The coming political argument about ‘Common Core Standards’ should force us to ask: “What is the mission of 21st century American education?” The mission of CCSS is to: Improve our economic future by teaching students the common core of knowledge and skills that WE KNOW THEY NEED TO LEARN. But how could we possibly think […]
This is in response to David Roberts’ article: “Getting used to being in charge of the planet” David Roberts (DR): “the decisions made by people alive today will determine the fate of life on Earth for centuries to come” Yes. And, it’s always been true that what each generation profoundly affects the generations that follow. The […]
A company has developed software that can compete with human authors in writing news stories. Education Week (4-12-12) put out a similar story about a computer competing with college professors at scoring essays. Extreme Tech carried a story (Will an IBM computer be your next mayor?) about the use of IBM’s Watson to manage the […]
Re: Man vs. Computer: Who Wins the Essay-Scoring Challenge? From Education Week: Curriculum Matters 4-13-2012 “The results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items with equal performance for both source-based and traditional writing genre,” says the study. This is fascinating. Artificial intelligence has already […]
Re: Getting Our Kids Ready for the Competition – the Great Conversations and the 32,000,000 Missing Words! by Dick Jacobs Your piece creates a great framework for conversation but one point needs clarification: “Cognitive science tells us that if learning our reading fundamentals doesn’t start very early and the skills aren’t in place by age nine or ten, […]
What happens to you when you become confused? How do you feel? Most of our children are growing up in that teach them to blame themselves for feeling confused. Children who blame themselves for feeling confused feel shame when they feel confused. Naturally, subconsciously-automatically, try to . If children feel too much shame when they feel confused they will avoid […]
The other night I received a call from the cable company. The voice explained that it was calling about an appointment I had scheduled and asked whether I wanted to keep the appointment, cancel, or reschedule it. After saying I wanted to keep it, the voice asked me if I or someone over 18 would […]
Re: the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Article: “We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading” by Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College. An important missing distinction: Most of the people who ‘love’ reading began loving it when they were children. In the past few decades there has been an unprecedented decline in how lovable reading is for most children […]
Re: “U.S. Education Woes Threaten National Security, Report Says” Education Week 3-20-2012 Of course everything about the future ultimately depends on our children’s learning. Certainly the economy and how well it resources traditional national security activities is one dimension. But the bigger issue is how well our nation learns. We as a nation must learn […]
