Reporters can be a tad obnoxious at dinner parties. We’re experts on everything for about five minutes. But parenting good students? I won’t even begin to pretend. So I turn to those in the know: teachers.

Helena Van Rooyen recently retired from academe after 40 years, most spent at the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District. But she isn’t done helping students, as she is working on a project for the district, helping at-risk second- through fifth-graders improve their math skills.

Melinda Anaya is a well-loved kindergarten teacher at Holy Angels School in Arcadia, where she’s taught for eight years. My two nieces, ages 13 and 10, adore her and remember how fun her classroom was. My own 6-year-old cried on the last day of school because he said he’ll miss her. (Don’t show this to him when he’s 16, please.)

I posed this question to them: What should parents of young children be doing now in the run-up to school? And what we can do throughout the year to help our kids succeed?

Van Rooyen stated it simply: “Just be a parent.”

“That means, get involved in your child’s learning, teach (and live) consistency, respect for authority and for peers, the meaning of the word `no,’ fairness and that there are choices,” she said.

And not to put undue pressure on you, but what we’re doing with our kinders now will echo through the years.

“I do think that the primary grades are the most important,” Anaya said. “This is when they begin to develop their work habits and everything is a new learning experience.”

The good habits we help instill in our pre-K and kindergarteners are the foundation to that perfect SAT score later on. (OK, just a 2,300.)

So herewith, homework for us parents on how to grow good students:

Forget the preaching. Instill a love for learning by providing kids with a model. Don’t just tell kids to read when you never read or to be nice and not fight when all you do is scream.

Play learning games, even simple ones like name everything in the room that’s green, and provide kids with a variety of experiences beyond video games and TV.

Consider volunteering in your child’s classroom

Both teachers’ No. 1 activity is reading. Read to kids and later with them when they’re old enough to read to you. It can be hard with everything else we have to do, but it makes a difference.

“Talk up” school and all that can be learned there plus the new friends they’ll make.

Recognize learning and reward it.

Right about now, start waking the kids up early and getting back into the routine. Observe a wise bedtime. Have a daily schedule kids can count on.

Your Mama said it to you too: eat a healthy breakfast.

To help with first-day tears, it’s best for parents to say goodbye, kiss their child and leave. Two minutes after you leave, your kid is fine. We feel terrible all day.

After school, let them snack and indulge in a half-hour of active play (PlayStation doesn’t count, Anaya points out.) Then they can tackle homework.

Give students their own work space free of distraction. Give them all the materials they need.

Kids are apt to get sick when around other kids so keep them home when they are sick, and serve chicken soup (really.)

And lastly, both teachers remind us to love our kids, listen to them and spend time with them.

“Bottom line, learning requires attention and just plain old hard work,” Van Rooyen said.

Just like parenting.

Source: Whittier Daily News, CA
http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_10294073

Calculators are useful tools in elementary mathematics classes, if students already have some basic skills, new research has found. The findings shed light on the debate about whether and when calculators should be used in the classroom.

“These findings suggest that it is important children first learn how to calculate answers on their own, but after that initial phase, using calculators is a fine thing to do, even for basic multiplication facts,” Bethany Rittle-Johnson, assistant professor of psychology in Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development and co-author of the study, said.

The research is currently in press at the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and is available on the journal’s Web site: http://tinyurl.com/5f8tgd.

Rittle-Johnson and co-author Alexander Kmicikewycz, who completed the work as his undergraduate honors thesis at Peabody, found that the level of a student’s knowledge of mathematics facts was the determining factor in whether a calculator hindered his or her learning.

“The study indicates technology such as calculators can help kids who already have a strong foundation in basic skills,” Kmicikewycz, now a teacher in New York City public schools, said.

“For students who did not know many multiplication facts, generating the answers on their own, without a calculator, was important and helped their performance on subsequent tests,” Rittle-Johnson added. “But for students who already knew some multiplication facts, it didn’t matter — using a calculator to practice neither helped nor harmed them.”

The researchers compared third graders’ performance on multiplication problems after they had spent a class period working on other multiplication problems. Some of the students spent that class period generating answers on their own, while others simply read the answers from a calculator. All students used a calculator to check their answers.

The researchers found that the calculator’s effect on subsequent performance depended on how much the students knew to begin with. For those students who already had some multiplication skills, using the calculator before taking the test had no impact. But for those who were not good at multiplying, use of the calculator had a negative impact on their performance.

