March of last year, but since then no major problems except electric outages.
Get those kids out fast. In May, when the mud finally dries, the Russians will be coming fast. Since they took Bakhmut, there is nothing between you and them except flat ground. 23% have already left. Why would anyone stay? Especially with kids.
What????? I live here. Have lived here for fifteen years. I pay close attention. What do you know, and how do you know it? How do you presume that I have not thought these issues through?
You want to welcome me back to cultural Marxism and forced jabs? No way.
So you must know there's a war going on. And that about 10,000,000 Ukrainians have left the country (and say they're not coming back). And that the Russians occupy 24% of the country including 90% of GDP production. Are you saying all those people had no reason to leave?
Bakhmut is about 7 hours away from Kyiv and Bakmut is operationally surrounded by Wagner forces with a small remnant of Ukrainians holding on northwest of the city.
Kyiv and the Dnipro River, and Kharkiv, are the next logical strategic targets. The Russians already hit the state security service building in Kyiv and your power site. They can hit any square inch of Ukraine at will. And are you aware of the mass of 400,000 Russian troops just a few miles north of Kyiv in Belarus? They're sitting there fully equipped to manage force escalation, that is, to make Poland/NATO think twice about invading.
Haven't you wondered why the Russians have left the bridges over the Dnipro intact? Because they plan to use them.
Thinking the Russians will stop at Donbas is wishful thinking. They've breached the five well-constructed defensive lines the Ukrainians built with NATO since 2014 and now the way is flat and open all the way to the western border, except for that sea of mud. Neither side can move until the mud dries. The Russians were expected to move during the winter but you had a warm winter and armor movement requires two solid weeks of freeze. That did not happen.
Russia will at least move 150 miles west of their current Donbas front line because the new missiles NATO sent have a range of 150 miles. The Russians will not allow Ukraine to continue to shell and shoot missiles onto Russian territory, which is what the Donbas now is. Remember Russia invaded because Ukraine had been shelling the Russian-speaking Donbas since 2014, with NATO help, which killed 15,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians. That was a Ukrainian attempt at ethnic cleansing, to Ukrainianize the Donbas. That's why the residents of Donbas voted 96% to become Russian with close to a 90% turnout.
Additionally, Ukraine did its best to destroy the Donbas farmers by blocking market access and ending social programs, which decreased the farm population from 300,000 to 30,000. Their goal was to push down the price of irrigated agricultural land so the big US-backed conglomerates could buy it up cheaply. As you know, Ukraine has some of the most fertile lands in the world. The corrupt Ukrainian government pushed the price of a hectare (2.5 acres) down to $800. That same hectare in Russia goes for $8000 and $10,000 in Poland. The Russians are now reversing that and making the land productive and viable for farmers. Pre-Russian invasion, Ukraine was a wonderfully corrupt place to make lots of money - ask Hunter Biden about that.
By the way, Russia could have taken Bakmut fast but allowed it to stretch out as an attrition strategy. Zelenskyy kept sending in thousands of troops because Bakmut was the last lynchpin in the Ukrainian defense and a strategically important hub due to rail lines, roads, communications, warehouses, and factories. The Russians allowed them to send men into the meat grinder, called a fire trap. Russia ISR capability (best in the world) spots every troop movement from satellites and drones and instantly targets those troops with long-range artillery (15-mile range) annihilating them in minutes with no loss of Russian soldiers. This is why the death ratio is eight Ukrainian soldiers to one Russian soldier. The Russian artillery advantage is also at that 8:1 ratio. Russia fires 20,000 artillery shells per day, whereas Ukraine can only fire 1,000 per day, and will be completely out in a couple of weeks. The U.S./NATO artillery shell production capacity is only 14,000 per month, whereas Russian military production can produce and deliver artillery shells at 20,000 per day indefinitely. Not to mention that China has about 1 million 155 mm old stock shells sitting in warehouses it does not need.
The war in Ukraine is not configured like the usual insurgent wars against tribespeople the US has been starting for decades. Instead, it is a mass firepower and mass casualty war like World War 1. The key to winning is the continuous production of large numbers of long-range artillery tubes and their associated shells, as well as sophisticated ISR targeting capability. Russia has this - the US, NATO, and Ukraine do not. 75% of Ukrainian casualties are due to Russian artillery fire.
If you believe the Western or Ukrainian media, you have no idea what is happening, just like with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Remember those WMDs? China may be next because its land route to Europe (through Ukraine) will make the US Navy and the US dollar obsolete.
