Looking for a Silver Bullet

2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math

http://news.yahoo.com/2-2-parents-rail-against-common-core-math-060635222.html

An Iowa woman jokingly calls it "Satan's handiwork." A California mom says she's broken down in tears. A Pennsylvania parent says it "makes my blood boil."

I don't know what to expect.

I often see some parent railing against Common Core Math (more so than any other subject) on Yahoo! every now and then, and the specific moronic examples make me wonder what is going on, but I know this is not fair. Not one thing, such as different teaching method, can change or improve something so drastically. I know this, but still hope to be wrong.

Call it what you like. Math by any other name is Math, and that alone intimidates a lot of kids and adults. Therefore, I go by the rule of simpler is better (actually, this is my rule for a lot of things). There is a time for multistep, drawn out explanations (Geometry with theorems and proofs) and maybe that needs to come in the middle school time-frame, I don't know. But I don't think making math more complicated or convoluted is the solution (I'm mostly going by the internet examples).

One more personal gripe about Common Core Standards (as I know it practiced at our school) - too much testing! I thought standardized testing went away with STAR testing being gone, but boy, was I wrong.  Now, instead of testing students once a year, I think our schools students are tested three times a year! What is going on? What happened to the reduction of standardized testing? Hey, testing by any other name is still testing. 

American children do not go to school as long as some of their better test-taking counterparts. Therefore, I'm not sure if they should lose any more time in testing (three times a year!) when we don't really know what the test results are used for. I ask you - what are they used for? Do they effect next year's curriculum? If anyone has an answer, please let me know.

 I've also heard the imperative of transforming our schools to meet "21st Century Education" challenges, meaning bringing more computers and technology into our schools. Again, I know this alone isn't going to improve our education system, but again, I live in hope.

But the reality is this. A computer is a tool, just like a piece of paper and a pencil. It can only be as effective as a student who is using it. And in order to be effective, this student must be under an effective teacher's guidance. But lately, people are expecting technology alone to be the silver bullet that fixes the broken educational system. 

More and more chrome books are going into our schools, and I'm not convinced that that's a good thing. So far, I think they are effectively used in ~1/3 of the classrooms, max. Otherwise, I think they are little better than baby-sitters. And I've seen my child guess at and trick programs to get the correct answers. Can this be called learning? What is my child learning to do? Trick a software program. I guess you can call that problem-solving, but I'd rather have my child problem-solve with other children and teachers.  Maybe I'm too old-fashioned or too-anti technology, but I think we need to minimize the computer time in schools rather than maximize it.

Another question I'd like to ask is...how much is this costing the school district? A software program can't be cheap for a 700 students let alone 7,000 or more. A software program is useless without a computer or chrome book to run it on. So, how much more does that cost a school of 700 students or 7,000 students? How much money are we talking about here? Is it $100,000? Is it$500,000? Or is it $1,000,000? More?? Is this the best way to spend that money? How about hiring more teachers? Or reducing classroom sizes so that there will be more interaction between students and teachers? So, introducing technology into the classrooms alone is not a solution.

Well, for starters, I think parental involvement is crucial. Parental involvement doesn't mean blaming the teachers and administrators of your child's school. What I mean by it is an active parental engagement - checking homework, talking with children about the day, listening, etc. Several times, I've been shocked to hear a parent blame a teacher for his/her child's problems. A school/teacher gets that child for usually six hours a day in elementary school (if we take away recess and lunch, probably about five hours). No matter how long the child is in school, we, the parents, are responsible for that child. Period. No ifs or buts. We, the parents, need to own the fact that whatever the problem the child has, existed long before he/she entered school, and will exist long after he/she leaves this teacher, this school if the parents choose not to correct the behavior/situation. I think parental disengagement is one of the biggest contributing factors in children who struggle in school.

 So, what is the solution? I think there's a place for innovative teaching methods, stronger curricula, and technology. But no matter how many fancy computers populate our classrooms and nifty teaching methods are introduced to our children, nothing is assured of success unless the parents engage with their children actively.

P.S. - Just in case anyone is curious, I am not a teacher, but I've been teaching science as a volunteer (hands-on science projects) at my children's school for seven years now, covering K to 6th grade.

Coup d'etat or is it?

On 5/9/14, I spent the morning with one of my best friends from my Bechtel days. We haven't seen each other in almost twenty years, yet when we met, it felt as if we had kept in touch all that time. It was wonderful to fall back into our old friendship so naturally. He's been living in Egpyt since we last saw each other (along with a few other places in the Middle East), and I appreciated the fact that he made an effort to see me when he only had four days here. 

After we (my friend, his brother and I) talked about our families and caught up (as much as we could in a couple of hours) with each others' lives, I asked them about the situation in Egypt. Whenever I saw something on TV or read something on the web, it seemed as if the situation was chaotic, volatile and dangerous. Arab Spring toppled Mubarak's regime, then ushered in democratically elected Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood. Then there was a military coup, and Morsi was overthrown. In the eyes of the international audience, this coup d'etat was a blow to Eqyptian democracy, and I didn't fully understand what was happening in Egypt. So, I asked them, because whenever I saw one of those stories, I mostly spent the time worrying over my friends' and their families safety. They explained that this "coup d'etat" was caused by the actions of the "democratically elected president" taking many very undemocratic political steps to consolidate his power, thereby forcing the Egyptian people to act. 

