These are the good old days

National attention has been focused for the last few decades on the effort to create meaningful standards for K-12 education. In recent years, Common Core standards have become a flashpoint for conflict. I see Facebook posts from friends both local and far-flung complaining that Common Core is forcing an unnatural and incomprehensible pedagogy on children, especially in math, frustrating kids and parents alike.

Parental complaints like this always reminds me of the Peanuts comics Charles Schulz drew in the 1960s about the so-called "New Math," which focused on set theory, concepts of equivalence, and number lines rather than memorizing arithmetic facts and computation methods. It's clear from the set of strips that Schulz understands the new math, and while he lets Sally channel the displeasure of a generation of angry parents, he doesn't side with her. Instead, he presents her as the voice of willful ignorance and stultifying lack of ambition.

Noel and I were talking yesterday about how we sometimes seem to have stumbled through a portal into an alternate educational dimension, with our kids. Their teachers are, almost to an individual, dedicated, energetic, creative, and loving. Their administrations stress college and career preparedness, and I see that emphasis in the teachers' classrooms. The assignments they give and the pedagogies they employ engage our highly intelligent children; nearly every day we hear from them about what they are learning, and the innovative ways the lessons have been brought home to them. Real-world applications have been presented and stressed; when I ask my kids how a certain abstract concept matters in life or careers, they are always ready with an answer.

Maybe we have just lucked out with the teachers and schools we've had. But I don't think so. Seems to me that, despite all the obstacles in their way (of which the greatest by far is legislative parsimony -- far more than unions or out-of-touch professional training, the favorite villains of conservative media in the state), most educators never stop trying to do their job well. I'm constantly amazed at what my kids are learning to do and how they're being challenged. I went to expensive college prep schools when I was their age, and in so many ways they are getting a better education that I did -- largely because teaching methods are so much more advanced, standards are clearer, assessments measure actual learning better, and enrichment opportunities are more plentiful and more challenging.

I'll always be grateful for the teachers and principals that are giving my kids this terrific foundation for advanced learning and lifelong curiosity. What they're being asked to do now -- and how they're rising to the opportunity -- bodes very well for what they'll be able to do five, ten, and twenty years down the road.

Trajectories

I walked to school today thinking about Archer's future.

He came home last night and told us that he'd gotten his scores on the ACT Explore test, a version of the college-entrance exam given to eighth graders. His composite was 23 out of 25. His math score was a perfect 25 out of 25.

Now, as a member of a collegiate admissions committee, I know that tests like this don't tell you nearly as much about a student's college readiness as the test companies would like to claim. But because admissions officers find it convenient to craft policies -- including scholarship policies -- that rely heavily on such tests as a shorthand for aptitude, the one thing you can say about a person who scores high is that he will receive lots of attention and lots of opportunities.

I thought about that on my two-mile walk to Cady Gray's school, then to mine. I talked about it with Cady Gray; she told me what her fifth-grade teachers were saying to their students about scholarships and college. Archer's college choices are likely to be shaped by his autism; he may not be able to leap into independence and go to school away from home. His sister won't have any such limits. I thought about the training, the challenges, the resources that will be available to students as capable and promising as they are. I walked onto my campus under a gorgeous blue sky, feeling like a wind was gathering under their wings, ready to lift them up. I imagined how they might soar.

Then I glanced at my phone while waiting for my chai latte, and saw the news of the three Muslim students killed at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.* Suddenly I was aware of the fragility of any student's promise. Hate and violence, motivated by whatever ideology makes you see difference as a threat, can strike anyone. It seems especially tragic and sad when it happens at a college, a place devoted to enlightenment, a place that draws people of all backgrounds and beliefs in a common quest for a better life, a more informed mind, skills that can build the future and solve problems. If we can't find a way to live without fear of difference there, then where?

Like all parents, I worry about the treacherous parts of college for my children: binge drinking, sexual assault, study and recreational drugs, depression, time and task management, interpersonal relationships, anonymity and isolation. I see students just as smart as my kids get derailed by one or more of these, year after year. One test, no matter how remarkable, won't inoculate them against those dangers. Even years of training and character-building are no guarantee -- for some of those pitfalls, you can do everything right and still wind up shattered and victimized. And then there's the rage, the prejudice, the deadly weapons, that sometimes strike out of a clear blue sky.

We can do better -- as college officials and administrators, as teachers, as citizens, as communicators, as neighbors -- to change the culture, to rescue those who stumble before they hit the ground, to talk back to hate loudly and consistently, to insist that the values of the education we provide -- complexity, diversity, rationality, empathy, free inquiry, solidarity -- escape the classroom and reach into every moment of our students' lives.

Only if we do better can my children, and yours, and the children of people all around us who look to the future in hope, climb on to that upward trajectory with confidence.

* Early reports don't indicate conclusively that the murderer was motivated by racial or religious hatred. I don't mean to draw that conclusion here about this particular crime, just to follow a train of thought sparked by the way I am routinely shocked by expressions of hate, division, intolerance, and violence in threat and actuality on my campus and others.