If you're in Kyiv, you are in danger. Am I wrong? I'd be very interested to learn what the Ukrainian (government) media is telling you about the progress of the war. Are they as propaganda oriented as the processed news media here? Do you seriously think Ukraine is winning after losing so much of its prime territory?
As for vax mandates, do not various professions in Ukraine have mandates? (Yes they do, education and healthcare) And is not Kyiv vaxxed at 70%?
I've been married to the same woman for 48 years & wouldn't dream of trying to teach my wife any maths. She regards Socrates as an evil interrogator who just tries to make you feel stupid. If she's having trouble getting to sleep, she'll ask me to explain something mathsy/physicsy/engineeringy . Works like a charm.
We agreed on the covid racket from day one. In my case, I'd like to think based upon some rational thought process. For her, it just didn't feel right. Works for us.
I was stupid enough to try to teach my wife how to drive a stick shift (in San Francisco). The problem may have been that I started with how a transmission works.
That could well have been the problem. Would the 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow' details have helped as a foundation? Didn't work for me, but horses for courses. However, I still think teaching Mrs DD to drive was preferable to any maths interaction.
Hahaha, yes, our son regards Socratic questioning as a test of his abilities, a demonstration of his ignorance, and absolute torture. But I refuse to just give him the answers.
My wife of 22 years seems to have been formed from the same mould as yours. :-)
I can give her a 5minute synopsis of a book I have read and the job is done. When tired I have resorted to variations on the three little pigs with modern building methods, she has no memory of any of my variations.
"often typeset in LaTeX, which is used for math and science publication" - There's a blast from my past. LaTex is for those who like to program a presentation. Can display almost anything.
Have you ever checked out Jupyter Notebook/Lab? I've made some manuals for BASH and Powershell scripting and it is an awesome platform. When combined with "Notebook Grader" you have an electronic textbook with live code cells.
I, kind of, math home-schooled my children. (School maths was pathetic). My much younger, internet era son, Antek, used grade 3 maths from of Beast Academy, the moment it came out, and loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, new volumes did not come out on yearly bases so he jumped on to Prealgebra and other introductory Art of Problem Solving books. So we kind of met You, Mathew, there. :) The Antek even took one course with AoP, but time difference made it impractical to continue (we live in Poland). Before finding AoPs Antek took a course with John Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, but again they were only starting with Competitive math programs. Locally, my kids started out with Kanguroo and Bóbr contest problems, which were a very good way of expanding thinking skills, rather than new maths tools. (That's why I do not like IB maths much). I bet everyone knows Kanga sets and I can recommend Polish "BÓBR', which is discrete mathematics oriented. So my input as mom- teacher was basically finding good maths sources for my kids.
I also got my sons interested in programming. Antek playd with Scratch (when he was 6) first and then we came across Baltie which is sth I can whole-heartedly recommend for any school. It's a graphic version of C that codes moves for the icon Baltie (a little magition) on a 20X50 grid (if I recall correctly). Baltie may be instructed to draw patterns, bur also search mazes and islands relying on recurency or BFS, etc. And what I love about Baltie is that you see how the program operates. The programming challenge is to write the shortest code possible.
There is also a set of problems for kids to solve in a never ending open "contest". The more problems you have solved the shorter your coded the higher you are in the ranking. And you may keep redoing the problems on end looking for shorter solutions, and as you do, you move up in the ranking. So it can be lots of fun for some kids. The inventor of Baltie, Mr Soukup) is a fantastic person, amazing educator, and, I can imagine, he would be interested in exporting his idea to US. Currently Baltie is taught in some Polish, Czech and Slovak kindergartens and schools and Mr Soukup organizes 5 level long contests, each level requiring knowing more advanced commands, ending with international Polish/Check/Slovak level. You can learn more and contact Mr Soukup here https://www.bing.com/search?q=Baltie+net&cvid=dfab524699924010938a6d3789f0bda6&aqs=edge..69i57j0l8.7456j0j1&pglt=41&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=NMTS or search for Baltie.net
I must have done something right. As a fist year student, Antek won Central European Collegiate Team programming Competition this academic year and is preparing with his team for World Finals. If I recall correctly his teammates took 15 place in WF last year and this year, with Antek on Board, they did significantly better on two qualifying rounds, so hopes are up.
And I do know how important a good teacher is all too well. Antek was extremely unlucky with his highs school maths teacher, who hated Antek which was really tough on my son. To name just one example, while Antek scored 169/170 last year at GRE's quantitative part, at the same time he had unsatisfactory final grade for winter semester in high school maths. And there was nothing we could do about it, except keep supporting our son at home.
