Lift Up Your Hearts!

My morning routine often includes the SAT Question of the Day; the mental exercise is not only fun (at least when your future doesn't ride on it), but also, I'm assuming, good for my brain.  But I've begun to worry about the system, because it's too easy.

Mind you, I didn't find the Scholastic Aptitude Test easy when I took it in high school; I did quite well but not close to a perfect score (which was 1600 back then).  What's more, I would expect to do better now, since I've had some 40 more years of experience since then.  So I'm not really complaining that the questions are rarely challenging for me; what I find concerning is that they don't seem to be much of a challenge, period.  The number of respondents who get the question right is almost always more than half, and often quite a bit more for the Verbal questions.  People don't do as well on the Math questions, but still far better than I would expect for an exam that's supposed to be challenging our brightest high school students.  I realize those who undertake the daily question are a self-selected population, which may explain their success.

Nonetheless, the level of difficulty still surprises me.  I recall the SAT being interesting and even somewhat fun, but not a cakewalk by any means.  It's true that I studied quite a bit more math after taking the test in 10th grade, but so far I've not seen a question requiring higher math—often they can be done with common sense and/or grinding through the multiple-choice responses

So, my questions:  Has the SAT really become that much easier over the years?  Is the Question of the Day deliberately taken from the easier parts of the test?  Is the idea that our faculties decrease once we get out of school just a myth?  Contrary to popular belief, is motherhood actually a challenging and stimulating profession that keeps the mind agile?  I rather like those last two ideas.

Not a proper post today, but I must keep my readers checking in.  :)  A post on Random Observations led me to this Boston Herald essay by Michael Graham: Campus "Activism" Redefined.  As one commenter remarked, it's too late to be an April Fool joke.  Not content with co-ed dorms on college campuses, the latest push is for gender-blind dorm rooms. Whoopee!

To be fair, I think they're actually talking about letting you choose your own roommate regardless of sex, rather than yet another big shock when a freshman meets his or her roommate for the first time.  Still, it remains a stupid idea.

I suppose it's one way of dealing with the complications of housing homosexual and lesbian students, but I'd prefer colleges just get rid of the archaic roommate idea and provide single rooms for everyone who wants one.  They could solve the subsequent housing crunch by instituting very stringent and strictly-enforced visitation policies that would drive off campus everyone who thinks he's in college for sex rather than studies.

The article reminded me of a story I heard back when co-ed dorms were first being proposed.  One college dean—I have no idea who, or where—after listening patiently to the case as presented to him by a couple of student representatives, turned them down.

"You don't trust us," they complained.

"No, I don't," he replied.

"Why not?"

"Because one of you is male, and the other is female." 

My teacher readers have permission to roll their eyes now, but I've finally figured out the reason for those stupid vocabulary exercises we did in school—look up the word, define the word (don't just copy the dictionary), use the word in a sentence ("XXX is a vocabulary word" doesn't count), test on Friday.  I dutifully complied, but don't believe I learned any new word that way.  I'm very good at remembering something long enough to pass a test, but what increases my vocabulary is reading, hearing, and using new words in context.

Having subscribed (thanks to my father) for many years to A.Word.A.Day, and recently extended my random vocabulary fun to Free Rice (thanks to my brother), I realized that the point of vocabulary work is not to learn new words!  The purpose is to increase one's awareness of new words.  Perhaps slower, more careful readers do not have this problem, but I devour books, and any word I don't know is glossed over, its general meaning derived from context and the word itself forgotten.  However, if my awareness of the word has been raised through seeing or hearing it before, even if I don't know the meaning it will begin to pop out of the page at me, and gradually become incorporated into my working vocabulary.

So for me, and I suspect many others, vocabulary lessons are useless outside of the context of an environment rich in words, but given that context they are a useful tool after all.  I wonder, however, if they are of any use at all to children who will not go on to encounter the words in real life.  Another example of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, I suppose.

Thanks to the Prodical Kiwi(s) Blog for alerting me to this video of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson on nurturing (or not nurturing) creativity.  It wasn't as informative as I had hoped, but it hits some high points and is at least amusing.  Not everyone can take the time to read John Taylor Gatto's phone book sized The Underground History of American Education.  My apologies to all my teacher readers (who no doubt wish they had more freedom to nurture creativity) and epecially the university professors.  :)  I really like the story of dancer and choreographer Gillian Lynne.

I’ve been a fan of the Mars Hill Audio Journal since the early 90s, though only an intermittent subscriber.  I enjoy and appreciate its insight into life and culture, but generally prefer to receive information in printed, rather than spoken, form.  Plus I was tired of finding places to store the cassettes.

Recently I re-subscribed, because they now offer an mp3 version.  This I can take with me on my walks, and it takes up no physical space in the house.  Works for me.

Mars Hill also has more free resources, audio and print, than I have time to handle.  Here’s one that came to my inbox recently:  A Culture of One, a review of a book by Andrew Keen entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture.  I’ve ordered the book from our library, but haven’t yet read it, so this post will not be commentary on the book, per se, but on some of the ideas expressed in the review, which I believe to be worthy of comment and on which I seek your opinions.

