Middle School Summer Camp Opportunity: Young Writers' Workshop at NCSU

If your middle schoolers gets really inspired after participating in the Teen Poetry Contest in my earlier post, then NC State University has a summer camp that might be right up their alley.  The Young Writers' Workshop, sponsored by the NC State College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of English, is a two-week, nonresidential summer camp with daily afternoon activities to help students in late elementary and middle school to develop their creative writing abilities. 

The students spend two and a half hours on campus each afternoon with lessons on four different tracks:  fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama (each students lists their preferences, and are placed in two different areas).  Established professional writers, most of whom also teach at area colleges or high schools, give lectures, assign writing activities, put students into small groups to discuss or create something together, or work with students one-on-one on their writing. 

The students-to-teacher is kept low (a maximum of 12 students per instructor) to assure that all writers get individual attention.  The teen writers get instruction in such creative writing components as plot, character development, conflict, action, and more.  On the final day, students invite friends and families to celebrate the creativity of the group through a public reading of the work they have produced; they also get to take home a journal of work created by themselves and their peers.

The Teen Writers' Workshop costs $250, and is open to rising 4th through 8th graders.  They are now accepting applications, which require students to express what they hope to achieve through their participation as well as to submit up to two pages of their current creative writing.  The deadline for applying is Monday, June 3.

For more information, check out their website or contact the program director, Laura Giovanelli, at lbgiovan@ncsu.edu.

Is American Education Too Competitive?

Is the American educational system too focused on competition?  I would say "yes," not that anybody really cares what I think.  But this month, I am in good company, as that is the position that Deborah Stipek, Dean of the Stanford School of Education, takes in an editorial in this month's Science magazine.

Stipek argues that the burden to be on top among higher-achieving American high school students leaves them anxious and physically exhausted, makes them prone to cheat, and robs them of the intrinsic beauty and interest of the subject and the joy of learning.  The more they fill their transcripts with high test scores, exemplary GPAs, academic honors, and mountains of extracurricular activities, the emptier their actual experience of education is.  As Stipek said in a telephone call to reporters, "For the most part, high school has become for many of our students not preparation for life or college but preparation for the college application."

Stipek also believes that the impetus for change must come from the schools--high schools and colleges--rather than from the students.  She urges high schools to reduce this pressure by such steps as:

• linking subject matter to students' lives and interests
• focusing more on active student involvement in innovative solutions, problem solving, and hands-on experiments and activities and less on getting the right answer on a standardized exam;
• giving students multiple opportunities to achieve higher grades (by allowing papers to be rewritten or tests to be retaken, for example)
• publicizing and pushing a wider number and variety of high-quality educational options rather than merely worshiping at the alter of the top 10 or 20 elite institutions
• priding itself on how well it matches all its students to the postsecondary education best to each individual, rather than on the number that were accepted by "name" universities
• focusing and celebrating learning at whatever level, rather than test scores

She also states that colleges must do their part as well, and to encourage a student body that is passionately interested in the educational offerings at that school over having a high average SAT or GPA score.

Preparing Middle Schoolers for College

I've said before that Jay Mathews of the Washington Post is one of my favorite education journalists.  He has been their education reporter for decades, so he has a deep background in personalities, policies, programs, and research in the field.

This week he wrote an article right up our alley that was called "8 Subtle Ways to Prepare Middle Schoolers for College."  He has long been an advocate that their are great educations to be had at all sorts of different colleges, and generally works to relieve the pressure students and parents put on themselves in terms of having to get into ONE particular college.  So his is not going to be a "Tiger Mom" type of list of intense academic achievements.  In fact, much of his list, which he compiled from talking to college admissions experts, he says is really more geared to making middle schoolers into better people, which will help them in college along with the rest of their life.

The Mathews/Educational Experts list is:
1.  Notice what they enjoy, and help them do more of it.
(Colleges like students with depth, and students should spend time doing what is important to them, not racking up achievements to look good.)
2.  Make sure your child knows that B's are fine in middle school and that fun is important.
(Don't start the pressure too soon, especially for overachievers.)
3.  Enroll them in Algebra 1 in eighth grade.
(This prepares them for high school level work.)
4.  Insist they develop some practical housework skills.
(They are going to have to balance taking care of themselves with their college workload.)
5.  Flavor family trips with a bit of college atmosphere.
(My husband makes fun of me about this, but my family's vacations always included stopping by a local campus or two.)
6.  Encourage children who are curious about the world to take a foreign language.
(My son and I just participated in an online class this afternoon with students from three different continents.  It truly is a global world.)
7.  Character counts.  Encourage its development.
(Mathews admits this can be hard with emotional early adolescents, but suggests we start by being good role models ourselves.)
8.  Do everything you can to encourage reading.
(One of his experts says the highest correlation among the very best test-takers is a strong background in reading.)

That's a pretty good list, I think.  But some of his readers added a few others:

--More sleep for teens/preteens
--Teach listening skills
--Raise career awareness and preparation requirements(in both college-required and non-college fields)
--Have them write
--Make sure they spend time outdoors in nature

Any other suggestions you have for low-key ways to help prepare 10-14 year olds for their college experience (if they choose to have one)?

Middle School Minorities Achievement Gap in Math and Its Effect on College Success

On an email loop of my friend Maria's Natural Math community, there is a discussion going on right now about some research that taking advanced math, particularly calculus, in high school leads to greater success in science classes in college.  But I think the path to calculus in high school begins earlier, particularly with the math instruction students get in middle schools.  And several articles or reports published lately suggest that advanced math instruction in middle schools is problematic for many ethnic minorities, particularly African-American males.

One great example of this, I think, came from a recent article in The Washington Post about the school many publications list as the best public high school in the country, the magnet Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County (outside Washington DC).  While the school is almost universally lauded for the quality and subsequent success of its graduates, it has come under fire recently for the low percentage of black and Hispanic students, despite several years of a concerted minority outreach and recruitment program.  While blacks and Hispanics represent about one third of all students in the surrounding public schools, they make up only 4% of the TJ population.  Approximately 90% of students are Asian or white (with Asians accounting for a slight majority of that number), while the remaining students categorize themselves as "multi-racial."

The school's explanation for such a dramatic under-enrollment of blacks and Hispanics?  One of the pre-requisites for applying to Thomas Jefferson is that the student passed Algebra in middle school.  School officials claim that there is not a large pool of black or Hispanic middle school students with Algebra already under their belts from which they can recruit.  So should Thomas Jefferson drop that requirement for underrepresented minorities, or should the area middle schools do a better job of getting more of those students through Algebra?  (For comparison, the state-wide magnet program at the the residential North Carolina School for Math and Science has about a 10% black, 3% Hispanic, and 1% Native American population; that high school strongly recommends, but does not require, Algebra.)

This issue has been under a lot of discussion here in Wake County, because recent data shows that in previous years, where teacher recommendations were a major factor in admittance to advanced math classes, Asian and white students were admitted to Algebra at much higher rates than other minorities.  In 2008, over half of all test-qualified white or Asian students were enrolled in Algebra 1 in 8th grade, while among black and Hispanic students with similar test scores, only 40% went on to Algebra.  Things were even worse in 2006, where only 19% of high-scoring black male students were placed into advanced math.  This led to a policy change this year where students were placed into math classes purely on math scores, rather than considering teacher recommendations (although the effects won't begin to show up in Algebra until next year, because they still have a requirement for students to complete pre-algebra before entering the Algebra 1 class).  For a detailed analysis of this data, see the article entitled "Math Placement and Institutional Racism in Wake County Schools?" on the excellent blog "Barbara's Take on Wake."

