Learned helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does not influence what happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or results. For example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the outcome, she may think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.” On the contrary, a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study for this test, I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness relates to poor grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties. Students who experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned helpless response style. Because of repeated academic failure, these students begin to doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do anything to overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease their achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials, which leads to more school failure. This pattern of giving up when facing difficult tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome his or her academic difficulties.
Learned helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many students with a learning disability. In a never-ending cycle, children with a learning disability frequently experience school difficulties over an extended period, and across a variety of tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in turn reinforces the child’s feeling of being helpless.
Characteristics of Learned Helpless Students
Some characteristics of learned helpless children are:
1. Low motivation to learn, and diminished aspirations to succeed in school.
2. Low outcome expectations; that is, they believe that, no matter what they do in school, the outcome will always be negative (e.g. bad grades). In addition, they believe that they are powerless to prevent or overcome a negative outcome.
3. Lack of perceived control over their own behavior and the environmental events; one’s own actions cannot lead to success.
4. Lack of confidence in their skills and abilities (low self-efficacy expectations). These children believe that their school difficulties are caused by their own lack of ability and low intelligence, even when they have adequate ability and normal intelligence. They are convinced that they are unable to perform the required actions to achieve a positive outcome.
5. They underestimate their performance when they do well in school, attributing success to luck or chance, e.g., “I was lucky that this test was easy.”
6. They generalize from one failure situation or experience to other situations where control is possible. Because they expect failure all the time, regardless of their real skills and abilities, they underperform all the time.
7. They focus on what they cannot do, rather than focusing on their strengths and skills.
8. Because they feel incapable of implementing the necessary courses of action, they develop passivity and their school performance deteriorates.
The Pessimistic Explanatory Style
Learned helpless students, perceive school failure as something that they will never overcome, and academic events, positive or negative, as something out of their control. This expectation of failure and perceived lack of control is central in the development of a learned helpless style. The way in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in the classroom helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving in school and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).
Children with an optimistic explanatory style attribute school failure to momentary and specific circumstances; for example, “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will always be present), global (the cause of the negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal (they conclude that they are responsible for the outcome or consequence of the negative event). A typical pessimistic explanatory style is, “I always fail no matter what I do.” On the contrary, when the outcome of the event is positive, a pessimistic child attributes the outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is transitory), specific (the cause of the event is situation specific), and external (other people or circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.
Learned Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies
Due to this perceived lack of control of the negative event, a learned helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or help when he is having difficulty performing an academic task. These children are ineffective in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to engage in strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example, learned helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a checklist, and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a multistep math word problem. With learned helpless children, success alone (e.g. solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to ease the helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember that these children attribute their specific successes to luck or chance. According to Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998), trying to persuade a learned helpless child that she can succeed, and asking her just to try hard, will be ineffective if we do not teach the child specific learning and compensatory strategies that she can apply to improve her performance when facing a difficult task. The authors state that the key in helping a learned helpless child overcome this dysfunctional explanatory pattern is to provide strategy retraining (teaching her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when she can use those strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy achievement problems; coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and maintaining a success expectation. When we teach a learned helpless child to use learning strategies, we are giving her the tools she needs to develop and maintain the perception that she has the resources to reverse failure. Ames (1990) recommends that, in combination with the learning strategies, we help the learned helpless child develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I will make drawings to accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the child knows and implements learning strategies, she will be able to experience progress toward her individualized goals.
Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort Increases Skills
To accomplish this, we need to help learned helpless children recognize and take credit for the skills and abilities that they already have. In addition, we need to develop in children the belief that ability is incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and skills. Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help children see success as improvement; that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as improvement, states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to remediate their academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to focus on strategies and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and achievement.
Concluding Comments
To minimize the negative impact of learned helplessness in children, we need to train them to focus on strategies and processes to reach their academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort, they are in control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of developing their own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus on the learning process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe you can think of another way of doing this.” This way, our feedback stays focused on the child’s effort and the learning strategies he or she is using -within both the child’s control and modifiable. When children themselves learn to focus on effort and strategies, they can start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and responsible for their own successes in school and in life.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action
They rely on data but ignore the evidence. They have no argument based on credible evidence yet their position has the mic. It’s a philosophical war and the traditionalists are losing. And for once, the ‘revolutionary’ movement is trying to erase a hundred years of progress.
We’re not talking about second amendment advocates, creationists vs. rational scientific explanations, nor doves vs. hawks on a war and peace issue. The ‘movement’ away from sanity, accountability, responsibility, humility, and reasonable arguments is being led by a variety of MBA-type wonks who never spent a day in front of a classroom yet use everything made up at their disposal to denigrate public education.
Could it only be in public school where they teach when writing a paragraph the topic sentence is followed by support statements? You would think so since so many with the ‘Superman Syndrome’ think that if you make a bold statement, nothing that follows has to be supportive and if it is, it’s made up.
The list of topics demagogued to death include charter schools vs. public education, evaluating teachers based on student performance, the evils of the unions, and how it’s better to use inexperienced and less paid Teach For America neophytes rather than tenured professionals with advanced degrees.