Although he doesn't use the phrase, Keen's book is about the loss of cultural authority. He believes that the survival of the very best forms of cultural expression, in journalism, music, fiction, and other disciplines, requires a network of mediation and accreditation. Cultural institutions that nurture the production of the best cultural artifacts maintain teams of editors, critics, producers, and teachers who have advanced in their careers through years of training and evaluation within a guild or tradition. Over time, some of those institutions earn more trust and respect among their peers than do others, their expertise and ability are acknowledged through an organic process of accountability and recognition. Those cultural institutions can be corrupted and standards can become debased. But without some form of institutionalized judgment established over time in communities of expertise, without, that is, some knowledgeable person to tell you your work isn't good enough to be published, cultural expression easily becomes mere self-expression.

I would respectfully cry, au contraire!  Perhaps I’m being a bit defensive here, as I am one of those who “can self-publish by putting up a few bucks for a website, [and] don't have to face the humiliation of rejection slips.”  He’s talking about blogging, but also about amateur music and other forms of cultural expression.  In this and all of life I fear the Cult of the Professional much more than the Cult of the Amateur.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a strong proponent of excellence, and of training our children (and ourselves) to appreciate the best in music, art, literature, and life in general.  I readily admit that developing such taste usually requires deliberate effort; scattering random seeds on unprepared ground is not equivalent to planting and tending a garden.  In a world dominated by Doritos and Coke, children will not naturally prefer edamame and milk.  Similarly, much that is excellent and worthy of appreciation does not immediately captivate us, but must be assisted by experience and education.  Keen’s concern that the true ore is being buried in a flood of dross is valid, but the solution does not lie in letting a guild of professionals control access to the mines.

Professionalism is good, and professional certification is good when it provides information about minimum standards to those who otherwise would be ignorant.  When choosing a surgeon I would want him to be board certified; when purchasing raw milk I would like the dairy to have a governmental imprimatur.  However, the freedom to choose outside of official sanction is equally important; all the obstetricians in the world should not be able to stop a midwife from exercising her skills, and no state should make it illegal to buy milk from my neighbor’s uncertified farm.

We are too much overwhelmed by the professional in all of life.  We blindly trust our health to our doctors and our children’s education to their schools.  We watch; we do not do.  We watch professional sports; few of us play.  More of us watch the productions of professional actors, directors, set designers, and sound technicians, and fewer of us participate in amateur theatrical troupes.  We pay large sums to hear musical superstars perform, but who of us—besides Irish seisiún participants—gathers with friends to make joyful, informal music?  Mothers hardly sing to their babies anymore!  Professionalism has also put its mark on the amateur performances we do indulge in, and not always for the better.  Well-organized, scheduled, and rule-laden children’s sports may have their place, but they’re not a substitute for neighborhood pick-up games.

By all means, let’s encourage the development of excellence, discernment, and good taste in ourselves and our children.  (“By all means”—what an odd expression, when you think about it, because I don’t really mean “by all means”; I’m about to state an exception.)  But don’t close the door.  Above all, don’t assign as porter those in whose interest it is to keep others out of the business.

There’s a lot of junk on the Internet.  Some wicked, some dreadfully bad, some merely insipid.  And I’m not even going to talk about American Idol!  (There’s another odd expression; I just did.)  But to the extent that YouTube, blogs, amateur music publishing sites, and yes, even American Idol encourage people to become participants rather than observers, they are providing an important service.  Life is to be lived, not handed over to others and watched.

Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty

Whether you attribute that quotation to Wendell Phillips, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry, it's the truth, and no less true when it comes to the rights of parents to educate their own children.

When we first considered educating our children at home, that right was in legal limbo here in Florida, not being mentioned in the statutes at all. Some homeschoolers stayed under the government's radar by never registering their children for school in the first place (and staying out of sight during school hours), and others registered their homes as private schools, but I believe the most common choice was to homeschool under the "umbrella" of an existing private school. Some private schools were set up specifically for homeschoolers to be able to choose that option. It worked reasonably well, and thus some homeschoolers were reluctant to rock the boat when others pushed to make home education specifically legal. They were—quite reasonably—afraid that bringing the issue to the attention of lawmakers might result in less freedom rather than more. It's a legitimate fear, but recent events in California show the danger of not making rights and freedoms explicit.

A California appellate court ruling in the case of one specific family has thrown into confusion the legal status of homeschoolers in the whole state. The homeschooling family came to the attention of the authorities when the oldest child made accusations of child abuse. Whether these accusations were valid or a rebellious teen's reaction to resonable and legitimate family restrictions and discipline is not the point here—I only mention it because there's a general assumption that the parents were guilty, and I know personally that the alternate scenario is sometimes the truth. The matter of immediate concern to other homeschoolers is that the court made a general ruling on the legitimacy of homeschooling, and "published" it, making it available as legal precedent for other court cases. The judges ruled that parents do not have a right to educate their own children unless they hold valid state teaching certification at the appropriate grade level.

Several things are frightening about this, not the least of which is that the issue didn't even come to light until several days after the court decision had been made. The battle was lost before it was joined.

