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"When he lectured in the United States, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget would invariably get what he called 'the American question' from a member of the audience. After he had explained various developmental phases that young children go through in their understanding of concepts like length and volume, someone would raise their hand and ask, 'How can we accelerate a child’s progress through the stages?'
"Baffled, Piaget would explain that there is absolutely no advantage to speeding up a child’s progression. The point of knowing the stages is to be aware of what stage a child is in, so that we can create the conditions and offer the guidance to help her move to the next one. It’s not a race."
I get that "American question" a lot, and my response is to ask the same question that this teacher asks:
"What is sacrificed in that rush?"
And his conclusion applies to parent-educators even more directly than it does to teachers:
"We are workers of gradual miracles. Gardeners know how long seeds take to grow. It’s hard work tilling the soil, nurturing the first fragile green tendrils, and staying vigilant when frosts or murderous insects threaten the seedlings' survival....The work of sustaining a gradual miracle requires patience. If we can teach ourselves that hard habit, our students will grow. They may also learn to slow down, delight in the present, and take time to fully experience the many moments before the harvest."
Well worth your time.
www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2018/04/18/the-problem-with-hurrying-childhood-learning.html
The Problem With Hurrying Childhood Learning
edweek.org
Too many kids are rushed toward the level they’re "supposed" to be on by the end of a given grading period, with little attention given to the path they’re walking to get there, writes teacher Justin Minkel.7 hours ago
The bigger issue is that these stages aren't static. There are a huge variety of factors that can cause children to go through them faster or slower. So many students are also hurt by being hindered when they are ready to move on, and I see this a lot too. Kids aren't pea plants, and brain development isn't botany. This is why a one sized fits all educational system will always lose quite a few.
I love this so much...sharing with my homeschooling friends with young children.
But in defense of different types of kids, some need to get rushed through to keep them properly stimulated and entertained. That's my two cents.
Equally dismaying is stunting, pinching or stemming the natural growth of the plant.
This is spot on! Thanks for sharing. ~Tammy
I have always loved Piaget
Geneice Monica Heather Libby good read.
So good! Sharing. 🙂
Great share thanks!
Love this!
Carissa Schubert, just because it mentions Piaget and it's fascinating.
YES!!
Jennifer Kline Dupree Thought you might enjoy this article
Maegan Lottinger Richard - good read
Robin Einzig
Evelyn C. Marshall
Rene Steinkamp
"Though Montgomery insisted that Anne wasn’t based on anyone she knew--'I have never drawn any of the characters in my books ‘from life,’' she writes, 'although I may have taken a quality here and an incident there'—her journals suggest otherwise. Reading them alongside Anne of Green Gables is to see the many similarities between the young Maud and Anne. Both were raised by elderly people after losing their parents (Maud’s mother died when she was young and her father left her with her grandparents before moving to western Canada). Both had vivid imaginations and the same seen-only-by-them friends (Katie Maurice, Violetta). Both gave similar names to their favorite places to walk (Lover’s Lane, the Birch Path), and both saw trees and plants as sensate beings who welcomed a greeting after time spent apart. Anne is, in many ways, an idealized version of the young Maud, completely at home in and energized by the natural world. As a result, her presence is far larger than that of simply fascinating, charismatic girl; she embodies the very stuff of life...
“'It has always seemed to me,' Montgomery writes in her journal, 'ever since I can remember, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty.' A thin veil separates her from it, which she can never quite draw aside, but when the wind causes it to flutter, there’s a glimpse of what lies beyond, and 'those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.' It’s that drive to approximate what briefly caught sight her eye—in prose that does justice to the luminous moment—that makes Prince Edward Island, her landscape of choice, seem such an idyllic place."
Lovely piece on Lucy Maud Montgomery, Prince Edward Island, and Anne of Green Gables, for all you fans out there.
lithub.com/on-the-magical-landscapes-of-anne-of-green-gables/
On the Magical Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables
lithub.com
Often a measure of a novel’s success, in its depiction of a particular place, occurs when readers feel they know it, they recognize it, or, better yet, they want to visit. Such has been the case wi…1 day ago
And Megan Follows will always be “Anne” to me. She was perfect! ❤️
We are heading to PEI this summer, so my little red-haired girl can see this beautiful spot she has read so much about. ☺️
Reading Anne of Green Gables with my fifth graders is a highlight each year.