The researchers also found that the students using calculators were able to practice more problems and had fewer errors.

“Teachers struggle with how to give kids immediate feedback, which we know speeds the learning process. So, another use for calculators is allowing students to use them to check the answers they have come up with by themselves, giving them immediate feedback and more time for practice,” Rittle-Johnson said.

And, for many of the students, using calculators was simply fun.

“Kids enjoyed them. It’s one way to make memorizing your multiplication facts a more interesting thing to do,” Rittle-Johnson said.

“So much of how you teach depends on how you market the material — presentation is very important to kids,” Kmicikewycz added. “Many of these students had never used a calculator before, so it added a fun aspect to math class for them.”

“It’s a good tool that some teachers shy away from, because they are worried it’s going to have negative consequences,” Rittle-Johnson said. “I think that the evidence suggests there are good uses of calculators, even in elementary school.”

Source: PhysOrg.com, VA
http://www.physorg.com/news138373871.html

Guidelines for managing attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder have alarmed leading education researchers, who warn they will cause an exponential increase in children being labelled as having ADHD by schools chasing funding.

A group of 14 researchers in education, disabilities and ADHD from seven universities have written to the Rudd Government, criticising moves to instruct teachers to look out for ADHD and to allocate special funding to schools for students with the disorder.

The guidelines are being reviewed by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians at the request of the National Health and Medical Research Council. Draft recommendations were released for public comment.

In a letter to Education Minister Julia Gillard and Health Minister Nicola Roxon, the researchers say the recommendations will encourage over-diagnosis of ADHD and give schools an incentive to have children classified with the disorder to gain access to extra money.

“This risk is particularly acute for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.”

A survey of children’s mental health, conducted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 1998, found almost 8 per cent of 12- to 17-year-olds were diagnosed with ADHD.

A study of South Australian children taking medication for ADHD in 1999 found rates highest among children from families with low incomes and high unemployment.

The lead signatory on the letter, Linda Graham from the University of Sydney, said yesterday resources would be better spent on giving teachers the skills and support to deal with a variety of children’s behaviours rather than singling out disorders.

Dr Graham said diagnosing a child as having ADHD was sometimes medicalising normal behaviour and should be a last resort, but it had become the first step in dealing with challenging children. “The diagnostic criteria for ADHD over the past 15 years has been expanding and it’s now almost possible to diagnose one of my cats,” she said.

The chairman of the group writing the guidelines, David Forbes, said between 5 and 10 per cent of children had the features of ADHD and might need special intervention to help them learn at school. He disagreed that training teachers to recognise ADHD would increase diagnosis of the disorder.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24203785-5013871,00.html

The man who addressed more than 2,000 teachers and administrators Wednesday has extraordinary credentials.

Dr. Ben Carson is the pediatric neurosurgery director at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. He is internationally-known for his work in separating conjoined twins. The author of three books, Carson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the nation’s highest civilian award - from President Bush earlier this year.

In an education summit sponsored by community businesses and organizations and coordinated through Public Education Partners (PEP), Carson spoke to educators from the Aiken School District, USC Aiken and Aiken Technical College.

In a real way, Carson credits his success to the poverty he experienced as a child, because it “put a fire in my belly” to move beyond it. His mother, one of 24 children, married at 13. She later divorced her husband, a bigamist. There was never any money for anything. When Sonya Carson took Carson and his brother into grocery stores in Detroit, the boys would ask to get a penny candy. But they saw such pain in their mom’s eyes that they stopped asking.

Teachers helped Carson in very real important ways when he was growing up. But his young, remarkable mother made the difference for him. Sonya Carson worked a number of domestic jobs to keep from going on welfare. In those homes, she noticed that education was valued, that the families spent time reading.

Carson’s mother proceeded to turn the television off and made her sons check out library books. They had to give her written reports, not realizing that their mom, with a third-grade education, couldn’t read.

“After a number of weeks, I started to enjoy reading,” Carson said. “We lived in a horrible environment, but I could go anyplace with books. I learned how Booker T. Washington was born a slave. It was illegal for him to read, but he taught himself and ended up as an advisor to presidents. Through reading, I could have complete control of my life.”