California homeschoolers are trying not to panic. The host that has arisen in their support includes Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger and the state superintendent of education, Jack O’Connell, as well as the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). Predictably, however, opponents are taking advantage of the opportunity as well. Los Angeles teachers' union president A.J. Duffy: What's best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher. Los Angeles Daily News columnist Paul Kujawsky: [W]hat could work would be a regulatory scheme in which the California Department of Education creates standards for initial training and continuing supervision of home-schooling parents. This training and supervision could be carried out by organizations of credentialed teachers under contract with the department. Such a solution may not satisfy everyone, but it would preserve home schools while ensuring that their students are getting the sort of education California law requires. Note that Kujawsky's "solution" says nothing about how well children are actually learning and puts parents under direct control of the state and the teachers' union. (See Kujawksy's whole column here.)

If this doesn't scare you, read this column by Steven Greenhut of the Orange County (California) Register. Here are few excerpts (emphasis mine).

The judges—two Republican appointees and one Democratic appointee—argued that "parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children. … Because parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling within the provisions of these laws, parents who fail to do so may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program." The court made it clear that parents face a loss of custody if they don't comply, arguing that "the juvenile court has authority to limit a parent's control over a dependent child.

The ruling is shockingly totalitarian, as it echoes this point: "In obedience to the constitutional mandate to bring about a general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence, the Legislature, over the years, enacted a series of laws. A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."

Is this California or Germany? I haven't written about the homeschooling horrors in Germany since the Melissa Busekros case (see here, here, and here), but the situation is so bad people are fleeing the country rather than turn their children over to the state. Homeschooling has become a significant movement in the United States, and most families who now teach their children at home have no memories of the battles that won them that freedom. They may have to repeat them.

I have had my quarrels with the HSLDA in the past, but nonetheless we chose to support them (and join them) while we were actively homeschooling, and I would do so again. As far as I can tell, they are the best and most effective organization around for monitoring the legal assaults on homeschooling, both here and abroad, and as they have matured they seem to have become more calm and less likely to panic unnecessarily (one of my objections in the past). One HSLDA opponent complained that the organization should have quietly gone away after home education was legalized in all states, instead of continuing to grow. Much as I respect that person, one California court decision was all it took to prove him wrong.

I'm not sure of the value of petitions, especially the electronic variety, and though I've signed some physical petitions, I'd never signed one online. Until now. The HSLDA website has a petition requesting that the California Supreme Court "depublish" this case, which would mean it could not be sited as legal precedent. Normally I would not expect petitioners to matter if they are not California citizens, but the HSLDA would like to show broad national support as well, so I signed.

On the other side of the continent, Washington, DC is now considering instituting Draconian restrictions for its homeschoolers. According to this Washington Times column by J. Michael Smith, president of the HSLDA, The regulations cover everything from record keeping and home visits to the power of government officials to immediately terminate a homeschool program at their discretion.

Here's an interesting map, taken from this San Jose, California Mercury News article.

Note that both California and Washington, DC were considered to be "low regulation." Connecticut is a great place to live if you want to homeschool, almost an island in the midst of its heavy-handed neighbors. North Dakota, on the other hand, stands out in the other direction.

Many people choose where to live based on the quality of the public schools. Homeschoolers are liberated from that concern, but would do well to consider the homeschooling regulations to which they would be subjecting themselves. Even so, nothing can be taken for granted. To continue the Wendell Phillips quote, Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot. That's a lower case "d" democrat—Republicans are not exempt.

I am on an Andrew Pudewa kick.  I first discovered his Institute for Excellence in Writing through an online forum for early childhood education, and—as usual—once I'd heard of him, his name started coming to my attention in other ways.  A friend of ours is the principal of a private Christian school which emphasizes academic excellence as well as a solid Christian worldview, and she and her teachers waxed so enthusiastic about his program for teaching writing that she even sent me a sample videotape of one of his lectures.  It didn't take me long to get hooked.  For the first three minutes, I found Pudewa's voice to be annoying; after that I was so intrigued by what he was saying and how he was presenting it that it didn't matter.

Now I'm not averse to spending money on educational materials for our grandkids, but they're not yet old enough for the writing materials, which are a bit pricey to buy on speculation, especially since there might well be a subsequent edition or two by the time they would be used.  Fortunately for my curiosity, one of our favorite homeschooling families was impressed enough to try it out, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their experiences.

Some of Pudewa's other materials are financially more accessible, and since I couldn't interest anyone else in his poetry memorization program, I bought it for myself!  I think I'm going to enjoy it.  It came with a bonus DVD of his lecture entitled Nurturing Competent Communicators, which I highly recommend.  As a writing teacher, he has been appalled by the lack of writing ability very much evident today, and has come to the conclusion that you can't get out of a mind something that's not there in the first place.  Today's children (and those from a generation or two before, as well) simply have not had sufficient input of good language vocabulary, structure, and style; this hinders not only their ability to write, but also their ability to think.  Rather than spend much time berating the negative influences on language (peers, media, lack of reading, stress and fast pace of life), Pudewa suggest two positive solutions.

