I had a really nice chat with Jonah’s principal yesterday. She asked me what skills did I think the school should emphasize. What should students learn in elementary school to help them succeed later in high school and in college? It was a good question and I’m still thinking about it. I said writing skills. The students who come to college able to write effortlessly have a huge advantage. But now I’m thinking on a different line. Perhaps a good work ethic, good study skills, and ambition are the most important skills that determine success later in school and in life. I’m not sure how a school could teach those qualities though. So, I’m throwing that question out to you all.
Question of the Day — What should students learn in elementary school to help them succeed later in high school and in college?
Apt. 11d 
Here’s http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/04/opinion/oe-klein4 a great little tear-jerker which will have you voting for: Multiplication Tables!
X = Karin (Johnny) > 95%
By Karin Klein
February 04, 2006 in print edition B-17
JOHNNY PATRELLO was a greaser. I was a dork. And yet, despite our rigidly stratified school culture, we came together in the spring of 1968 at Walt Whitman Junior High School, where I tutored Johnny in algebra.
I thought about Johnny again as I read The Times’ series this week on L.A.’s dropout problem. Algebra, the reporters found, is an insurmountable stumbling block for many high school students.
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I’d say independence. Teach them that they don’t have to/shouldn’t rely on someone telling them all they need to know. My interns drive me crazy in this regard. They often expect me to have all the answers and I don’t. The sooner kids are encouraged to explore on their own, the better.
I often say to my own kids when they ask me something–let’s look it up! I find most instruction through middle school involves learning to follow directions–and then kids expect that everything they do will have a list of directions.
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My two cents: how to read. So many of my students’ problems with writing stems from the fact that they haven’t had enough experience reading.
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Critical thinking and how to look at a problem from multiple angles. This applies to both math (which will help later in algebra) and writing.
I also think goal setting and study habits are important. I don’t think you can teach ambition, but you can show students the steps to complete a project or assignment.
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Critical thinking.
Ambition.
Pleasure in learning.
The discipline to keep working even when it isn’t pleasurable.
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Reading. Comprehension and pleasure in reading. So much of what I do is teaching students sentence patterns that they’d pick up if they read more.
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Wanting to know, to really know about things (I think that’s pleasure in learning). Everything else comes with this.
But then, I wonder if this can be taught. My analogy is the physical. My daughter, who really is a learner, every teacher’s dream, does not love to move. When I see children running on the playground, or hitting balls, or catching and you see the joy in their faces, I realize that I can mostly teach my daughter competance, but not much more.
But the book-learning stuff, for her, that’s a joy and it will help her navigate other deficits.
So, I think the answer really might be that different children need different things. There is no magic bullet.
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dr has it right. I teach college composition, and while writing is really important, I can set any hard-working student on the right path. I can’t motivate people who don’t want to learn and who find the endeavor of learning itself a giant yawn. I would say the best qualities are
Critical thinking
A good work ethic
Reading skills
Being independent and engaged in their own education rather that passive slackers who expect me to spoon-feed them every single answer and give them time in class to write their papers.
Independence and engagement are crucial as is a sense of personal responsibility.
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I think I’d say reading, too–give them 20 minutes a day to read on their own, read aloud to them for another 20 minutes a day. Yes, it takes away from instructional time, but kids who read are better writers, better thinkers, and can usually figure out a better way to amuse themselves than video games or facebook, to boot. (Or at least alongside, if not instead of!)
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In the category of academic things that can be taught:
How to read.
Enough history and civics to understand the newspaper easily. (Reading comprehension has a lot to do with prior knowledge–E D Hirsch makes that point pretty well in Cultural Literacy IMO.)
Arithmetic, particularly fractions and the multiplication table.
Non-academic skills which can be somewhat taught:
Working at un-fun things
Timeliness
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To me, comments seem a little uninspired, but maybe that’s because it’s summer? Are we in a rut?
