Early Education Is More Demanding Than Ever, and Experts Have Concerns. Image On a recent trip to the eye doctor, my 4-year-old stumbled over some letters on her vision test. She didn’t falter because she couldn’t see the letters; it was because she couldn’t name them. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but my optometrist was concerned. She really needed to know her letters by the time she entered kindergarten in the fall, he said. It didn’t used to be this way. The school routines of kindergarteners have changed too: Over the 12 years covered in the study, kindergarteners began spending less time on music, art, dance and theater, and more time doing worksheets. Older elementary grades seem to be following the same trend. Why are these changes happening, and are they ultimately good or bad? How we got here To understand why early childhood education has changed so much, I had to go back to a 1983 report called “A Nation at Risk.” Then, in 2002, President George W.
Effects on learning In a study of 70 4- and 5-year-olds that Dr. Effects on mental health Dr. Wayfinding Academy. Make School Hard Again.
Segregation of schools. The Absurd Structure of High School – Featured Stories. Consider this schedule: At 8 a.m. you arrive at work. Immediately you are busy with a quick problem needing to be solved. You sit and get to it, but only for about three minutes. You break your focus to stop and receive instruction for the next half hour, before getting to work on another task. There may be a bit of discussion, but you are on task and dedicated. Just before 9 a.m., you stop again, move to a new office, and start a new task. It’s now 11 a.m. Each of these hourlong periods leaves you with work to do outside the office: four or five math problems, 20 pages of reading, a paragraph to write, 10 new vocabulary words to memorize.
You want to stay healthy, but you spend most days sitting the entire time. We are married to a system that has not been properly re-evaluated for 21st-century capabilities and capacities. You do all of this every day, Monday through Friday. This absurd work schedule is high school. The system’s scheduling fails on every possible level.
2018’s Most Popular Free Online Courses. Higher Education. What Happened When I Made My Students Turn Off Their Phones - aeon - Pocket. As a teacher who has long witnessed and worried about the impacts of technology in the classroom, I constantly struggle to devise effective classroom policies for smartphones. I used to make students sing or dance if their phones interrupted class, and although this led to some memorable moments, it also turned inappropriate tech use into a joke. Given the myriad deleterious effects of phones – addiction, decline of face-to-face socialisation, deskilling, and endless distraction, for starters – I want students to think carefully about their phone habits, rather than to mindlessly follow (or not follow) a rule. After reading my Aeon essay on the topic, a representative from a San Francisco startup called YONDR contacted me.
YONDR makes special pouches that keep audiences from using their phones at shows. You silence your phone, slide it into the pouch, and lock it at the top. YONDR sent me pouches to use in class. Workarounds emerged immediately. 7 percent: Yes! 400 free Ivy League courses you can take online right now. This is an updated version of a story Quartz originally published in April 2018. The eight Ivy League schools are among the most prestigious colleges in the world. They include Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia universities, and the University of Pennsylvania.
All eight schools place in the top fifteen of the US News and World Report 2017 national university rankings. These Ivy League schools are also highly selective and extremely hard to get into. So far, they’ve created over 494 courses, of which around 396 are still active. Computer Science (31 courses) CS50’s Introduction to Computer ScienceHarvard University Algorithms, Part IPrinceton University Algorithms, Part IIPrinceton University Machine Learning for Data Science and AnalyticsColumbia University Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency TechnologiesPrinceton University Reinforcement LearningBrown University Enabling Technologies for Data Science and Analytics: The Internet of ThingsColumbia University U.S.
U.S. Later School Start Times Really Do Work To Help Teens Get More Sleep : Shots - Health News. Teens' biological clock drives them to stay up late and sleep in. Most school start times don't accommodate that drive. Jasper Cole/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Jasper Cole/Getty Images Teens' biological clock drives them to stay up late and sleep in. Most school start times don't accommodate that drive. Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep.
In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. "This study shows a significant improvement in the sleep duration of students, all by delaying school start times so they're more in line with the natural wake-up times of adolescents," says senior author Horacio de la Iglesia, a University of Washington researcher and professor of biology.