Read good books (especially poetry) aloud.  This is still critical well after children are competent readers.  One can read aloud books at a much higher level of sophistication than a child can (or will) read for himself.  Moreover, even very good readers will often mispronounce words they've only encountered in print, and will often read so quickly as to get the meaning of the words while missing their music; hearing them read aloud corrects both these errors.  A cosy family situation is best for such reading, but Pudewa acknowledges the time crunch many families suffer and the value of books on tape.  He also suggests enlisting grandparents in the project, suggesting we create heirloom recordings of our own.  Reading aloud is more critical to language development, says Pudewa, than much of what we give higher precedence.  I'm grateful that Porter knew this instinctively and for many years ended each meal by reading aloud to us.  He even began with poetry—and no, it wasn't just a way of getting out of helping with the dishes, though I must say it did make doing the dishes much more interesting.

Memorize poetry and other examples of good language.  Memorization itself promotes brain growth, and memorization of good language provides the brain with a stock of good language patterns.  Pudewa tells a story close to my own heart for reasons most of you will recognize.  As a Suzuki violin teacher, he had lived in Japan for three years, studying under Shinichi Suzuki himself.  Naturally he wanted to learn the language, and had reached the point where he could communicate reasonably well, and yet was frustrated by knowing that he wasn't really getting things right.  Drawing on his Suzuki training, he devised a plan:  He asked his sensei to record himself reading a Japanese children's book version of Jack and the Beanstalk.  This Pudewa practiced and practiced, phrase upon phrase, until he had it completely memorized.  As a result, his ability to speak Japanese took a significant leap forward; through a simple children's story he had given his brain many of the patterns and cadences of the Japanese language.  Plus he became a great hit with the little Japanese children he met.  He would have loved the HIPPO Family Clubs!  No wonder my dad was so smart:  when he was young, he walked a lot, and when he walked, he memorized poems.

At the same time that I purchased the poetry program, I couldn't resist getting a couple of CDs containing his lecture, The Profound Effects of Music on Life.  I'm anxious to hear my favorite musician's take on this lecture (if she ever has time to listen to it).  I know he has greatly oversimplified things for his lay audience, but much of what he says rings true to my ears and I'd love to have an expert's opinion.

And I wonder why everthing takes me so long!  It was to clean my office that I set out to do, but I couldn't just put the CDs on the shelf, I had to enter them into my library software, and I had to rip them to mp3s so I could listen to them when I go out walking.  In the process of ripping I discovered that one was a DVD, and since I couldn't rip it I listened to it then and there.  And that inspired me to install another piece of software that I was going to install "sometime," and then of course I couldn't stop but had to write about it all.  Now I'm done and can finally put the materials away.  But there's still the rest of the room to work on, and where did the day go???

Those of you who begin each day with my Morning Coffee page are already familiar with the Geography Zone challenge.  Thanks to DSTB you will now see a new geography quiz in the list, National Geographic's GeoBee.  This is a tough one, not only because it covers more than locations (natural resources, culture, and religion for example), but because the questions are not always multiple choice.  Not only is it necessary to come up with the answer on one's own, which is much more difficult than merely choosing, but spelling counts.  I mis-spelled "Montpelier."  :(

Gambate!

It's been a while since we paid college tuition (though the loans linger on), and even longer since we paid for private schooling pre-college (Heather's kindergarten and first grade years), but the desire to compare the cost of a trip to Antarctica to other forms of education led me to some shocking discoveries.

The educational system in America, like the health care system, is in terrible shape.  Don't get me wrong.  I have yet to be convinced that the situation is better in any other country, and the number of people who flock here from overseas, both to our doctors and to our schools, is ample evidence that I'm not the only one.

What's more, anyone who knows me knows my strong belief that the solution to neither problem lies in more governmental funding and/or control (it's always "and," anyway), but rather in more freedom of choice.  Despite my passionate thoughts on the value of home education, the three-fold cord of public, private, and home education is much stronger than any one of them separately.  Equally important is always to be thinking outside the box, and that (at long last) brings me to the heart of this post:  the cost of education.

The per-student cost of public education is not an easy figure to calculate, since (1) it varies from district to district and (2) school boards aren't always eager to make the figures readily available.  I did find that Fairfax County, Virginia calculates its average annual cost per student as about $13,500.  I'm not sure this has much meaning other than to depress those who are paying for private or home education on top of the taxes necessary to foot such a bill, but I offer it for what it's worth.

I surveyed the tuition costs of six private schools:  one Catholic (C), one "Classical Christian" (CC), one "other Protestant" (OP), and three elite private boarding schools (EPB).  Note:  the numbers are approximate, but accurate enough.  Some figures reflected this year, and some next, so I did some rounding.  Also, tuition isn't everything—I added the cost of a required annual "fee" of nearly $1000 to the tuition figure of the Classical Christian school, though for the other schools the fees were minor and I ignored them.  The elite schools have two figures, because there are two classes of students: day and boarding (boarding figures in parentheses).  In all cases I considered high school tuition.  (Lower schools usually charge less.)  So, for each year of private high school education, you will pay (scholarships excepted):

• C: $9,000 if you're Catholic; $12,000 if you're not, or not active in your parish
• OP: $9000
• CC: $10,000
• EPB1: $24,000 ($38,000)
• EPB2: $29,000 ($37,000)
• EPB3: $29,000 ($39,000)

For comparison, a year at Harvard University (tuition, room, board, fees) is about $46,000.

