If you are wondering why education is floundering in the United States, why stop here? I just listened to British school Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw discuss how changing the United Kingdom’s school inspection form will lead the charge to change education in the UK. His talk can be found at RSA under the title “The End of Satisfactory Schools.” I suggest you listen to it. Hopefully the talk will dispel the myth that UK schools are better than their counterparts in the US, or that their leaders are any wiser than we are in our approach to school improvement. They have similar issues. Their leaders advocate being harsher as a method of improving schools.

Haven’t we heard enough of this? Beating up the teachers, the administrators, and the communities they serve will not improve education. Changing a form so that struggling schools are given a more negative category will not help either. If there is to be real reform, we have to get out of the mindset that just being harder on employees will win the day. We already have a high turnover rate in classroom teachers. We disrespect them in every political race, and yet we keep going down this cul de sac hoping that it will lead us on the long path to “excellent” schools filled with “highly qualified” teachers and “high-performing” students. We imagine that proper categorization will generate students happily engaged in their communities who are preparing for profitable and productive lives once they leave school.

Yep, changing an inspection form will accomplish great things, just like painting your car a different color will make the engine idle smoothly and fix that annoying shifting problem in the transmission.

There are two aspects of a successful classroom. Students memorize what they need to know, and they are able to apply what they have memorized to accomplish tasks involving higher level thought processes and continually advancing skills. Basically, they learn some facts, and then do something with those facts that both advances their knowledge and skill while reinforcing them at the same time. You are familiar with this process. It is how math courses are taught.

It’s a simple process, so why are we having so much trouble with it?

That’s simple too. We are looking to the wrong processes to make it happen. We expect math teachers to pass their students. If the students don’t pass, we blame the teacher. This makes sense. Let’s fire the teacher and find a replacement to get the job done. When we finally go through the maze of school politics, blaming unions along the way for all the faults in education, we manage to get a new teacher in the classroom. Everyone is happy, but over time it turns out that the results are the same. Solution? Fire this teacher and get another one. Wait, maybe it’s more systemic than just the teacher. Let’s fire the department head, the principal, the superintendent. Let’s throw out the school board and put in fresh new clear-thinking people and start over. Surely that will work.

Nope, it doesn’t work. All the yammering about unions, teachers, administrators, school boards, and test results does not fix what is wrong with schools. Painting the car doesn’t fix the engine.

Look at the process again. Memorize, then apply. If we expect students to memorize until they learn something, if we demand that happens, and if we don’t blame the teacher when it doesn’t happen, then we might get somewhere. If kids do memorize (and yes, they can memorize!) then they have something to think about and apply. If not, they sit bored in their classrooms and gain little. They pass through the system with limited ability to achieve all of the dreams we have instilled in our school systems for them.

The teacher is a pitcher in a weird kind of  baseball game, one where the object of the pitcher is to have the batter hit the ball into fair territory. The administrator is the coach. The community is in the seats cheering and booing. Politicians are announcers shouting into their microphones telling the fans what to think. Sound familiar?

But it is the kids who have to step up to bat. If we encourage them to do so, if we teach them that practice is important, indeed it is mandatory–no exceptions, if practice becomes the rule of the day, then they will step up and swing at the ball with all their best skill and all of the effort they have put into place in their practices. They might not hit home runs, but they will gain skill every time they go to bat.

Unfortunately, we are spending a lot of time sending the coach out to the mound to tell the pitcher it’s about time to hit the bench with the comforting admonition: “Better buck up and do the job or you’re outta here!”

Think about it. In this weird game of baseball, the goal of the teacher is not to strike out an opponent, but to have the kids hit the ball into fair territory, to aim for the home run. If kids don’t achieve this, we put in a new pitcher. The kids, however, look at the teacher/pitcher and see the same old opponent of real baseball. This is a person who is trying to strike them out. After enough failures at bat, many kids simply quit getting out of the dugout. Some of them don’t even bother showing up for the game.

