Steve and I often plot our future trek through Europe with the boys. I would love to go to Basque country just for the food. Garlic and tomato rubbed on bread is so damn good.
We, as a family, are bereft of executive skills. Yesterday, I left my purse in a restaurant and showed up late an hour and 20 minutes late to a kiddie birthday party. While it's cool that schools are teaching kids to become more organized and better planners, this pre-school sounds like a disaster. No one education philosophy should ever take over a school. I also don't want to see a world of tidy, organized bores.
No college president should make $500,000 and get a mansion.
Thanks to the charter school system, we've been able to measure that a longer school year increases school performance. However, most kids only get 180 days of instruction in the US, while the children in Japan and Germany spend 240 days in a classroom. Obama is now speaking up in favor of increasing the year.
Apt. 11d 
I dunno, Laura. This stuffs seems quite useful, although I wonder if we shouldn’t teach them in college instead. Graduate school, even. I know that my grades would have suffered here: “Time Management – The capacity to estimate how much time one has and how to allocate it.”
Did you get your purse back?
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About the college presidents–some of those guys are routinely running $100 million construction projects and safeguarding multi-billion dollar endowments, not to mention the responsibility for thousands of employees. For that level of responsibility, $500,000 sounds even a bit low.
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Yeah, I was being overly flippant. Executive skills are really important. The school sounds like it is teaching those skills in a strange way though. The kids only do play acting. From the article, it sounds too ridged and boring.
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That’s the number one referred article on NYTimes.com right now. Interesting that it’s sparking so much interest.
Executive functioning is on my mind right now because I just read Chapter 4 of Different Minds, which focuses a lot on how AS kids have deficits in EF. I don’t have a clue how to teach it, though.
I think the issue is that you can’t teach planning/organization in preschool, but you can teach kids to learn to be patient, to develop habits. A lot of this is probably done by a lot of parents already, but for people like me and my husband, it would have helped a lot with our parenting!
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I’m working on Jonah’s executive skills right now. When he comes home, I check his assignment pad. If there are blanks, I fill them in and review it with the class website. We check items off when he’s done. He has a book report due at the end of October. We made a calendar to figure out how to break down the task into small bits and to give himself deadlines.
When I met with his teacher last week, I told her that I was working on Jonah’s executive skills; she didn’t know what that term meant.
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“How did you get into education?
I don’t know. It’s all an accident. I thought I’d go work for a law firm.”
Ugh. Is he trying to everyone in his system mad at him?
BTW, it’s the convention to try to make college president’s pay sound like less than it is. First, the guy gets 500K, then he gets 120K in rent, then he gets a pension payment, probably worth at least 200K. He probably gets a housing allowance/drivers allowance/etc, at another 100K or so. The question of whether this is the right amount depends on whether you can get the right person for the job while paying them so little. That’s never an issue for US president (i.e not to many candidates bow out because of the pay they receive when they’re president — mind you that’s sensible of them, since they can cash in on the experience after they’re done, and get a lot of perks during the job).
I believe that we’d get plenty qualified people for college president even if we paid them less, and we might even get people with some knowledge of a university’s mission that goes beyond “it was an accident.”
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Laura, I just heard the term “executive skills” for the first time recently in a student’s file noting her lack of it. So I got on the Internet and looked up as much as I could about it, which Jonah’s teacher may have done after your meeting also. Even if she doesn’t know the term, she may be teaching it in the room anyway.
It’s those kinds of throwaway remarks that make you sound like you don’t respect or value classroom teachers, FYI.
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Does it annoy me that I am more well versed in the edu-lingo than someone who is working on her second Masters in Education (J’s teacher)? Yes, it does. Slightly.
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Add Dordogne region of France to the list. Just did this past summer with two boys. Castles (real ones with arrow slits and drawbridges, not chateaus for pampered royalty), caves, kayaking plus great, great food.
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I had to define the word ‘hue’ for a teacher once. We were talking about paint colors.
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“BTW, it’s the convention to try to make college president’s pay sound like less than it is.”
Don’t forget the taxes!
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And, meanwhile, the chancellor & vice-chancellor of the UC system are circulating a proposal that the “Great Public Universities” be federalized (with a bailout) in order to avoid privatization. Hopefully, that’s a proposal that will go no where.
