American Colleges: Their Branding

Everybody knows that MIT stands for brilliant engineering. Stanford represents the highest academic standards in a very tight symbiotic relationship with Silicon Valley. Harvard and Yale also have clear brands.

What about The University of Texas, the University of Oklahoma, Notre Dame, and lots of other schools? They are known for their football teams. They are not known for student fitness or a high level of excellence. They are known for their football teams and the general giddiness and celebration around their teams, the games, and their campuses. These are schools with a big Greek system. I mean fraternities.

I just spent a few days with a friend of mine who had been at a conference with some major university presidents, Fortune 200 Presidents, and public education people. One of the university presidents was particularly outspoken on why this country is over-reacting to the threat for leadership from China and India in the future. He had recently visited China and saw universities with shoddy construction and poor facilities which, compared to his well constructed campus, seemed lame.

I hear this and worry for tthe future. Our educational system is our future and the universities are dominated by a corrupt dysfunctional alliance with sports. With semiprofessional sports. I feel that these schools have sold their soul. In terms of the future, here's a simple summary.

Our big schools are about the prestige of big time sports, the associated parties and drinking, and the fraternity partying system. Our professors all know this and are very cynical as a result.

Their schools are about education, national competitiveness, and a chance to get ahead. We have frats, they don't. They'll win. And they deserve to.

Christian Homeschool

Many Christian parents who are just beginning to homeschool start out seeking a curriculum that not only meets their learning needs but one that also fits in with their Christian beliefs. As time goes by many of those parents find that their homeschool curriculum is really good at one... or the other... but not both.

As Kerry from North Carolina says in her article about Homeschooling as a Christian "We are Christians, but aren’t really homeschooling for religious reasons..." and I suspect the difficulty finding curriculum to handle both concepts may have had a hand in making that decision. Either the religious content is first priority and the educational content suffers or vice-versa.

Religion is personal. Your education is something you will show to everyone you ever come in contact with. When it comes to homeschool curriculum and religion, I see them as completely different animals who should be contained in two separate cages for the sake of the trainers (parents) and the audience (students).

Educational Reform - Higher Education Thoughts

While my eldest is just in 8th grade, I have alot of friends whose children (and families) are going thru the ordeal of applying to and selecting a college.

I'm struck by the fact that while elementary and primary school education are in a period of wild-change, I'm unaware of any dramatic re-engineering that is going on at the college level.

For primary and secondary education, the great waves are:

• A major new vote with their feet by 4% of the population to homeschooling
• An attempt from above to control and impose rigor by No Child Left Behind
• An attempt to privatize with school vouchers and school choice
• A massive investment by parents in supplementary education materials and services
• Much attempts to move to magnet schools, centers of excellence, and other choices within the system and away from the large high schools which supposedly provided resources for everyone (but turned into a scary environment for everyone)

At the college level however, it seems to be business as usual. Anyone who lives near a large state university campus can tell you that education appears to be the last thing on most students' minds. The professors all know that undergraduate education is the last thing on their mind as they compete to publish and for perks. But the budgets of so many families and states are built around providing four year access to these institutions of "higher learning". In the case of most schools, this expression is a joke.

Shouldn't this be on the agenda? Any politicians want to step up to the plate?

Kumon

I just read an old article about Brian's experience working at a Kumon center: "Educating Ali". Basically, while inside the Kumon machine, he found a child who needed a little focused one-on-one attention and gave it to him.

I think it makes the basic point that with a little special help, many children's education can be greatly improved.

It struck a different cord with me. It was while sitting in a Kumon Center that I decided to launch myself as an entrepreneur. I was there with my 6 year old son and was very impressed by how crowded the waiting room was. Parents were lining up in droves for Kumon. I looked Kumon up in the almanac and found it was the single largest franchise in the US (in terms of number of centers).

A Kumon Jr. session for my son consisted of him sitting at a low table with 3-4 other kids and filling out simple worksheets while a para-professional watched and encouraged them. Then, the kids were given a large number of worksheets to fill out at home with the parents during the week along with a reading book.

For this, we were paying $250/month. There was nothing magic about the worksheets. They looked identical to the free ones on the net or the ones that you can get in a 200 page book for $4.99 at a discount store.

I asked myself why were all these parents paying so much for so simple a product. After considering a few possibilities (we were all dumb...?), I concluded that the answer was that it's not the worksheets per se, it's the fact that the kids get the right worksheet at the right time along with a motivational system that makes it valuable and effective. It was when I realized that and I looked at all these parents lining up for help. And I thought about all that driving and parking and followup by us parents at home that I decided to make the plunge and start Time4Learning.com.