The best coach encourages the pitcher to get the ball over the plate. They give advice and resilience in the face of adversity, not threats. Oh, did I mention? Giving threats in the face of adversity is counterproductive? Don’t think so? Go ahead and try to do something complicated and let me guide you through the task with threats and belittling comments while you work. See how well you do.

We need to change the system, not the form we use to grade the system. We need to find ways to get the kids to step up to the bat and quit giving them excuses to sit on the bench in the dugout. We need to get the announcers to turn off the microphones and get the crowds out of the stands so the coaches, pitchers, and batters can do the work they signed on for. We need administrators who energize their teachers. We need teachers and parents who energize their kids. That is our job in the communities.

Finding social success for the shy child is a huge challenge, and not one that can be easily solved. If you have a shy child who is not taking part in peer activities, then you might be interested in the following thoughts I gave to a parent who wrote to me about her child, a young boy who is not doing well in school:

Hi  (name withheld),

Keep in mind that I am not a counselor, but I can tell you my opinion on the matter. Your child is just like many I previously taught in middle school and high school. Being in a large group setting does not, in my opinion, bring about sociability in students who don’t fit into the mainstream. It’s a real problem. Frankly, not all people will be, or ever want to be, the center of attention. I have never taught a class in a school setting where there wasn’t a small group of kids on the outside of the main group.

My classroom door was always open to these kids, giving them a safe haven when the halls and break areas were miserable places for them to be. I found them to be warm and decent people who were more sensitive to social interactions than their peers, who would pick on anyone who showed any sensitivity. I noticed that the shy kids just needed some place to be safe until they got out into the world as adults. A first job or college away from home was a real eye-opener, as it gave them a chance to meet new people who didn’t have years of judgment and bad behavior standing between their relationships. That’s when these students begin to flourish. By the time they got to me, especially in high school, it was really too late to socialize them into the main group. The main group had already formed a hierarchy, and shy kids were left out.

Telling them to toughen up is not a viable solution for most of the shy kids. They need to find some place where they can be socially accepted. Music, theater, computer groups, independent sports, and activities like these are where shy kids can often find a role in a group. Believe it or not, I saw kid-competitors treat each other much better in wrestling than they did in football or basketball. In individual sports, it’s all on the skill and ability of the one person, so whoever trains hardest wins. It’s not the one perceived as the best athlete, as other sports often have with the star athlete. They need to be somewhere where ego is less important than talent and contribution. They need to be around people who are interested in a topic other than who is the coolest of the group, thus computers, theater, or music are good choices.

A martial arts course taught by a good and compassionate instructor can be a huge boost to a child with low self-esteem. Pick one where the instructor is more concerned with personal development than with winning tournaments. They are out there, and those instructors are miracle workers. Weight training is also beneficial. I’ll never forget the comment of one high school student about one who was pretty much of an outcast. The peer group insider said of the other, “He’s such a nerd! We’d beat him up except he’s so buff we can’t.”

How’s that for turning the tables?

If you decide to home school, make sure that you do it right and provide a solid education for your boy. He needs to excel in something, not just get by. That is what will allow him to take his place in the adult world. Some of the biggest successes in the world were outcasts in school, and sadly, some of the stars in school reach their peak before they get out into the adult world. I’d rather deal with the shy kid who has room to grow than the star who already knows everything and doesn’t want my advice.

Once again, this is all just my opinion.

Readers, what do you suggest to this very real problem?

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

When I look at the schoolwork kids turn in, I usually find a very common mistake. Kids will fill out their daily worksheets, but all too often they don’t read the directions. Recently I looked at an assignment that asked for the student to underline the main verb on a worksheet. The student circled  several words but didn’t underline anything. I’m not sure if the student understands what a main verb is because the things I see circled are not consistently main verbs, even though the student was right some of the time. Since there is no underlining, I’m not sure if the student read the directions at all and therefore made mistakes because of a misunderstanding of what the assignment was asking.

