One of our favorite ways of spending a Sunday afternoon is at MoMA PS1 on Long Island City. Yakuza Baby and I love hanging out at The Meeting, by James Turrell. Everyone sits on the rectangular (or might it be square) bench. There’s no where to turn your gaze except at each other, at the sky. The sky in the middle of the ceiling feels real, but it’s so blue, and it’s so clear. At different points, it makes us wonder if it’s really there or it is simply an illusion.
The best of art and education does this. It makes us:
question our assumptions
connect to other people in surprising ways
see what’s in front of us every day as if for the first time
Yakuza Baby attending a meeting with the sky.
- Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education, LIU Post in New York and also creator of the bilingual comic book iPad app, Dim Sum Warriors
Been thinking and trying to imagine what public schooling might look like based on the kind of peer-to-peer, mass-to-mass, spontaneous learning networks that we learn through now. How would school as “learning network” maintain it’s public role of providing access to a good education for all kids, and providing a space for a diversity of people to interact with each other?
“Studies show widening gap between rich, poor students,” says today’s New York Times, reporting that although the gap between the races has been narrowed in recent years, the educational gap between rich and poor has widened.
I see this as a result of children’s different levels of access to forms of capital – not just economic, but also social and cultural capital (for a detailed explanation, take a look at French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s “Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture”).
So, for example, a kid in a middle-income home might know a relative, or a parent’s friend, who is a doctor, a lawyer or a professor, who can give advice about the most strategic ways of applying for college, and who can make going to college an unquestioned reality for the kid. Low-income kids have far less access.
Are there solutions?
Across different school districts in the U.S., there have been experiments with “economic integration” of schools. The results have been powerful – low-income students perform much better when they are in schools which are predominantly middle-income. They gain access to the kinds of social and cultural capital that their school mates have, and their schools benefit from the kind of support that middle income parents are able to afford the school. See: “Study of Montgomery County schools shows benefits of economic integration”.
However, there are challenges. First, the opposition from middle-income parents who feel that they have paid high prices in order to access more exclusive schooling communities. It is important to note, however, that the research shows economic integration demonstrates no adverse effect on the academic achievement of middle to high income students. In other words, their kids don’t lose anything when they hang out with poor kids. I would even argue that it is, in fact, educationally beneficial to interact with people different from ourselves.
Second, it is simply a logistical and numerical impossibility to truly mix rich and poor kids because they live so far apart from each other and there are far more low-income kids and kids in poverty than there are One-percenters or those who are closer to the One-percenters.
Whether we are middle or high income, we all get hurt when poor kids don’t get a good education. What the economic integration of schools has shown us is that poor kids, given access to the right social and cultural capital, can be much more successful academically. Instead of testing ourselves out of educational problems, the focus should be on providing the resources for poor kids to access social and cultural capital.
For my home country of Singapore, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for a small country (it’s easy for students to travel to different parts of the country) to try this bold new education reform of “economic integration of schools” – I think it will be bold, clever, and it will actually be good for everyone.
Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education, LIU Post in New York and also creator of the bilingual comic book iPad app, Dim Sum Warriors
Enjoyed this article, “How Children Learn a Second Language” by Linda Halgunseth. I grew up with multiple languages and my daughter is now growing up in a bilingual environment. I see how for my almost three-year old daughter, her linguistic adaptability has also framed her way of thinking about her interactions with others.
When she encounters a new person, she tries to guess what language they speak and uses that, but if that doesn’t work, she switches language, and if that doesn’t work, she tries to use signs, or actions, or she tries to approximate the tones and sounds of the recipient’s language while speaking her own language. Knowing and understanding that people speak different languages and knowing different languages seems to give her the faith and belief that she can communicate with anyone, she just needs to find the right language.
I think that it will make a big difference to children’s experience of schooling in the U.S. if knowing more than one language is regarded more widely as a strength rather than a deficit. Kids will try harder to communicate with each other rather than consider someone who doesn’t speak English abnormal.
Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education, LIU Post in New York and also creator of the bilingual comic book iPad app, Dim Sum Warriors
Parenting is such a plunge into the unknown that we often desire experts, or many other parents found through Googling to give us definite guidelines, like, “kids should only have 20 minutes of TV a day”, or “kids should sleep at 8pm every night”. These rules make us more secure as parents, so we can “parent” like many other parents are parenting.
It is scary to parent with our children as collaborators.
The iPad is such a tremendous lure for everyone, especially kids. My nearly 3 year-old daughter loves playing cooking with Toca Boca Kitchen, has been learning the sounds of alphabets from Starfall ABCs, and surprised me when she said, “Hexagon!” when pointing to a hexagonal STOP sign, thanks to the app, Make it Pop..
I have found that I am very impressed by how Kaikai controls her own experiences on the iPad – she doesn’t want and doesn’t need me to direct her learning. She chooses what she wants to learn and often slaps my hand away when I try to intervene.