Support for public education is with so many other campaign promises that President Obama has rejected, reneged, reversed himself on, or misrepresented his position in order to win the Presidency. (For example we can include closing Gitmo, supporting card check, supporting a public option, opposing consolidation of the media, opposing the excessive human and civil liberties attacks of his predecessor, etc.) Now we see in his education platform that it is based on the advice of so many illustrious educators like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Oprah.
It is they who have the mic spewing illogic, union/teacher bashing hysteria, and a fistful of data made up faster than could come from a slide rule. As they used to say regarding computer programming, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Their ‘supermen’ cheered the firing of an entire staff in a high school in Rhode Island for low test scores. Missing from the narrative that made its way through main stream media is that the students were majority English Language Learners, or that it was the only high school in the poorest city in RI. Poverty’s data has no weight when dealing with test scores. So what that it was a highly dedicated and professional staff. They couldn’t work the “miracles” that the private schools often do or charter schools pretend to. The numbers said it all. Apples trump oranges all the time.
There are many voices out there, even if they’re sailing against the wind. The June issue of the ISR (International Socialist Review) devotes an entire edition to exposing the real reasons why our students are being commodified and why charter schools are winning the grants but failing to produce what they promise. In the NEA Today, January 21, 2011 edition it prints a teacher’s response to Oprah. http://neatoday.org/2010/09/24/a-teachers-letter-to-oprah/. Where else do we get to see real criticism of Oprah and her sham knowledge of pedagogy? After all, Oprah doesn’t have the mic, she owns it.
So what’s to be done??How about teachers getting off their asses and doing something. How about teachers’ unions stop groveling for crumbs from Race To The Top and organize with other unions to stand up to the bureaucrats and corporatists who do not have every students’ interest in mind, only those who fit their corporate models of success. In other words, students who can help to increase the bottom line of the testing company, the charter school, the think tank; any corporation that sees students as a commodity and not a living learner. If only teachers could strike!
We see how immigrants in 2009 were able to shut down cities (especially in California) with massive demonstrations, echoed all over the country. If only teachers could be so organized to shut down city after city demanding that this country return to its values of supporting public education!
So what will be done?
We teachers are not asleep. We’re just merely exhausted. We’re beaten down. But we’re not on our knees. We are organizing. This July 30 we’ll be marching in DC with the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. Join its Facebook page (with the same name) and get involved.
We certainly don’t have any friends in the White House. In his State of the Union Address he heaped praises on teachers. Yet in the next breath he pushed his Race To The Top as a model for educational excellence. Right. Destroy public schools. Promote privately run, tax paid charters. Increase the profit margin for testing companies.....
But everyone knows a teacher. Maybe you’re married to one or one lives on your block. Maybe you tried to talk your kids out of being one but damn it they had the calling and just wouldn’t listen to you. Let’s remember that in the US we have a long history of struggling for what’s in the public interest: union rights, civil rights, suffrage, public education. Join this march in July and begin to take back public education from the ‘Billionaire Boys Club’*. Teachers need some kryptonite and here’s a beginning.
They rely on data but ignore the evidence. They have no argument based on credible evidence yet their position has the mic. It’s a philosophical war and the traditionalists are losing. And for once, the ‘revolutionary’ movement is trying to erase a hundred years of progress.
We’re not talking about second amendment advocates, creationists vs. rational scientific explanations, nor doves vs. hawks on a war and peace issue. The ‘movement’ away from sanity, accountability, responsibility, humility, and reasonable arguments is being led by a variety of MBA-type wonks who never spent a day in front of a classroom yet use everything made up at their disposal to denigrate public education.
Could it only be in public school where they teach when writing a paragraph the topic sentence is followed by support statements? You would think so since so many with the ‘Superman Syndrome’ think that if you make a bold statement, nothing that follows has to be supportive and if it is, it’s made up.
The list of topics demagogued to death include charter schools vs. public education, evaluating teachers based on student performance, the evils of the unions, and how it’s better to use inexperienced and less paid Teach For America neophytes rather than tenured professionals with advanced degrees.
Support for public education is with so many other campaign promises that President Obama has rejected, reneged, reversed himself on, or misrepresented his position in order to win the Presidency. (For example we can include closing Gitmo, supporting card check, supporting a public option, opposing consolidation of the media, opposing the excessive human and civil liberties attacks of his predecessor, etc.) Now we see in his education platform that it is based on the advice of so many illustrious educators like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Oprah.
It is they who have the mic spewing illogic, union/teacher bashing hysteria, and a fistful of data made up faster than could come from a slide rule. As they used to say regarding computer programming, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Their ‘supermen’ cheered the firing of an entire staff in a high school in Rhode Island for low test scores. Missing from the narrative that made its way through main stream media is that the students were majority English Language Learners, or that it was the only high school in the poorest city in RI. Poverty’s data has no weight when dealing with test scores. So what that it was a highly dedicated and professional staff. They couldn’t work the “miracles” that the private schools often do or charter schools pretend to. The numbers said it all. Apples trump oranges all the time.
There are many voices out there, even if they’re sailing against the wind. The June issue of the ISR (International Socialist Review) devotes an entire edition to exposing the real reasons why our students are being commodified and why charter schools are winning the grants but failing to produce what they promise. In the NEA Today, January 21, 2011 edition it prints a teacher’s response to Oprah. http://neatoday.org/2010/09/24/a-teachers-letter-to-oprah/. Where else do we get to see real criticism of Oprah and her sham knowledge of pedagogy? After all, Oprah doesn’t have the mic, she owns it.
