[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[velociraptor]

On 4/12/07, Sandwich Maker <adh at an.bradford.ma.us> wrote:
>
> ...and pointy-headed politicians demanding action 'to keep the us
> competitive' just make the problem worse.  but that's politics all
> over; we must all have heard the story of the illinois legislature
> that tried to cut through the mathematical wrangling about pi by
> declaring it to be 3...

..who listen to their constituents bemoaning the quality of education
but who want everything for nothing...to wit, the atrocity that is
most public school teachers' salaries.

> " One of my good college
> " friends (a history & classics geek, on top of an IT geek) has been
> " teaching his son, who's 8, iirc, Greek and Latin.  His son is gobbling
> " up pretty much every piece of info put in front of him by his dad.  He
> " loves it, so he doesn't even think it's hard.
>
> it isn't hard, for kids.  we are wired for learning, and learning
> language, when we're young.  consider how much english you learn
> without even trying, by age 4.  your friend's son is probably helped
> by parents who are fluent and comfortable in greek and latin.

It's 100% the dedication of his father.  I have nothing but kudos to
say about my friend and his loyalty to his son in the face of a very
bad situation.  Would that all parents could be this good.

> brain scans have shown that people who grew up polyglot use the same
> language center for all their languages, but people who learn
> languages when older use a different part of the brain for the new
> tongue.  i wonder if this takes learning method into account...

Aside from my own problems with public schools, probably the first two
things that gave me more than emotional reasoning for my anti-school
bias was taking classes in the education department in college.  First
was the general poor quality student I saw in the classes, and second
was the insider peek into educational methodologies, aka "pedagogy".
Schools are really just these big labs where educators "try things,"
which scares me a lot.  And, along those lines, the general lack of
common sense, as well.  The inability to step back and look at the
bigger picture--things like drawing parallels between educational
issues and other NIMBY hot buttons or the unwillingness to review past
pedagogies and compare them to what they wanted to try in the "lab"
today (e.g. the cycle of "whole word" vs "phonics" reading  ).

The other big problem with school is that it is a factory.  Different
people require different learning strategies to be successful.  Public
schools cannot, by their very design, accommodate this to any large
extent.

=Nadine=