As a teacher, I try to get into the mind of a student to see if he or she comprehends the material, but it’s difficult when the student doesn’t follow directions. When I teach mathematics, for example, I ask my students to show their work. If they don’t, I won’t give them credit. Students, and some parents, don’t like this. The say if the answer is right, why worry? But I have a goal in mind. By going through all of the steps I teach, the student will consistently get the right answer. The steps I give are not gimmicks. They always work for that type of a problem. Students may do shortcuts for specific problems, but if they don’t practice the correct steps they forget them. Before long they can’t figure out how to do those problems where the gimmick doesn’t apply.

It’s no surprise that kids look at homework as busywork. They don’t see the benefit of practice for solving fractions, all they see is a period of time doing homework when they would rather be doing something else. So what do they do? They do the entire worksheet as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort, then act surprised when they get bad grades on the homework and the subsequent tests. Parents ask why their children aren’t being successful and are genuinely perplexed because they know their children are doing the work. They see the evidence of completed worksheets and other assignments. So why isn’t their child learning?

The problem is that the child has to be engaged in the learning process, actively doing the best he or she can on an assignment in order to benefit from it. Knowledge is built from day to day application of our highest level of thought and concentration. If the level of thought and concentration is low, then the results cannot be as good as they are when the level of thought and concentration is high. We all know this from personal experience. It’s just the way things are. We have to accept this and quit resisting it if we want to make significant progress in learning.

My advice to students and their parents is–don’t just do the work to get it done, do the work to master the material.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

Really? Kids are different? Heck, we aren’t all that different from chimpanzees, if you measure by DNA, so the difference between kids now and kids a few decades ago is not even worth our consideration. Are there different ways for kids to spend their time and energy? Yes . . . they spend more time with electronics equipment . . . but they haven’t changed in terms of capability.

Fashions change around us, focus changes around us, be we are essentially the same people we were one-hundred or even one-thousand years ago. I am speaking in terms of our ability to learn, our hardware that takes in, stores, and processes information. That hasn’t changed since Socrates pestered his students on the streets of Athens.

The fact is that we can learn. We have not lost the ability to take in information, so we need to think about how people who are successful in learning do so. Is it because they are inherently smarter or better? Not really, and certainly not as much as we would like to believe. If we want to get stronger, we have to work out. We can’t look at pictures of strong people and expect to bulk up. In the same way, we have to work at becoming smarter in order to build our mental muscles. There’s nothing wrong with  us.

Learning requires dedicated effort and focus, combined with interest. Our interest is often generated by learning more about a subject until it clicks and we achieve a level of mastery. That can happen for any of us, even those who say they can’t write or do math, or whatever else they decide is beyond their ability.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

Yesterday I asked a group of business people to add two fractions together: 1/3 and 1/4. I asked if anyone’s mind went blank. A few immediately raised their hands, but some were too embarrassed to acknowledge that they had either forgotten how to add fractions or had never mastered the skill in the first place. They were reluctant to raise their hands. Too bad, though. One of the strongest positions to take in education is the position that we don’t know something.

Instead of accepting our ignorance on a subject, which is not a sin, by the way, our minds will go searching through the memory hoping to find a clue. It feels like we are “going blank,” even though our brains are working hard. When we don’t get any results, it feels like we have nothing going on upstairs.

If you were to ask this math question and look at the brain scans of two different people, one who knows how to solve the problem and one who doesn’t, then you would see opposite brain activity. The person who knows how to do the problem will have very little activity. The person who “goes blank” will have many areas of the brain lit up.

Why is this? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the person with the blank feeling have little or nothing going on? Not really! Our brains can be thought of as computers. If they are efficient, like the person who can easily do the problem, then they use very little of the brain to process the correct answer. If they are inefficient, our brains will work very hard at the subconscious level trying to come up with a solution. We wait for the result, but nothing shows up, so we feel blank. Please note that when I am talking about a brain being inefficient, I don’t mean that it is incapable, I just mean that it is untrained in that subject.

