Learning Gap

So the Press ran an editorial today (Sonata Gap) about the Chinese investing in music education. Somehow, they also magically connected this effort to Asian math performance. Let me tell you a little more about math performance in some Asian countries.
In 2004, I had the opportunity to attend ICME 10 (International Conference of Math Educators) where I scrambled around to every session offered by Asian presenters. I learned some interesting things. One Korean presenter started the session by stating that he does not attribute the "math miracle" to school mathematics. He then explained that Korean children attend many hours of tutoring in addition to school math. He also shared that competition for teaching positions in Korea is very great. The comment that stuck in my memory? He said Korea does not have an abundance of natural resources, so human capital is very important. In his view, it was the duty of every citizen to develop human capital.
Chinese presenter, Liu, described how his team never "taught" the quadratic equation. Rather, they had designed a carefully sequenced set of problems that started simply then progressed in difficulty. By the end of the sequence, the students had already solved the quadratic equation.
So beside just citing the Asian math miracle, let's also talk about valuing learning, teacher selection, academic learning time, instructional design, and more....

Thinking People

from Nov 21...I attended the Solutions Summit (which turned out to be, in part, a sales pitch for Read 180), but what a beautiful exchange of ideas from thinking people who are actually doing work in schools. Kate Kinsella was there are talked about all her usuals...tiered vocabulary, language development, sentence frames and materials that support. Tanya Ward Singer delivered a great session on maximizing student engagement. We had just been talking about this and how to make it real and she gave real life suggestions. Even more beautifully, she said that she wants schools and districts to build internal capacity....thank you.
Another speaker INTRIGUING.... Julie A Washington, a linguist, talked about African American English . . . and other Englishes we have these days. Most interesting to me was her discussion about code switching and about community English. Community English...there is a concept needed today. What children bring to school is the ability to speak and understand a mishmash of language that includes many things, Spanish, slang, street, marketing, and more. Children need to be taught classroom English, which increasingly fewer of them know. Regarding code switching, Julie taught us that children who speak African American English (AAE) also read in AAE. This was a revelation to me. In the learning environment, what that means is AAE speakers must translate in order to comprehend. According to Julie, this reveals itself in a decrease in fluency rate. Great!