I bought I’d read that Emily of New Moon was more “her” than Anne
This makes me want to read the books again but I have sooo much school work that needs to be done first
I want that book
Huge fan!!! Absolutely adore this author. I have since I was 10 ❤️
One of the most beautiful places I have ever visited.
Lori Ginn Hanson. PEI here we come!!
Adriane 👍🏼
Missy!
Rachel Carpenter
Kimberly Joy Lively Ledbetter 😊
Amy Bolger Anna Dillon
Shannon Boggs Swathwood Sara Richburg Alexander
Ignore anything about Liberty University's political or religious positions, and this is still a scathing indictment of Liberty's online educational practices.
"Chris Gaumer taught English courses both on campus and online at Liberty after getting his bachelor’s degree on campus in 2006. The difference between the two forms of teaching was startling, he told me. As an online instructor, he said, he was not expected to engage in the delivery of any actual educational content. That was all prepared separately by L.U.O.’s team of course designers and editors, who assemble curriculums and videotaped lectures by other Liberty professors. This leaves little for the instructor to do in the courses, which typically run eight weeks... This helps explain why the instructors — the roughly 2,400 adjuncts scattered around the country, plus the Liberty professors who agree to teach online courses on the side — are willing to take on the task for what’s long been the going rate for the job: $2,100 per course.
"Gaumer, who now works at Randolph College in Lynchburg, said the steep drop-off in quality from the traditional college to the online courses was both openly acknowledged among Liberty faculty and not fully reckoned with. The reason was plain, he said: Everyone knew that L.U.O. was subsidizing the physical university. 'The motivation behind the growth seems to be almost entirely economic, because it’s not as if the education is getting any better,' he said."
If you're interested in online education, please read this piece carefully. Schools can make a lot of money with online classes--as long as they don't fret too much about the quality of the instruction. What the article refers to as "keeping instructional costs low" has two parts: paying faculty very little, and in return requiring no lecture preparation, meaningful interaction with students, or rigorous grading.
We struggle with this at the Well-Trained Mind Academy ALL the time. Our instructors TEACH. They are highly qualified. They prepare their own courses, write their own lectures, and spend huge amounts of time guiding and mentoring students. In return, we do our best to pay them well--which is reflected in tuition costs.
Interested in your thoughts, but please do READ the piece first.
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/magazine/how-liberty-university-built-a-billion-dollar-empire-online.html
How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online
nytimes.com
With a hard sell to prospective students and huge amounts in taxpayer funding, Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed the evangelical institution into a behemoth.3 days ago
I feel the need to leap to the defense of online education in general. I am a current student of Western Governors University, which was mentioned here, though mercifully in a different breath than Liberty. In exchange for slogging through that ridiculously long article, I would like to stick up for the WGU Night Owls. I am quite the connoisseur of non-traditional education. I was homeschooled from 13 and earned a Virginia GED at 16, whereupon I went straight into community college. That was followed by a hard left turn into the Army Band program, which eventually led to a grab bag of sporadically-taken night classes, online courses and paper correspondence courses, which I eventually cobbled together into an AA. I rolled that into an abortive attempt at a history degree, and then into my current elementary education track, which should result in a teaching license just as I hit my 20 year mark with the army. I have come out of this experience convinced that the quality of the student is at least as important as that of the education. Most of my colleagues hold BA's in music education and some are as intellectually dead as the next guy. One of my personal strengths is that I remember nearly everything that I read, hear and see in an academic context; well enough that I can apply and analyze it years later. (Don't ask me about appointments, grocery lists, or that thing you wanted me to do yesterday.) This allows me to masquerade as a good student, and I think I do pretty well, meeting with overall success however I've chosen to do go about it. I picked WGU from my online options (and Liberty was another) because of their pricing model: for a flat rate of tuition, you are allowed to take as many classes as you can in a six-month window. This is possible because anytime you feel as if you've learned enough, you can ask for the final exam or turn in your papers then move on to the next thing. This told me that WGU cared more about getting you out of college and into the workforce than about soaking you for student loans. On the subject of instructor interactions, everyone at WGU gets as much as they need. Each student gets a "program mentor", which you might call an adviser on steroids who calls you every one or two weeks to keep you on track. In addition, every course has a team of "course mentors", who, in addition to designing an curating the course material, conduct frequent live webinars, record lectures and make themselves available for phone appointments. In the Teacher's College, these are generally Ph.D.'s and Ed.D.'s with classroom and administrative experience. They are separate from the corps of evaluators, who are responsible for grading papers, so the "CM"s can work with you a little more than they otherwise might. I usually find that I can get by with one phone call and maybe a webinar to pass an exam (these are proctored by webcam), but for the courses that require papers I need my hand held a little bit harder; I usually call them up a couple of times per project. I haven't yet looked too hard into what the people at WTM do and how they do it.. I only just got into your books recently. I logged into Overdrive and said "I wish I could find an audiobook survey of world history;" whereupon the Good Fairy said, "And so you shall!" But I hope that WGU doesn't get tarred with the same brush as LUO.