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I think a longer school year is a good idea for disadvantaged children (since summer is when the gap really opens up), but comparing our school year to Germany is pulling a fast one. German kids get out by 12 or 1 and have lunch at home.
http://www.german-way.com/educ.html
I think that would not be popular here.
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We took our kids to Switzerland last summer (while my wife still had a job and we were feeling prosperous) and had fond dreams of culturally broadening and new food and museums. We got some of that, but there was a LOT of push back and lobbying to eat at places where we could get french fries…
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240 days is more than I spend at work, baring illness and whatnot. I get two weeks vacation, from Christmas through New Years, two personal days, plus 8 minor holidays, so I figure 235 days.
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We’re planning a road trip to the West next summer; I really want to go to Europe and show my little geography/travel nut the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but we’ll settle for Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, and Old Faithful this year.
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I would be in favour of a longer school year but only if teachers and school staff are paid more to reflect their additional duties. Which I suspect wouldn’t be the case in this cratered-out economy!
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$500,000 would be mean more than a 60% pay cut for the president here, who lives in a mansion, and has a cook and a driver.
Not that I would want the job!
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I would love to see a comparison chart of the pay scale of college presidents along with the pay scale of an adjunct professor. The chancellor of CUNY gave himself a 14% raise last year. He makes $550,000 per year, including benefits. Adjuncts make about 2 grand and change per class.
Actually, I probably wouldn’t have commented on his salary, but he comes off as a bit of an asshole throughout that article.
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“but he comes off as a bit of an asshole throughout that article. ”
Yeah, completely. My suspicion is that the reporter didn’t like him very much. Those pull-out interviews (one sentence responses, limited questions) are a recipe for disaster if the reporter wants to make you look glad. Of course, he might have helped her along.
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Comparative data are most useful in thinking about the salaries of professors and administrators. I was recently in Oregon where there is a lot of conversation about a calculation that:
UO senior administrators are paid 120% of their peers.
UO full professors are paid 81% of their peers.
And that is using the same institutions as comparisons!
http://uomatters.blogspot.com/2009/02/blog-post.html
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” there was a LOT of push back and lobbying to eat at places where we could get french fries…”
Congratulations, dave s.! Your kids have gone native already. Little Swiss and German people love their fries, too, and resist eating in places where they’re not available. Unless pizza is involved, of course.
Wendy, I dunno if you’ve been to the leaning tower yourself, but on the off chance that you haven’t: Pisa is an almost textbook example of how not to be home to a world-famous monument. There’s but nothing else in the town. People tramp up to the duomo complex from the train station, look around, and tramp back. There’s a souvenir strip, but even on the main drag to and from the tower, restaurants and such are extremely thin on the ground. And that in Tuscany! If you’re in the neighborhood, check out Siena, Lucca and other places. Obviously if you have a car (which I never have there), even more of the region is open to you.
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We came within a few amendments of dropping to 170 days of school, as legislators cut education spending to balance the state budget.
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Doug, I’ve never been. Thanks for the tip. 🙂 I’m sure my husband would insist on a car so we could drive around (read: get plenty of photos).
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Pisa had very strange souvenirs when I was there. Somebody was selling green Nebraska Football caps, which is inexplicable on a couple of levels.
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“I’m sure my husband would insist on a car so we could drive around (read: get plenty of photos).”
And carry even more camera equipment.
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“And carry even more camera equipment.”
LOL, yes.
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Re the 240 days at school in Germany: hell, yes. Because my kids (1st and 2nd grade) come home at 11 am.
Yes, you read that right. They start school at 7:40 am. Those are really short days. Both used to be in US-curriculum based International schools and had much longer days (until 3 pm), longer vacations, and they learned a lot more.
Blah. I’m not happy, no.
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11am???? That’s just plain wrong. I’ve heard that the Spainish schools are surprisingly good. The kids stay there until 5 and all their activities are at the school. No driving around.
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Maybe Jonah’s teacher thought executive skills were different from executive function and you were trying to be ms. high and mighty PhD. BTW, the term executive function refers to the patterns of thinking that inform which organizational skills are appropriate for different circumstances. (If homework is given, should I commit the pages to memory or write it down? That’s in the EF domain. Where you write it down: on your arm, in a binder you don’t take home everyday, on an online calendar, or in a hw notebook is the actual organizational skill.) So if you said, “I’m working on Jonah’s executive skills” you actually didn’t say anything in edu-lingo at all.