For a little more info on the Kumon philosophy, here's a quote from Brian's blog...

Regular school maths usually seems to involve the children working through only a few rather hard problems. Kumon makes them do many more much easier ones. Instead of hoping that they get, say, about half to two thirds of their stuff right, Kumon says they must get nearly everything right. At the heart of the Kumon method is the difference between a child painfully working out that seven plus six equals, er, thirteen? (anxious glance at face of teacher), and knowing with real certainty that seven plus six equals thirteen, with no doubts or hesitations. The usual educational emphasis is on "understanding". The Kumon literature talks of "mastery".
Each child does a clutch of sums selected for him or her personally (there is no everyone-in-the-class-does-the-same-stuff rule) each day, which are supposed to take about twenty minutes to complete.

Or, as Time4Learning.com puts in (quoting from a page comparing Time4Learning & Kumon)

It provides a service for children and parents alike, based on the philosophy of repetition and self-motivated learning. This after-school program works primarily toward enrichment and a mastery of the basics through a standardized approach of workbook completion. The Kumon workbooks consist of several pages of sequential math or reading content. Students complete one workbook while at the Kumon Center. In addition, students are required to complete a workbook at home each day they are not in attendance (including weekends). Workbooks range from two pages a day to twenty pages a day, requiring a degree of parental supervision.

I watched a family member a few years ago, spend an hour per week in speech therapy. He was young - 6 years old - but his language skills were developing properly. We all noticed that his speech was hard to understand. Once he was tested, his vocabulary (understood and spoken) turned out to be small.

In therapy, there was a long series of exercises with his mouth and tongue to build muscles and habits to improve his enunciation. There were alot of flash cards and exercises to build his vocabulary.

It was all very pricey and, since the problems went away, we were pleased with the results. I was struck at the time by how technology-void the therapy was.

I've just seen an article which points out that some of the free online word games provide the type of therapy that many families pay for. Take a look at the article on games for word retrieval therapy.

Computers for Learning for Everyone

At Time4Learning, our mouse says: "It's Time 4 Learning. And Fun!". At times, we like to add : "For Everyone!".

If only this were true. Usually, we think of inclusiveness in terms of how our program works for special needs learning.

This thanksgiving week, we gave a thought to those who don't have access to computers and are on the wrong side of the digital divide.

We donated to Nick Negaponte's One Laptop one child...

Thank you for participating in the One Laptop per Child "Give One Get One" program. Your donation of $399.00 will bring education and enlightenment to children of the developing world. $200 of each $399 "Give One Get One" Donation is tax-deductible (your donation minus the fair market value of each laptop you receive). With Shipping and Handling, the total charge to your credit card is $423.95.

Learning to Write - Poetry

At Time4Learning,

Which has a cute name

Learning to Write

is practically a game!

My karate interest, my interest in blogging leads to...

I've been quite the dojo rat, hanging out at lavallees karate school in ft lauderdale. What's funny is how I have now combined two of my hobbies:

• Karate
• Blogging

The fusion of these two hobbies can be seen in my karate blog. Plus, I've combined them with my professional life in several ways. Firstly, I've been building blogs and found that they can be used to help grow my business through providing increased visibility for my online educational sites. Secondly, and this is the most interesting, I've found that writing an interesting blog is difficult. While I can write interesting articles, I've had trouble finding a voice and personna that people want to read and that the audience will keep coming back to. So I started looking around for interesting examples. And I've found that only a few people have learned how to blog about their life in a way that actually connects to an audience.

So, my efforts at karate blogging have led me to wish that I could earn a black belt in blogging. That is, I wish I could blog well. So if you want to know more about my writing course and specifically, the blog writing course.

This is how it's all come together. john

Karate School

I've been spending alot of fun time learning in a whole new area: karate.

I've been going to the lavallee black belt dojo in Ft Lauderdale.

I've been learning a new language with terms like bugo kum ite, (bugo khum ite), ouse, aiee, sensei, keoshi, kata, kempo kataa, mma, XMA, ultimate fighting, and a bunch of other funny terms.

Education is social...so....

Heh, I'm in the business of education. We can't teach without having students.

And, we would like to share our thoughts on websites and blogs and get your thoughts. To do this, we will try using technorati....


Technorati Profile

Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun - Now has a blog!

Hi Everyone!