Franklin High School science teacher A.J. Does It Matter Where You Go to College? Does It Matter Where You Go to College? - The Washington Post. Choice page. 'School Choice' and How High Schools Shaped the U.S. What Is Harvard Trying to Hide? The long war over affirmative action turned hot again last week, as Harvard and lawyers for Asian-American applicants duked it out in a federal courtroom in Boston in a closely watched case that could end consideration of race in college admissions.
I’m a veteran of that war. Nearly three decades ago, as a student, I was at the vanguard of a movement that took no side in the then-intense debate over affirmative action but advocated for something more radical than it might first appear: breaking down the secrecy over how elite colleges choose whom to admit to their ranks. Story Continued Below Winning the chance to attend an Ivy League school is an increasingly daunting feat.
My role in that crusade also led to a federal courtroom, albeit in the kind-of-grimy, dual-purpose post office building that housed Boston’s federal court through the 1990s, not the far glitzier complex that now sits on the waterfront. But the political reaction was a mild one. In 2003, Sen. Just last month, U.S. The New Teacher Project says low expectations hurt kids. Opinion | Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way? Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn. It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers.
It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level. How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science. What have scientists figured out? [The Opinion section is now on Instagram. These ideas had been debunked by the early 2000s. Many teachers learn these approaches in their teacher preparation programs. Why Millions of Teens Can't Finish Their Homework. It’s a glaring irony that’s also a major force behind class- and race-based discrepancies in academic achievement.
In what’s often referred to as the “homework gap,” the unequal access to digital devices and high-speed internet prevents 17 percent of teens from completing their homework assignments, according to the new Pew analysis, which surveyed 743 students ages 13 through 17. Black teens are especially burdened by the homework gap: One in four of them at least sometimes struggle to complete assignments because of a lack of technology at home. And close to half of teenagers in the bottom income bracket have to do their homework on a cellphone occasionally or often. Read: The futile resistance against classroom tech From a history-class assignment on the political debate over immigration to required participation in an online discussion board for AP Environmental Science, access to a functioning computer and high-speed internet is all but a prerequisite for success in high school.
- The Washington Post. Facebook and Udacity want to give you a scholarship to master machine learning. This device is unable to play the requested video. Interested in a job in artificial intelligence (AI)? Facebook may be willing to foot the bill. On Tuesday, Facebook and Udacity announced the PyTorch Scholarship Challenge, offering students the opportunity to learn how to build, train, and deploy deep learning models. PyTorch is an open source deep learning framework that is growing in popularity among AI researchers due to its ease of use, clean Pythonic API, and flexibility, Stuart Frye, Udacity's vice president of partnerships, wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
With PyTorch 1.0, now available in preview release, developers can more easily move from exploration to product development with a single unified framework, Frye wrote. The scholarship program will offer students the chance to learn in-demand deep learning skills with PyTorch, as well as earn a full scholarship to Udacity's Deep Learning Nanodegree program, according to the post. The big takeaways for tech leaders:
Motherjones. When Leigh McIlvaine first learned that her student loan debt could be forgiven, she was thrilled. In 2008, at age 27, she’d earned a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota. She’d accrued just under $70,000 in debt, though she wasn’t too worried—that’s what it took to invest in her future. But graduating at the height of the recession, she found that the kind of decent-paying public-sector job she’d anticipated pursuing was suddenly closed off by budget and hiring freezes. She landed a gig at a nonprofit in Washington, DC, earning a $46,000 salary. Still, she was happy to live on that amount if it was the cost of doing the work she believed in.
At the time, she paid about $350 each month to stay in a decrepit house with several roommates, more than $100 for utilities, and $60 for her cellphone bill. The PSLF program, backed in the Senate by Ted Kennedy and signed into law by President George W. The program was by no means a handout. College-professors-experts-advice. Should I Major in the Humanities? The Fight Over Teacher Salaries: A Look At The Numbers : NPR Ed. The teachers strike in West Virginia may have ended last week when Gov. Jim Justice signed a law giving educators a 5 percent pay increase, but the fight in other states is just warming up. "You can make anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 more by driving 15 minutes across the state line," said Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association.