But am I a derelict parent by letting her use the iPad whenever she asks for it? Should there be a limit to the amount of screen time that she should have?.
Peter Gray’s perspective in Psychology Todayis the most enlightened perspective I have heard on these questions so far
He argues that:
1. There hasn’t been research evidence to support all the fears that we have about kids being less sociable, less physically fit, less intelligent because of their screen time;
2. That kids can and should have the freedom to regulate their own learning;
3. That in fact, research has shown many positive benefits to the brain and even in terms of social interaction with computer use.
Here’s where I stand. (Note: this is not carte blanche permission for parents to now plonk their kids in front of screens, but must be read in the context of the learning environment in the home.)
Here’s how this translates into practice in my household (at least for the moment):
1. We try to have an environment at home for Kaikai to direct her own experiences – not just in terms of iPad use, but also in terms of playing with clay, reading, making up stories. Playing with the iPad or watching TV is a part of this decision to have her direct her own experiences as much as possible.
2. We talk to her about her various experiences through the day and make connections between the kinds of texts that she reads and real life experience. For example, she did that herself with “hexagon”, while we do that through, e.g., asking her, “Remember this dinosaur in Dino Dan?”
3. We also try to provide her with a variety of activities every week. She’s quite happy to put down the iPad or abandon the TV if there’s something new and fun available, especially if we’re participating too.
I remember that there was one summer a long time ago, before parenthood and before starting work, when my husband and I did nothing but watch crap like “VHI: Where Are They Now” and “E! True Hollywood Story” on our TV while slouched in our couch. By the end of that summer, we were so disgusted with ourselves that what followed was a burst of creative production for a really, really long time. Who is to say that screen time, even screen time watching “Where are They Now” is necessarily useless? Or perhaps you could say, imagine how much more productive you would have been if you’d spent that time reading books instead of watching TV. Who can really predict what happens next?
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Dr. Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education at Long Island University, C.W.Post and the creator of the Dim Sum Warriors comics app, available through the App Store in 2012. Read a comic, learn a language! www.dimsumwarriors.com.
Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about “The Value of Teachers“. He cited new research from economists, Raj Chetty (Harvard), John Friedman (Harvard), and Jonah Rockoff (Columbia) to highlight how important a good teacher is to the future possible earnings of each child:
Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime — or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class — all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn.
I agree: it is of urgent importance that good teachers are recruited and retained in the profession, and bad teachers are asked to leave.
It is his proposal for how this can happen that I cannot buy into. He writes:
And, increasingly, we’re getting solid evidence of what reforms may help: teacher evaluations based on student performance, higher pay and prestige for good teachers, dismissals for weak teachers.
In today’s Times, we read about what these conclusions about what works in education reform look like in NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s proposals:
Mr. Bloomberg proposed enticing top teachers to remain in the profession with a $20,000 salary increase if they are rated “highly effective” for two consecutive years.
He said the city should offer to pay off up to $25,000 in student loans — $5,000 a year, for five years — for top college graduates who teach in the city’s schools.
And, seeking to break through a stalemate between the city and the union over a teacher evaluation system, he said the city would form committees to evaluate teachers at 33 struggling schools based on classroom performance. He said this would allow the city to “replace up to 50 percent of the faculty” at these schools, and to reclaim nearly $60 million in federal grants that have been withheld because of the lack of an evaluation system.
This is a simplistic carrots-and-sticks approach without an understanding of human motivation and the collaborative nature of teaching and learning. This is also the kind of approach more aligned with the individualized rewards and punishment environment in banking and finance- and look what that got us into. Within financial institutions, the potential for handsome individual rewards got bankers to create ever riskier and more complex products that eventually brought the US and global economy to its knees.
Enough said.
Teaching is work that is highly creative, emotional, and collaborative. It is not a job in a factory where productivity can be measured simply by the sheer increase in say, the number of bottles that are produced. Kids are not digits, or bottles.
Daniel Pink in his book Drive and in his TED talk below summarized incontrovertible research in motivation showing how the carrots and sticks approach “dulls thinking and blocks creativity.”
Imagine ourselves as the high-achieving teacher who is recruited at $150,000 a year to teach in classes with 50-60 students (assuming Bloomberg’s suggestion of firing half the teachers and doubling the class size comes true). What would happen is that within a year, you and I would be frustrated that we aren’t working with the kids and affecting their individual lives and learning – too much to grade, too many students to manage, the conditions and environment of teaching have not changed. The salary might be so good that, like make bankers I know, it attracts us to stay teaching even though we are less and less satisfied with the work. This is why after some years, so many lawyers and bankers I know start dreaming about becoming yoga instructors, starting their own bakeries, making films, and even going into teaching, because they need something that feeds their souls, not just their wallets. How would kids benefit from such teachers?