So what’s to be done??How about teachers getting off their asses and doing something. How about teachers’ unions stop groveling for crumbs from Race To The Top and organize with other unions to stand up to the bureaucrats and corporatists who do not have every students’ interest in mind, only those who fit their corporate models of success. In other words, students who can help to increase the bottom line of the testing company, the charter school, the think tank; any corporation that sees students as a commodity and not a living learner. If only teachers could strike!
We see how immigrants in 2009 were able to shut down cities (especially in California) with massive demonstrations, echoed all over the country. If only teachers could be so organized to shut down city after city demanding that this country return to its values of supporting public education!
So what will be done?
We teachers are not asleep. We’re just merely exhausted. We’re beaten down. But we’re not on our knees. We are organizing. This July 30 we’ll be marching in DC with the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. Join its Facebook page (with the same name) and get involved.
We certainly don’t have any friends in the White House. In his State of the Union Address he heaped praises on teachers. Yet in the next breath he pushed his Race To The Top as a model for educational excellence. Right. Destroy public schools. Promote privately run, tax paid charters. Increase the profit margin for testing companies.....
But everyone knows a teacher. Maybe you’re married to one or one lives on your block. Maybe you tried to talk your kids out of being one but damn it they had the calling and just wouldn’t listen to you. Let’s remember that in the US we have a long history of struggling for what’s in the public interest: union rights, civil rights, suffrage, public education. Join this march in July and begin to take back public education from the ‘Billionaire Boys Club’*. Teachers need some kryptonite and here’s a beginning.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Are we ready for a new paradigm?
Every morning we see new developments happening in the field of education. Some researcher talks about the need for sight words, while the other talks about phonics, some advocate the need to promote thinking skills, some stand for memorizing skills and the list goes on and on. These things show that there is good amount of awareness on the need for ‘good’ education. I also think that the people around the globe have started believing in the power of educated mass. While I am glad as an enthusiastic learner, I am left with lots of questions and wonderments. School brochures are filled with attractive lines like Multiple Intelligence enabled classrooms, World class curriculum, Teachers catering to emotional intelligence, activity based classrooms, child centered curriculum, result oriented coaching, etc. Parents get attracted to those captions and admit their children. School managements adopt such kind of frameworks, strategies and techniques with all good intentions but how is it ensured that their classrooms are geared up to meet the respective requirements. Are there are some benchmarks set in those areas by the schools with clear timelines? How do such frameworks, strategies or techniques reflect in the school’s vision and philosophy? A school is comprised of various stakeholders that include management, parents, teachers and students. Every stakeholder is important and plays a significant role in the development of the child. It doesn’t stop there. It is important that the stakeholders develop themselves as well. More importantly what about the teachers who play a key role in the development of children?
How many school managements think about teacher empowerment? No doubts some schools focus on training teachers. What kind of follow ups are done after the training? How many school managements ensure that the practices brought in as a result of training gets sustained? What measures are taken to do so? Above all do schools see this as an intellectual investment than a training fund for the staff which has to be spent in some way? While such things could help managements to review and refine their approach, there are also some aspects which the teachers could look into?
Teachers are provided with an opportunity to get themselves empowered with. Do teachers realize the need to get empowered with? Do they see such opportunities as doors that could keep them abreast of the latest developments in their profession than looking at it as extra workload? How many teachers visualize the power of their influence among children?
I believe such kind of questions could help schools and teachers to self- reflect. Such kind of reflections and subsequent realizations could lead to actions which in turn could pave way to a new paradigm in education.
Are we ready for a new paradigm?
How many school managements think about teacher empowerment? No doubts some schools focus on training teachers. What kind of follow ups are done after the training? How many school managements ensure that the practices brought in as a result of training gets sustained? What measures are taken to do so? Above all do schools see this as an intellectual investment than a training fund for the staff which has to be spent in some way? While such things could help managements to review and refine their approach, there are also some aspects which the teachers could look into?
Teachers are provided with an opportunity to get themselves empowered with. Do teachers realize the need to get empowered with? Do they see such opportunities as doors that could keep them abreast of the latest developments in their profession than looking at it as extra workload? How many teachers visualize the power of their influence among children?
I believe such kind of questions could help schools and teachers to self- reflect. Such kind of reflections and subsequent realizations could lead to actions which in turn could pave way to a new paradigm in education.
Are we ready for a new paradigm?
Friday, December 16, 2011
Education viewed as Form and Content
(Summary: Education has two basic components: Content and Form. All the rest is tinsel and trivia. Indeed, it often seems that irrelevant debates keep us from focusing on the obvious formula for success: teach important stuff; teach it well.)
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A poem, a movie, a book, anything creative, you can analyze in terms of its content and its form. What is said; and how it is said.
I recently had the thought that education can be analyzed the same way. We can examine WHAT is taught; and HOW it is taught. Doesn’t that cover everything?
Our educational doldrums are quickly understood when we note that our Education Establishment has an almost perfect track record dismissing content, while simultaneously making sure that whatever little remains is poorly taught. In summary: less content further diminished by bad form.