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Maybe. But I don’t tell people that I have a PhD or that I’m a professor. I introduce myself just as Laura or Jonah’s mom. Thanks for the correction, Western Dave.
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FWIW, I value teachers just as much as I value other professions – doctors, lawyers, bankers, postal workers, accountants. My sister and SIL are teachers. I have considered getting an alternative route teaching certicificate.
I have a big interest in reforming education. I’m going to criticize the system. That’s just the way it is.
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While I can’t speak for Japan, I teach in Korea where the students attend a lot more days than North Americans. Like in Germany, they also get out of school earlier in the day, though they do often have to go every other Saturday.
That said, most students attend as many private lessons as they can afford because the education is fairly low quality.
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Amanda,
Do tell.
When I worked in a Russian public school, they theoretically had a partial day on Saturdays, although I remember that in the gardening months, the school had to plead with parents to send their kids to school on Saturday rather than taking them to the dacha to work. I can’t remember the exact details, but elementary age kids had a pretty short day (roughly German-length) and even high school kids had a pretty short day in comparison to Americans. My high school students were in a lycee program with an extra class or two at the end of the day, plus one day a week when they went to Vladivostok and spent the day at the Marine Academy taking college prep classes. I think I remember them finishing up some days at school at 3:30 or so, but they were totally fried by then. Normal Russian high school students would finish up considerably earlier. The school cafeteria and the schedule weren’t set up to offer a real lunch, but there might be a long break when there was just time to pop in and drink some compot or tea and have some bread with butter or bliny.
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3 cheers for the collective knowledge of the blogosphere. You’re blowing serious holes in a lot of stuff that I’ve been reading this week.
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Laura,
OK, I’m dying of curiosity.
Completeness obligates me to add that teenage Russian boys seemed to get through the school day on a combination of cigarettes and the occasional bare-knuckle fistfight behind the school.
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One more thing: in the lower grades in my Russian small town, a lot of the kids would do school (for academic subjects) in the morning and then go over to the musical school for the afternoon. The musical school was very serious.
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Amy P, without much food during the day, were the Russian students noticeably thinner than American counterparts? Also, what was the incidence of ADD?
I have no idea if tobacco improves function in ADD.
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“I have no idea if tobacco improves function in ADD.”
I don’t know that the research is very good, but there is an association between tobacco use and ADD symptoms (and some guesses that nicotine might be a form of self-medication).
People say the same for tobacco use & schizophrenia.
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Tobacco improves everything except cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary health. If only those weren’t required for living.
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“Amy P, without much food during the day, were the Russian students noticeably thinner than American counterparts? Also, what was the incidence of ADD?”
There was a very occasional plump (not morbidly obese) kid. The kids were slender, but not scrawny. I was there in the mid/late 90s, so those kids would have experienced real nutritional deprivation when they were growing up but were enjoying a period of relative plenty. My Peace Corps group arrived in ’95 and was the third in the area. The previous Peace Corps group had lived through the “white diet,” meaning in the winter there wasn’t anything to buy in the stores that wasn’t white: flour, sugar, milk, etc. The locals would have basic home-canned stuff and their home-grown potatoes beyond that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the deficient diet had an effect on brain development.
As to ADD, I can’t say, since I didn’t even know the term when I was there. There were probably some boys who would have benefited from some Ritalin. Some of the boys would get awfully fidgety when it was time for the next cigarette.
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“Tobacco improves everything except cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary health”
There’s mouth cancer, too.
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Fidgeting could be a sign of addiction, rather than ADD, though. Hmm.
There are many significant (dangerous and expensive!) downsides to tobacco use. How does the expense of ADD treatment compare to a typical cigarette habit?
(This is just my darkly cynical side. I’m NOT proposing cigarette addiction for schoolchildren to battle obesity & ADD at one blow.)
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” How does the expense of ADD treatment compare to a typical cigarette habit? ”
Oh yeah, you try to propose that experiment to a study section. Mind you, the data is very weak. It’s tough to separate out all the factors (fidgeting, inattention, socioeconomic factors, . . . cigarette use, add, or schizophrenia). I don’t think anyone would propose cigarette’s as a solution to ADD. The research seemed to be aimed at considering the compounding affect of ADD in contributing to nicotine addiction, and trying to figure out how to fine-tune quit-smoking strategies.
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I would love to TV ads that talk about the benefits of smoking for ADD. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Mad Men.
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