What’s my proposal you say?
Teacher recruitment has to be rigorous, and once recruited, all teachers get paid a good salary.
The conditions of teaching has to support what makes good teachers do their best: small class sizes, collaborative and collegial environments, time and focus on continual professional development, teacher autonomy in terms of curriculum development and assessment, supportive mentorship.
Teacher evaluation has to consider a basket of goods that takes into account the collaborative nature of teaching: student work, lesson plans and assignments, principal and peer evaluations, degree of collaboration, degree of contributions to the community, level of support for diverse learners, communication with parents and community.
There is only one way that I feel test scores should be used in teacher evaluations – not for identifying the best teachers. There should be a very basic test score that a school can identify as being necessary for all students. When a teacher performs badly in the evaluation of the basket of schools listed above, below acceptable test scores can be used as part of the the evidence package to let a teacher go.
Most people that I know who go into teaching have some level of desire to help children learn. The best way to recruit, retain and motivate these teachers is to provide all the possible conditions for them to work together with each other to help children learn, not to create a system of individual stars and losers.
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Dr. Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education at Long Island University, C.W.Post and the creator of the Dim Sum Warriors comics app, available through the App Store in 2012. Read a comic, learn a language! www.dimsumwarriors.com.
I don’t say this often enough and I should. Queens Public Library, you are awesome!
This week, Joseph Berger wrote in the New York Times about “Queens Libraries Speak the Mother Tongue“. The Mitchell-Linden branch of the Queens Public Library has just been so welcoming and inclusive to us and all the parents and children in the neighborhood. The wonderful children’s librarian in the the Mitchell-Linden library, Mrs H, makes an effort to know all the children’s names in the correct intonation, no matter what languages their families speak, and can greet everyone in their own language.
I also remember an incident when a Chinese-speaking parent asked her in tentative English,
“How do I read a story like you to my child?”
And Mrs H asked, “What language do you feel most comfortable in?”
Parent: “Chinese”
Mrs H: “You can read in Chinese too – it doesn’t have to be in English. What’s most important is to have your child see you enjoying reading and sharing a book with her.”
I love this neighborhood and all the languages that we are surrounded by and feel lucky that my daughter can grow up in this environment.
Yesterday morning, Kaikai, who’s two and a half, told me “I am sick, I want to stay at home to rest”. She looked fine, and her Papa had been sick over the weekend, and her Nanny was staying at home sick, so I thought she was pretending to be sick, to be like Papa and Nanny.
Papa and I enticed her with, how about the park and a movie? She said she wanted to watch “the Penguin movie”. We tried to persuade her to watch “the Muppet movie” but she really really wanted “the Penguin movie” – so Happy Feet it is.
By the end of the day, as she’s trying to pick edamame with her chopsticks, she crawled onto me and put her feverish head on my chest. We asked for the check and she immediately reached for the fruit platter the waitress brought with the check. I think her body told her that fruit was what she needed.
When we got home, she took some Ibuprofen and went to bed. In the middle of the night, she kicked off her blanket and woke up a few times to go to the bathroom and we would offer her water, which she drank thirstily. Her fever had subsided.
At 5 am, she suddenly woke up and told me, “Mommy, I need to wash my hands”. I said, “no, you don’t … go back to sleep”. After a few minutes, she insisted, “I need to wash my hands, with cold water!” and proceeded to walk to the bathroom. I felt her and realized that her fever had returned.
Lesson learned: I need to learn to trust my child as she tells me how she feels. I need to help her trust and listen to her instincts, about her body, about what she needs, about good and bad. And the Penguin movie wasn’t so bad either.
I have been learning about creativity. I have learned that making something out of nothing is incredibly scary.
What if the people around me don’t understand my work? What if my work never sees the light of day? What if it’s crap?
In writing, making films, and now writing comics, there are days when I feel on top of the world as I make connections I didn’t see before, and there are days when I am filled with self-doubt.
Over the years, two of the most important lessons that I have learned about creating are:
1. Always complete what you start;
2. It takes as much effort to make a crappy product as it does a brilliant product. So you might as well focus your energies on making it as good as you can.
And thanks to my friend, Michelle Ingkavet, I’ve learned two additional lessons through this Ted talk by the best-selling author, Elizabeth Gilbert, that really puts the emotions of creativity into perspective:
3. It’s not you, the individual who is creating, but your muse, your fairy, your little gnome. So, don’t take too much credit if it’s good or beat yourself up if it’s bad;
and,
4. As a creator, you have to turn up everyday for work.
A big thank you to all the creators who inspire me through your daily, unending labor.
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Dr. Yen Yen Woo is Associate Professor of Education at Long Island University, C.W.Post and the creator of the Dim Sum Warriors comics app, available through the App Store in 2012. Read a comic, learn a language! www.dimsumwarriors.com.
Who can really predict what happens next?
