Tackling financial illiteracy

I read today’s news, that the Obama administration had “announced a new campaign to promote financial education for high school students nationwide,” with mixed reactions. On the one hand, it’s a no-brainer that students need a better understanding of financial issues, both to handle money wisely in their personal lives and to be well-informed voters when it comes to how their tax money is used. But is a new campaign pushed by our President the best way to accomplish that?

Looking for related news stories, I discovered that the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy had made a number of recommendations last January (prior to Obama’s inauguration), including that “Schools should be required to teach financial education from kindergarten through 12th grade.” Wondering why it took so long to even start to implement these, I read another article which explained that the changeover in administrations was one barrier to faster progress (presumably that would have been the case regardless of who the outgoing and incoming Presidents were).

It also pointed to the difficulty in implementing any kind of nationwide educational requirements, because most curricular decisions are made locally. Furthermore, teachers are already struggling to fit current curricular requirements into their class schedules. How are they going to squeeze in one more?

Ideally financial literacy is not treated as a separate program but is integrated into other classes. I think several things I read did stress this point. But I can’t help wondering something that I didn’t see addressed in any of the articles I read – what are the reasons this isn’t happening already? If something as obviously needed as financial literacy hasn’t already been incorporated into classroom teaching, are there underlying problems that won’t be solved by simply adding a new program at the federal level?

When fingers do the reading

Monday evening, our Webelos den went to the library to work on earning their Communicator pin. After going over how to find books and how to take good care of them, the children’s librarian brought out what looked like a very large photo album. This was a Braille copy of the Bible, she explained, and she gave the boys a chance to feel the pages.

My parents had friends who were blind, so I was familiar with the look and feel of Braille materials from an early age. (Not that I ever learned to read them.) It came as somewhat of a surprise, Monday, to realize that it has been so long since I have seen someone actually using Braille that it was probably something completely new to these fourth grade boys.

The librarian added that no one was using the Braille books anymore, so they had been removed from the library’s holdings. She saved the Braille Bible herself, because it seemed a shame to lose something so wonderful. Today people use recorded books instead, she explained.

When I was growing up, there were recorded books, but they weren’t widely available. When my grandfather had cataract surgery, he had patches over his eyes while he recovered, and we took turns staying with him and helping him out while he was unable to see. To pass the time, he listened to some recorded books, which were loaned out by the organization that made them available to blind people.

Books: Education (Opposing Viewpoints)

For a book less than two hundred pages long, this took me a long time to finish (and not only because I mislaid it for two weeks). The subject is interesting and relevant, and each viewpoint is short enough to finish easily in one sitting, even with a dog whimpering for attention (or maybe it’s the food I’m eating while I read) and staring at me with her big dark eyes. But as with the previous book that I read in this Opposing Viewpoints series (on Islam), I felt that the viewpoints were addressing various aspects of the issue without answering the points made by other writers.

Partly that is a result of these books being compiled from previously written materials, rather than essays written for the purpose of the book. The best books I have read that present opposing viewpoints allow each author to directly address the points made by other authors in the same volume – and better yet, to respond to their responses. One article did directly criticize the views expressed in the previous one, which had been written by then-President Clinton and was no doubt widely distributted. But its objection was that too many people would jump on what Clinton said to do without noting that he said one had to go about it the right way.

That probably applies to just about everything written on the subject of education, and accounts for a great many of the problems in the system at all levels. It is folly to take any one recommendation about education and try to apply it across the board, without consideration for how it will work out in a specific situation, and often without heeding the cautions that accompanied the initial recommendation. The best piece in the book, I think, is one that emphasizes the need for each local community to have authority for and take responsibility for implementing educational programs that meet their needs and their goals. That author also stressed that it is a long, difficult process, with no quick or easy fixes.

There are some places where bilingual education is done well. One of them happens to be in a community near ours, where elementary students (whose parents choose to have them participate in this program) learn to be fully bilingual, regardless of whether their first language is English or Spanish. Other bilingual programs have been found to be dismal failures. It is a mistake to say that bilingual education is best based on the success in West Liberty. But it is even more mistaken to say that the whole idea is flawed because of the places where it has been done so badly.

