I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry while reading today’s NYT article about how many teachers/schools are experimenting with giving students choice in what books they read rather than assigning required reading to the whole class. Turns out giving kids choice motivates them to read more. My only response was a proverbial “Dah?!” How long did it take experts to come up with this discovery? Has anyone bothered to just talk to any high school student? Last summer we held a roundtable at IFTF with about 15 high school seniors most of whom talked about loving to read when they were younger but hating “doing” reading in high school both because it was “assigned” and simply because they did not have time to read for pleasure. Is there anything we like to do when forced? Why should reading be any different? The sad part was to read about teachers having to make choices in whether to teach to the test or in in a way that develops the love of reading in students. Here is a reaction of one teacher who was observing a reading workshop where kids were given reading choices:

At the end of the first day the teachers discussed the demands of standardized testing and how some had faced resistance from administrators. Ms. McNeill said her students had so little freedom that they even had to be escorted to the bathrooms.

Suddenly she was overcome with emotion as she contrasted that environment with the student-led atmosphere in Ms. Atwell’s class. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, wiping away tears. “These children are so fortunate.”

Thinking again about unintended consequences and how oftentimes what you think is bad for you turns out to be good, this time in connection with education, specifically how what today is construed as “rigorous academic education” filled with AP classes, competitive tests, and loads of homework results in kids turned off from learning. This again based on personal experience.

For 10 years, starting in 1995, my family was engaged in an educational experiment. The experiment involved our son, Greg, who was enrolled at Peninsula school, an 85-year old progressive school in the San Francisco Bay Area. For about half of that time, mostly starting with 4th grade, my husband and I were nagged by doubt: yes, Peninsula is a great environment for kids; yes, Greg is turning out to be a creative, caring, thoughtful human being; but is he getting enough academics? Is he getting enough of the basics in math, writing, and sciences? Several times we seriously thought about taking him out of Peninsula and enrolling him in another “more academic” school. Usually this happened after a conversation with a parent whose child was doing algebra in 3d grade or writing 10 page essays in 5th. The only thing that stopped us from leaving Peninsula was the fact that Greg truly loved it—its teachers, its choices, its grounds, its smells, its music room (more about that later)—and that at some subconscious level we felt that for him, and for us, being at Peninsula was the right thing. We just didn’t know why—it went against all the prevailing wisdom of more accountability, more standards, more rigor, more home work, more time management for kids—all the prescriptions for improving our education system and preparing our kids for a world in which they will be competing for jobs with highly educated kids from China, India, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, noone at Peninsula was good at articulating for a couple of overeducated, analytically minded adults schooled in the “old” system why this was the best kind of education. We constantly saw examples of Peninsula’s success—poised, articulate, and reflective graduates who went on to high schools and did remarkably well. Every time, however, the nagging doubt was still there—yes, it worked for them, that doesn’t mean it will work for Greg. He still can’t do math very well. (more…)

I just went through a ritual of helping my kid move into a college dorm. The college he is entering has pretty much mastered what could otherwise be a chaotic and messy process. We had exact directions for where to go, where to drop stuff off, and there were plenty of helpers and carts on site. While watching my son’s belongings as he was lugging stuff upstairs, I had the occasion to review everyone else’s pile of stuff, one of which included a giant flat screen TV (several kids hoped to get the owner as a roommate). The amount of stuff was impressive, with even more modest piles probably having enough to furnish a house in a “less developed” country. It got me thinking about Peter Menzel’s book “Material World” published in the early 90’s and showing pictures of families with all their belongings in front of their houses. In fact, when I got home I found an old NOVA PBS documentary based on the book and called “World in the Balance.” I just wanted to see how a single American teenager compares in terms of material possessions (physical only and probably partially so as, I am sure, most kids left lots of stuff at home) to families around the world. In my inexpert judgment they have way more than the Wu family in China had in the early 90’s, about a third of what a three person family in Japan had, way more than a family in Mali (albeit no pots and pans), and about a quarter of what the American family of four had at the time. And this is just what they are starting life with.

Any wonder I was humming “I’m a Material Girl” all the way home?

Remember Grisha Perelman, Russian mathematician who declined the Fields medal in mathematics? At first I thought he was a nut—a familiar caricature of a quirky mathematics professor, riven by social anxiety, unable to hold a conversation, or tie his shoelaces. A Russian version of Bobby Fisher or John Nash, maybe even Ted Kozinski, who will eventually drop off the face of the earth only to be found years later and hauled away in handcuffs as he mumbled incoherently. After all, who in his right mind would not jump on the opportunity of fame and riches (and in Russia, $500,000 is definitely riches) that go along with winning the Fields prize in mathematics? Only someone mentally unstable.

For all I know, Grisha Perelman may have been all that—a nutty Russian eccentric. But as I read more about him, he seemed more and more familiar. Actually, the more I read, the more I found myself feeling nostalgic for people like him, people I used to know in Russia in the 70’s—writers, poets, artists, musicians, physicists. They lived in the rarefied world of ideas, completely removed from cares for success defined by money and fame. They gathered in tiny kitchens around cramped tables to drink tea, smoke cigarettes, argue, recite poetry, sing underground songs, exchange latest news of travails with the Soviet bureaucracy, and talk about big ideas. Troubles with the bureaucracy, being denied publication, or having a movie premiere canceled by the censors was their badge of honor, their status symbol. They lived in the forgotten world of pure intellectual and spiritual freedom that seems only possible in a totalitarian state where ideas is the only escape and only reward. This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked about when he said that the freest he ever felt was in the Gulag. I guess the only regime more repressive, and at the same time more free than the Soviet regime, was the Soviet prison regime. In the Gulag there is nothing more one can lose, nothing much to aspire to. One can experience the kind of spiritual, almost ascetic freedom that is hard to imagine in a society in which there is so much to lose—good jobs, money, possessions, celebrity status. (more…)