I decided to look up my son’s school’s teaching philosophy statement:
– the importance of making choices; how to work collaboratively and independently; how to take responsibility for interactions with materials and people; how to plan and engage oneself in a project, whether short (< 1 day) or longer duration (weeks); how to document and share work – both process and product; how to take and give feedback and suggestions to and from adults and peers; the ability respect varying perspectives and to ask questions from varying perspectives; to construct knowledge in a variety of ways; to explore many forms of expression including multiple arts (visual, music, theater)
Ambitious and inspiring, no? They take for granted that kids will learn to read and that young kids generally love learning unless some mindless educator has already killed that love.
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What SamC said – reading (also grammar) history and arithmetic. These fundamentals serve as the foundation for additional learning and skill building in the upper grades.
Mastery of number facts and fractions are critical to learning algebra. I would want my child to read content-rich books that will help him learn history. I have read a lot about how the middle school slump can be attributed to the deficiency of prior knowledge that makes additional learning painfully difficult. The Johnny Patrello story is a poignant example of this.
I agree with educators who believe that elementary students should not be writing anything longer than a paragraph. Too many schools rush writing instruction, so that fifth graders are assigned 5-page research papers on topics like global warming or overpopulation. I think that’s a mistake, and really means that parents must do much of the work. If a student emerges from elementary school with a growing mastery of grammar and sentence composition, there will be time in the upper grades for learning to write longer pieces.
This push for young students to learn “critical thinking” skills seems to have translated itself in a content-poor curriculum. Critical thinking develops when there is sufficient domain knowledge to incorporate information efficiently into the analytical process.
I think the parents are much more important than the schools in the teaching a good work ethic and other character traits. Stay away from character education, please.
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“To me, comments seem a little uninspired, but maybe that’s because it’s summer? Are we in a rut? ”
😛 It’s summer!!!!
OK, here’s a thought: my daughter is 9. She’s already starting the … I don’t know how to describe it… curling up? curling inward? folding up inside herself? that my mom feels so many young women start to go through at this age or a little later. (My mom raised 4 daughters; she and I were talking about this this past weekend.) She’s self-conscious and afraid everyone is looking at her. She doesn’t want to do anything out of her comfort zone. So I’m working with her on confidence issues and doing “uncomfortable” things. Like for example, we were sitting on the side of the road waiting for my sister (long story I won’t go into) and my daughter was worried people were watching us, wondering why we were there. So I tried to turn it into a game of sorts. If someone asked us what were we doing there, we’d say: Waiting for a spaceship to land, or We heard there was going to be a parade led by Barack Obama, or I don’t know–what are *you* doing here?
I also have been talking about trying new activities. I’ve been playing the guitar lately. I have no talent, but it makes me feel good. I may also take up mandolin. I started gardening this year, and I explained how I knew nothing about gardening and anything I accomplished I did by reading, asking questions, and just trying.
So I guess I’d add “taking risks” to that list of things to teach.
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This is an extremely middle-to-upper-middle-class list of swell things we want kids to learn. Not that they’re not swell things. Laura was asking about her kids’ school, and she’s in a district with widely varying parent SES. The left half of the bell curve is present at her kids’ school. So I’m going to claim: how to balance a check book. How to notice bullshit in someone trying to sell you an instalment contract, how to think what it will do to you two years out. Once more, with feeling, multiplication tables and fractions.
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Interesting — I would never have thought of putting “learning math facts” on any list of what I expect my child to learn in school. Mind you, I know my daughter is gong to learn that anyway, and it’s the soft skills of courage, discipline, joy, respect, . . . that I am concerned about.
I’m trying to get beyond the academic, and think about what I want my child to learn in something that doesn’t come easily for them (like sports, or art), because I’m wondering if my disregard of reading, say, or math facts is based on the fact that I know that mastery of those has come/will come easily. But, I don’t think my disregard is limited to those skills. I was actually turned off to an art class because they taught her to produce acceptable output, and didn’t teach her the critical thinking/fundamentals of art.
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I support learner’s wish to have his school prioritize teaching his 8-year old how to make choices, work collaboratively, take responsibility for interactions with materials and people, plan a project, give feedback, ask questions from varying perspectives, construct knowledge and to explore many forms of expression. And other parents who want their children to learn the “soft skills” should have that choice. I’d like to choose reading, writing and ‘rithmetic for my child.