Then we instantly see a very simple truth. Do you wish to improve public schools? It’s easy. You simply reintroduce content. And you reintroduce serious teaching methods. It’s elementary, my dear Watson. Attend to form and content, and all will be healed.
All of this needs saying because so much of the education debate spins and gyrates around big confusing issues that are not central. We have a forest fire but people insist on discussing the lousy weather. That’s not a luxury we have at this time. We must concentrate on putting out the fire.
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First, let’s consider content. More than 100 years ago John Dewey scorned what he called “mere learning.” Ever since that time, elite educators have found one pretext after another for removing content from the schools. The kids don’t need this content; our kids can’t handle that content.
For years, Relevance was the favorite sophistry: content was dismissed because it wasn’t about a child’s own life. Then came Multiculturalism and content was dismissed because it was about a child’s life. When those excuses got tiresome, the educators turned to Self-Esteem, using the argument that academic demands made some children feel bad about themselves, and that must be avoided at all costs. Point, is, our educators are equal-opportunity sophists. When it comes to deleting content, there’s always a clever gimmick at hand.
The elder statesman with regard to content is E. D. Hirsch. He’s written a book called "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know." Anybody who’s serious (for example, Bill Gates) about improving the schools could say: “Mr. Hirsch, could you please prepare a basic curriculum for us. We’ll call it the American Curriculum and it will be a starting point for all school systems. You’ve been writing about these things for so many years, I’m sure you can put something together from files on your computer.”
(Hirsch, by the way, provided us with an anecdote that tells you everything you can stand to know about the assault on content in this country’s schools. He was explaining his ideas at a school in California when one of the administrators questioned him about what a child should learn in the first grade. “I think they should know the names of the oceans,” he said. A perfect answer, I would think. But this silly educator objected: “I can’t imagine why our children would need to know that.” And there you have the whole dumb diorama. No matter what little scrap of information you might think a child should know, the people in charge of the schools would say, genuinely puzzled, “Why would a child need to know that?” And finally you’re reduced to saying, “Well, surely it’s all right to teach them their names...Isn’t it??”)
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Now let’s turn to Form or Structure. How do you arrange the parts and pieces of a sales pitch, a presentation, a symphony, a fireworks display, or a course?
Clearly, there must be optimal ways to present information to an audience. I call this the ergonomic dimension. That’s the Greek word for efficiency.
When the subject is instructional methods, the elder statesman there is Siegfried Engelmann, one of our great educators. He has made the brilliant point that if kids are not learning it’s not their fault and it’s probably not the teacher’s fault. It is the school’s fault or the system’s fault, because the school has adopted bad methods.
Typically, public schools embrace an array of foolish methods, such as Constructivism, Cooperative Learning, Discovery Method, etc. What they all have in common is they don’t work as promised. Engelmann points out the obvious: if kids aren’t learning, keep firing administrators until you find people with enough sense to use methods that do work. Meanwhile, don’t abuse the kids and don’t send notes to the parents abusing them. The real problem is that the school has not chosen well-designed instructional materials.
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QED: If we combine what Hirsch has been teaching for 40 years and what Engelmann has been teaching for 40 years, presto, there is our answer: proper Content married to proper Form.
Not to mention, I trust any sentence from these two guys before I’d believe any book coming out of Teachers College. The Education Establishment seems to be staffed by hacks recycling the same old bad ideas. It’s not reasonable to expect that they would now say anything useful. So let’s do what Hirsch and Engelmann suggest.
By the way, if you put the content back in, and you organize it in an intelligent way, what will you end up with? Would it be something exotic, something from the remote future? No, it will be exactly what all good schools through the ages have done, and what the real-world schools do now. I’m thinking about driving school, bartender school, flying school, cooking school, any school that is actually trying to teach a body of information to its students. Which is precisely the part that our public schools seem determined to ignore.
The Education Establishment used to brag about doing a bad job with this bizarre claim: “We don’t teach history. We teach children.” That was the problem. The common name for this approach is dumbing-down.Mr. Hirsch, could you please prepare a basic curriculum for us. We
-------------------------------------------------------
A poem, a movie, a book, anything creative, you can analyze in terms of its content and its form. What is said; and how it is said.
I recently had the thought that education can be analyzed the same way. We can examine WHAT is taught; and HOW it is taught. Doesn’t that cover everything?
Our educational doldrums are quickly understood when we note that our Education Establishment has an almost perfect track record dismissing content, while simultaneously making sure that whatever little remains is poorly taught. In summary: less content further diminished by bad form.
Then we instantly see a very simple truth. Do you wish to improve public schools? It’s easy. You simply reintroduce content. And you reintroduce serious teaching methods. It’s elementary, my dear Watson. Attend to form and content, and all will be healed.
All of this needs saying because so much of the education debate spins and gyrates around big confusing issues that are not central. We have a forest fire but people insist on discussing the lousy weather. That’s not a luxury we have at this time. We must concentrate on putting out the fire.
-----------------------------------------------------------
First, let’s consider content. More than 100 years ago John Dewey scorned what he called “mere learning.” Ever since that time, elite educators have found one pretext after another for removing content from the schools. The kids don’t need this content; our kids can’t handle that content.