I'm not questioning anyone's decision to spend that kind of money on their children's schooling.  Those we know who have chosen these options (and we know people in all categories) are convinced that this is a worthwhile investment for their children: socially, spiritually, academically, and even financially.  (One parent credits his son's Classical Christian education with the "free ride" given him by a highly-ranked private university, and it's hard to argue that spending $40,000 to save $140,000 is unwise!  Not that that happens to everyone.)

The more I learn, the more I'm convinced that the wise expenditure of money on education before college is more important than saving for college itself.  But these numbers rattled me, and I fling them out as a challenge to all parents who have chosen public or home education for their families.  (I wish we'd thought of it this way during our homeschooling days.)

If these parents can sacrifice so much to send their children to private schools—and I know of no one for whom such costs are not a significant burden—what can the rest of us do?  (I realize these schools offer scholarships, and not every student is paying the full price, but many are, and I believe that includes most of the people we know.)  Just think about it!  Field trips (aka family vacations), museum memberships, opera tickets, laboratory equipment, books, videos, musical instruments, special classes—think what can be done for $10,000 - $40,000 per year!

I like my customized Google News page, the keyhole through which I see not only major world and U.S. stories, but also the latest news on specific topics of particular interest to me, such as home birth, home education, and Basel, Switzerland.  That's how I occasionally come upon little gems I'd never find otherwise, such as Homeschooling Grows Up, an article from today's Catoosa County News.  Have you ever  heard of the Catoosa County News?  How about Catoosa County itself?  Me, neither.  (It's in Georgia.)

Not that the article says anything spectacular or new to those already in the home education field, but it caught my eye because of a conversation I had recently with Janet, in which she noted that in her lifetime home education has gone from being considered extremely counter-cultural to being so common some people homeschool simply because that's what's expected of them, at least in their own circle of friends.  It's hard for me to imagine the latter, but apparently in places it's true.  I can't get too upset by that—I don't see it as being any worse than sending your kids to public school because "that's what's done"—but admit it does pose some risks as the pool expands.

Be that as it may, Homeschooling Grows Up struck me as a nice summary of the diversity of homeschooling experiences available today.

I have over 200 e-mails in my inbox, and though sometimes I can deal with a lot quickly when I put my mind to it, progress came to a screeching halt when I'm confronted with one from my brother, alerting me to the FreeRice vocabulary game.  It's a simple, multiple-choice vocabulary quiz that adjusts to one's abilities, making it suitable for a wide range of players.  For each correct answer, 20 grains of rice are donated (funded by advertising on the site) to the United Nations World Food Program.  All at one site: good turn, mental workout, and addictive distraction.

This game is particularly useful when there are so many other things you need to be doing that your mind can't concentrate on any of them.  :)  In my introductory session, I spent about half an hour and got up to Level 49 (of 50) and 3300 grains of rice.  This is much better than the Reader's Digest "Word Power" for challenging me.

The fun at the higher levels was in noting the many different ways I was able to get the correct answer.  Some I guessed from word roots and endings, some from similarities to others words.  Others I knew outright from a wide variety of sources:  Swallows and Amazons books, A.W.A.D., hobbies, Peter Wimsey mysteries, you name it.  My sister pointed out that a number of the words can be found in Ruth Heller's children's books (though they are by no means children's words).

And for my sister-in-law (the one who will know what I'm talking about), I present the word that made me stop playing and write this post:  geoduck!

I manged to get fairly quickly to Level 50, which is currently the highest (they are working on adding more words), but it's difficult to stay there, since a single wrong answer causes a one-level demotion that requires three correct responses to reverse.

If you plan to play the game with any regularity, you'll want to click on the Options link and set it up to remember your vocabulary level and amount of rice donated.  The default is to start anew each time, so my first session's level and more than 3000 rice grains were forgotten.  But it didn't take me long to recover, and now stand at over 5000.  I wonder how much rice that is?  I'm not about to go to the pantry and count to find out.  I'd rather earn and learn some more....

But I won't now; it's time to get back to work.  But geoduck...heh...that's great.

Uncle Vine, digging geoducks in Washington

[Part 3 will be the last, at least for a while, since the book must go back to the library.  Here are Part 1 and Part 2.]

[The best state of mind to promote if you want to encourage someone to be successful is] a fully realistic assessment of the difficulty of the challenge ahead of him, and, at the same time, an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it.

This one is suprising, and no doubt controversial, yet resonates so well with my experience that I am compelled to write about it.

[C]onventional wisdom tells us that self-awareness is a good thing; that people who have a realistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses outperform those  whose assessments are inflated.... [C]onventional wisdom is misguided.  Current research suggests that accurate self-awareness rarely drives performance, and that in many circumstances, it actively retards performance.  Only self-assurance drives performance, even when this self-assurance turns out to be unrealistic.