No to just about everything. Last I looked Ukraine was vaxxed, mostly one dose, at about 36%. Kyiv is bound to be higher - the professionals I know mostly took it so they could travel to the west.
The Russians have been fighting seven months for Bakhmut, which is nothing. At this rate I'll die of old age before they reach Kyiv.
The territory we lost was gone over a year ago. Since then we've won half of it back.
There is background danger everywhere. Where I lived in Washington D.C. it includes vaccine mandates, polar bear hunting and bad drivers.
It was six months into the war before I saw any war damage here in Kyiv. Photos of atrocities eight miles away, yes. Damage in my neighborhood? None.
I was born in wartime, served in the military and spent four years in Vietnam. I know something of war. I'm not worried.
I have volunteers! I'm a 71yo grandmom raising 2 grandchildren and math is an issue. I have a degree in science, but I am a terrible math teacher, and the new math is crazy confusing to me. One of the kids has his head in space, time and probabilities. I would hate for him to not be able to choose advanced math classes simply because he never learned his math facts because of Covid craziness.
With maths there are now a lot of educational youtube videos available. And it would be great to integrate these things into an interactive system. But children also need to do something physical. Maybe using dice and playing some chance games together.
One major problem is that people have very different levels of mathematics. One can see a problem in seconds that another does not understand at all. So in education either one will completely fail or one will be completely bored. To help education there are also proposals to have different levels of difficulties build into the problem. So there is an easy solution and a difficult solution. I saw magic squares as an example. Or puzzles with a specific solution and a general solution.
Both are also important in the real world. Sometimes a simple solution is more practical and a general solution can give you long term insight. Example: Using a machine that throws out a ball.. How fast or direction do you need to throw a ball to hit a target? Can you just throw it at different speeds? Or can you calculate it with gravity and resistance?
3Blue2Brown is exceptional. Yes, curriculum can and should point to such resources and encourage students to physically gather, play, amd go outside the lines.
Did YouTube delete your whole channel or did you take it down yourself?
I enjoyed the one on tutorials you did with kids and the way you bring them to understanding the problems from first principles. You’re a really good teacher.
"Brings back unhappy memories for me. I fell so far behind because I just found mathy things beyond my ken."
This nearly always means you had poor teachers. In all my time teaching, I interviewed one student whom I felt was not able to get the basic counting/combinatorics skills down, and he seemed to have some sort of retardation issue, which his father seemed to dodge talking about. When I've worked with a high school dropout recently, it was little different than when I worked with a CEO taking a Harvard graduate course. Most of the rest is really just issues of confidence thrust on people by a horrific system.
Dr. John Campbell (of a bit slow to wake up youtube fame) has his normal and abnormal physiology books available digitally for free. He might be prepared to let you distribute them as well.
While I applaud the goal and curriculum, you should include civics, unaltered history and age appropriate philosophy teaching as well (which teaches not just ethics, but critical thinking). The reason we're besieged by the Marxists is because they seized the education system and have flooded it with their ideology and version of history. Does little good to have a youth great at numbers and science if they believe the state is the religion to be worshipped and the color of your skin automatically labels you as a oppressor.
Sounds great but it sounds more like a math team type development program. As you know I have been doing ACT / SAT Math/Science prep tutoring for over 20 years and the interesting thing I see is that the schools, at least in our area, teach the basic tools of Algebra and Geometry but there is very little evidence of teaching problem solving. In my 3 or 4 one hour sessions with a student I work on problem solving skills - which start with READING the problem and detecting the significance of certain words in the problem itself. Once students start READING the problem, doing the math is not hard. One fact is obvious - the longer the problem description is the more likely students are to give up quickly and not even try. I get them to keep their focus on WHAT ARE THEY ASKING? The problem can be something very basic like:
John is going on a trip and he has been talking to a car rental company and the company explains that for his trip they have two options - Car A gets 22 miles per gallon and costs $50/day to rent and costs $0.25/mile driven. Car B gets 34 miles per gallon and costs $60/day to rent and $0.20/mile driven. John's trip from his home in Houston, TX to Denver, Co will take 2 days and cover 1,500 miles. How much will John save if he chooses the lowest cost option assuming that the cost of gas is the $3.00/gallon for both cars?