Another reason I support school choice. (I wonder if I was taught how to make choices in 3rd grade?)
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I would never have thought of putting “learning math facts” on any list of what I expect my child to learn in school.
Although your daughter is going to learn that anyway, many other children will not because the schools will not teach it.
School choice.
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I’ve been thinking what skills/knowledge that I wish I learned by 8th grade that it took me way too long to pick up later in life.
1. Black shoes/Black belt; brown shoes/brown belt
2. Flaunt it when you’re young.
3. Whatever smart thing you’re saying is made smarter by a good pair of heels.
4. Never believe a man when he says that he loves you until after you have been dating for six months.
5. 99% of the world is stupider than you. Don’t be intimidated.
6. A good number of the 99% know something quite cool and you’re a fool if you don’t take the time to figure out what that is.
7. Set goals and work your ass off to get there.
8. When you’re done, get seriously drunk.
9. Go off the grid at least once a year.
10. Smile a lot and people are nice to you.
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The ability not to feel overwhelmed when it’s not immediately clear how to tackle a problem. As a math professor, I see this as the biggest problem that students who flameout in their math courses have. Students with a weak background who are willing to take some time to just think and puzzle over something that at first seems impenetrable do much better than supposedly well-prepared students who freak out once they realize that real analysis is much, much different from their AP calc classes.
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I would say that the “soft skills” are just other names for the behavioral skills children learn in any school where good behavior is expected. Other words for “Take responsibility for interactions with materials and people” are “share”, “don’t steal others’ things”, “behave respectfully toward your teachers and other students.” Plan a project can mean “get that report on dinosaurs done on time.” I can’t imagine a parent who would not want their child to be able to consider things from a variety of perspectives. At the elementary level this usually translates to “How do you think this character from your reading book felt when such and such happened.”
I totally agree with sara on the importance of being able to puzzle out an issue rather than freak because you can’t figure it out right away. I saw this when I worked as tutor for freshmen biology. A lot of students freaked when they couldn’t immediately grasp certain concepts.
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To approach problems or questions as friends, not enemies.
To be able to evaluate sources, and ask questions.
Basic writing and arithmetic skills.
Beginning critical thinking skills: Who, what, where, when, how, and why?
Exposure to different ideas, basic cultural literacy, literature, geometry, etc.
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Megan McArdle has a good response to my last post. She wonders whether any government program or school can teach kids lessons about hard work and the fun of reading, if those things aren’t being taught at home. That response could also work to this post. There is a limit to what schools can do. Of course, it would be great if schools could provide a love of learning as well as making them learn the times tables. But I think schools need a simple mission. Something that’s operational and scalable. When I told the principal that I thought writing skills were important, she was immediately able to seize on that goal with a plan of bringing in a writing coach for the teachers.
Sorry to pick on you, bj, but I’ve been thinking about your “love of learning” skill today. If I had to chose a soft skill, I would pick hard work. The friends of mine who actually finished graduate school were the hard working and goal driven ones, not the free thinking, super smart ones.
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Don’t mind being picked on about this. Hard work is great, but it makes the world gray and unlovely if it’s not in the service of something you love. The people I know who have succeeded have had both skills. And the ones who have succeeded wildly didn’t know how hard they were working, because they were driven to find the answer because they wanted to know it so badly.
I answered the question thinking of what I want for my own child. And, for my child, I certainly don’t want the “operational/scalable” version of education. But then, I know that, and I buy it.
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Re the soft skills: believe it or not, squishy liberal as I am, I don’t have any problem with operational/scalable. The problem is that kids are in school for 6 hours a day, and “soft” skills can’t help but be relevant. Maybe the “hard skills” are the curriculum and the “soft skills” are the teaching strategies? Teachers simply have to deal with having 25 different kids/personalities/learning styles in the classroom. These are going to come into conflict somehow. They need strategies. They need to model dealing with problems and solving problems, social and intellectual.