By then, no book was safe from Carson’s hands. He had thought he was dumb and his classmates thought so too. One day his fifth-grade science teacher asked the class to identify an obsidian rock. Carson not only did so, he began to describe its characteristics in detail. The teacher was delighted and said so, and Carson realized he was no dummy. He had gotten the answers from a book.

In his inner city junior high school where most kids weren’t interested in school, teachers were thrilled when Carson sought them out. He excelled in band and got a scholarship to the prestigious Interlochen summer arts camp; his music teacher urged not to go, fearful his prize student would forego his academic efforts. He joined the ROTC in high school and the instructor made it possible for Carson to attain the rank of colonel in record time and receive an appointment to West Point.

Carson turned down the appointment and enrolled at Yale University. Still another teacher helped him land a summer job at Ford Motor Company to have some spending money for college.

“Teachers are dream managers,” Carson said. “They can tell you why you can do something, not why you can’t.”

He frets that China is producing 392,000 engineers a year and the U.S. is providing just 60,000 annually, of which 40 percent are foreigners. America has to change this equation, has to build up the intellectual firepower needed to succeed. In the 21st century, Carson said, it’s hard for teachers to keep up with keep up with ever-changing information and technology so they can inspire their children to go into a variety of career paths.

“We have to start thinking of teachers as educational quarterbacks,” said Carson, “who can draw from other sectors and develop contacts to the guy who invented the catalytic converter and to provide the kind of tools that will get kids excited.”

But educating the next generation in a technological society is not a turf war, he said. It’s a job for business, industry, higher education. Everybody has to be involved with it.”

Following Carson’s speech, a short PEP video aired. Each time a scene from a county school hit the screen, teachers from that school cheered — much like a pep rally, as Aiken Superintendent Dr. Beth Everitt said.

“Isn’t it great to be here with everybody,” she said. “We’ve received an inspiring message of hope and determination. To our teachers, principals and staffs, this was all for you and shows how much (the business community) appreciates your hard work and what you do for children.”

Redcliffe Elementary School teacher Denise Broome called Carson’s speech “a great way to start the year, It was inspiring and showed me why I became a teacher,” she said. “I had stayed home with my children and volunteered in the schools, where I saw the impact the teachers were making on my children. I wanted the opportunity to make that kind of impact.”

Source: Aiken Standard, SC
http://www.aikenstandard.com/0814-ben-carson

Glasgow schools have long had the poorest levels of academic attainment in Scotland. The gap has been particularly difficult to bridge because so many of the city’s school draw their pupils from some of the most deprived areas, while the leafy suburbs tend to be outside the city boundary. Yet it is all the more important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve their full potential in school.

The news that children in both primary and secondary schools in Glasgow have reached the highest levels of attainment in the “three Rs” since the 5-14 assessment tests began is welcome, but a long overdue step towards closing the gap with other areas. There is a disturbingly long way to go: in the first two years of secondary school, 40% are still failing to reach the required standard in reading and maths and 50% are below the standard in writing. That is unacceptable, whatever hurdles have to be overcome. Other local authorities with their own problems of deprivation, such as Inverclyde, achieve a high pass rate in English and maths at Standard Grade and Higher, compared with similar areas.

However, improved results in Glasgow primary schools as a result of the zero-tolerance approach to poor literacy and numeracy which has seen specialist teams of experienced staff training teachers and supporting parents as well as teaching pupils, suggest that teaching methods make a considerable difference. These include giving “booster” lessons to pupils struggling at primary school and extra lessons in reading, writing and maths at the expense of other subjects to pupils who are behind by the time they reach secondary school. That tried-and-tested reading method, synthetic phonics, has also been adopted with impressive results, following success in two other local authorities with previously low attainment levels. Pleasing as this is, it is hardly rocket science and will cause many a time-served teacher and weary employer to shake their greying heads over how a country which prided itself on pioneering mass education ever came to tolerate such low standards.

That improvements are evident so soon after the new blitz on literacy should spur further efforts. Resources are always scarce in education, but surely cannot be better spent than on achieving basic skills. The earlier such intervention is made the better, a child who is unable to decode the written word or understand basic arithmetic will become more and more frustrated, miserable and unable to learn. Education is the key to success, and people who reach adulthood without learning to read, write and count competently and confidently have their lives blighted.

Source: The Herald, UK
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/editorial/display.var.2422085.0.Three_Rs_are_the_key.php

Just one in 50 teachers of the youngest schoolchildren in England is male, figures revealed.

