Getting enough sleep and still getting into Stanford

I wrote this for the March-April issue of VaHomeschoolers Voice.

--------------------------------------------------

Here in my pleasant homeschooling bubble, I know I'm receiving a distorted message about the magnitude of the backlash against the current high-stress, hypercompetitive culture among college-bound high school students. Many of my friends and peers are recommending movies like “Road to Nowhere” and reading books like College Without High School: A Teenager's Guide to Skipping High School and Going to College – books and movies that urge us to reject the modern American practice of subjecting highschoolers to a brutal trial-by-exhaustion in which no number of AP classes is ever too many.

But I recently got a reality check from the larger world. Because of a mutual friend with whom we often spend New Year's Eve, my family has become slightly acquainted with an out-of-town family with two bright, ambitious teenage girls who are in public school. It's always a pleasure to see them. But this year, we hardly saw the older daughter at all. While the rest of us were having a good time chatting and listening to music, she disappeared into a bedroom and collapsed into exhausted sleep. Her mom explained the grueling schedule her daughter had been keeping.

Like a typical mother, I started to worry whether I've been kidding myself about my ability to guide my children through high school. So I was ripe for this book. How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out), by Cal Newport (2010, ISBN 978-0-7679-3258-5), is a welcome corrective to the idea that a hard work and ambition can't go hand in hand with adequate sleep and free time. Newport's book doesn't reject competitiveness or the desire to get into top-ranked schools, but it does show an alternative path that doesn't ask students to suffer heroic sacrifices now in exchange for a shot at a better future down the road.

What Newport proposes is that students adopt what he calls a “relaxed superstar lifestyle,” which balances academic achievements and decent SAT scores with generous amounts of free time to live an interesting life. (Newport has written two prior books aimed at college students and also writes a student advice blog, Study Hacks, http://www.calnewport.com/blog. These are mostly about how to develop the good work habits and study skills necessary to make finishing schoolwork by suppertime an attainable goal. An overview of some of these skills is at the center of this book.)

Newport's first example of a “relaxed superstar” is, not too surprisingly, himself, and, as with all advice books, you have to put up with a certain amount of authorial ego. But he has also collected a number of convincing examples of other people whose relaxed-yet-impressive high school careers led to acceptances at elite colleges. (Newport has a Ph.D. from MIT.) There aren't any homeschoolers among them, but there easily could be.

To be a “relaxed superstar,” Newport proposes three ideas, the first of which is underscheduling. This doesn't mean adopting a slacker academic schedule, but it does mean pruning away all of those classes and activities that are there just to look good on the resume. Nor does this mean that the resulting free time in the schedule is spent killing time on Facebook. It's time to explore the world, by reading lots of books, visiting interesting places, and meeting interesting people – to lead an interesting life! Hey, that sounds a lot like the unschooling lifestyle, doesn't it?

With enough exploring, deep interests are sure to emerge. These are things that Newport says pass the Saturday Morning Test, because you'd voluntarily choose to spend your free Saturday morning on them. After that, Newport counsels students to pick a deep interest and focus on it. This is not earth-shattering advice, but it's contrary to the well-rounded, well-padded resume approach seen elsewhere. And, finally, Newport calls on the student to be innovative -- “pursue accomplishments that are hard to explain, not hard to do.” This means stepping out of the deep grooves worn by other high school students as they trudge through their mandatory community service requirements. Instead, the students Newport uses as examples all connected to the larger community and found meaningful work to do there.

I particularly enjoyed this book because Newport seemed to have happened upon some of the lessons of unschooling -– exploring the world, pursuing personal interests, and not waiting until later to live a meaningful life. That Newport has come upon these lessons while looking for the secret to getting admitted to top colleges is cheering. I hope he succeeds in spreading the word that you can become an interesting, accomplished adult by having a happy, fun adolescence.

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics

A version of this review appeared in the January-February 2008 issue of the VaHomeschooler's newsletter. I thought it was worth keeping, especially in light of the recent news on Shanghai schoolchildren.
----------
Most of us, I suspect, are less than confident when it comes to math and wonder if we've got what it takes to teach it. But I imagine Liping Ma was a little anxious, too, when, as an eighth-grader from Shanghai, she was sent to be "reeducated" by illiterate peasants in a rural Chinese village -- and quickly found herself teaching elementary school instead.

Ma's unexpected detour turned out to be a fruitful one, starting her on a path that led her to the United States to study teaching itself -- and, in particular, what it takes to be a good math teacher. Three decades after her Cultural Revolution experiences, Ma created a sensation (in math and education reform circles, anyhow) with her research on math teachers in the U.S. and China. Ma concluded, unsurprisingly, that Americans are weak in math because our elementary school teachers don't really know the subject themselves.

But Ma's book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, ISBN 0-8058-290803, is far more than just a critique of math instruction in U.S. schools. It also paints a vivid picture of what really good math instruction looks like -- and it contains some hints about how homeschoolers could become pretty good math teachers, whatever their educational backgrounds.

Why on earth do I think homeschoolers (and especially those of us who rarely think of ourselves as "teachers") should read a doctoral-dissertation-turned-book comparing elementary school math teachers in the United States and China? Before I try to answer that question, here's a question for you:

Imagine you are teaching division with fractions. To make this meaningful for kids, something that many teachers try to do is relate mathematics to other things. Sometimes they try to come up with real-world situations or story-problems to show the application of some particular piece of content. What would you say would be a good story or model for 1 and3/4 divided by 1/2?