The math is basic arithmetic but the test writers add all the extra words to get students lost in the words rather than focusing on the math. So, I suggest that a part of the coursework focus on reading long problems and how to screen out extra information that does not help with the problem.:)
I tell the students that in 3 or 4 hours I can't reteach what they have covered in school over the past 6 or 7 years but if I can help them learn to THINK, then they can figure out any problem the ACT will throw at them and it works. The analogy I use to help people understand what schools are doing is this: Assume you took a mechanics course to learn how to rebuild your car engine and the teacher spent weeks going over each and every tool in the tool box. They show videos on how the tools are made and who has what patent on it. They include a few interviews with the people who invented the tools. They give tests making sure you remembered the %chrome and % iron in each tool and how much stress it can handle and all these kinds of details. THEN, for your final exam they roll in an old car and say - Now rebuild the engine. Not one single thing has been taught about USING the tools or how to use the tools to rebuild the engine or how an engine works. They just focused on teaching the tools. That is what I see from the math students I work with every day.
Mathew, you also know I have done a lot with science - specifically I developed over 30 hands-on science classes for working with elementary school students that focused on combining several levels of hands-on problem solving within the science that all students love. In 25 years of teaching 200 - 300+ students a year my classes we never had even one student that was not interested. All students participated. If your program would be interested in me working with you on that just let me know.
Any other aspects that you come up with that I can help with, let me know. I have all of my math videos on my YouTube channel for AllPencilsDown and I will be developing more but those are specifically about ACT/SAT math.
Very impressive. Those students were lucky to have such a great teacher!
It is unfortunate that many students in the US lack reading and comprehension skills. My son, as a teenager, would tutor college students (much older than him), teaching them to read and understand the literature in front of them. He's been a voracious reader since he was in elementary school. We both agreed that our educational system has failed millions of kids, especially the underserved community. Thanks to the grotesque amount of corruption, spending more money has made the problem worse. Let the teachers teach instead of focusing on standardized test scores. My daughter's elementary school focused on teaching kids how to take tests, it was a huge battle for us.
1. I am Polish and live in Poland. Polish is a phonic language so the idea of using whole language method has never crossed anybody's mind here. So I doubt there is problem with reading in Poland - at least no one talks about it.
2. Polish schools are now test oriented, too, and moving on to the next level of education most of the time depends on test scores and grades. That's devastating. Hovever, there is a small loophole - olympiads. If you make it to top 100 nationally, roughly, a highschool of your choice/ university program of your choice, , respectively, must accept you. But that's a risky bet for most, though my kids used it.
3. I taught my kinds to read English using whole word method (it is very different from whole language method) as proposed by Glenn Doman when they were toddlers. The idea is to learn words by being shown them for a split second. With sufficient exposition, you learn to read any word without prior exposure to it. This puts all the effort on the parent and let the child absorb reading naturally. I explained why it works within Mario Bunge's paradigm here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315717657_Philosophy_and_teaching_reading_to_home-schoolers_phonics_vs_whole_words and here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344592826_2_Introduction_to_How_does_language_work . I taught my kids reading skills also to help them acquire English while living in Poland. My older son grew-up in pre-internet era, so books were the only way for him to master English. Since it worked so well for him, I used the same method with the young one, which I believe assisted him in learning English, providing an extra channel of input. I wrote about that here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31050115_Rethinking_the_role_of_reading_in_teaching_a_foreign_language_to_young_learners Both my sons grew up being vivid readers, which translated into becoming good writers and speaking much better English than I do. So I believe my effort was well worth it.
Thank you thank you thank you! English is my second language yet I am more proficient in it than many native-born Americans. My youngest grandchild is being taught Spanish (my native language) and he's grasping it, he loves switching between English and Spanish. He's a very smart toddler. I will be reading your research and I whole heartedly appreciate your response. Please continue to share your knowledge in this space, I'm sure Mathew and Liam will enjoy reading it as well, both are always willing to learn new techniques. If you're not a member of their Locals channel, I suggest you join. We get to discuss all sorts of interesting subjects and research. (https://roundingtheearth.locals.com) You don't have to pay to become a member. I'm a paying member because I support these two young men who want to make this world a better place - through education.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I am already on Locals so we may cross our paths again. I am interested in spreading my experience to help others, too. :)
Awesome! I'm a member at Rounding the Earth to learn and I appreciate everyone who shares their knowledge.
But it's not unfortunate. It is evil.
Stop believing there are even a large minority of currently employed teachers capable of teaching reading. They didn't learn phonics themselves, they don't read, and they can't teach reading. You can believe the problem is tests, but at least the tests show kids can't read. Schools know this.
Kids can't read and then of course, can't do anything else because they cannot follow instructions.
We are now an anti literate society.
Let's fix that.
