To improve America’s school kids, we need to get them moving

Math and reading scores have been declining in American classrooms for years. And this is not just an academic challenge, it’s a matter of national security. According to a Department of Defense brief from late last year, China and Russia are graduating far more math, science and engineering students than the US, compromising America’s defense preparedness.

Hiring more teachers might seem like the most obvious way to help America’s students catch up; so too is reducing classroom sizes. But neither appear to boost graduation rates. What about injecting more movement into class time, instead? The need could not be greater.

Indeed, according to a recent “report card” from the Physical Activity Alliance, barely one-fifth of American children are meeting the minimum physical activity levels of 60 minutes each day. What’s more, average American teenagers are sitting up for upwards of eight hours each day. These behaviors have serious consequences — including obesity, depression, and sleep disturbances; prolonged levels of inactivity are bad for both the body and the mind.

Children need to move — and the US education system is failing to get them on their feet. Instead, students are told to actually stay still, stop fidgeting and remain quietly for hours at a time. This might make things easier for teachers, but for students there are far better options, most notably kinesthetic learning.

For the uninitiated, kinesthetic learning — also known as tactile learning — involves the active engagement through physical sensations or movements. Rather than merely sitting in classes, students learn through practical experiences, exploration, and the process of discovery. The current education system treats children like passive recipients of information; kinesthetic learning, on the other hand, actively engages kids. It works particularly well for boys, who are far more prone to in-class distractions in than girls.

Research demonstrates that while physical activity may improve overall academic achievement, it’s particularly effective in boosting math skills. That’s because exercise activates regions of the brain associated with mathematical cognition. The incorporation of movement can also aid in the development of phonemic awareness and letter-sound recognition, along with the understanding of fundamental concepts.

For instance, when 8-year-olds were instructed to use their hands and bodies to act out the meaning of words in a foreign language — such as spreading their arms and pretending to fly to learn the German word for airplane — they were significantly more likely to remember the words, even after two months, with a 73% higher recall rate.

This effect is not just limited to language. In a 2021 study involving 757 elementary school students in Copenhagen, researchers divided the participants into two groups. One played in basketball while doing math, while the other followed the usual classroom routine and shot hoops as a regular gym activity. Those who paired basketball with math exhibited a six percent improvement in subject proficiency, a 16% increase in intrinsic motivation, and a 14% enhancement in perceived autonomy compared to their peers who learned math solely in the classroom

The brain influences the body, but the body also influences the brain, a process known as “embodied cognition.” For many students, engaging in low-intensity movement helps them regulate alertness levels; with Stanford experiments demonstrating that students generate more creative ideas while walking than when seated.

Incorporating more movement, even micro-movements, into the average school day is not rocket science. For instance, in mathematics classes with younger children, hand and arm gestures can be employed to impart a wider array of complex concepts like tangents and cosines.

Additionally, teachers (and parents) can get children to draw what they have learned. As indicated by a 2018 study out of the University of Waterloo, Canada, children asked to illustrate their lessons were twice as likely to retain the information than children who merely wrote or read about what they had just learned. The combination of cognitive and physiological activities leads to a more profound encoding of learning, making drawing a dependable and easily replicable method for enhancing performance.

Learning is necessary, but it needn’t be a nightmare. The more fun and interactive, the better it is for students — and teachers. Not only does movement influence cognitive abilities, it improves classroom behavior. Children are balls of energy; they are not “designed” to sit for countless hours. Educators must reimagine classrooms accordingly — the future of America’s security depends on it.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/23/opinion/to-improve-americas-school-kids-we-need-to-get-them-moving/

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NYC: No one’s telling the truth about the class-size law: It hurts kids and ONLY helps the UFT

All the recent sound and fury over the state class-size law signifies nothing because all the players refuse to say the most important part out loud: This mandate only serves the interests of the United Federation Teachers — and is actively bad for the city’s schoolchildren.

Declining enrollment had the UFT’s ranks steadily shrinking as of 2022; the class-size mandate is purely a gimmick to turn that around.

State Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) and the other Democrats who pushed the law through plainly don’t even believe the mandate is pro-education, or they wouldn’t have imposed it only on New York City.

Note, too, that the city’s lower-performing schools already mostly meet the law’s class-size targets: It’s the schools that largely work that have more kids in every classroom.

So the law’s actual impact is to force those schools to break up classes — and, indeed, if they don’t have enough available classrooms, to admit fewer students.

That is, fewer children being taught by the best, veteran teachers, and fewer kids in the better schools.

This may well mean fewer students getting the chance to learn at the city’s elite high schools: The buildings that house Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science have fixed numbers of classrooms, after all.

Worse, complying with the law requires the city Department of Education to triple its rate of hiring new teachers — which pretty much forces it to hire every warm body that comes along with the right paper qualifications.

Another wrinkle: Under the UFT contract, senior teachers have considerable rights to choose which school to teach at; human nature ensures that many (maybe most) will transfer to any new slots that open up at “nice” schools, and away from schools where harder-to-educate kids predominate.

Yes, some dedicated veteran teachers will always stick it out at the “tough” schools; a few gifted new teachers will be great from their first days on the job.

But the fact is that this mandate mainly harms the education of the city’s needier kids — and everyone who understands how the system works knows it.

That includes Liu, UFT boss Mike Mulgrew, and the City Council members griping about the city’s slow implementation of the mandate: That they posture to the contrary just makes every one of them even more despicable.