To make that feeling go away, at least in terms of adding fractions, all we have to do is learn a few simple rules (really! they’re simple!) and apply them often enough to memorize the pattern. Once we get some fraction success we no longer go blank. We become efficient. We gain confidence, and we are willing, even eager, to learn more.

No one is bad at math. Some of us have memorized the rules, and some of us haven’t. That’s all.

By the way, the answer is 7/12.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

2011 was a struggle for many of us, but now we’re moving headlong into 2012: the new and improved year. From what I’ve read in blogs and articles the past couple of days, about half of us have made resolutions. There is plenty of information discussing what we need to do to be successful in keeping these heartfelt vows. Within a few weeks many of us will have already fallen off the resolution bandwagon and given up.

It’s no different for students. They make promises. At that time they are completely sincere, but they lack follow-through. Interestingly, they continue to think about their promises just as we remind ourselves of our resolutions–too late . . . after we have already messed up!

So what’s the problem? When we carry out actions either reinforcing or going against our resolutions, we are doing so in the present moment. A resolution is made for the future. I can’t tell you the mechanism that keeps the present and the future apart in our minds, but my guess is that it has to do with our automatic actions guided by the subconscious.

Let’s face it, most of what we do in life is automatic. We can drive to work without really noticing the drive. We can find ourselves lost in thought in front of the computer–it happens to me all the time! Even when performing our work, we are governed by thought processes so deep that we seldom notice them.

If we want to address the promises made regarding studying, we have to start from a place where we acknowledge this lack of conscious control of our thoughts. We have to catch ourselves acting against our promises while we are in the time when we should be acting in accord with them. We have to train ourselves to change paths and get back into the promises.

Imagine you have made that resolution about losing weight. You find yourself finishing a piece of pie and put down the fork before polishing off that last bite. That is what acting on the resolution looks like. Practiced often enough, the change in behavior from finishing something to not finishing it becomes a habit. Eventually, you will get to the point where you no longer get the piece of pie out of the refrigerator. Ultimately, you never purchase it in the first place. When that happens, you have beaten the pie beast and fulfilled your resolution.

Students will take the same path when dealing with their schoolwork. They might do a little bit of homework that they would have completely blown off before. Given encouragement, they might just do a little bit more each day until they find a way to catch up.

The big surprise will come on the day when they honestly have no homework because they are not only caught up, they have worked ahead. You see, it doesn’t take much to get to the head of the class. All we have to do is catch up  and stay ahead. We work our way into promises while others wonder why they can’t keep them.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

I created a simple paragraph format for my students to help them respond to the types of multiple-sentence assignments they found in their science, social studies, and English textbooks. The idea was to give the kids a template for developing a top quality answer and teaching them to apply the template to all of these assignments. I wanted my students to be able to wow their other instructors with high level responses.

To accomplish the task, students just had to follow a few simple rules. First among these was to write four sentences for each response. Second was to use keywords from the textbook’s original question. Other rules involved making a claim, proving the claim with  details, and analyzing the claim in relation to the details.

Most of my students stepped up to the task when they found out how they would be graded. Each response was worth five points. If they wrote less than four sentences they would only get one point. If they wrote four sentences they would be eligible for the full five poinsts, as long as their answers were of sufficient quality to demonstrate that they understood what they were talking about and had proved their points. I wanted to teach students to develop their answers. Unfortunately, some students by nature resist such well-intentioned desires.

One student, a kid I truly enjoyed talking to and having in class, was a born and bred member of La Resistance. He would artfully avoid anything that would signal his true ability, therefore he naturally would turn in a one-sentence response to every question in order to earn his one, and only one point for each.

As all good English teachers do, I wrote a lengthy diatribe on his feeble assignment, gave it back, and informed him that he had to return it to me completely rewritten, with four sentences for each response. The next day he came in smiling, tossed the original sheet of paper on my desk, and went to his seat. I looked at the paper and noticed that his solution was to take his single sentence answers and randomly place three additional periods in each. It was a brilliant solution.

I believe he is working as a chef. If not, it would be a waste of talent. He was a great cook, even in middle school.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker.