Joy Hakim: Finding the Stories in Science and History

Seems that “literacy” programs are being funded, but history programs are not in the latest federal budget. But literacy doesn’t win when history loses. Few subjects are better suited for teaching critical reading than history. A discipline that gives you people, ideas, and stories, it demands research and thinking and writing. We hardly teach it in the early grades, and our children have paid a price for that. (more…)

Signing books isn't easy. I always want to write something clever, or pertinent, or worth thinking about, but I’m not very good at it. So, recently, when my friend Lee Kravitz signed his book "Unfinished Business" for me, I was impressed by his personal comment. He said I was “opening people up to the instructive power of story.” (more…)

Here's a blog by Lynne Munson, chief of commoncore.org.

I challenge anyone to think of a nation that works as hard as we do to find silver linings in its educational failures. On Tuesday morning NAEP reported that, in the course of two years, our nation's 4th and 8th graders improved a single point (on a 500-point scale) in three of four reading and math assessments, and flatlined on the fourth. If you look at figures plotting NAEP scores over the last 30 years, any upward slope in the data is nearly undetectable to the naked eye. (more…)

This is about three of my educator friends. The first became a teacher of the year. When a supervisor asked this middle school whiz if she would consider teaching a class made up of the lowest achievers from several schools in her district, she said “yes.” A year later the reading comprehension scores of students in that class were up more than 10 percent. After that the district used her as a teacher/trainer. She retired last year.
The second educator, in her fifties, already has 25 years of teaching experience. A reading expert who works in grades 1 and 2, she has long been considered an exemplary teacher. Her district is changing retirement benefits; if she doesn’t retire at the end of the academic year she will lose substantial income. She can’t afford that. (more…)

“The average person’s body contains about 100 trillion cells, but only maybe one in 10 is human.” That sentence made the front page of the October 11th Washington Post. And, yes, most of your cells and mine are not the familiar nuclear cells diagrammed in textbooks. Rather, they are microbial cells—bacteria and archaea--that pass on their information buddy to buddy, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. We are just beginning to understand the implications of that process and of the role those 90 trillion microbial cells play in your life drama. “We’re seeing an unprecedented rate of discovery. Everywhere we look, microbes seem to be involved,” says a Colorado University scientist quoted in the Post. Microbiology is today’s revolutionary science; the excitement in the field is palpable. The American Society of Microbiologists now has 38,000 members.
After reading the Washington Post article I decided to see if any of that excitement is conveyed in the National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 science education, a document intended to lead to another, which will frame a common core science curriculum for states to use. The assumption is that this well-intentioned blue ribbon committee-effort will change science education in this country and make our children able to compete in a global economy.
I read the 300 page NRC document to see if that is likely. Does it describe good science? Good pedagogy? (more…)

An email today is titled, "Lessons schools can learn from business." I find its content frustrating. NCLB is a business-oriented approach to schooling and hardly anyone is pleased with it. All over the country, lawyers and businesspeople are becoming superintendents. Mostly their record is one of failure. It's teachers who understand the problems and the solutions. But very few are speaking out in state and national forums. If schools are to find their place in this new century, if they are to be all we want them to be, no one can lead the way like experienced teachers. It's time for the real experts in the field to speak up and take charge.

Here the link to a web post: http://www.good.is/post/can-storytelling-keep-kids-hooked-on-science/
It's about education researchers in Australia who are testing to see if storytelling enhances science comprehension and interest. Umm, they don't have to test. Just ask me and some of the teachers I've seen this summer. Of course. Everyone likes stories, they are the classic way to teach. A story cements details in the mind. It's hard for me to understand how we got away from this method of teaching and why we replaced stories with litanies of facts.

I‘d been a business reporter and editorial writer for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk when I decided to leave daily journalism to write a U.S. history for young adults. That was after I read an academic study that compared student’s comprehension of writing by journalists (in this case Time magazine writers) with their comprehension of the same events as written in standard textbooks. Comprehension was 40% higher with the journalists. (more…)

A letter from a reader about the updated 4th edition of "All the People" says: “I was very disappointed to see that the Mississippi Gulf Coast got barely a sentence in the discussion of Hurricane Katrina. Like the rest of the nation, you have overlooked the destruction that our state suffered and focused only (more…)

Getting letters from readers is always a treat. They used to come in handwritten classroom batches, now mostly I get individual emails. I’m not sure what that says about today’s teaching, but there seems to be less time for a writing-to-the-author exercise. So, yesterday, when I got a manila envelope filled with (more…)