For years, Relevance was the favorite sophistry: content was dismissed because it wasn’t about a child’s own life. Then came Multiculturalism and content was dismissed because it was about a child’s life. When those excuses got tiresome, the educators turned to Self-Esteem, using the argument that academic demands made some children feel bad about themselves, and that must be avoided at all costs. Point, is, our educators are equal-opportunity sophists. When it comes to deleting content, there’s always a clever gimmick at hand.
The elder statesman with regard to content is E. D. Hirsch. He’s written a book called "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know." Anybody who’s serious (for example, Bill Gates) about improving the schools could say: “Mr. Hirsch, could you please prepare a basic curriculum for us. We’ll call it the American Curriculum and it will be a starting point for all school systems. You’ve been writing about these things for so many years, I’m sure you can put something together from files on your computer.”
(Hirsch, by the way, provided us with an anecdote that tells you everything you can stand to know about the assault on content in this country’s schools. He was explaining his ideas at a school in California when one of the administrators questioned him about what a child should learn in the first grade. “I think they should know the names of the oceans,” he said. A perfect answer, I would think. But this silly educator objected: “I can’t imagine why our children would need to know that.” And there you have the whole dumb diorama. No matter what little scrap of information you might think a child should know, the people in charge of the schools would say, genuinely puzzled, “Why would a child need to know that?” And finally you’re reduced to saying, “Well, surely it’s all right to teach them their names...Isn’t it??”)
---------------------------------------------------------
Now let’s turn to Form or Structure. How do you arrange the parts and pieces of a sales pitch, a presentation, a symphony, a fireworks display, or a course?
Clearly, there must be optimal ways to present information to an audience. I call this the ergonomic dimension. That’s the Greek word for efficiency.
When the subject is instructional methods, the elder statesman there is Siegfried Engelmann, one of our great educators. He has made the brilliant point that if kids are not learning it’s not their fault and it’s probably not the teacher’s fault. It is the school’s fault or the system’s fault, because the school has adopted bad methods.
Typically, public schools embrace an array of foolish methods, such as Constructivism, Cooperative Learning, Discovery Method, etc. What they all have in common is they don’t work as promised. Engelmann points out the obvious: if kids aren’t learning, keep firing administrators until you find people with enough sense to use methods that do work. Meanwhile, don’t abuse the kids and don’t send notes to the parents abusing them. The real problem is that the school has not chosen well-designed instructional materials.
----------------------------------------------------------
QED: If we combine what Hirsch has been teaching for 40 years and what Engelmann has been teaching for 40 years, presto, there is our answer: proper Content married to proper Form.
Not to mention, I trust any sentence from these two guys before I’d believe any book coming out of Teachers College. The Education Establishment seems to be staffed by hacks recycling the same old bad ideas. It’s not reasonable to expect that they would now say anything useful. So let’s do what Hirsch and Engelmann suggest.
By the way, if you put the content back in, and you organize it in an intelligent way, what will you end up with? Would it be something exotic, something from the remote future? No, it will be exactly what all good schools through the ages have done, and what the real-world schools do now. I’m thinking about driving school, bartender school, flying school, cooking school, any school that is actually trying to teach a body of information to its students. Which is precisely the part that our public schools seem determined to ignore.
The Education Establishment used to brag about doing a bad job with this bizarre claim: “We don’t teach history. We teach children.” That was the problem. The common name for this approach is dumbing-down.Mr. Hirsch, could you please prepare a basic curriculum for us. We
Monday, December 12, 2011
5 Homework Strategies that Work for Kids
Are you trapped in a nightly homework struggle with your child? The list of excuses can seem endless: “I don’t have any homework today.” “My teacher never looks at my homework anyway.” “That assignment was optional.” “I did it at school.” If only your child could be that creative with their actual homework, getting good grades would be no problem!
Pre-teens and teens often insist they have no homework even when they do, or tell parents that they’ve completed their assignments at school when they haven’t. If your child’s grades are acceptable and you receive positive reports from their teachers, congratulations – your child is doing just fine. James Lehman advises that students who are doing well have earned the privilege of doing their homework whenever and however they see fit. But if their grades reflect missing assignments, or your child’s teachers tell you that they’re falling behind, you need to institute some new homework practices in your household. For those classes in which your child is doing poorly, they lose the privilege of doing homework in an unstructured way. For the classes they are doing well in, they can continue to do that homework on their own.
Trying to convince your child that grades are important can be a losing battle. You can’t make your child take school as seriously as you do; the truth is, they don’t typically think that way. Remember, as James says, it’s not that they aren’t motivated, it’s that they’re motivated to do what they want to do. In order to get your child to do their homework, you have to focus on their behavior, not their motivation. So instead of giving them a lecture, focus on their behavior and their homework skills. Let them know that completing homework and getting passing grades are not optional.
If you’re facing the rest of the school year with dread and irritation, you’re not alone. By following the tips below, you can improve your child’s homework skills and reduce your frustration!
5 Strategies to Get Homework Back On Track
Schedule Daily Homework Time
If your child often says they have no homework but their grades are poor, they may not be telling you accurate information, they may have completely tuned out their teacher’s instructions, or need to improve some other organizations skills, for example. The Total Transformation Program recommends that whether your child has homework or not, create a mandatory homework time each school day for those classes in which you child is doing poorly.
Use the “10-Minute Rule" formulated by the National PTA and the National Education Association, which recommends that kids should be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. In other words, 10 minutes for first-graders, 20 for second-graders and so forth.