Reading Buddies

I am now a Reading Buddy.

Considering that google reported approximately 21 million hits when I searched on “reading buddies,” it’s hardly a new idea. Somewhere in those 21 million pages, I might possibly find who started the first program, whose success was copied over and over again in schools across the country. At least one of them has been around since 1994. So I’m somewhat surprised I never heard of it before.

I have known of programs pairing adult volunteers with students who struggle with reading. When we moved to Michigan in the fall of 1998, I volunteered in such a program at a nearby school until I found full-time work. But there, it was the students who did the reading, and our role as volunteers was to listen, help with difficult words, and ask questions to check for comprehension. I’ve no idea how much my participation helped the girl I worked with – six weeks is probably not long enough to make a big difference. (They assured me before I started, though, that they were glad to have me even for a limited time.)

In this program, though, I do the reading – at least most of the time. According to the school principal, who presented the idea of the program to our church a few weeks ago, many of the children in his school have no one read to them at home. Most of the children live in poverty, and statistics show that they get read to about a tenth of a percent of the time a middle class child is read to. One of the many websites I looked at said that in households living in poverty, there are often no children’s books in the house, and often no adult able to read them anyway.

I’ve no idea how many hours I read to my boys over the years, or how many hours my father read to us as children, but it’s sad to think of a child getting only a tiny fraction of that time. My own boys are long past the age when I sat and read to them at bedtime (though once in a while my younger son does ask me to read something). I’ve always felt a bit awkward with children until I get to know them (I was very relieved to discover that I didn’t have the same problem with my own children because I’ve known them since birth), but I love books, so I decided this was a program I had to get involved in.

A better alphabet?

I’ve driven many times past church signs written in a language I didn’t understand but knew to be Korean. Actually, I’m not sure I knew they were Korean until I married a Presbyterian, and learned about the strength of the Presbyterian church in Korea. Mostly, I still thought of the unreadable symbols as another of those Asian languages that don’t use the kind of letters we do.

Beyond that, I never gave it much thought. I like learning languages, but never had any inclination to learn a language that required learning a new alphabet, except for New Testament Greek (which wasn’t too difficult because I knew much of the alphabet from math and science classes, and many of the letters are similar to those in our own alphabet). I tried learning the Hebrew alphabet once, but quickly lost interest.

I do find the whole subject of linguistics fascinating, however, and for several years, as a teenager, planned on becoming a Bible translator. I knew that it meant having to learn a tribal language unknown to outsiders, and then develop a system for writing it down, before I could even begin translating the Bible, or teach its speakers to read and write their own language. The idea was daunting, yet also an appealing challenge, all the more so because it would bring the Word of God to people who had never heard it.

I never imagined using a completely different alphabet, however. There are languages with sounds that our alphabet cannot represent, but the International Phonetic Alphabet can account for virtually all of them. In college, I took a course in which we studied how different sounds are formed by the mouth, and how to represent them all using the IPA. (I also learned that I don’t pronounce “s” the normal way, and that I have a “lazy jaw” which results in a tendency to mispronounce certain vowel sounds.)

It’s been a long time since I did much reading on linguistics, but I was fascinated to read recently, in the Wall Street Journal, about the effort of some Korean linguists to export their alphabet to other countries. The Cia-Cia language, spoken by less than a hundred thousand people on the island of Buton in Indonesia, has never had a written form. Efforts to use our Roman alphabet to write Cia-Cia produced confusion. The Korean linguists are convinced that their Hangeul script is the answer.

Why, I wondered, would the Korean alphabet be better than the IPA? It turns out that Hangeul was designed specifically to make it easy to learn. Most alphabets evolved over time, but Hangeul was created to replace the difficult Chinese and Japanese characters that had previously been the only way to write the Korean language. Not only do the symbols represent the sounds of the Korean language, their shapes even indicate the shape of the mouth for forming those sounds.

Faith, science, and BioLogos

One of the regulars over at worldmagblog emailed me today about a website he thought I would find interesting, after I had mentioned my difficulty finding good materials to evaluate the conflicting claims of creationism and evolution. I had heard of Francis Collins before – mostly from posts at worldmagblog – but I knew little about him except that he is a highly respected scientist who is also a Christian, and who sees his faith and his science as compatible rather than contradictory.