[For example, researchers] selected two groups of people, one a group of anxious and nervous types, the other more socially active, and measured the social skills of each group—how well did they remember names, how comfortable were they at introducing themselves to a stranger, and so on.  To their surprise they found virtually no difference whatsoever in the actual skill levels of each group....  They then asked the members of each group to rate themselves on their social skills.  Here the two groups differed dramatically.  The anxious, nervous group assessed their skill levels accurately, whereas the more socially active group gave themselves inflated ratings.  They thought they had more skills than they actually did....  Their overly positive view of themselves didn't trip them up; instead, it pushed them to apply the skills they imagined they possessed.  [That reminds me of a school principal's statement to a friend of mine:  "Your daughter is working above her ability."  Sounds like nonsense, but Buckingham would understand.]

As the research reveals, people who have a slightly unrealistic confidence in their abilities outperform those whose self-assessments are more realistic.  These overconfident optimists are also more persistent and more resilient when faced with obstacles—"I'm not giving up now because deep down I believe I have what it takes to succeed."  So if you want a person to achieve his utmost and to persist in the face of resistance, reinforce his belief in his strengths, even overemphasize these strengths, give him an almost unreasonable confidence that he has what it takes to succeed.

Buckingham describes self-assurance, or self-efficacy, as a combination of self-confidence, optimism, positivity, and a feeling of being in control during an activity. At this point in the book, I was beginning to wonder about my disdain for the self-esteem movement as I saw it played out in schools, where more effort seemed to go into training children to chant variations on "I am great!" than into promoting actual accomplishment.  But Buckingham quickly distances himself from that.

Self-efficacy is not the same as self-esteem.  Self-esteem refers to your general feeling of worthiness, and, while having high sefl-esteem must, in some general sense, be a good thing, unfortunately a recent nationwide study sponsored by the American Psychological Society revealed that high self-esteem predicts nothing at all—not resilience, not persistence, not goal-setting, and certainly not achievement.

Self-efficacy is not a general feeling, but rather is always tied to a specific activiity.  You might have feelings of high self-efficacy for selling comptuer software, or for administering injections safely, or for analyzing corporations' annual reports.  And, in contrast to self-esteem, your level of self-efficacy for an activity does an excellent job of predicting your subsequent performance.  It predicts how quickly you wil lbounce back from failure at the activity, how forcefully you will persevere at the activity when you meet obstacles or setbacks, how high your goals for that activity will be, and, most importnat of all, the likelihood you will actually achieve these goals.  When it comes to performance, sefl-efficacy is one of the most powerful of mental states.

Although your self-efficacy is tied to specific activities, it does come in very handy when you are confronted by  new challenges.  According tto research..., how well you face new challenges is determined by your ability to transfer your self-efficacy from one activity to another.  The best way to do this is to look deliberately for simliarities between the new challenge and previous challenges where you have succeeded in the past.

But here's the catch:  Self-efficacy isn't enough. It can lead to nonchalance, overconfidence, and arrogance if not combined with sufficient challenge.  Not, Buckingham emphasizes, in the areas of weakness, of but strength.

[D]on't try to bring [an overconfident person] down to earth by detailing his many weaknesses and telling him he'd better set about fixing them.  At times this may be tempting, particularly with your most arrogant prima donna, but you must resist.  You will be fueling his self-doubt, and although self-doubt may occasionally serve a purpose, it's unlikely to spawn excellent performance.... Instead, to combat nonchalance, build up the size of the challenge.  Having detailed the outcomes you want, tell him how hard it's going to be to achieve them.  Emphasize their scope, their complexity, thier "no one has ever pulled this off before" quality.  Do whatever you can to get his attention and make him take his challenge seriously.

Lately a great deal of time and money has been focused on redesigning educational material in order to make it more relevant and accessible for kids—less boring tests, more fun-but-educational television shows and video games.  The underlying theory is that kids will learn more from this kind of edutainment....  Unfortunetly, it's not true.  [Shows like Sesame Street and Blue's Clues] don't seem to teach very much.  In the Journal of Educational Psychology, in a paper titled "Television Is 'Easy' and Print Is 'Tough,'" researchers revealed their finding that "children...invested high cognitive effort and learned much from instructional media they considered difficult," i.e., written tests, "but invested less effort and learned less from the same information conveyed by media they believed to be easy" i.e., television shows.

What strikes me so about these ideas is how much they correspond to the most successful efforts of one of the most gifted choir directors it has ever been my privilege to observe.  She worked incredibly hard with us, adults and children, with amazing results.  She turned timid singers into soloists, morphed monotones into beautiful voices, taught children to sing difficult classical choral works, and brought our church choir to musical heights I've never seen in an all-amateur church choir, before or since.  She excelled at holding the bar high and convincing us we could jump over it, using Buckingham's techniques—though I'm sure she's never heard of him.  She praised us extravagantly, and made sure we knew how difficult the task was.  As I gained more experience and sang in other choirs, I came to be suspicious of her praise, and to take it with a grain of salt, especially as it became obvious that even she didn't believe all she said.  I even accused her of lying to us....