Surprised all one needs is a bachelor's degree to teach. Quality of online courses is definitely hit or miss. The rigor also varies widely even within the same department at one school.
In 1989, I attended Liberty University for the first semester of my freshman year of college, and in 1990, I came home and took three courses from Liberty University’s distance learning. The courses were prerecorded. I watched them on VHS. There was absolutely no interaction between professor and me. I think I called once or twice and left messages or just communicated by writing notes and had to wait until a reply came in the mail. This was the way we did things back in the dark ages. I did find one professor’s notes and study questions hard to follow and out of sync with tests and quizzes. It is funny how my kids complain about the same thing with some of their teachers who have multiple classes of the same subject. I feel a lot of the complaints in this article are due to the kind of classes they signed up for. Prerecorded video classes are just more difficult to personalize and education suffers in my opinion. I decided in 1990, that prerecorded video learning was not for me. I enjoyed the dynamic between teacher and students and usually made better grades in classes which had a live teacher. However, live classes are not always possible. Abeka Academy has helped many homeschooling families in this same way, kids watching prerecorded videos and taking tests to be sent away and graded. This is very helpful to missionaries and many others whose families are in remote places. It is only in recent years that online classes have arisen. Many of my friends used Abeka when we first started homeschooling 16 years ago. These kinds of classes are still around, though now they are computer based and offer more interaction. Teaching Textbooks and Monarch come to mind. In my opinion, these courses are often easier than teacher based live classes. I do not think this criticism should be only leveled at LU because it seems to me that the medium has always been this way. I remember old LifePacks that were very easy in the content areas when I was in a Christian grade school in the 1970’s. Two of my daughters took classes from The Well Trained mind academy. The teachers were live. The course material was particularly difficult in history because your high school level books are more like college texts. She loved the class. That said, sometimes Blackboard did not function properly. In fact, my kids who are in college still complain about Blackboard not functioning properly. With a live teacher who has a relationship with a smaller amount of students, these incidents were dealt with fairly and quickly, much to my relief. So in my opinion, many of the complaints in this article are more due to the medium rather than a concerted effort to cheat people or greed. This is certainly implied in the article. If the author wished to discuss educational practices, he should have left out the political criticism and implied accusations of hypocrisy. It makes his criticism sound more like a hit piece.
Goodness that was a lot longer than expected 😂 but I think it’s common knowledge that all online programs are really easy. The online classes I have taken were a total joke. The live seminars are totally different.
I’m doing an MA in English, online, through Arizona State University. All of my professors have been regular, full professors, some of them leaders in their fields, all of them regularly published in respected journals. They prepare lecture videos, provide detailed feedback on all assignments, and are very responsive and engaged. My classes all have fewer than 15-20 students, who we run into in other classes, which means we actually get to know each other. I’ve mentioned to my husband on more than one occasion that I’m getting a far better education through this medium than I received during my undergrad, in-person experience at a top-tier research university. I also started an online master’s in library science at Syracuse several years ago (didn’t finish because life and babies). It kicked off with a week-long summer intensive on campus, where we met our cohort and professors and stayed up all night doing projects. The rest was online, again with full professors who were fully engaged. I’m still friends with the people I met the in that program. So I think it depends on the school. I know lots of online programs (Southern New Hampshire, for example) do the same thing as Liberty, with canned curricula and centrally-created lecture videos. That’s a scam to me. The value of higher education lies in the connection with great minds who mentor you and give you feedback on original work that you generate. That, and the opportunity to network and learn from peers. This other stuff is mechanized. It’s no different than self-education and YouTube (which is wonderful, and I do it, but I do it for free and I shouldn’t get a degree for it).