First we have to separate reading into 2 categories - one is what I call pleasure reading where we let the writer(s) transport us to a different place and time and entertain us with their story and the second kind is reading to extract information. Two totally different skills. This is where the confusion comes from. Every school I have been aware of does a great job of promoting the pleasure reading to help kids love reading books. That is great but what I see and deal with every hour of the afternoon in my tutoring is they do not know how to extract information from what they read. That is what I really focus on for both math and science. Reading for information basically means asking yourself questions and searching for the answers. This is a higher level thinking skill and is not really taught in school. Some kids are just better at it than others naturally but I can help all of them get a lot better.
Mr. Mizzell, I don't mean to sound combative, but I don't think you have been in a school in several years if you believe this: "Every school I have been aware of does a great job of promoting the pleasure reading to help kids love reading books. "
Schools don't present books to students anymore for them to enjoy. tlThey present books with agendas. This is most noticeable for boys, for whom there are no books with heroes normal protagonists anymore, no adventures. Books for boys with male role models are gone. All books now are either female leads of only approved races or lbgqtiaaa+++. Almost all books are about ugly and dystopian futures where children suffer. The few others are queered.
The most popular books --hugheat selling--are Dav Pilkey Cat kid and Big Nate comics. Boy books that boys age out of by 10. But part of the sky high demand is because they're comics, and poor readers can guess the story through the pictures.
But the reason you distinguish pleasure and content is really because you're distinguishing simple, comic-heavy, dialogue heavy stories from books that require comprehension.
Boys can't read because there's nothing to read ,but also because they weren't taught reading comprehension. That's because only a handful of schools in the US use synthetic phonics. Without synthetic phonics students are taught to read by guessing a word based on the first letter and the context clues (the picture son the page, the previous sentence.) This is the most common method for reading taught in the US.
Now that may look like reading especially if you're bright and came from a home with much vocabulary spoken and some reading aloud, because you have a good mental model for what words come next and what the words are for the pictures you see. The book shows a farm and a barn and a tractor on the top of a hill, the sky behind it? A bright child may guess correctly "Jamal saw the tractor on the horizon" even if he can't sound out "horizon" or even "tractor."
Books with comics and graphics, heavily dependent on pictures and dialogue, can be guessed-read and enjoyed even while skipping over whole paragraphs.
But reach middle school and that same student can't distinguish "contract" and "constant", can't tell "factor" and "faction." They also have never gotten the sense of grammar, of tense, declensions, phrases and clauses to even infer the next part of speech correctly. Their model fo sentences doesn't exist that means they eapent years, and a majority of their time alive, having writren words be senseless to them. They don't know that sentences comvey ideas. So they literally can't read for content and pull apart the science or math, but they also can't read anything but a low-level dialogue heavy book for fun, either. They can't enjoy literature because it's senseless.
Synthetic phonics fixes that, by teaching sound and spelling patterns to connect words on the page with words known aurally, and teaches the syllabification needed to break words into known subunits. Then Latin and Greek stems come alive to help with meaning in contact as well.
So your issue of reading and asking yourself questions a out what you've read is a metacognitive process that requires more reading comprehension (and vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and rhetoric) than kids are now taught. They aren't really reading for pleasure, either, but they don't know it.
But by grade
Synthetic phonics
I like it. I am a math grad (Berkeley, 1966) and former math teacher, home schooling my Ukrainian/American kids in Kyiv. My oldest is using the standard 6th grade Ukrainian textbook. What's to like? It is free on line. There is no indoctrination - "rainforest math". Interesting questions, viz "A departing guest hands the bellhop four unmarked keys to the four doors of his suite. What is the maximum number of tries it takes to figure out which key goes with which door?"
https://pidruchnyk.com.ua/514-matematika-ster-6-klas.html
Learning is a question of the attitudes of students and society. Here they are serious. Moreover, there is no built-in bias against boys. I think Ukraine would be receptive to your approach.
Wow, are you actually living in Ukraine right now with the war? Can you give us an update?
Almost daily I post several page reports prepared by my friend Bob Homans, now writing from Virginia. Every few days I write about the more mundane aspects of life here. Home-schooling, shopping, the folks in the neighborhood.
Bottom line is that our neighborhood is relatively safe. Nothing here worth targeting. Things were hot in March of last year, but since then no major problems except electric outages.
Get those kids out fast. In May, when the mud finally dries, the Russians will be coming fast. Since they took Bakhmut, there is nothing between you and them except flat ground. 23% have already left. Why would anyone stay? Especially with kids.
What????? I live here. Have lived here for fifteen years. I pay close attention. What do you know, and how do you know it? How do you presume that I have not thought these issues through?
You want to welcome me back to cultural Marxism and forced jabs? No way.
So you must know there's a war going on. And that about 10,000,000 Ukrainians have left the country (and say they're not coming back). And that the Russians occupy 24% of the country including 90% of GDP production. Are you saying all those people had no reason to leave?
Bakhmut is about 7 hours away from Kyiv and Bakmut is operationally surrounded by Wagner forces with a small remnant of Ukrainians holding on northwest of the city.
Kyiv and the Dnipro River, and Kharkiv, are the next logical strategic targets. The Russians already hit the state security service building in Kyiv and your power site. They can hit any square inch of Ukraine at will. And are you aware of the mass of 400,000 Russian troops just a few miles north of Kyiv in Belarus? They're sitting there fully equipped to manage force escalation, that is, to make Poland/NATO think twice about invading.
Haven't you wondered why the Russians have left the bridges over the Dnipro intact? Because they plan to use them.
Thinking the Russians will stop at Donbas is wishful thinking. They've breached the five well-constructed defensive lines the Ukrainians built with NATO since 2014 and now the way is flat and open all the way to the western border, except for that sea of mud. Neither side can move until the mud dries. The Russians were expected to move during the winter but you had a warm winter and armor movement requires two solid weeks of freeze. That did not happen.
Russia will at least move 150 miles west of their current Donbas front line because the new missiles NATO sent have a range of 150 miles. The Russians will not allow Ukraine to continue to shell and shoot missiles onto Russian territory, which is what the Donbas now is. Remember Russia invaded because Ukraine had been shelling the Russian-speaking Donbas since 2014, with NATO help, which killed 15,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians. That was a Ukrainian attempt at ethnic cleansing, to Ukrainianize the Donbas. That's why the residents of Donbas voted 96% to become Russian with close to a 90% turnout.
Additionally, Ukraine did its best to destroy the Donbas farmers by blocking market access and ending social programs, which decreased the farm population from 300,000 to 30,000. Their goal was to push down the price of irrigated agricultural land so the big US-backed conglomerates could buy it up cheaply. As you know, Ukraine has some of the most fertile lands in the world. The corrupt Ukrainian government pushed the price of a hectare (2.5 acres) down to $800. That same hectare in Russia goes for $8000 and $10,000 in Poland. The Russians are now reversing that and making the land productive and viable for farmers. Pre-Russian invasion, Ukraine was a wonderfully corrupt place to make lots of money - ask Hunter Biden about that.
By the way, Russia could have taken Bakmut fast but allowed it to stretch out as an attrition strategy. Zelenskyy kept sending in thousands of troops because Bakmut was the last lynchpin in the Ukrainian defense and a strategically important hub due to rail lines, roads, communications, warehouses, and factories. The Russians allowed them to send men into the meat grinder, called a fire trap. Russia ISR capability (best in the world) spots every troop movement from satellites and drones and instantly targets those troops with long-range artillery (15-mile range) annihilating them in minutes with no loss of Russian soldiers. This is why the death ratio is eight Ukrainian soldiers to one Russian soldier. The Russian artillery advantage is also at that 8:1 ratio. Russia fires 20,000 artillery shells per day, whereas Ukraine can only fire 1,000 per day, and will be completely out in a couple of weeks. The U.S./NATO artillery shell production capacity is only 14,000 per month, whereas Russian military production can produce and deliver artillery shells at 20,000 per day indefinitely. Not to mention that China has about 1 million 155 mm old stock shells sitting in warehouses it does not need.
The war in Ukraine is not configured like the usual insurgent wars against tribespeople the US has been starting for decades. Instead, it is a mass firepower and mass casualty war like World War 1. The key to winning is the continuous production of large numbers of long-range artillery tubes and their associated shells, as well as sophisticated ISR targeting capability. Russia has this - the US, NATO, and Ukraine do not. 75% of Ukrainian casualties are due to Russian artillery fire.
If you believe the Western or Ukrainian media, you have no idea what is happening, just like with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Remember those WMDs? China may be next because its land route to Europe (through Ukraine) will make the US Navy and the US dollar obsolete.
If you're in Kyiv, you are in danger. Am I wrong? I'd be very interested to learn what the Ukrainian (government) media is telling you about the progress of the war. Are they as propaganda oriented as the processed news media here? Do you seriously think Ukraine is winning after losing so much of its prime territory?
As for vax mandates, do not various professions in Ukraine have mandates? (Yes they do, education and healthcare) And is not Kyiv vaxxed at 70%?
🤪🤣
What would Mr. Seibert do without your expert knowledge?!
He will get killed along with his kids.
If you think you know more than I do about the situation in Ukraine, let's hear it.
Didn't think so.
Wow, respect.
I've been married to the same woman for 48 years & wouldn't dream of trying to teach my wife any maths. She regards Socrates as an evil interrogator who just tries to make you feel stupid. If she's having trouble getting to sleep, she'll ask me to explain something mathsy/physicsy/engineeringy . Works like a charm.
We agreed on the covid racket from day one. In my case, I'd like to think based upon some rational thought process. For her, it just didn't feel right. Works for us.
I was stupid enough to try to teach my wife how to drive a stick shift (in San Francisco). The problem may have been that I started with how a transmission works.
That could well have been the problem. Would the 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow' details have helped as a foundation? Didn't work for me, but horses for courses. However, I still think teaching Mrs DD to drive was preferable to any maths interaction.
The bigger problem is that they're becoming almost impossible to find.
😂😂😂😂you were brave!
Hahaha, yes, our son regards Socratic questioning as a test of his abilities, a demonstration of his ignorance, and absolute torture. But I refuse to just give him the answers.
I admire your patience. Of course, I'm sure you know what happened to Socrates, so be careful!
Yeah. Some days the pushback does feel lethal. At least to my feelings of motherly love and patience. 😬
My wife of 22 years seems to have been formed from the same mould as yours. :-)
I can give her a 5minute synopsis of a book I have read and the job is done. When tired I have resorted to variations on the three little pigs with modern building methods, she has no memory of any of my variations.
"often typeset in LaTeX, which is used for math and science publication" - There's a blast from my past. LaTex is for those who like to program a presentation. Can display almost anything.
Have you ever checked out Jupyter Notebook/Lab? I've made some manuals for BASH and Powershell scripting and it is an awesome platform. When combined with "Notebook Grader" you have an electronic textbook with live code cells.
I, kind of, math home-schooled my children. (School maths was pathetic). My much younger, internet era son, Antek, used grade 3 maths from of Beast Academy, the moment it came out, and loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, new volumes did not come out on yearly bases so he jumped on to Prealgebra and other introductory Art of Problem Solving books. So we kind of met You, Mathew, there. :) The Antek even took one course with AoP, but time difference made it impractical to continue (we live in Poland). Before finding AoPs Antek took a course with John Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, but again they were only starting with Competitive math programs. Locally, my kids started out with Kanguroo and Bóbr contest problems, which were a very good way of expanding thinking skills, rather than new maths tools. (That's why I do not like IB maths much). I bet everyone knows Kanga sets and I can recommend Polish "BÓBR', which is discrete mathematics oriented. So my input as mom- teacher was basically finding good maths sources for my kids.
I also got my sons interested in programming. Antek playd with Scratch (when he was 6) first and then we came across Baltie which is sth I can whole-heartedly recommend for any school. It's a graphic version of C that codes moves for the icon Baltie (a little magition) on a 20X50 grid (if I recall correctly). Baltie may be instructed to draw patterns, bur also search mazes and islands relying on recurency or BFS, etc. And what I love about Baltie is that you see how the program operates. The programming challenge is to write the shortest code possible.
There is also a set of problems for kids to solve in a never ending open "contest". The more problems you have solved the shorter your coded the higher you are in the ranking. And you may keep redoing the problems on end looking for shorter solutions, and as you do, you move up in the ranking. So it can be lots of fun for some kids. The inventor of Baltie, Mr Soukup) is a fantastic person, amazing educator, and, I can imagine, he would be interested in exporting his idea to US. Currently Baltie is taught in some Polish, Czech and Slovak kindergartens and schools and Mr Soukup organizes 5 level long contests, each level requiring knowing more advanced commands, ending with international Polish/Check/Slovak level. You can learn more and contact Mr Soukup here https://www.bing.com/search?q=Baltie+net&cvid=dfab524699924010938a6d3789f0bda6&aqs=edge..69i57j0l8.7456j0j1&pglt=41&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=NMTS or search for Baltie.net
When I have time, I will definitely reach out to good instructors who might be willing to pool Open Source materials, or even network for teaching.
I must have done something right. As a fist year student, Antek won Central European Collegiate Team programming Competition this academic year and is preparing with his team for World Finals. If I recall correctly his teammates took 15 place in WF last year and this year, with Antek on Board, they did significantly better on two qualifying rounds, so hopes are up.
And I do know how important a good teacher is all too well. Antek was extremely unlucky with his highs school maths teacher, who hated Antek which was really tough on my son. To name just one example, while Antek scored 169/170 last year at GRE's quantitative part, at the same time he had unsatisfactory final grade for winter semester in high school maths. And there was nothing we could do about it, except keep supporting our son at home.
Why on Earth would YouTube delete a discussion on mathematics? How bizarre.