But now I'm wondering if this kind of prevarication is more akin to the "lies" parents must tell to raise healthy children.  The world can be a dangerous, frightening place—but if we want our children to grow up confident, competent, and with sound minds able to deal with the terrors and dangers that come, we can't tell them much about that.  If we let them grow up fearful, they won't learn well, and the world will be for them more dangerous still.

In any case, the system worked.  Magnificently.  When I was told the choir music was difficult, but that we would work hard on it and I would be able to do it—I did!  And I loved it!  In contrast, when we started singing pop-music "praise songs" instead of Bach, Handel, and Haydn, we hardly worked on them at all, because "they're easy."  Well, I didn't find them easy.  Still don't, though I'm getting better.  The music has tricky rhythms that are very difficult to read, and no one ever seems to sing them the way they are written anyway.  Being told to ignore the written music and sing "by ear" was like being dropped off a cliff and told to fly.  If our director had taken the same approach she had with the "hard" music, telling us that it was difficult and would require hard work and a new way of thinking, but that we could and would be able to do it well—I'm certain I would have learned much faster and better.

Many will claim that my decided preference for the music of Bach, Handel, and Haydn over "praise songs" is the greatest factor in making the former easier to learn.  I'll admit there's some truth to that.  But what most of those who blithely assume it's the whole cause don't know is that when I began singing in choirs, traditional choral music was as foreign to me as praise songs, possibly more so.  I'm now convinced that the "high confidence/high challenge" experience played a much greater part in the development of my musical preferences and abilities than I knew.

I'm curious.  Have you had a coach, teacher, manager or mentor who used this approach with you?  What was your experience?

The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)

[This is Part Two.  Part One is here.] 

The mediocre manager believes that most things are learnable and therefore that the essence of management is to identiry each person's weaker areas and eradicate them.

The great manager...believes that the most influential qualities of a person are innate and therefore that the essence of management is to deploy these innate qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance. 

I find Marcus Buckingham's belief in the essentially unalterable effect of our genetic makeup on our abilities to be disturbing, to say the least.  However, that doesn't change my appreciation of his observation that we spend too much time and effort trying to shore up our areas of weakness, and not enough building on our strengths.  True, we can't afford to ignore our weaknesses, and well-directed efforts at overcoming them are often in order.  Spending the majority of our energy on our strengths, however, generally leads to the most progress, the most satisfaction, and the most achievement.

There's a reason we're strong where we are.  Buckingham didn't put it this way, but God created us as unique individuals, with our own special strengths, and it's reasonable to think he had a purpose in mind.  Why say to one's creator, "You made me good at X, so I'm going to ignore that and work on Y, where you weren't so generous."

Strength builds on strength.  Buckingham indulges in some hard biological explanations of why this is so, but the short version is also obvious:  It's easier to multiply knowledge and skill in an area related to those in which one is already knowledgeable and skilled.  Progress in areas of weakness requires a greater investment of effort and time—often just to get to the point of being mediocre. Building on one's strengths is a more promising path to excellence.

Concentrating on weaknesses also comes, for most people, with a huge psychological burden.

[I]f you really want to ruin your chances of sustained success, ponder your weaknesses, ruminate on your past failings, chew on your flaws.  Pretty soon you'll wonder why it's worth getting out of bed in the morning.

[Y]ou will be more likely to be resilient, persistent, self-confident and effective in those areas where you have developed some mastery, and you will transfer these powerful feelings to new challenges [that] are substantially simlar to your existing areas of mastery.

I'll bet that if you can name someone in your life who consistently inspired you to do be better than you thought you could be, that person focused on your strengths, not your weaknesses.  Couldn't it be that one of the reasons most children dislike school is that the classroom is a place where their weaknesses are always in focus?  Where teachers are rarely concerned with building on their strengths once they've reached an acceptable level of mastery?

There's wisdom in The One Thing You Need to Know that applies far beyond the business world. 

The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)

Reading, for me, is not a luxury but a necessity, like eating.  Ideally, meals should be eaten slowly, savored, and appreciated, preferably in the company of good companions and interesting conversation.  So it also should be with books.  All too often, however, under the pressures of the day, we gulp a hasty meal and move on. Alas, I have not done justice to The One Thing You Need to Know, but when I read about it on the Prodical Kiwi(s) Blog, I knew I had to grab what I could from it now, and hope to give it a better reading later.

Still, I can't resist giving you a few high points, and in this post I'll begin with his insightful classification of learning styles, and I'll quote almost directly quite a bit because he says it so well.  His caveat:  I am not suggesting that these three styles are mutually exclusive.  Certain [people] may rely on a combination of two or perhaps even all three styles.  Nonetheless, keep your ear attuned to each of these three styles and you should be able to focus your coaching with greater accuracy.

Analyzing Analyzers understand a task by taking it apart, examining its elements, and reconstructing it piece by piece.  And since in their eyes, every single piece is important, they crave information.  They need to know all there is to know about a subject before they can begin to feel comfortable with it.

If they don't feel they have enough information they will dig and push until they get it.  They will read the assigned reading.  They will attend the required classes.  They will take good notes.  They will practice.

The best way to teach an Analyzer is to give her ample time in the classroom.  Role-play with her.  Post-mortem with her.  Break her performance down into its component parts so that she can then carefully build it back up into a total performance.  Always allow her time to prepare.