It will be most effective if you choose the same time every day. For example, you might schedule homework time for the classes that your child is doing poorly in to begin at 4:00 p.m. every school day. If your child says they have no homework in those subjects, then they can spend that time reading ahead in their textbooks, making up missed work, working on extra credit projects, or studying for tests. If they say “I forgot my books at school,” have them read a book related to one of their subjects. By making study time a priority, you will sidestep all those excuses and claims of “no homework today.” If your child has to spend a few days doing “busy work” during the daily homework time, you may even find that they bring home more actual assignments!
Use a Public Space
It’s important to monitor your child’s homework time. For families where both parents work, you may need to schedule it in the evening. In many instances it may be more productive to have your child do their homework in a public space. That means the living room or the kitchen, or some place equally public where you can easily check in on them. Let them know they can ask for help if they need it, but allow them to do their own work. If your child would like to do his or her homework in their room, let them know that they can earn that privilege back when they have pulled up the grades in the subjects in which they are doing poorly.
Use Daily Incentives
Let your child know that they will have access to privileges when they have completed their homework. For example, you might say, “Once you’ve completed your homework time, you are free to use your electronics or see your friends.” Be clear with your child about the consequences for refusing to study, or for putting their work off until later. According to James Lehman, consequences should be short term, and should fit the “crime.” You might say, “If you choose not to study during the scheduled time, you will lose your electronics for the night. Tomorrow, you’ll get another chance to use them.” The next day, your child gets to try again – observing her homework time and earning her privileges. Don’t take away privileges for more than a day, as your child will have no incentive to do better the next time.
Work towards Something Bigger
Remember, kids don’t place as much importance on schoolwork as you do. As you focus on their behavior, not their motivation, you should begin to see some improvement in their homework skills. You can use your child’s motivation to your advantage if they have something they’d like to earn. For example, if your child would like to get his driver’s permit, you might encourage him to earn that privilege by showing you he can complete his homework appropriately. You might say, “In order to feel comfortable letting you drive, I need to see that you can follow rules, even when you don’t agree with them. When you can show me that you can complete your homework appropriately, I’d be happy to sit down and talk with you about getting your permit.” If your child starts complaining about the homework rule, you can say, “I know you want to get that driver’s permit. You need to show me you can follow a simple rule before I’ll even talk to you about it. Get going on that homework.” By doing this, you sidestep all the arguments around both the homework and the permit.
Skills + Practice = Success
Tying homework compliance with your child’s desires isn’t about having your child jump through hoops in order to get something they want. It’s not even about making them take something seriously, when they don’t see it that way. It’s about helping your child learn the skills they need to live life successfully. All of us need to learn how to complete things we don’t want to do. We all have occasions where we have to follow a rule, even when we disagree with it. When you create mandatory, daily homework time, you help your child practice these skills. When you tie that homework time to daily, practical incentives, you encourage your child to succeed.
If you are a Total Transformation customer, you can access our Support Line for help with these and other challenges you’re experiencing with your child. Support Line specialists have helped hundreds of parents customize homework charts and plans, and we can help you, too. Specialists can also work with you to formulate realistic, appropriate consequences to help enforce the daily routine.
5 Homework Strategies that Work for Kids is reprinted with permission from Empowering Parents.
Pre-teens and teens often insist they have no homework even when they do, or tell parents that they’ve completed their assignments at school when they haven’t. If your child’s grades are acceptable and you receive positive reports from their teachers, congratulations – your child is doing just fine. James Lehman advises that students who are doing well have earned the privilege of doing their homework whenever and however they see fit. But if their grades reflect missing assignments, or your child’s teachers tell you that they’re falling behind, you need to institute some new homework practices in your household. For those classes in which your child is doing poorly, they lose the privilege of doing homework in an unstructured way. For the classes they are doing well in, they can continue to do that homework on their own.
Trying to convince your child that grades are important can be a losing battle. You can’t make your child take school as seriously as you do; the truth is, they don’t typically think that way. Remember, as James says, it’s not that they aren’t motivated, it’s that they’re motivated to do what they want to do. In order to get your child to do their homework, you have to focus on their behavior, not their motivation. So instead of giving them a lecture, focus on their behavior and their homework skills. Let them know that completing homework and getting passing grades are not optional.
If you’re facing the rest of the school year with dread and irritation, you’re not alone. By following the tips below, you can improve your child’s homework skills and reduce your frustration!
5 Strategies to Get Homework Back On Track
Schedule Daily Homework Time
If your child often says they have no homework but their grades are poor, they may not be telling you accurate information, they may have completely tuned out their teacher’s instructions, or need to improve some other organizations skills, for example. The Total Transformation Program recommends that whether your child has homework or not, create a mandatory homework time each school day for those classes in which you child is doing poorly.
Use the “10-Minute Rule" formulated by the National PTA and the National Education Association, which recommends that kids should be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. In other words, 10 minutes for first-graders, 20 for second-graders and so forth.
It will be most effective if you choose the same time every day. For example, you might schedule homework time for the classes that your child is doing poorly in to begin at 4:00 p.m. every school day. If your child says they have no homework in those subjects, then they can spend that time reading ahead in their textbooks, making up missed work, working on extra credit projects, or studying for tests. If they say “I forgot my books at school,” have them read a book related to one of their subjects. By making study time a priority, you will sidestep all those excuses and claims of “no homework today.” If your child has to spend a few days doing “busy work” during the daily homework time, you may even find that they bring home more actual assignments!