Challenging

One week of Summer Laureate University For Youth -- SLUFY -- is done.  It's our second year with both kids in the day camp, which is produced by the Center for Gifted Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Last year we really struggled to get the kids down to Little Rock and back every day.  The camp runs for five hours in the afternoon, not enough time to be worth the thirty minutes each way of commute, so whoever drops them off winds up hanging around coffee shops and libraries until it's time to pick them up. This year we have a carpool partner, so we only have to make half the trips per week, but it's still brutal.

But we decided after last year's experience that it was well worth it for our kids.  The classes are wonderfully interdisciplinary and advanced.  Take the first week of Cady Gray's class on ice cream as an example.  The students conducted taste tests; created their own flavors (each using a base flavor, a fruit, a nut, and a candy ingredient); wrote a letter to Ben & Jerry's about why their flavors should be adopted and produced; designed packaging; and shot a commercial using Flip cameras.  Any kid would love to do those activities, but collectively they create a self-directed, creative, and educational picture of the food business's many facets.

We're lucky that both our kids have been able to qualify for this camp two years running.  Archer's classes are Game Show Probability (and how perfect is that -- today they explored the Monty Hall Problem) and Burning Issues (about fire).  In addition to the ice cream class, Cady Gray has come home with facts about medieval times from her Knightly Days class (we've heard about the plague or "the plaque" as CG termed it, the unfairness of the feudal system, and the code of chivalry, and a lot about the cardbox box and tube castles they've made).

I could wish that all their education were like this, but I'm thankful that at least some of it is.  One more week of SLUFY -- I hope they enjoy every minute.

Experimental

Earlier this year, Archer's GT teacher sent home information about a two-week summer program administered by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for talented youngsters. When I looked into it, I saw that Cady Gray could also apply. They were thrilled that they were accepted, as were we.

The monkey wrench in our planning is that the program is in Little Rock, a 40-minute drive from our house, and at an odd time -- 12:30-5:30 pm. One of us (Noel most days, though I'm hoping to relieve him a few times) has to drive them down at midday, and then find a library or bookstore or coffeeshop in which to while away the hours until it's time to pick them up.

It also means that our family mealtimes are disrupted. Noel is the cook, and most days he'll be on his way to pick them up at the time when he's normally serving us dinner. We might switch the big meal to lunch a few days; I'll pack lunchboxes so the kids can eat on the drive home. And there might be fast food sometimes.

Right now I'm waiting for my family to come home, and I'm hearing that there might be a few kinks for the program staff to iron out in the pickup procedure. Noel tweeted at 6:10 pm, 40 minutes after pickup time, that he had been stuck in a line of cars for 45 minutes and still hadn't gotten to the point where the kids could be retrieved. That makes me anxious for Archer. Things going over schedule, having to wait, minutes and hours dragging on without knowing when the next thing will happen -- these are recipes for weeping and meltdowns. I hope that the process gets fixed so he (as well as the rest of us) doesn't have to endure that day after day.

And I hope the program itself is worth the trouble it takes for us to commute with the kids and disrupt the routines that give comfort and structure to our days. Everything up to this point has made us confident that it is. I'm looking forward to the kids being home and hearing about it. It would be a shame if their enthusiasm about the classes and the experience was dampened by a traffic jam on the first day.

Blame Google

Today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reprinted this scattershot story from the Chicago Tribune and headlined it "Is the internet making us duh-mer?"

The underlying question is this: Does increased accessibility of information result in a shallower knowledge base among the populace? Well, of course it does. It's a completely rational choice: Why spend time and effort placing information in your brain's long-term memory, when the long-term random-access memory of the internet already holds it?

The real question is why this rational behavior has resulted in a generation that (to paraphrase all the alarmist stories from the last ten years) can't find China on a map with both hands and a GPS-enabled 3G China-Locator 240Z (tm). And to my mind, the answer is that education has been very slow to evolve in the new information-rich, information-accessible environment. We have a lumbering brontosaurus of a primary and secondary education system that still stresses putting bits of information in students' heads for recall, instead of teaching them critical thinking, connected thinking, and problem solving to use the information they have at their fingertips.

Now I think there is a set of general, broad pictures that everyone ought to place in their personal memory banks in order to put the detailed information available on the internet in instant context. They should know what continent France is on, in what century Europeans discovered the Americas, and in what decades the Vietnam War happened. The closer to the students' own time and place we get, the more detail should appear on that general, broad map; we should have a richer context for the last twenty years in America than we need for the last 500 years in Europe.

By all accounts students are not getting this general, broad picture that will help them use the informational nuggets it's so easy to find online. One could argue that the internet is generally making them lazy, or that it's rotting their brains, or whatever you like. But isn't it also plausible that (once again) the education system isn't helping them distinguish between the framework they need in their heads and the content that hangs on that framework? Which side of the knowledge equation are the tests testing and the teach-to-the-test classes teaching?

Just like you can do more math if you let a calculator do the calculating, concentrating on understanding relationships and developing solution strategies, you can get more education if you let the internet do your storage and retrieval. But we won't see the benefit until the inherently conservative educational system -- and I include everything from primary through graduate school therein -- stands up to the traditionalists (for whom only bits in the memory bank count as knowledge) and stumbles into the nineteen-nineties.