This is funny. From Scholastic Administrator story on Finland:
“One anecdote that truly illuminates the difference between U.S. and Finnish culture came when visitors asked librarians how they filter the Internet for students. Finnish educators didn’t understand the question, Walker says, because the concept was so foreign to them. Finally, the two responses the group got were, ‘Students know these computers are for learning,’ and ‘The filters are in students’ heads.’”
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Marc Tucker explains why Americans are so burnt-out on tests that they might cannibalize the Common Core—the best thing to happen in American education in a long while.
“American teachers’ experience of testing is very different from that of their counterparts in the top-performing countries. They see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students. What is ironic about this is that, because these other countries do much less accountability testing than we do, they can afford…
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American students, teachers and parents are sick of tests and rightly so. For years, they’ve been bombarded with ridiculous, dumbed-down tests that waste class time and demoralize everyone.
Now some are taking their rage out on the Common Core, a new set of voluntary, rigorous standards designed by educators around the country.
That is a mistake, understandable as it may be. And it’s one that could grow into a tragedy over the next year if things continue as they are.
Here’s what we know for sure: The U.S. urgently needs more…
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Sometimes when I tell Americans I am working on a book about the smartest countries in the world, they assume I mean China.
I don’t mean China. And I won’t, not anytime soon.
It’s true that teenagers in Shanghai, a huge, booming city in China, trounced teenagers on every continent on an international test of critical thinking in math, reading and science in 2009. Their performance was remarkable. Truly. In math, their poorest kids outperformed our richest kids.
But concluding anything about China from Shanghai’s results is like using test scores from Minneapolis to make assumptions about Detroit; one…
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During my recent obsession with tracking kids’ boredom on Twitter, I’ve naturally been wondering which country has the most bored kids.
Of course, this is hard to find out—for about a thousand reasons, most of which are boring. But the closest thing I’ve seen to an imperfect answer comes from the OECD’s 2002 Education at a Glance report. The survey asked 15-year-olds around the world if they “often felt bored” at school. It’s worth noting that “often” and “bored” are words with very different definitions depending on the culture you live in…but let’s…
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On Friday, I took a break from doing my taxes and spent one hour monitoring Twitter for the words bored, class and school. I expected to see a few posts; instead I saw a galaxy. All over the world, kids were posting—at the rate of about 1 per second by my guess—about how bored they were in real time.
The sheer volume—and outrage and creativity—of their laments was part awesome, part tragic. I wondered what would happen if we could somehow capture all that energy, all those empty hours?
For now, unsure what else to do, I have documented…
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Buried in a NYT story about niche online classes (on sites like CreativeLive) was this line:
“[T]wo of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, have invested small sums in CreativeLive that signal their interest in using the company’s service as a new outlet for their celebrity clients.”
Here’s why this matters: Two of the country’s most unique and potent exports are higher education and Hollywood. Until now, they had little reason to intersect.
But online classes are different than the in-person kind: Not only do they have a huge potential…
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Finland’s Core Math Curriculum for 1st & 2nd graders:
“Pupils…will derive satisfaction and pleasure from understanding and solving problems.”
“Pupils will…learn to justify their solutions and conclusions by means of pictures and concrete models and tools, in writing and orally; and to find similarities, differences, regularities and cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena…”
Enough said.
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