Remember, the Analyzer hates mistakes.  A cliché about learning is that "mistakes fuel learning," but for the Analyzer this just isn't true.  In fact the reason she prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes.  So whatever you do, don't expect her to learn much by throwing her into the middle of a new situation and telling her to wing it.

Doing  In direct contrast to the Analyzer, the absolute best way to teach a Doer is to throw him in the middle of a new situation and tell him to wing it.  The most powerful learning moments for the Analyzer occur prior to the actual perforrmance, whereas for the Doer they occur during the performance.  The dead ends, the trials and the errors are all integral parts of his learning process.

The Doer learns most in the act of figuring things out for himself.  For him preparation is a dry, uninspiring activity.  Only the task inself, with its inherent possibility of real failure or real success, is intense enough to get him to concentrate and to apply himself.

If you want a Doer to learn, do not ask him to role-play with you.  Role-playing is fake and therefore uninteresting to him.  Instead pick a task within his role that is simple but real, give him a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and then get out of his way.  Once he has figured out how to complete this simple task, gradually increase the level of each task's complexity until he has mastered every aspect of his role.  Sure, he may make a few mistakes along the way, but for the Doer, mistakes are indeed the raw material for learning.

In one sense Doers can be frustating students because they won't give your advice much credence.  They have to experience a bad or good outcome themselves before they believe that it's true.  But in another sense, they are wonderful to have around.  They will always be the first to jump into a new challenge and attack it with spirit. 

Watching  Watchers won't learn much if you break a task down into its component parts and ask them to practice each part or if you ask them to role-play with you.  Since most formal training programs incorporate both of these elements, Watchers are often viewed as rather poor students.

They may be poor students, but they aren't necessarily poor learners.  Watchers can learn a great deal, but only when they are given the chance to see the total performance.  Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph.  For them what's important is the context of each pixel, its position relative to all the others, and they can see this, they can "get" this, only when they view the completed picture.

If you're trying to teach a Watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom, take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers. 

As with all such categorizations, nothing is 100% for anyone I know, but it's clear to me that Porter is an Analyzer, making all the more amazing how well he has adapted to IBM's continually throwing him into new situations where he must "wing it."  And Janet, who favors "learning to swim by drowning," has plenty of Doer characteristics.  I see Heather and myself as a less obvious mixture of all three.

[Note: Despite Janet's chosen phrase describing her learning preferences, she did not learn to swim by drowning.  Before she was 18 month old she was as joyful, confident, and competent in the water as a porpoise, but the YMCA program under which she (and Heather) learned to swim was as gentle and enjoyable as can be.  We did not drown nor even scare the kids!  Just in case someone from Child Protective Services is listening....]

I hope this post generates some comments, as I think there's a fair amount of value in Buckingham's analysis. 

I'm designing a playroom, and have been for years.  I don't ever expect to see it, since (1) our children are grown, and (2) my design takes no account of cost.  Nonetheless it's fun imagining what I'd do if I could, kind of like mentally spending lottery winnings (even though I never buy a ticket).

My playroom would be as much outdoors as it could be while still being usable in all seasons—lots of large windows or sliding glass doors with screens, perhaps, and an indoor/outdoor connection.  The latter could be a door, but wouldn't a tunnel be fun?  There would be a large art/craft section, and music (instruments for playing and a CD player for listening), and a brachiation ladder; well-stocked bookshelves and perhaps a sunken reading pit with comfortable cushions; a timeline all around the room and many maps and pictures on the walls.

The centerpiece of my imagined room has always been a structure of tunnels, ladders, ramps, and steps to encourage crawling, creeping, and climbing.  I was quite excited to discover that such a thing really exists!  However, even if Heather and Jon had room for it, and we could afford it, they wouldn't be getting it for Christmas.  This one was custom-made for a Hong Kong preschool.  Still, maybe the idea will catch on.

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with a man whose children graduated not long ago from our local Catholic schools system.  He mentioned that his son found his college classes much easier than the ones he took in high school.  This man believes that education in the United States in general, and textbooks in particular, have been significantly "dumbed down." As I've written before, I both agree and disagree with that statement.  I find it generally true even though there are notable, marked exceptions.

I'm not one to be overly awed by statistics purporting to show how much better other countries' educational systems are.  It wasn't that long ago that we were sending teams to Japan to discover why their children were learning so much more, yet at the same time the Japanese were sending teams here to learn why American students were so much more creative and innovative.  And yet the signs are screaming like downtown Tokyo, from this tiny preschool to the large population of foreign students on U.S. college campuses, particularly in the hard sciences and engineering:  Other countries take education, effort, and discipline far more seriously than we do.

So far we have survived on our creativity, our intellectual capital, and our tremendous natural and financial resources.  We've also enjoyed political and economic systems that are conducive to innovation and growth.  And we've been lucky.

Would I revamp our educational system to sponsor preschools such as this one all over the country?  No.  But I do wish Americans respected children, valued education, and encouraged self-discipline much more than we do.

And I'm going to keep my eyes open for play structures like that one.