"We're having trouble keeping and attracting young teachers. " And this refrain is not new or unique to West Virginia. The ink had barely dried in West Virginia before teachers in Oklahoma made it clear they too could walk out if lawmakers don't find a way to raise their pay and school spending. In recent years, thousands of public school teachers in Oklahoma have crossed state lines for better pay. "It's gotten so bad that the state Department of Education has had to issue emergency teacher certifications to replace teachers as quickly as possible," reported Emily Wendler of member station KOSU in July. American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn't Exist. Are Americans getting dumber? Our math skills are falling.
Our reading skills are weakening. Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales. Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist. To become a chef, a lawyer, a philosopher or an engineer, has always been a matter of learning what these professionals do, how and why they do it, and some set of general facts that more or less describe our societies and our selves. We pass from kindergarten through twelfth grade, from high school to college, from college to graduate and professional schools, ending our education at some predetermined stage to become the chef, or the engineer, equipped with a fair understanding of what being a chef, or an engineer, actually is and will be for a long time.
We “learn,” and after this we “do.” About. When Kids Start Playing To Win : NPR Ed. Hide captionPeri Schiavone, 13, gets some quick notes from her swim coach, Raj Verma, before hopping back into the pool at the Fairfax County YMCA in Reston, Va. Sarah Tilotta/NPR Peri Schiavone, 13, gets some quick notes from her swim coach, Raj Verma, before hopping back into the pool at the Fairfax County YMCA in Reston, Va. This week, NPR Ed is focusing on questions about why people play and how play relates to learning. It's a playful word that's developed something of a bad reputation: "competition. " To explain what competition means to the average 5-year-old, I'm going to invoke an adult known for his ferocity on the playing field, a titan of competition: Vince Lombardi.
Lombardi once said: "Winning isn't everything, but it's the only thing. It's a famous line he often repeated. Lombardi may not have been 5 when he said it, but it's around that age that kids start thinking about competition the way adults do: They want to win, every time. 'Boo-Yah! "It's my birthday! " The Water Wolves. Why Some Schools Are Selling All Their iPads. For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning? It’s a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when many school reformers were advocating to replace textbooks with online curricula and add creative apps to lessons.
Some teachers welcomed the shift, which allowed their students to replace old poster-board presentations with narrated screencasts and review teacher-produced video lessons at any time. Four years later, however, it's still unclear whether the iPad is the device best suited to the classroom. Meanwhile, the cost of equipment is going down, software is improving, and state policies are driving expectations for technology access.
However, the L.A. district quickly recalled about 2,100 iPads from students. Hillsborough took a different approach. The End Of Neighborhood Schools : NPR. Harris founded the brand-new Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. His team of newly minted Ph.D.s shares a bare, beige-carpeted downtown office space with a fraternity of New Orleans choice backers. But the goal of the Education Research Alliance, Harris says, isn’t necessarily to promote charter schools or choice. “We’re here to do deeper research, and to do that it’s important to be a neutral party,” he says. In fact, Harris has some bad news for RSD schools. “The increasing trend in scores is not all achievement,” he says, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head.
Harris isn’t talking about outright cheating — though more than a third of the city’s schools were flagged by the state between 2010 and 2012 for cases of plagiarism, suspicious levels of erasures, and similar indicators. He means something subtler: a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice. “The curriculum is really characterized by a narrow interpretation of state standards. Kids And Screen Time: What Does The Research Say? : NPR Ed. Salem College professor Spring-Serenity Duvall banned students from emailing and got more engagement from class.
The Best Resources for Free Online Classes. The LA School iPad Scandal: What You Need To Know : NPR Ed. The Key to Smarter Kids: Talk to Them. Paying attention is a skill: Schools need to teach it. Http---www.positivityblog.com-index.php-2008-04-02-16-things-i-wish-they-had-taught-me-in-school-.url.
Bringing Literacy into Broad Daylight - Cadalyst AEC.url. These Smart Bricks Mean the Time Has Finally Arrived: Adults Have Legos of Their Own. Low education makes the brain age faster. Literature BetaLED.url. Blackboar.url. 2010 May The Facility Information Council.url. The Simple Logic » Blog Archive » You Say You Want An Education? Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing. The Summer's Most Unread Book Is… - WSJ. Coursera.org. FLP Vol. I Table of Contents. The National Academies Press.