Schools Chancellor David Banks knows it, too, though it’s beyond impolitic for him to call out the vile powerbrokers for playing this game.

But, since he cares about the kids, Banks has a moral duty to drag his feet as much as possible.

As for Liu: How does he sleep at night? The only possible answer: Wherever, whenever, and however the UFT tells him.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/23/opinion/no-ones-telling-the-truth-about-the-class-size-law-it-hurts-kids-and-only-helps-the-uft/

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Woke mathematics teaching in Australia: Rather sickening

Cresta Richardson, the head of the Queensland Teachers’ Union, declared that the 1.3 million children in Australia preparing to sit this year’s Naplan test should be spared the ordeal because it is too stressful for them. It is not surprising Richardson is calling for a boycott of testing, because Naplan testing exposes the complete failure of our education sector to teach people how to read, write and add up.

To his credit, federal Education Minister Jason Clare disagrees, stating he believes Naplan should stay. Since being sworn in as minister in June 2022, Clare has often repeated the mantra that we need to get ‘back to basics’. This is an admirable sentiment, but as long as this country’s education sector is controlled by a cohort of progressives who believe education is a vehicle for politicisation, it will remain nothing more than wishful thinking.

The progressive view of education is of course completely at odds with the expectations of most mainstream parents who still cling to the antiquated notion that, at the very minimum, schooling should be about acquiring basic skills such as numeracy and literacy. Nowhere is this difference more vividly illustrated than in the mathematics learning area of Australia’s national curriculum.

Deeply embedded in the K-10 mathematics syllabus is the ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures’ cross curriculum priority, which ensures ‘students can engage with and value the histories and cultures of Australian First Nations Peoples in relation to mathematics’. The consensus seems to be that children should be taught things like statistics and algebra, not because these will furnish them with necessary life skills such as planning budgets or finding the best prices for products bought and sold, but because it will give them a deeper appreciation of Aboriginal dance, corroborees and dreamtime. Not so long ago, this was called anthropology.

Indeed, Aboriginal dance features heavily in the primary syllabus, especially when it comes to addition and subtraction. In Year 1, teachers attempt to explain to the kiddies why 2 + 2 = 4 through First Nations Australians’ dances. In Year 2, the point is hammered home again, using ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances to understand the balance and connection between addition and subtraction’.

For those students who still have not caught on, their teachers will explain through ‘First Nations Australians’ cultural stories and dances about how they care for Country/Place such as turtle-egg gathering using number sentences’. In Year 4, teachers explore ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances that show the connection between addition and subtraction, representing this as a number sentence and discussing how this conveys important information about balance in processes on Country/Place’. Just in case you thought this might be the last time children are subjected to the silent snake or cassowary dance, think again. The Year 5s are investigating ‘how mathematical models involving combinations of operations can be used to represent songs, stories and/or dances of First Nations Australians’.

As it turns out, these all-singing, all-dancing classes are a bit of a distraction. Not from learning the times tables or how to do a long division, but from something much more pressing, which is Reconciliation. This highly charged political concept is introduced in a Year 3 ‘Number’ class by ‘comparing, reading and writing numbers involved in the more than 60,000 years of First Peoples of Australia’s presence on the Australian continent through time scales relating to pre-colonisation and post-colonisation’. Two years later, they are busy ‘investigating data relating to Australia’s reconciliation process with First Nations Australians, posing questions, discussing and reporting on findings’.

It is in secondary school, however, that the architects of the mathematics syllabus really get down to business. From Year 7 onwards, students studying statistics are introduced to the notion of reconciliation between ‘First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians’. They are told to look at ‘secondary data from the Reconciliation Barometer to conduct and report on statistical investigations relating to First Nations Australians’. The Reconciliation Barometer was invented back in 2008 by Reconciliation Australia to measure, every two years, just how racist non-Aboriginal Australians really are. This racism is confirmed for students in Year 9 as they go about ‘exploring potential cultural bias relating to First Nations Australians by critically analysing sampling techniques in statistical reports’ as well as observing ‘comparative data presented in reports by National Indigenous Australians Agency in regard to Closing the Gap’.

Every Australian parent should know that their children are being subjected to overt politicisation in maths classes courtesy of the national curriculum. They should also know that the technique being used was developed by Brazilian Marxist, Paolo Freire, who proposed that the only true education is political education and that all teaching is a political act. When Freire talked about literacy, he meant political literacy, rather than actually being able to read and write.

His view was that the teacher’s role is not to educate in the traditional liberal education sense of the word, but to bring about what he termed the ‘conscientisation of the student’ by awakening their consciousness to the real political condition of their lives. Freire claimed that conscientisation could be achieved in the classroom by ensuring children are taught to see structural oppression in all aspects of life.

Thus, a potentially dull statistics lesson on standard deviations, random variation and central tendency is transformed into an entirely different, and much more exciting class in which children develop a critical consciousness of Australian society.

They might discuss the devastating consequences of the invasion of this land and colonisation, past and current systemic racism in Australia, the need for truth-telling, the reconciliation processes, or the need for reconciliation action plans. By the end of the session on statistics, all they will see is structural oppression. And by the end of twelve years of schooling, they will be ready and willing to overthrow the oppressive capitalist power structures and replace them with a utopian socialist society of diversity, equity and inclusion.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/dreamtime-maths/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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