Inside Tad's Mind

Yesterday I discussed the problems that occur when a child is arbitrarily placed in a class more advanced than her ability level. Today, I'd like to discuss the opposite end of that spectrum; arbitrarily placing a child in a class that is below her ability level. Another of my daughters, Mirinda, was born on September 12, and so the school system here in Utah said she needed to start Kindergarten a year later than we believed she should have started. Mirinda was ready to start school in 1997; she not only could pass all of the Kindergarten readiness tests, but was also starting to read on her own. But the school system wouldn't hear of her starting in 1997 because her birthday was 12 days after the arbitrary cutoff date. We lived in Bountiful at the time, and the school Mirinda attended was a fairly decent school academically. Nevertheless, Mirinda was always at the top of her class, and demonstrated the ability to do class work above her level. We discussed the possibility of ...

A couple months back, my daughter Neeva asked her mother and I if we would let her go to the local public school. Since the school in our neighborhood has a much better reputation and academic record than the school in our old neighborhood, we decided to enroll her and see how things went. Neeva is nine years old. When she was five, she wasn't quite ready to begin reading, so we waited until she was ready rather than try to fight an uphill battle for a year with a disinterested pupil. Neeva has also struggled with Amblyopia ("Lazy Eye" Syndorme) and a more recent eye infection which has caused delays in her reading development. As a result, Neeva has progressed to the third grade level in her reading and math skills. Her birthday is on August 26, just five days before the cutoff date to determine which grade a child should be placed in in Utah. When we enrolled her in the local school, the school used her birthday as the determining factor in her class placement, and stuc...

Neeva has been begging to go to public school for months, so back in August we set a goal, which she reached, and her prize was to attend the local elementary school. Her sister Mara decided she wanted to attend too. They both started today. One of them brought home a newsletter, published by some outside third party, this afternoon. In the newsletter was a Q&A section with a question about whether it would be okay for children to miss a few days of school around the holidays if the family was visiting and didn't get back in time. The answer given, of course, was that the school would not excuse the absence and that the child needed to be in school when school was insession. It gave the standard reasoning for maximizing attendance: falling behind on classwork, etc. I'm not so sure I agree with this reasoning. Oliver van de Mille, author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-first Century describes three types of education: what he...

My daughter Mara has been asking for Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 3: Early Modern Times ever since she finished volume 2 . So Santa brought her volume 3 and The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 4: The Modern Age: From Victoria's Empire to the End of the USSR for Christmas. She's devouring them, and thought that she got better presents than her sisters who got stereos and MP3 players. At last check, she was reading about the great fire of London, and commenting the need for building codes. (That discussion is food for another post...) I am also very much into history. I have two complete bookcases filled with history and biography, including a complete set of Will Durrants The Story of Civilization and Britanica's 18 Volume The Annals of America and 2 volume Great Issues in American Life (Volumes 1 - 18 and two volume Conspectus) In that context, last night Amy and I were listening to Show...

One of the areas where the public education system really lets us down is the area of financial education. If you read John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling or The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation of the Problem of Modern Schooling this is probably predictable, since Gatto hypothesises that the purpose behind compulsory schooling is to prepare a large workforce to work in the factories of the Industrial Age. In any event, I've decided to dedicate this blog to the topics related to education, educational philosophy and education reform, and I've created a new blog, called "Educational Oddyssey" to discuss the specific areas of financial education. The trick is going to be being able to keep both blogs up to speed; hopefully, I'll be able to keep Betsy from having any more withdrawl symptoms.