Only 2% of staff in nursery and reception classes - teaching under-fives - are men, Department for Children, Schools and Families figures show.

Critics say men are deterred from working with young children because of the idea that it is women’s work, the low wages and fears they may be branded paedophiles, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Anastasia de Waal, head of family and education at the think-tank Civitas, told the newspaper: “It is very important for children, particularly young ones, to see men as teachers.

“Seeing men as role models is very important.

“The idea that men are afraid of being seen as paedophiles is very serious. Obviously we want to protect children but we don’t want to get to the stage where we are harming them because they dont see any men in schools.”

A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said: “Male childcare workers act as positive role models for children, which is why we launched a campaign to attract more men to the sector last year.

“The campaign challenges the stereotypical view that childcare is a woman’s role.

“Also, several of our recent early learning partnerships projects focused specifically on engaging fathers in their children’s early learning and our Children’s Plan called on all public services to take account of the needs of both parents.”

Source: The Press Association
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jtHGZzALO6_KynChwlehtUDnc3fg

Standards of spelling among university students are now so bad that lecturers are being urged to turn a blind eye to mistakes.

Many undergraduates misspell basic words such as “their”, “speech” or even “Wednesday” in essays, it is claimed.

First year students are the worst offenders, despite already spending at least 13 years in the education system.

Standards have deteriorated to such an extent that one leading academic has been forced to ignore common errors altogether.

Dr Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University, said “atrocious” spelling was rife among new undergraduates, with many failing to apply basic rules, such as “i before e, except after c“. The words “weird”, “seize”, “leisure” and “neighbour” are regularly misspelt by students, he said.

The comments come amid growing fears that many sixth-formers are leaving school lacking basic skills.

Some universities have already extended courses by a year to give weak students extra tuition in core subjects that they failed to pick up in the classroom.

Last year, another academic claimed that British undergraduates had a poorer grasp of English than some foreign students.

Dr Bernard Lamb, a reader in genetics at Imperial College London, said those from Singapore and Brunei made fewer mistakes in their work, despite speaking English as a second language. Many British students appear to have been through school without mastering basic rules of grammar and punctuation, or having their errors corrected, he said.

Writing in Times Higher Education magazine, Dr Smith said mistakes were now so common that academics should simply accept them as “variants”.

“Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling,” he said. “But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.”

He lists 10 words which are most regularly misspelt by students, including “February”, “ignore”, “truly” and “queue”.

“I could go on and add another 10 words that are commonly misspelt - the word ‘misspelt’ itself of course, and all those others that break the ‘i’ before ‘e’ rule - but I think I have made my point,” he said.

Jack Bovill, chairman of The Spelling Society, said: “All the data suggests that there are more and more students at university level whose spelling is not up to scratch. Universities are even finding they have masters-level students who cannot spell.”

Top ten misspellings

Argument Arguement

February Febuary

Wednesday Wensday

Ignore Ignor

Occurred Occured

Opportunity Opertunity

Queue Que

Speech Speach

Their Thier

Truly Truely

Twelfth Twelth

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2510704/University-students-cannot-spell.html

We soon will experience the most important time in the entire school year for children: the first two weeks. What happens during this critical period pretty much determines how the rest of the year will go.

When children return to school after the summer break, their perceptions about school and themselves as learners are mostly uncertain. It’s a new year with new teachers, new books, new classes, new schedules and new friends. All of these new things come with the hope that this year could be different and better than all previous years.

That uncertainty in students’ perceptions continues only until teachers administer the first quizzes and tests near the end of the second week of school. When teachers assign grades to those first quizzes, the grades put students into categories. And getting out of a category is really difficult.

Students who receive a C on that first math quiz, for example, begin to see themselves as C students. Their uncertainty suddenly becomes fixed, and they accept the idea that they are likely to earn Cs in math for the rest of the school year.

When the second quiz or test occurs, they expect to receive another C. When they do, it reinforces their perception. Similarly, if they receive a failing grade on that first quiz, they think all following grades will be the same.

But if they succeed on that first quiz and receive a high grade, that, too, is their perception of all that might follow.

This means that teachers must do everything they can to ensure students’ success in the first two weeks. And not fake success, but success in something challenging. The key to motivating students rests with that success. Students persist in activities at which they experience success, and they avoid activities at which they are not successful or believe they cannot be successful.