He set up The BioLogos Foundation “to address the escalating culture war between science and faith in the United States.” Through a variety of resources, it “addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life.”

I’ve just started exploring the BioLogos website, but I certainly like what I see so far. There are answers to Frequently Asked Questions about faith and science, such as:

• What is the proper relationship between science and religion?
• Can scientific and scriptural truth be reconciled?
• Does thermodynamics disprove evolution?
• How are the ages of the Earth and universe calculated? How accurate are those figures?
• How does the Fall fit into evolutionary history? Were Adam and Eve historical figures?
• How should we interpret the Genesis flood account?

Some of the “Coming soon” questions are:

• Can evolution explain morality?
• How does the harshness of evolution align with the idea of a loving God?
• How can evolution account for the complexity of life on earth today?

There are also articles, discussion groups, resources for teachers, and more. If you have an interest in this area, it’s well worth checking out.

Middle-aged brains

A conversation yesterday with my older son, comparing his high school physics class with the one I took in 1979, reminded me that this year is my 30th high school reunion. (I don’t plan to attend – for all I know it’s already over – I had few friends in high school and I can find most of them through Facebook.) As he went through elementary school and middle school, I looked forward to when he got to high school and we could discuss subjects of interest. I thought I might even be able to help him with his schoolwork sometimes, as I thought I remembered things pretty well, if general if not all the details.

I have occasionally managed to help him with a math problem (though I find that I can only do so with a pencil and scratch paper – it seems I used to be able to do more work in my head but I’m not sure), but most of the time I find myself casting in vain to dredge up knowledge that I thought had been submerged just below the surface. Apparently a lot more than I thought has long since sunk to the bottom, rusted, disintegrated, or whatever else happens to knowledge left too long unused.

I read somewhere, a few years ago, that studies have shown that the brain of a young adult is better suited to absorbing new information, while the brain of an older adult (older meaning past young-adult age, not “old”) is better suited to synthesizing different pieces of information. It’s been over ten years since I last took a for-credit class (when I got my MBA), so I can’t say how my brain is doing in that regard. I still love learning, but I haven’t had to submit my learning to a written test in a long time.

Fifty-seven-year-old Sue Shellenbarger accepted her teenage son’s challenge to take the SAT this year, forty-one years after taking it the last time. Today’s Wall Street Journal has the fascinating account of her test preparation, taking the test, and the results. I’m not particularly keen on emulating her, though I will take refuge in claiming that it is to avoid the unnecessary expense. I had very good scores thirty years ago, I find it highly unlikely that I would get as good scores again, and I have no desire to prove myself right.

A new look at old books

Since I have been an avid reader for as long as I can remember, my husband is also, and our sons take after us, Children’s Book Week seems somewhat unnecessary in our family. What would make us read books more than we already do? Still, books and children being two of my big interests, I couldn’t help but take notice when an email from amazon.com let me know it was Children’s Book Week.

So I followed the link before deleting the email, but I was disappointed to find nothing about it at amazon.com except links to children’s books to buy. I suppose that’s to be expected from an online bookstore, but I was looking for something more. So I went googled the phrase, and found the official site of Children’s Book Week. I found a bookmark I could download and print if I had some cardstock, which I don’t.

More interesting was a page of story starters, so I printed out the one started by Jon Scieszka (whose book The True Story of the Three Little Pigs is a family favorite here). I was going to work on it with my son, whose career goal this week is to be a writer (he was one of a select number of students from his elementary school invited to a Writers Workshop, held day before yesterday). But I was brimming with ideas and started writing. Scieszka called it “And Then…” but my version is more like “The Egg from Outer Space.” Maybe I’ll post it when I finish it.

Scholastic.com had more suggestions of how to celebrate the week. (One is amnesty for overdue library books – so that’s where our local library got the idea! They also offer free replacement of lost library cards this week, though when I tried to take advantage of it for my son’s card, it turned out it had been lost at the library, and they had simply filed it away for him.)