If you find this difficult, you've got plenty of company. Less than half the U.S. teachers in Ma's study could get the correct answer, much mess provide a real-world example. The Chinese teachers all got the math right, and 90% of them came up with a conceptually-correct illustration.

Ma's study is filled with a number of equally horrifying examples, but that's not the meat of her work. She goes on to examine the teachers who can handle the material -- the Chinese group -- and tries to discover what they're doing right.

Most of the Chinese teachers have what Ma refers to as a "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics." But it doesn't seem to be a result of formal education. In fact, most Chinese elementary teachers leave school at ninth grade, followed by two or three years of normal school, whereas U.S. teachers typically have at least a bachelor's degree.

Ma asserts that Chinese teachers become good teachers by teaching and by doing math. U.S. teachers are at a disadvantage here, because they are assume to emerge from the U.S. educational system knowing how and what they will teach and not needing to study any further.

Consider a third group: homeschoolers. Granted, most of us will never gain the deep, broad foundation in mathematics that Ma found in veteran Chinese teachers. On the other hand, most of us start off no worse than the average public school teacher in this country -- and we're in a better position to learn on the job. Most homeschoolers, in my experience, aren't afraid to admit they have holes in their education, and that they learn alongside their children. Also, we don't need to develop an arsenal of teaching techniques for a wide range of kids -- we just need to figure out what our own kids need.

In China, teachers devote a considerable amount of time outside the classroom studying the curriculum themselves, both to make sure they understand the material and to think about how students will approach it. This reminds me of the way many homeschooling parents approach a math curriculum, trying to view it through the eyes of the kids who will use it. (For instance, I quickly figured out that any materials containing cute and colorful visual distractions would only frustrate my child.)

Given the amount of time homeschoolers spend debating the merits of various math curricula, this leads to the obvious question: is the Chinese math curriculum superior to what's available in this country? Perhaps, but Ma doesn't focus on curriculum. The Chinese classroom looks very "traditional," and teachers there stick closely to the curriculum, but Ma says they also transcend it -- the curriculum is a framework for a great deal of discussion. This may be the most valuable message of Ma's book: they believe elementary mathematics is worthy of respect.

In this country, elementary mathematics is generally seen as a rather dull preliminary to more exciting areas, leading to a "take your medicine" approach to math -- learn the procedures, check the box, and move on as fast as possible to something more interesting. But elementary math, as a body of knowledge, is more than just memorizing math facts and learning algorithms. "Know how, and also know why," say the Chinese. Underlying the more obviously practical aspects of elementary mathematics is a connected, unified whole that is an "intellectually demanding, challenging, and exciting field -- a foundation on which much can be built," Ma writes.

What Ma suggests we need to do is slow down and appreciate math -- play with different approaches, seek out connections between concepts and the logic behind the procedures, and not accept "because that's how you do it" as the final answer. Are we, as parents who probably got a mediocre math education ourselves, really up to this? I think we are. Eventually, many of us expect our children to go beyond us in math. Perhaps we can give them some good tools to take with them, like the Chinese teachers Ma studied. She quotes one whose sixth-graders have just won a math contest:

"They did it! They solved problems that they have never learned before. They solved problems that even I myself don't know how to do! I am proud of them. But I am also proud of myself, because I am convinced that it is me who fostered their ability to explore new problems on their own -- the capacity to surpass their teacher!"

Two Durrells

I stopped reading Lawrence Durrell's book The Greek Islands after it irritated me for fairly trivial reasons -- he called an island dear to me "a bit of a slut." So, I had felt slightly guilty for failing to sample his purported literary masterwork, the Alexandria Quartet.

Not any more!

http://www.themillions.com/2009/04/modern-library-revue-70-alexandria.html

Much as I suspected.

While elder brother Larry was launching his literary career, little brother Gerry, unwittingly anticipating the unschooling movement by several decades, was running barefoot on Corfu, working on his nature collection and, evidently, his comic prose style. (As often happens, it's the youngest sibling who gets the sense of humor.) My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell's memoir of his childhood years on Corfu, is a perfectly delicious book. I'm crossing my fingers that the two sequels are half as good.

The Ugly Vegetables

At first, this appears to be nothing more than another cheerfully-illustrated picture book about the pleasures of small girl working with her Mom in the garden. But trouble soon appears. Mom keeps doing things differently from the neighbors, marking the garden with mysterious Chinese characters instead of seed packets with flower pictures.

Sure enough, this garden turns out all wrong. The neighbors all have beautiful flowers, but the girl's mother has planted nothing but vegetables. And these are ugly vegetables.

Because this is a book for children, there is a miraculous happy ending that affirms the worth of the vegetables. Even more miraculous, the little community grows to make room for vegetables and flowers both.

Like most of Grace Lin's work, this lovely book aims to portray the Chinese-American experience in particular, but anyone who has ever stood outside mainstream culture can identify with this story.

The Ugly Vegetables, by Grace Lin, ISBN-10: 0881063363, ISBN-13: 978-0881063363