Ascendly Building the creators of tomorrow, right after school

I had fun today working with Lucas at the Belmont Media Center. We filmed an introductory test video to help Ascendly coaches prepare for their lessons.  

This was our first real filming and I got to explain how to make an electronic greeting card.

JJ and I were teaching a class last week to K-2 graders on building bridges. While we had showed them some techniques, a lot of the kids, especially the younger ones, had some trouble building the part of the bridge that is suspended in the air.

It is not immediately obvious, I admit, to figure out how to get a bunch of 2×2 and 2×4 blocks to form a span between two columns on either side. Many kids were inclined to build the span off the end of one of the (not so steady) columns, working their way across, carefully interweaving the 2×4 bricks. (It turns out no matter how many times you show them how to build it on the ground first, some kids just really want to build it in the air. More fun, I guess.)

Building a bridge up in the air is really hard so it wasn’t surprising to the grown-ups in the room when the bridge the kids had been steadfastly working on suddenly crumpled when the column broke in half or when the span came off the column at the top.  Even those who had followed our suggestions of building it on the ground first, sometimes struggled to get the bridge attached without crumbling their columns.

I watched the reaction of the kids when their creations faltered under the pressure of attaching new bricks at precarious angles or from pushing too hard on the bridge span at an odd angle when it wasn’t lined up properly. Crack. Thud. All their work was now sitting in front of them in pieces. Some kids picked it up and started over again. A fair number however, got visibly frustrated. Some cried. Other blurted out, “I can’t do this!” or “This is never gonna work!” JJ or I (usually JJ, because he’s much better at this than I am) would go and sit with them and encourage them to try and figure out what went wrong and help them find a way to make it work.

It occurred to me that these types of engineering classes are a great place to teach kids about making mistakes and learning from them, which I regard as a critical skill in developing curious and productive young minds. In a culture such as ours where everyone is a winner and well-meaning parents do everything they can to keep their kids from experiencing disappointment, we may be inadvertently creating kids that are afraid of messing up, lack resilience and don’t have the psychological tools to learn from their mistakes. (For more an interesting take on this, see this recent article in Psychology Today.)

And yet, to be an innovator, to be creative and to invent new ideas and approaches that will have an impact on society when they are adults, kids today need to learn the art of learning from their mistakes. And you can’t learn from mistakes unless you have the opportunity to make mistakes in a safe environment where the downside is limited and someone or something can help you figure out where you went wrong. It seems like we have an opportunity in Ascendly and other STEM projects to create this type of environment, which is another reason why this whole endeavor is so enormously worthwhile.

Hey – my family is covered in the National Society of Professional Engineers' July issue "A Family Edu-vacation" #STEM http://t.co/yl6Fi4kd

— JJ Rohrer (@ascendlyJJ) July 2, 2012

Here are the short highlights: “His third-grader son wanted to go to Dubai to see Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. ” & “Rohrer would love to start a movement to take school kids to visit local engineering, science, and technology companies and structures after school or on weekends.”

You can see the original article here:

Thanks Eva for writing the the article!

So, in case you didn’t hear, Finland keeps scoring at the top of PISA tests for education. It’s a big deal. Their kids don’t study like crazy. They don’t test like crazy. Their teachers are highly unionized. They are experiencing an expanding, yet equally well educated, immigrant community. They also have teachers that, on average, are paid less than U.S. teachers. The Atlantic Monthly just ran a piece, that mainly claims their key to success is their lack of private schools and lack of private universities. While the purely public hypothesis gives me food for thought, I don’t beleive it can be that simple.

I encourage you to read the article, it’s good fun with a mostly intelligent discussion in the comment section.

I’ll wait.

Letcombe /Foter

You can skip to the end if you actually read the article.

Ok, here are the highlights from the article:

• All their schools are public, but the U.S. doesn’t want to talk about this contrast.
• Finland reformed its school system some time ago by focusing upon equal access for all students – their high PISA scores were a surprise to them.
• Although Finland is very homogoneous, 4.7% vs. the US’s 12%, are foreign born. Finland’s immigrants tend to congregate in a concentrated area, but they haven’t seen much change in variation between the finish schools, despite their recently doubling of immigrant population. So Finland is apparently educating their new immigrants just as effectively as their native citizens.

The Finnish results contrast with Norway, which has very similiar demographic and georgraphic makeup to Finland, but it has pursued a more U.S. like educational policy with more competition and more focus upon testing. Norway’s results were less than stellar.

Leo-setä /Foter

The article concludes with

Finland’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

and

The problem facing education in America isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed.

I’m left with a few outstanding questions:

• I’ve learned, from other sources, that the average US teacher is paid more than the average Finnish teacher, but I would like to know if US teachers are paid equally well for their respective regions. For example, a teacher in NYC, or in DC, can be paid significantly more than their North Dakota counterpart, or their Finnish counterpart, but be still be paid badly for their region. Also, statistically, the large number of teachers in NYC will make it seem like teaching is a lucrative profession if you are looking at it through a mid-westerner’s low-cost-of-living lens of the world. I’m trying to determine if our teachers, when compared to Finland’s teachers, are underpaid. Maybe standard-of-living is a better metric? I feel like I don’t have enough data to have an informed perpective.
• Several commenters suggested Finaland’s culture of raising their kids to be independant and self-reliant was crucial to their success. One person suggested it would be reasonable to send a 14 year old on a 3 – 4 hour train ride, on their own, to visit grandparants. Is there any data, or at least anecdotal evidence, that this translates well to academic achievement? It makes sense, but is it true?
• One poster claimed many U.S. school districts spend 20% of their budget on special-needs children, implying that this significantly undermined the educational process for the remaining children. Is that number remotaly accurate? Is it significantly different than other systems with similiar demographics? What about other expenses, like athletics? We know the U.S. spends a lot on education, but is that whole number a bad proxy?
• I have read, but can no longer find, articles that claimed that the US actually doesn’t have an education problem once you controlled for 1st and 2nd generation immigrant status. Is it true?

Leo-setä /Foter

In a future post, I’ll try to post updates as I find the answers to some of these question.

Sidebar – Did you know?
Finland is not considered a Scandanavian country – it’s Nordic.