I've come to the conclusion that unless you are going to become an engineer, a medical professional, or an accountant, college is largely a waste of time and money.
How does a private Christian university get huge amounts in taxpayer funding? Or is that the norm?
On the one hand, I appreciate knowing that WTM offers quality online education. 🎉🎉🎉 I have always had great respect for ALL educational materials that you have offered, and have used several texts and workbooks. Having said that, I would have had greater appreciation for a piece that addressed the flaws and potential challenges of this medium of education as an effort toward critical thinking rather than sharing public criticism aimed at a particular institution. I think it weakens your position of actually having excellent online classes by criticizing another institution. (I already expect WTM to be superior, so why do that? That belittles your own excellence, IMO) I have seen my own child flounder in two online college classes with no direct access to the instructor and poor teaching, and this is a public college in another region of the country. I question the model itself, and do not see the value in pointing out one particular school in an opinion piece.
I am currently taking my final class before graduating from LUO with an MA in history. I can say "ditto" to Adrienne's first paragraph about my experience. I have had nothing but great contacts with my profs. My class (on the Civil War) is taught by a prof from Texas Christian who is one of the top CW scholars in the country. As a veteran, LUO offers me (and my husband, if he wants it) a tuition discount of 66%, which makes it cheaper than my undergrad alma mater of Old Dominion University.
I recently had to go through a Microsoft Office courses where the lack of instructor involvement was appalling. I appreciate that at the end of each semester the institution allows course evaluations, and I have certainly noticed online education improving. I've noticed that this year the school is requiring a lot more class participation through discussion boards and instructor involvement in lectures. My experience with online courses has been much better than on campus though thanks to the increased availability, involvement, and attention my instructors have shown. This has certainly allowed me to make great strides in my work although that could be partly due to the extra effort I have put in and the lack of attention I previously held.
I initially struggled with the tuition costs at WTMA— I was working full-time on homeschooling anyway, so I had become accustomed to teaching courses for the cost of the books— but no longer! I bit the bullet and enrolled my oldest in rhetoric I three years ago, because I wanted him to have an external mentor, hoping he’d hear commentary on his writing better if it didn’t come from me. He is now wrapping up Rhetoric III at TWTMA, and I tell other Homeschoolers that these courses just might be some of the best money spent on homeschooling. My son’s writing has improved tremendously. He has taken several writing-intensive college courses and earned A’s. He understands how to apply all the years of logic we studied, not only to critically evaluate what others say and write, but now, to use when constructing his own written and oral arguments.
My local university (which, in full disclosure, employs both my husband and me) is pushing for more and more online degrees. We have yet to hear about actual, positive teaching practices nor real learning outcomes although I’m sure that some professors are better than others. When they pushed for my husband to put his MA program online, the rationale was all about money: enroll more students, grant more diplomas. Meanwhile, our local, small, work college has graduated students who say this: “The philosophy of the school [Berea College] is that I am an asset worth investing in rather than a product to make money off of. I think that influences every relationship here." -Jay Callahan, 2018
It is almost every college/university that offers online courses. To add, it is not just online courses that lack substance. Quality is non-existent in the "adult learning" tracks. Schools are capitalizing on a job market that requires degrees, even in fields 10 years ago that only required experience or trade school.
Joshua Ryan Carter, NYT is baggin' on your alma mater again.However, I think this might explain where all the money for those new buildings came from since you went there.
Interesting read. What a shame.
Kevin Cloonan
McKenna Hight
Jenny Jerry Angelia
Daniel P. Aldrich
Tabitha Bell-Marie