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hey laura, my turn to pick on you now. You learned to get seriously drunk after you’re done with a project by the 8th grade?
(I was so straight laced that I’m one of the few boom-xers who doesn’t have to worry about her kids learning about anything I did as even a college student, or . . .)
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Things kids could learn in elementary school:
How to play well with others: Even if you don;t like somebody, when they are on your team you need to work with them.
How to communicate with one and other: Talking to other kids works well, especially if someone is better in a subject that you are not.
&
Akido: Because the cred that you get putting an arm lock on the local bully when he tries to give you a wedgie will be priceless. 🙂
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I think the ability to express themselves, whether through talking or writing. It’s their opinions that make them unique, and this is what the college, and the whole world, needs to see.
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In elementary school I want my kids (currently 4, 6, and 8) to be exposed to a broad array of disciplines and ideas so that they can find out what interests them, have ideas to think about and build on, and be able to make connections. History, quality literature, and accessible, interesting science are all high on the list for me. However, I don’t want them to have the pressure of being tested. I want them to be taught in an engaging way, and the information sticks, all the better.
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(Bangs drum again) Multiplication Tables!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/29/AR2008072902646.html?sid=ST2008073101667&pos=
“This thesis has become Walstein’s obsession: In its drive to be the best, please affluent parents and close the achievement gap on standardized tests, the county is accelerating too many students in math, at the expense of the curriculum — and the students. The average accelerated math student “thinks he’s fine. His parents think he’s fine. The school system says he’s fine. But he’s not fine!” Walstein declares on one occasion. On another, Walstein is even less diplomatic. ” ‘We have the best courses and there’s no achievement gap and everything is wonderful,’ ” he says, parroting the message he believes county administrators are trying to project.
“The problem is, they’re lying!” ”
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It strikes me as misplaced to make the goal “be a success in high school and college”. I see this quite often — kids who are so drilled at the skills they need *in college* — skills that do not apply in the real world. (All who talk at length about the importance of writing an essay, I’m talking to you.)
That said, I’ve come to believe that in this life it’s all about motivation and persistence. Find a way to motivate yourself, find a way to stick with something. If you do these things, you will learn facts because you’ll need them to solve problems. You will give up waiting on others to give you direction and you’ll learn independence. You will be successful.
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“I see this quite often — kids who are so drilled at the skills they need *in college* — skills that do not apply in the real world. (All who talk at length about the importance of writing an essay, I’m talking to you.)”
I don’t know about the work place (haven’t been there for a long time), but essay writing skills are awfully important on the internet. On the internet your credibility hangs on your spelling, your grammar, your sense of audience, your ability to find reputable sources for facts and then to organize them properly. Any good blog post (or even comment) is a mini-essay.
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Well! There you go! Let’s all just blog for a living! And people wonder why we have to find H1-Bs who can actually WORK.
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It’s not crazy to think that blogging and other internet content production is going to be part of many real live jobs from here on out. I think, for instance, that my relatives who do kayak and raft guiding would do very well to create a blog, as an easy-to-use venue for photographs of raft trips and descriptions of wildlife seen on the river as part of their advertising. I’m going to keep bugging them until they do it.
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All right, so I’m regretting popping off at Amy. But I do think her comment perfectly illustrates for me why preparing someone for college is not like preparing them for life.
I can’t believe I have to reiterate this, but evidently it’s needed: I believe the goal of the educational system is to prepare people for life. Not “finishing graduate school”, not “getting into Harvard”. Living life. This means that the skills of being a student should only be as valuable as the life skills they imbue. Yet it seems that everyone has come to focus on the student skills per se, as opposed to the output.
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It strikes me as misplaced to make the goal “be a success in high school and college”. I see this quite often — kids who are so drilled at the skills they need *in college* — skills that do not apply in the real world. (All who talk at length about the importance of writing an essay, I’m talking to you.)
Our school is good at teaching third graders how to make PowerPoint presentations, but not so good at teaching writing. Does that count as “real world”?
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Yes, what are those “real world skills,” anyway?