This is the reason that truancy and attendance problems rarely occur during the first two weeks of the school year. They begin to occur after the first graded quizzes and tests. In students’ minds, the grades they receive on these first quizzes establish their likelihood of future success. And why come to school if there is so little chance of doing well?

Parents, too, must be genuinely involved in their children’s education during the first two weeks. Routines established at home in this critical period profoundly affect the likelihood of success.

Daily conversations about school activities help children recognize that their parents value success in school. Providing a quiet place for children to work on school assignments and limiting the time they spend watching TV or playing on computers further increase chances for success. Checking with teachers to make sure children are well prepared and ready to succeed also can help.

Successful experiences during the first two weeks of school do not guarantee success for the entire year. But they are a powerful and perhaps essential step in that direction.

Teachers and parents need to take advantage of this critical time and use it well. It can make all the difference.

Source: Kentucky.com, KY
http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/478728.html

The secret to the academic success of many Asian students starts in the home, with a study of schoolchildren suggesting a regular homework routine carries benefits into the classroom.

The research examined the study habits of three groups of Year 3 students and found that Chinese children spent more time on their homework, completed more work and did it on a more regular basis than Anglo or Pacific Island students.

The study by University of Western Sydney researchers and the NSW Education Department challenges the myth that Chinese students perform better at school because of a cultural disposition to study.

“There has been inadequate attention given to the ways educational attainment is founded on embodied capacities, such as productive stillness and quiet, which are crucial to sustained attention and application in intellectual endeavour,” the report says.

Cathy Garde, a Year 3 teacher at Berala Public School in Sydney’s west, agreed that less attention was paid in recent years to the practicalities of learning, and training young bodies to sit still.

“I often have to start the year teaching the kids work habits, the capability to sit down and focus,” she said. “Some children struggle to control themselves. They don’t have any self-discipline. You get children who come into the classroom and start walking around the room in the middle of a task.”

The report, Cultural Practices and Learning, involved interviews with parents, teachers and 36 students in six Sydney schools, as well as classroom observation.

The study found that 56per cent of the Chinese students spent more than one hour a night on their homework, compared with 24per cent of Anglo children and 35per cent of Pacific Islander students.

But the study says the time spent on homework was not as important as the study routine.

A greater proportion of Chinese students, 40per cent, did homework in their bedroom or study at a desk compared with 13per cent of Anglo students and 25per cent of Islander children, who tended to do their homework sitting on their bed.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24115399-2702,00.html

Three years after the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, got into trouble for questioning women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science and engineering — and 16 years after the talking Barbie doll proclaimed that “math class is tough” — a study paid for by the National Science Foundation has found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests.

Although boys in high school performed better than girls in math 20 years ago, the researchers found, that is no longer the case. The reason, they said, is simple: Girls used to take fewer advanced math courses than boys, but now they are taking just as many.

“Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance,” said Marcia C. Linn of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the study. “But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

The findings, reported in the July 25 issue of Science magazine, are based on math scores from seven million students in 10 states, tested in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys. (To their dismay, the researchers found that the tests in the 10 states did not include a single question requiring complex problem-solving, forcing them to use a national assessment test for that portion of their research.)

Janet Hyde, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the study, said the persistent stereotypes about girls and math had taken a toll.

“The stereotype that boys do better at math is still held widely by teachers and parents,” Dr. Hyde said. “And teachers and parents guide girls, giving them advice about what courses to take, what careers to pursue. I still hear anecdotes about guidance counselors steering girls away from engineering, telling them they won’t be able to do the math.”

Girls are still underrepresented in high school physics classes and, as noted by Dr. Summers, who resigned in 2006, in the highest levels of physics, chemistry and engineering, which require advanced math skills.

The study also analyzed the gender gap on the math section of the SAT. Rather than proving boys’ superior talent for math, the study found, the difference is probably attributable to a skewed pool of test takers. The SAT is taken primarily by seniors bound for college, and since more girls than boys go to college, about 100,000 more girls than boys take the test, including lower-achieving girls who bring down the girls’ average score.

On the ACT, another college entrance test, the study said, the gender gap in math scores disappeared in Colorado and Illinois after the states began requiring all students to take the test.

Source: New York Times, United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/education/25math.html?ref=us