The Problem:
This coming school year in California and many other states your child will attend school five fewer days. There are now 175 school days instead of the 180 only a few years ago.
This means your child will have almost 30 hours less time spent learning anything. Five fewer math classes, five fewer science classes, less time having a teacher to help learn anything.
Not to mention the majority of school districts have no plan in place to help you as a parent mitigate the likely loss of time spent mastering content or for that matter excercising.
What’s a parent to do?
This coming school year in California and many other states your child will attend school five fewer days. There are now 175 school days instead of the 180 only a few years ago.
This means your child will have almost 30 hours less time spent learning anything. Five fewer math classes, five fewer science classes, less time having a teacher to help learn anything.
Not to mention the majority of school districts have no plan in place to help you as a parent mitigate the likely loss of time spent mastering content or for that matter excercising.
What’s a parent to do?
As a parent what can you do to help your child succeed in school without spending a fortune or quitting your day job?
Edtoids Mission:
This blog is built to provide parents with suggestions on how to help their child succeed in school, based on my twenty year search for answers to this question.
This blog is built to provide parents with suggestions on how to help their child succeed in school, based on my twenty year search for answers to this question.
To begin with:
I like to start at the beginning. In order for you to be able help your child learn what they need to its good go know exactly what content they should learn or “how high is up”? I define this in terms of what specific content (vocabulary words, science and math problems) the world’s best students are mastering and how are they learning to do so.
How high is up?
Singapore tells us a great deal about what a world-class education is, and how poor our performance levels in the US really are. Take a look at these edtoids:
- Forty Six percent (46%) of Singapore eighth graders scored in the top 10% of the world. That means half of their students would rank as top-performing students in our schools.
- At least 75% of their students placed among the top 25% of all eighth graders worldwide.
- Just 1% of their students placed among the bottom 25% of all eighth graders around the world.
Singapore?
Why do I like Singapore as a benchmark for parents to use to compare their student’s achievement in math and science? Singapore is the world standard for math and science education in English. Finland ranks very high but Finland is a very homogenous small society and the speak and teach in Finish, not much help for me or you. Japan is by far the largest country (127 million) with the highest level of average achievement but to date English language translations of their curricular material are limited.
Although Singapore’s population is only a little over 5 million (less than the number of people who visit the Mall of American during the holidays) they are a solid benchmark for any parent because:
1 Their curricular materials (textbooks workbooks, teacher’s guides) are paperback, in English, inexpensive and available online at www.singaporemath.com.
2. Three decades ago the Singapore education system was sub par at best. Signapore is now ranked #1 in the world by TIMSS (International Math and Science Survey) and #2 by PISA.
3. Singaporeans speak three different languages (Chinese, Tagalog and English).
4. The average class size is 40 and they don’t whine about it.
5. 85% of Singapore students use Heymath.com as their supplemental math program which was developed in India so they have no problem using what works no matter who invented the tool or where in the world it originated.
US national standards:
Although there is a movement towards a national “common core” standard that will not be much help because it won’t be specific enough to tell you what your student needs to learn.
Existing de-facto national standards: There already exists national standard for high school achievement which is often used by upper middle class and wealthy students. It’s called the AP course system and the gateway exam for college is the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT.
Existing de-facto national standards: There already exists national standard for high school achievement which is often used by upper middle class and wealthy students. It’s called the AP course system and the gateway exam for college is the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT.
SAT question a day: Sign up at the college board website to have one question per day sent to your or your child's inbox. http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-question-of-the-day
Vocabulary matters:
To help your child build a bigger vocabulary go to go to http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscribe.html and sign up for a vocabulary word a day for any of your school age children. You can Google “100 words every high school freshman should know (or sophomore etc) and obtain a list. So pick a word a day for your child to learn. Why build vocabulary?
1. On average each year a student learns the meanings of more than a thousand new words.
2. Most of this knowledge comes from incidental acquisition.
3. The innate problem with learning from silent reading is most students do not read widely or quickly enough.
4 Research studies show that vocabulary is the best single indicator of intellectual ability and an accurate predictor of success at school.
Math and science sample problems:
For age specific questions for your child in math and science you can download the release sample questions for TIMSS at the following sites. In my future blogs I will be posting questions from TIMSS for you to use to see what your school aged children know about math and science in 4th, 8th and 12th grade.
For age specific questions for your child in math and science you can download the release sample questions for TIMSS at the following sites. In my future blogs I will be posting questions from TIMSS for you to use to see what your school aged children know about math and science in 4th, 8th and 12th grade.
- http://timss.bc.edu/timss1995i/items.html
- http://timss.bc.edu/timss2007/items.html
- http://timss.bc.edu/timss2003i/released.html
Free tutoring online
The best free tutoring for math and related subjects can be found at www.khanacademy.org. My 18 year old son and 14 year old daughter like the short tutoring snippets find them very helpful, use the tutorials often and they don’t agree on much of anything. In addition Bill Gates offers a video endorsement for Khanacademy on the homepage. Sal Rocks!!!!
To be continued:
This is the first in a series of blogs that will focus on how to help your school aged child succeed in school in spite of the budget mess, educrats and too few really effective teachers.