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I went back and re-read all the comments and I see that many people have pointed out real-world skills already.
I personally have trouble narrowing it down to just skills that can be taught in elementary schools. If I had to generate a list a person should have by the time they reach 21, it would include structured problem-solving, reading for comprehension (it’s not a requirement that you read for pleasure), spelling and grammar, arithmetic, handling conflict constructively, money/risk management, time management. As I mentioned above, I think persistence and self-motivation are huge. Of those, I’m not sure which ones you can teach in elementary school. You can start on the spelling/reading/math and conflict stuff I guess. Maybe persistence.
BTW the list TOTALLY does not include PowerPoint (shudder)! Nor does it include much math above arithmetic, much literature, writing research papers with formal citations (although you do need to be able to lay out a formal argument), essay writing. Test-taking. My personal bane, the professional student’s gift of assessing the situation to see what they’ll be tested on and ditching on the rest of the content. They don’t seem to realize: this is real life! You eventually get tested on all of it!
I think I’m almost done ranting about this. 😉 Again sorry to pop off; Amy’s comment about not even working just totally set me off.
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Jen,
If it makes you feel better, I’m thinking of doing some paid babysitting at home again to help with the house downpayment fund.
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I’m sure this thread is already dead, but I want to make it clear here that I’m not criticizing stay-home parents. This is about the role of college in life, not about whether you work for pay.
We have discussed at length, here and at other blogs, the fact that college is “overprescribed” in the States. We as a country do a terrible job of preparing kids for life if that life does not require a traditional college education. College has many great benefits, but for when it’s overused it causes damage. Many bad things go along with it: the debt load, the diminishment of non-white-collar skills. I personally feel that college education is one of the primary mechanisms for intergenerational transfer of privilege.
And yet here we are, once again discussing success in college as if everyone should end up there, and as if it’s some sort of goal in and of itself. I am not implying that, instead of college as the goal, the paid workplace should be the goal. You don’t have to work for money in order to call your life successful. But what I hear in this argument is people speaking from a position of privilege, arguing that we should craft education for all as if everyone had that same position of privilege. Not everyone is picking up all the general skills (cultural knowledge, reading, organizing your time) at home and learning “extras” at school. And once school is over, not everyone has a family situation that allows them to bow out of the paid workforce if they choose. In short, not everyone can afford to blow their educational years learning to write essays. Some people need actual applicable skills right from the jump.
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Jen,
I think what you’re talking about is nuns for everybody. I haven’t ever had the Catholic school experience as a kid or as a parent, but I’ve heard a lot of people talking about theirs, and one of the things that jumps out at me in those reminiscences is how valuable the non-academic side of those schools was: organization, neatness, self-discipline, respect for authority, etc. (Of course, it could be that that style of education was simply the norm in the 1950s and 1960s, and it simply lived on longer in Catholic schools.)
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Jen, I’m hearing you, fwiw. I’m still trying to figure out why I needed calculus. I never use it! I use algebra and geometry on a regular basis, but not sin cos and tan or function d(dx) whatever. See, I can’t even remember it, and I got a 4 on the AP exam.
I teach writing in college, but I’m with you, mostly, on the traditional college essay. However, there are things *about* it that are transferable, and there are reasons why the college essay is important to learn/use *in college* as a way of “writing to learn.” It’s a tool that is useful for learning stuff, which is what one does in college. On the other hand, I’ve been moving much more to community service learning in my comp courses if only because it involves “real-life” writing and problem-solving (I use a model developed by a colleague that isn’t just “tutor poor kids and write about your experiences”).
And finally, as a college professor, if I had to pick one thing I wish students would do/be able to do, it would be to READ THE DAMNED ASSIGNMENT. Seriously, I think most professors would be thrilled if the students would just do the reading we assign.
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Math is a tool for learning stuff, too. And, math comes up all the time, if you know it well enough to realize it’s coming up. I wish people understood statistics and randomness, personally, rather than the analytic tools of calculus, if I had to have only one. But, the beauty of math is that really knowing that stuff gives you the tools for analytic thinking, logic, and quantitative rigor.