Use a Public Space
It’s important to monitor your child’s homework time. For families where both parents work, you may need to schedule it in the evening. In many instances it may be more productive to have your child do their homework in a public space. That means the living room or the kitchen, or some place equally public where you can easily check in on them. Let them know they can ask for help if they need it, but allow them to do their own work. If your child would like to do his or her homework in their room, let them know that they can earn that privilege back when they have pulled up the grades in the subjects in which they are doing poorly.
Use Daily Incentives
Let your child know that they will have access to privileges when they have completed their homework. For example, you might say, “Once you’ve completed your homework time, you are free to use your electronics or see your friends.” Be clear with your child about the consequences for refusing to study, or for putting their work off until later. According to James Lehman, consequences should be short term, and should fit the “crime.” You might say, “If you choose not to study during the scheduled time, you will lose your electronics for the night. Tomorrow, you’ll get another chance to use them.” The next day, your child gets to try again – observing her homework time and earning her privileges. Don’t take away privileges for more than a day, as your child will have no incentive to do better the next time.
Work towards Something Bigger
Remember, kids don’t place as much importance on schoolwork as you do. As you focus on their behavior, not their motivation, you should begin to see some improvement in their homework skills. You can use your child’s motivation to your advantage if they have something they’d like to earn. For example, if your child would like to get his driver’s permit, you might encourage him to earn that privilege by showing you he can complete his homework appropriately. You might say, “In order to feel comfortable letting you drive, I need to see that you can follow rules, even when you don’t agree with them. When you can show me that you can complete your homework appropriately, I’d be happy to sit down and talk with you about getting your permit.” If your child starts complaining about the homework rule, you can say, “I know you want to get that driver’s permit. You need to show me you can follow a simple rule before I’ll even talk to you about it. Get going on that homework.” By doing this, you sidestep all the arguments around both the homework and the permit.
Skills + Practice = Success
Tying homework compliance with your child’s desires isn’t about having your child jump through hoops in order to get something they want. It’s not even about making them take something seriously, when they don’t see it that way. It’s about helping your child learn the skills they need to live life successfully. All of us need to learn how to complete things we don’t want to do. We all have occasions where we have to follow a rule, even when we disagree with it. When you create mandatory, daily homework time, you help your child practice these skills. When you tie that homework time to daily, practical incentives, you encourage your child to succeed.
If you are a Total Transformation customer, you can access our Support Line for help with these and other challenges you’re experiencing with your child. Support Line specialists have helped hundreds of parents customize homework charts and plans, and we can help you, too. Specialists can also work with you to formulate realistic, appropriate consequences to help enforce the daily routine.
5 Homework Strategies that Work for Kids is reprinted with permission from Empowering Parents.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Nevada Criminal Records For Resident Research
The State of Nevada is one of the few states that allow the public access to their Nevada criminal records. The Records and Identification Bureau under the Nevada Department of Public Safety is the central repository of Nevada criminal records. The purpose of the state database of Nevada criminal records is to provide centralized, complete and documented criminal justice information and statistics to the state's criminal justice community, the public, and many other authorized clients and contributors. Such information is then used in making informed public policy, criminal justice and regulatory decisions concerning crime and criminal offenders.
What Information is there in Nevada Criminal Records?
Pursuant to Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) 179.070, Nevada criminal records are defined as:
"Record of criminal history" means information contained in records collected and maintained by agencies of criminal justice, the subject of which is a natural person, consisting of descriptions which identify the subject and notations of arrests, detention, indictments, information, or other formal criminal charge and dispositions of charges, including dismissals, acquittals, convictions, sentences, correctional supervision occurring in Nevada, information concerning the status of an offender on parole or probation, and information concerning a convicted person who has registered as such pursuant to chapter 179C of NRS. The term includes only information contained in memoranda of criminal justice in this state. The term is intended to be equivalent to the phrase "criminal history record information" as used in federal regulations.<
Nevada criminal records stored in local databases contain pertinent personal information about a person. The information you get from them includes the subject's identification data, such as name, date of birth, social security number, sex, race, height, weight, et cetera. Also included in Nevada criminal records are arrest data, including the arresting agency, date of arrest, and charges filed.
Nevada criminal records may also contain the final judicial disposition data submitted by a court, prosecutor or other criminal justice agency and custodial information if the offender was incarcerated in a Nevada correctional facility.
Public Access to Nevada Criminal Records
Nevada criminal records are available for public access. Any person may request a copy of his or her Nevada criminal records or criminal history record or notice of absence of criminal history record from the Repository. This provision is stated in the NRS 179A.100.5 (b). The information provided will be based upon Nevada arrest fingerprint card submission to the Repository, as well as, dispositions. It should be noted that not all Nevada criminal records are accompanied by dispositions. This is because it was only 1987 that courts began requesting or including dispositions in the reports that they send to the Repository.
What Information is there in Nevada Criminal Records?
Pursuant to Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) 179.070, Nevada criminal records are defined as:
"Record of criminal history" means information contained in records collected and maintained by agencies of criminal justice, the subject of which is a natural person, consisting of descriptions which identify the subject and notations of arrests, detention, indictments, information, or other formal criminal charge and dispositions of charges, including dismissals, acquittals, convictions, sentences, correctional supervision occurring in Nevada, information concerning the status of an offender on parole or probation, and information concerning a convicted person who has registered as such pursuant to chapter 179C of NRS. The term includes only information contained in memoranda of criminal justice in this state. The term is intended to be equivalent to the phrase "criminal history record information" as used in federal regulations.<
Nevada criminal records stored in local databases contain pertinent personal information about a person. The information you get from them includes the subject's identification data, such as name, date of birth, social security number, sex, race, height, weight, et cetera. Also included in Nevada criminal records are arrest data, including the arresting agency, date of arrest, and charges filed.
Nevada criminal records may also contain the final judicial disposition data submitted by a court, prosecutor or other criminal justice agency and custodial information if the offender was incarcerated in a Nevada correctional facility.
Public Access to Nevada Criminal Records
Nevada criminal records are available for public access. Any person may request a copy of his or her Nevada criminal records or criminal history record or notice of absence of criminal history record from the Repository. This provision is stated in the NRS 179A.100.5 (b). The information provided will be based upon Nevada arrest fingerprint card submission to the Repository, as well as, dispositions. It should be noted that not all Nevada criminal records are accompanied by dispositions. This is because it was only 1987 that courts began requesting or including dispositions in the reports that they send to the Repository.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Philosophy as a science
Philosophy is considered a science but it is difficult to say, when one has to compare with an ordinary science, for example biology, or chemistry. This is a question that turns into a burning problem among the scientists and linguists all over the world. Can philosophy be a science? What does philosophy operate with? It operates with categories, which can be as wide and as interchangeable as one can only imagine. Ordinary science operates with definitions, which are quite limited in their field of research. Ordinary science uses terms and laws of that very science to continue the research, uniting with the others in very rare cases. Philosophy gets into the sense of every science trying to achieve results.
We also can not call philosophy a supra-science, for it also uses hypothesis and arguments to state the opinion. But there is the obvious thing: there are now laws in philosophy and never will be, for the science changes with the age, the needs, beliefs and requirements of the citizens. To prove your opinion, you can write the definition essay and state all the facts and arguments you know to prove one way or another. This is also a nice way to research the problem and see what the solution is. But you have to research it carefully; otherwise definition essays will not be fruitful. As all sciences philosophy has gone through its stages of development. Some scientists believe that the crib of philosophy was mythology and religion. If to see the principles of life and some primitive morals stated in some myths we may see that the statement is quite true and philosophy still continues to develop out of social beliefs and ideas. Philosophy is a science which is obligatory learned by every college student in order for him to establish his own philosophy of life. It is quite exciting to find answers to ever existing questions: who am I? What do I know? What can I know? What am I destined to do? Here is one more interesting observation. You can see that all famous philosophers were researching other science fields also. For example, Freud, Yung, Kafka and others were doing research in linguistics and social sciences. Their numerous creations are the pride of human history for they revealed some secrets that remained undiscovered for a long time before their great contributions.
There are so many currents and branches, so many schools of philosophy that it is hard to decide, which one do you prefer and agree with. This much depends on the country, family, society you live in. This is one more difference between philosophy and other natural sciences. The law is stable for any country; gravity exists in India, same as in Brazil. Philosophy is a hard science, for it is very difficult to understand the sense of the dogma reading it only once. It is of course, not easy, but gives credit for you if you get interested and somewhere, being at the social event you quote one of the famous doctors of philosophy and make a great impression of an educated and intelligent personality.
We also can not call philosophy a supra-science, for it also uses hypothesis and arguments to state the opinion. But there is the obvious thing: there are now laws in philosophy and never will be, for the science changes with the age, the needs, beliefs and requirements of the citizens. To prove your opinion, you can write the definition essay and state all the facts and arguments you know to prove one way or another. This is also a nice way to research the problem and see what the solution is. But you have to research it carefully; otherwise definition essays will not be fruitful. As all sciences philosophy has gone through its stages of development. Some scientists believe that the crib of philosophy was mythology and religion. If to see the principles of life and some primitive morals stated in some myths we may see that the statement is quite true and philosophy still continues to develop out of social beliefs and ideas. Philosophy is a science which is obligatory learned by every college student in order for him to establish his own philosophy of life. It is quite exciting to find answers to ever existing questions: who am I? What do I know? What can I know? What am I destined to do? Here is one more interesting observation. You can see that all famous philosophers were researching other science fields also. For example, Freud, Yung, Kafka and others were doing research in linguistics and social sciences. Their numerous creations are the pride of human history for they revealed some secrets that remained undiscovered for a long time before their great contributions.
There are so many currents and branches, so many schools of philosophy that it is hard to decide, which one do you prefer and agree with. This much depends on the country, family, society you live in. This is one more difference between philosophy and other natural sciences. The law is stable for any country; gravity exists in India, same as in Brazil. Philosophy is a hard science, for it is very difficult to understand the sense of the dogma reading it only once. It is of course, not easy, but gives credit for you if you get interested and somewhere, being at the social event you quote one of the famous doctors of philosophy and make a great impression of an educated and intelligent personality.
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