Time4Learning now has a new affiliated site called: Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun

Mostly, we will keep the vocabulary site the way it is. The few changes that we will make will be:

- increase the number of vocabulary words and vocabulary topics in the vocabulary games. For instance, we just added 600 new words to the database by providing individual word lists for pre-kindergarten to 8th grade. There are now 219 topics and 10,353 words in the vocabulary database. There are many suitable topics for both young and older students.

- adding a vocabulary blog to improve communciation with the users and to solicity information on what more the site could be providing or on how best to use it. The first post was about Teaching with Crossword Puzzles and the second was the announcement about Jacob (creator of the site) about the increased vocabulary topics list.

Teach to the Test - FCAT

This year, my daughter has teachers who have thrown out all pretense of teaching anything other than FCAT.Last night at her school’s open house, I sat, stunned, as her English teacher explained that there would be no curriculum other than FCAT practice until after the writing test in February... “I don’t teach any literature at all until after that time,” the English teacher said. “I’m sure you all understand.”

I don’t understand. Not at all. I’m speechless. by Vicki McCash Brennan

Ms. Brennan - You are so right to be outraged.

How can America, whose future depends so much on education, have turned our educational system into this test prep morass? It's a grim frivolous time in education where the need for reform has been hijacked by a top-down order to focus on the simplest most-measurable type of education and get the largest number of kids possible to score at the passing level.

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And now a word from our sponsor. There's an article about Warriors Collide, Ft Lauderdale. This is a little bit like news.

Here's some resources to be found on Vocabulary Learning Fun.
Vocabulary Resources :Ultimate Vocabulary - A software package designed to vocabulary
Expand Vocabulary - A chnce to do what the name says!!!!
Power Words - For people with little minds. Use big words to compensate and highlight your lack of brainpower.Vocabulary Builder - Learn about the parts of words. Like lego, parts can be assembled into bigger things!!!!

.GRE Vocabulary - This will teach you how A better vocabulary is...uh...better. A series of cheesy educationally-invalid ways

Increase Vocabulary - How does your vocabulary tell everyone about your personality ?Vocabulary Software - To feed the hungry machine, we need to keep pushing software. Very popularWord Smart Review - I haven't had a chance to review this essay but I'd like to.

Lastly, aren't you curious:Why do I blog?

That's all folks !!!!

Technology Education

My kids in the car yesterday reminded me how different their childhood world is than mine was. The eight year old was looking at a catalog and asked me to buy some gadget so he could "text message" his friends. Text message his friends? I only figured out what that was about in the last year.

And then my 13 year old handed me her cell phone saying that there was something wrong: she was hearing a sound that she had never heard before. I listened and laughed. It was a busy signal. Something that she with her digital world with voice mail et al had never heard before.

All of this reminds me how different the kids skills are these days. And how different the tools that they use are. They seem to be doing very well with the practical aspects of mastering the computers and the net and their cell phones and ipods, but what about understanding how some of this stuff works?

I think that its a bad thing for anyone to thing that the technology around them is black magic, not understood and not understandable. No, I'm not saying that everyone should learn to code. I am saying that everyone should be able to explain why the light goes on when you touch a switch, what's the difference between a circuit switched classic telephone line and the VOIP technology used by digital networks, and the relationships between magnets and electricity.

As technology becomes more embedded in our world, I think our understanding of the technology, at the conceptual level, should also deepen. I'm now looking at the technology curriculum standards to see if they are addressing these issues only as users or with some feel for the need to appreciate the tools around them.

Home school high school

Homeschooling for High School – What’s different?

Homeschooling your students into high school will surely many bring changes to your homeschool program . There are several reasons that the approach used in the elementary and middle school years should change for the high school years.

First of all, the subject matter is much more in-depth. So most homeschooling parents shift from a role where they are a subject-matter expert to a role where they are more of a guide. Parents often broaden their use of outside resources not just from their local support group but they include online courses, courses at local colleges, and often, at their local high schools (especially for homeschool driver’s education.)

Homeschooling in high school can also be different since at the high school level, there is a need to prepare skills and credentials to meet career and post secondary education requirements. This means that in addition to complying with minimal requirements for homeschooling, parents start considering the requirements to receive high school diplomas, to gain acceptance to colleges, and to be prepared for careers.

Here is a link to more information on how to plan for the changes in homeschooling at the high school level.

And, there are parents who are moving in the other direction. There are parents who only start homeschooling in high school.

Free Educational Games Online

Online Free Fun Educational Games.

I'd like to mention four websites:

A Vocabulary site called Vocabulary.co.il

A Spelling site called SpellingCity.com (really cool but not yet finished).

A site with Learning Games for Kids which features the hurricane song and sun song.

And, the free demo learning games on Time4Learning's site.