"As president, Morsi granted himself unlimited powers giving as reason that he would "protect" the nation from the Mubarak-era power structure, which he called "remnants of the old regime," and the power to legislate without judicial oversight or review of his acts. In late November, he issued an Islamist-backed draft constitution and called for a referendum, an act that his opponents called an "Islamist coup." These issues, along with complaints of prosecutions of journalists and attacks on nonviolent demonstrators, brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets in the 2012 Egyptian protests."      -- Wikipedia.

Listed below are some of the relevant excerpts from Wikipedia leading to the 2014 "coup d'etat."

 On Friday 28 June, protests against Morsi started to build throughout Egypt including in such cities as Cairo, Alexandria, Dakahlia, Gharbiya and Aswan as a "warm up" for the massive protests expected on 30 June that were planned by Tamarod. 

Pro-Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood supporters started counter demonstrations at the Rabia Al-Adawiya Mosque in Nasr City.

Prior to the protests, Christians, particularly in Upper Egypt, received threats from pro-Morsi protestors, pressuring them not to take part in the protests. Sheikh Essam Abdulamek, a member of parliament's Shura Council, said in an interview on television that Christians should not participate in the protests and warned them "do not sacrifice your children [since the] general Muslim opinion will not be silent about the ousting of the president."

On 29 June, Tamarod claimed that it collected more than 22 million signatures from a petition calling for Morsi to step down as president.
 
On 30 June, millions of protesters demonstrated across Egypt against Morsi. They (the Egyptian people) accused the Brotherhood of hijacking Egypt's revolution and using electoral victories to monopolize power and impose Islamic law. 

In response to the events, Morsi was given a 48 hour ultimatum by the military to meet the people's demands and to solve political differences or else they would intervene by implementing their own road map for the country saying that this should not be characterized as the threat of a coup.    

My friend and his brother told me they were at one of the gathering sites in Cairo (I forget the name of the square) to show their support for the movement started by Tamarod (a grassroots movement that was started to show opposition to President Morsi and force him to call early presidential elections). Tamarod, which means rebellion, will become a political party following the 2014 Egyptian presidential elections. 

Though my friend and his brother weren't certain who the right person would be the office of Egyptian president, they were 100% certain that Morsi had to go. After having suffered under 30 years of Mubarak's regime, the Egyptian people were impatient for real democracy to take place. They didn't want a pretender who'd hijack it for his own agenda rather than listen to the voice of the people. More importantly, they didn't want to wait around another year let alone a full presidential term to see what would happen. The people of Egypt were tired of waiting. 

 My friend and his brother felt that the actions of Egyptian military were "democratically" supported by the Egyptian people who showed up at the demonstrations and signed petitions. 

I decided to write about this because most of what I got from the media was that a democratically elected president was overthrown by the military, not the whole complex story behind the supposed "coup d'etat."

I know the media can't report everything. There just isn't the bandwidth to do that, but I wish there weren't so much spin on the story. I guess, ultimately, it's up to you and me to dig deeper into the stories that matter to us.

P.S. - I haven't written about the Nigerian situation because, as a mother of a daughter, I'm quite traumatized by this. I might write about this in the future.

P.P.S. - Please let me know if I got some of the facts wrong. I searched on the web and Wikipedia for the information I've used, but the quotes are from Wikipedia.

Rough Waters over Asia

I had hoped for a more peaceful world since the Berlin wall came down, but maybe that was just a prelude to a nightmarish world riddled with conflict - over oil, over food, over territorial rights, etc. I see more and more of these headlines on Yahoo and other websites, and it concerns me for several reasons. 

1. I want a more peaceful world for my children to inherit. 
2. I'm from Korea, and what happens to it concerns me.
3. I don't want to live in a might makes right kind of world. 

But, I wonder what the Chinese websites would say about America's international influences and policies.... I try to remember that I'm not getting the whole picture of the situation and that there's always two sides to a coin. But....

China insists it has right to put oil rig off Vietnam

http://news.yahoo.com/china-insists-put-rig-off-vietnam-122818355.html

Scores of Chinese Fishing Boats Invade Korean Waters

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/05/02/2014050201344.html

As the world's population grows, the battle for resources (albeit food, water, energy, rare earth metals, etc.) will become even more fierce since economic growth will depend on having ready access to some or all of it. I wonder how much more dangerous the world will be when my children and grandchildren will take over the stewardship of this place.

Clive Cussler is one on my favorite authors. At a writer's conference while back, he was one of the speakers, and I tried to shake his hand at every opportunity. One of his books, and he write A LOT of books with the help of co-writers, titled Blue Gold. It's a riveting tale of world's powerful governments and people fighting over the dwindling source of potable water. When I first read it, a while back, I wondered if it would really come down to an awesome struggle like that, but now, with an increase in clashes over fishing rights, contradictory air space claims, mineral rights, energy rights, and more, I'm not sure an epic battle for water is that far off. 

The scariest part of all this is that parts of Chinese "posturing" reminds me of some pre-WWII events that took place in Europe. I hope I'm wrong. I hope China isn't going to just keep upping the stakes in Asian waters. I hope the world has learned something from the previous conflicts and take steps preemptively to prevent all out armed conflict (I haven't even touched on the situation in Ukraine). Is there a way to avoid all out armed conflict? I guess it all depends on whether one or the combination of USA, China and Russia believe in might makes right and try to test that adage.