They deleted our whole channel after a discussion about the Project Veritas story.
Thanks that answers my question elsewhere in the comments (should have read all the comments before asking).
I was coming here to say the same. I mean, of ALL the work Matthew has done, they deleted THAT?!
No to just about everything. Last I looked Ukraine was vaxxed, mostly one dose, at about 36%. Kyiv is bound to be higher - the professionals I know mostly took it so they could travel to the west.
The Russians have been fighting seven months for Bakhmut, which is nothing. At this rate I'll die of old age before they reach Kyiv.
The territory we lost was gone over a year ago. Since then we've won half of it back.
There is background danger everywhere. Where I lived in Washington D.C. it includes vaccine mandates, polar bear hunting and bad drivers.
It was six months into the war before I saw any war damage here in Kyiv. Photos of atrocities eight miles away, yes. Damage in my neighborhood? None.
I was born in wartime, served in the military and spent four years in Vietnam. I know something of war. I'm not worried.
This is a good idea but will colleges and universities allow this type of education so people can enroll in the universities?
Lots of colleges and universities actually seek out homeschooled students, who likely are the students who will utilize this, at least at first.
I have volunteers! I'm a 71yo grandmom raising 2 grandchildren and math is an issue. I have a degree in science, but I am a terrible math teacher, and the new math is crazy confusing to me. One of the kids has his head in space, time and probabilities. I would hate for him to not be able to choose advanced math classes simply because he never learned his math facts because of Covid craziness.
"So, you don't remember how to take this derivative. Do you recall how to take the derivative of a polynomial?"
= What's a polynomial?
"Do you remember the Binomial Expansion Theorem?"
= God, no.
"Do you know what I mean when I say 'combination' or '7 choose 4'?"
= Of course, eleven.
"How do we correct for overcounting?"
= Why would you overcount?
Don't you have any harder questions?
With maths there are now a lot of educational youtube videos available. And it would be great to integrate these things into an interactive system. But children also need to do something physical. Maybe using dice and playing some chance games together.
Some math youtube channels: videos of 3Blue1Brown are great at explaining very complex concepts. https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown Channel Mathologer usually starts with a simple concept which then becomes more and more complex. https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer
One major problem is that people have very different levels of mathematics. One can see a problem in seconds that another does not understand at all. So in education either one will completely fail or one will be completely bored. To help education there are also proposals to have different levels of difficulties build into the problem. So there is an easy solution and a difficult solution. I saw magic squares as an example. Or puzzles with a specific solution and a general solution.
Both are also important in the real world. Sometimes a simple solution is more practical and a general solution can give you long term insight. Example: Using a machine that throws out a ball.. How fast or direction do you need to throw a ball to hit a target? Can you just throw it at different speeds? Or can you calculate it with gravity and resistance?
3Blue2Brown is exceptional. Yes, curriculum can and should point to such resources and encourage students to physically gather, play, amd go outside the lines.
Did YouTube delete your whole channel or did you take it down yourself?
I enjoyed the one on tutorials you did with kids and the way you bring them to understanding the problems from first principles. You’re a really good teacher.
It’s a shame they’re no long available.
YouTube took the channel down.
Thanks for the reply. The like is for the reply and not a like for them taking the channel down.
Brings back unhappy memories for me. I fell so far behind because I just found mathy things beyond my ken.
I did enjoy staring into space though, or at an atlas; looking at obscure places and wishing I could teleport myself.
Needless to say I'm reasonably good at geography.
"Brings back unhappy memories for me. I fell so far behind because I just found mathy things beyond my ken."
This nearly always means you had poor teachers. In all my time teaching, I interviewed one student whom I felt was not able to get the basic counting/combinatorics skills down, and he seemed to have some sort of retardation issue, which his father seemed to dodge talking about. When I've worked with a high school dropout recently, it was little different than when I worked with a CEO taking a Harvard graduate course. Most of the rest is really just issues of confidence thrust on people by a horrific system.
Matthew the link you provided to locals above gives a 404 error.
:(
Dr. John Campbell (of a bit slow to wake up youtube fame) has his normal and abnormal physiology books available digitally for free. He might be prepared to let you distribute them as well.
While I applaud the goal and curriculum, you should include civics, unaltered history and age appropriate philosophy teaching as well (which teaches not just ethics, but critical thinking). The reason we're besieged by the Marxists is because they seized the education system and have flooded it with their ideology and version of history. Does little good to have a youth great at numbers and science if they believe the state is the religion to be worshipped and the color of your skin automatically labels you as a oppressor.
There is no topic exclusion. It will simply take time to include everything.