(OK, I’m leaping into a dead thread because it bugs me enormously that science and math, which, frankly are th engine of our modern world, always get short shrift in thinking about what education means).
And, Jen, I honestly do believe that “learning to learn” is going to be a necessary life skill in our modern world, that the world has just fundamentally shifted (yes, because of science and technology) to a point where learning a skill set as a teenager and applying is not going to be good enough for a long life of being an active member of society. And, that goes for having the practical skills of fixing cars, or carpentry, or whatever. I think we’re moving towards a world where a certain level of cognitive skills will be required for almost all work.
I do worry that not everyone in society is capable of this level of cognitive skills, and am not really sure what to do about that problem
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This thread only looks dead. The NEA used ideas from this thread to try to re-create a plausible political platform that was somehow distinguishable from naked self-interest. In doing to, the NEA provided this thread with an inadvertent horcux.
A.D., a noted British educator with over 50 years of experience (and the rumored possessor of the “elder pen”), will soon arrive to explain the way forward.
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“And, that goes for having the practical skills of fixing cars, or carpentry, or whatever.”
Good examples. Cars have a lot of electronics running them these days, don’t they? Also, I keep hearing that factory produced homes are becoming more mainstream, that they have the advantage of being produced in a climate controlled facility, and that there is the potential for much better quality control. It’s actually amazing (and a bit crazy, actually) that we’ve gone so long building houses outside in all sorts of weather, with the various wood components getting alternately soaked and baked. There may be additional pressure from consumer dissatisfaction with recent stick-built construction.
Another issue is that a lot of self-employed guys doing blue collar work are uncomfortable with the clerical/business side of their operation. Customers don’t get billed, they don’t pay, the business is too highly leveraged, the payroll is too big, the business spends too much on shiny new equipment (“It’s a write-off!”), volume is high but not enough is being charged for projects to break even, etc. A trade oriented high school where you’d “double major” in some hand-on skill and pick up enough business knowledge to keep out of bankruptcy would be a very fine thing for a lot of kids, particularly those who don’t see the point of school. Even if the hands-on skill became obsolete, the clerical, organizational, and financial knowledge would continue to be relevant. You’d need to find some time for history, literature, and so forth, but I think two courses a term of those (out of a course load of six classes) would be more than sufficient. I don’t know what to do about literature, but in history you could emphasize economic history, talking about booms, busts, the Great Depression, the various panics of the 19th century, globalization, the housing bubble, etc. Even foreign language would fit in–you could do business and construction Spanish rather than “I like pizza!” Spanish.
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I should add that in the context of K-8 education, I’m extremely hostile to progressive “relevant” “hands-on” “applied” “cross-disciplinary” curriculum which all too often is code for irrelevant time-sucking busy work. I think K-8 ought to be primarily academic, but I’m a lot friendlier to applied stuff at the high school level.
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One more thing–small business people seem to get into awful tax trouble with great frequency. A long unit (or maybe a semester) on taxes would be part of the math curriculum in my dream trade high school.
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See, now everyone’s talking my language. I am 100% behind “learning to learn” and I believe that’s what I’ve been advocating: skills that will help you throughout your entire life, not just to get into college. The sort of trade school Amy discusses would be perfect for many, many kids I see dropping out of state colleges and ending up at work on my help desk. And I too wish more kids understood what I define as arithmetic but which bj refers to as “statistics and randomness”.
We all have our own baggage when it comes to education, which I fully cop to. My bias is based on spending so much of my professional time trying to hire people. And the kids who are hired out of college are often not successful; they have not learned to learn. They have learned to take tests.
We have an equivalent rate of success hiring people out of the temp pool. Isn’t that a sad statement? But the temps are scrappy; they really really want the job. And in fairness most of them have at least some college in conjunction with a few more years of experience out in the world. Maybe it’s just an age thing, but it doesn’t exactly speak well of our educational system.
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This guy says our early-years education doesn’t inculcate striving for science knowledge: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=03hp5gr19z5sb0cdvhtsk5qgp3yhdttf
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