They also have a whole section of resources for parents, which will take me some time to explore, but I hope to find some good ideas on broadening my son’s reading interests beyong Animorphs, Goosebumps, Garfield, Pokemon, and Magic School Bus. (He reads lots of stuff at school, but at home he mostly reads and rereads those.)

What I was more interested in, that took me longer to find, was about older children’s books. It seems that for most of my life I’ve heard about how children used to read more advanced books than they read today, but I had little idea what those were. And even when I learned of specific examples, I generally hadn’t read them myself and knew nothing of them but their titles. Homeschooling catalogs generally list a lot of them, but I wasn’t eager to just start buying them based on a blurb in a catalog.

Tonight I finally found a treasure trove. The Baldwin Online Children’s Literature Project has the full text of a large number of children’s books from about 1880 to 1922. Because these books are in the public domain, individuals may download and print these for personal and educational use. A few of these I am already familiar with, particularly books by Howard Pyle and Thornton Burgess. Some I read as a child, such as Thomas Bullfinch’s Age of Chivalry, but I struggled to get through them and didn’t think of them as children’s literature.

Most of them I’ve never heard of. A lot of them are history rather than fiction, which I suppose still counts as children’s literature if it was written for children to read, but isn’t what I generally think of under that heading. It’s hard to see how In the Days of Alfred the Great or War Inventions and How they were Invented could be as appealing to a child as Harry Potter – though they do sound interesting to me.

The site is well organized, with pages to look up books by author, title, or genre, as well as guides to selecting books on history or world civilizations. There are books of fables and fairy tales, stories from the Bible and stories of saints, biographies and science books (though science is one of the smaller categories). I’m not sure exactly how I’ll use this, but it’s a wonderful resource to have found.

Hands on learning

When I took high school biology, “hands-on” science meant dissecting an earthworm and a frog. I suppose I learned something from the activity – if nothing else, that I could hold a scalpel steady and keep from cutting in the wrong places. But I’m glad to see that our high school’s new biology teacher is taking “hands-on” out of the classroom.

I read in today’s paper about students catching tadpoles in the pond at school (though the idea had been to catch flatworms). This teacher has also given his students the opportunity to volunteer for a program where they work with elementary school students in an after school program, learning about native Iowa plants, ecology, and recycling.

I hear so much at worldmagblog about how terrible public schools are. It’s good to see some positive news, and see how students are not only learning but applying their learning by helping teach others. My older son has, in the past, been involved in programs helping teach music to younger students. And my younger son has benefited from older students who have taught science and – most recently – German language and culture.

I enjoyed being a student when I was in school. For a time I wished that I could go on being a student year after year. But eventually I got tired of just learning and wanted to do something useful for other people. I’m glad the students in our district get to start doing that while they’re still in school.

Am I a visual learner?

It was when I was reviewing curriculum and teaching methods for Sunday School, around ten years ago, that I first came across the theory of multiple intelligences. It made perfect sense to me based on both my own experiences as a student and the difficulties I had as a teacher.

I had long recognized that I was very visually oriented. I don’t have a photographic memory, but people sometimes think I must, based on my ability to recall material I have seen. In contrast, I have often been frustrated by my inability to make sense of what is being spoken out loud.

I hated the language lab in high school French class – I could understand the words perfectly on paper, but in the headphones they were a jumble of sounds that rarely fit together into recognizable words. (When I studied Spanish in college, I was pleasantly surprised to find I had no such difficulty. Of course, that could be in part because Spanish is such a nice phonetically spelled language, with very few silent letters.)

When one of my sons asks for help with a homework problem and starts reading it to me, I have to ask him to let me read it for myself. I simply can’t make sense of it from hearing it, but I quickly grasp the idea when I read it. I also find in recent years that I frequently mishear what someone says. (I got my hearing checked and they found nothing wrong – though I realize that it may be only certain kinds of sounds or pitches rather than the overall volume that is the issue.)

Sometimes my family is amused by my (mis)interpretations, but my younger son especially gets very frustrated when I don’t understand him. He’s not so great at listening comprehension himself, apparently – his scores on the ITBS this year were all high except for that one area, where he scored quite low. He also needs instructions broken down into simple tasks, and repeated – though this may be related to his autism.