clair073

Ever try to read your physician’s prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t (or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed. When we adults went to school, one of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient skill.” [1] The primary schools that teach handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, accordi...

When television first became popular around 1950, it was dominated by such shows as the Milton Berle comedy hour, “I Love Lucy,” and professional wrestling. Those who missed out on the halcyon days of early television might enjoy reading about its history . The potential for a damaging impact on education was recognized at the outset. In 1950 Boston University's President Dr. Daniel L. Marsh warned that “if the [television] craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.” Well here we are. Just look at how voters re-elect incompetents, panderers, and demagogues. Quick to jump into the breach anticipated by the brain-eating monster of TV, a new movement of “educational TV” sprang up . National Educational Television was born on May 16, 1954 and was a non-profit effort to bring educational programs to the masses. The network was not sustainable as such and was transformed into the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in October, 1970, whic...

Learning how to learn is a major objective of schooling. Yet, in my view, the emphasis in most schools is on WHAT to learn, not HOW to learn. My Improve Your Learning and Memory blog is aimed at filling that gap, yet these useful ideas have a hard time penetrating curricula that are designed to teach to government-mandated tests. Yet another, apparently unmet, challenge in education seems to exist: teaching students how to think. A recent U.S. Dept. Education survey reported in the Nation’s Report Card suggests that science students may be learning how to perform simple investigations but do not do well  in thinking about the meaning and implications of the results and how to use data to make decisions. About 2,000 students in each grade level 4, 8, and 12 were tested in three real-life science  problem-solving scenarios in an interactive computer test environment. Anybody can take the tests, which are posted on the NRC website; the tests are easy and fun. The test records r...