It will be interesting to see the data in a couple years about what happens with this policy change.  Is it really true, as Barbara suggests, that the WCPSS has institutional racism in terms of minorities in math?  Or do the teachers know something that the test scores don't show?  Of course, if we refused to allow failure and gave minority students additional time, if necessary, to complete such classes, that might be the best of both worlds.  But as my blog posts of November 14  and November 21 demonstrate, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

But this only deals with the under-represented minorities who are actually scoring well on their math tests.  According to a recent study by the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban school districts, among the urban school systems participating in the study, only about 12% of black males tested at or above the Proficient level in 8th grade math; at least 50% of 8th grade urban black males scored below the Basic level.  According to CGCS, this eventually leads to black men accounting for only 5% of all college students in 2008.

I don't know the answer to all this.  But it is a troubling question to examine.

Should We Send Homeschoolers to School for High School?

Although we're just in our first year of middle school, I am often asked, "Will you continue to homeschool your son through high school?"  My response is that we'll see where things are when we get to that point, but right now I don't know why we wouldn't continue homeschooling.  But certainly many families do decide to send their children to school for high school.

Just like with the decision to homeschool, sending a child to school for high school can come from many different reasons.  Some homeschooling parents are just tired, or have spent enough time devoted to their children and want to get back into their former careers, start a new career before they get too old, or just need some time for themselves and their interests.  Some don't want to add the pressures of having to be a teacher on top of the conflict that sometimes comes with being a parent to a child going through a rocky adolescent.  Others feel intimidated about teaching subjects at a high school level, and feel their children will get better instruction from specialists in each field.

But one big argument people give in favor of sending a homeschooler to school for high school is to prepare them to look attractive to and do well in college.  I don't want to judge those families who make those decisions; for many, especially those who want to pursue careers that will require a lot of schooling (like becoming a doctor) or that will ultimately be in education (like being a college professor), that is probably a wise choice.  But I also have to ask, especially for those with children like my son, who certainly doesn't have such a driving ambition right now:  Is teaching our children the skill set to do well in school going to help them, hinder them, or have no effect on their success in the rest of their adult lives?

My thinking along these lines was sparked by Alfie Kohn's latest blogging in the Huffington Post (followers of my blog know that Kohn is the source of some of my greatest educational inspiration).  Entitled "'Ready To Learn' Equals Easier to Educate,"Kohn explores what may be American education's greatest irony--that our best and most elite institutions are devoted to finding, attracting, and teaching the students who need it the least (or, as I'm constantly saying in discussions with my friends, if you have what it takes to get into Harvard, you don't need to go to Harvard because you already have it made).  Kohn argues that, starting in preschool, we cherry-pick the "brightest," usually most advantaged, and most cooperative students and give them additional educational resources that only increases the gap between them and their less advantaged peers, justified by the rationale that those other children aren't "ready to learn" (at least, in that institutionalized way, since children are learning all the time, one way or another).  But this gap continues and expands all along the educational pipeline until one set of children is on track for Harvard (or Duke or Cal Tech or whatever...it's not Harvard per se) and the other set is on a conveyor belt towards failure (see Waiting for Superman for more details).

But it seems to me one manifestation of this "ready to learn" concept is sending students to high school to prepare them for college.  On one hand, and particularly for some kids, sometimes it makes sense.  On the other hand, what does sending homeschool students to high school teach them?  For one thing, it certainly teaches them to expect less individual attention and less one-on-one discussion with teachers and peers.  I fear that it teaches them to give up pursuing their unique questions and curiosities about a subject in favor of following the pack along the educational path set by the teacher.  Since homeschoolers are an admittedly fairly homogenous community, even within a pretty sophisticated secular group like our Cary Homeschoolers, learning with a more diverse population might be a valuable aspect of school.  But reports from my friends in high schoolers in school say that their children are tracked or gifted-programmed or cliqued into groups that are no more diverse than our homeschool peers (who at least are definitely exposed to a greater age range of fellow students).

As I said, this is probably the right route for many students.  But does it develop skills that all students need to become happy, productive adults?  I don't think so.  Or am I missing something?  Please let me know, because I'm open to reconsidering this position.