Tag Archives: Education

The Handy Answer Book for Kids by Gina Misiroglu

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Synopsis:
Lots of answers to the kind of questions kids like to ask.

Review:
The Handy Answer Book for Kids is a great little reference book, filled with pictures and charts and other visual delights. The questions are a lot of fun, ranging from the profound–”Who is God?”–to the trivial–”How does a vacuum cleaner pick up dirt?” Parents will find lots of springboards for great discussions of important ideas and issues. Kids will love all the tidbits of information. There is a good discussion on the biology of how human life begins that doesn’t discuss sex directly, which would allow for an older child to ask questions if they choose.

I had some disagreements with some of the answers that touched on the theological, but I think that the answers are phrased in such a way as to provoke more discussion. I wish it contained a chapter on world religions, or some questions about religion in the world cultures chapter.

Many thanks to Lisa Roe and Visible Ink for the review copy.

Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax MD PhD

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Synopsis:
An examination of the science of sex differences.

Review:
Apart from some outdated and irresponsible advice about breastfeeding (says the LLL leader), I got a lot out of Why Gender Matters, which I listened to on audiobook.

Dr. Sax talks about how the neurological differences between men and women, and how that influences how we perceive the world and the choices we make. He applies it to teaching and to childrearing. In short, his argument is that gender blind education is harmful because it ignores biological hardwiring. Girls can excel in math and boys can excel in art, but they need to be taught these subjects differently. They can get to the same place, but by following different paths.

Interestingly, he says that sexuality has nothing to do with it. A gay man’s brain is still much more similar to a heterosexual man’s brain than it is to a woman’s brain.

Some examples:

The eyes of boys are dominated by the cells that perceive motion and direction. The eyes of girls are dominated by the cells that perceive color, shape, and texture. (Rods & cones, can’t remember which.) A girl will draw a picture with a wide array of colors, because she can see more color diversity than her boy classmate. She will draw faces, because they have lots of inherent variation. A boy will reach for black, silver, and gray crayons, and might just scribble a blur. When asked, he’ll say it’s a rocket or a car or something like that. The girl will be praised because her teacher has been trained to teach children to move towards using colors and detail. The boy will get the message that he is not good at art, and that art is for girls.

Boys and girls use different parts of the brain when thinking about abstract concepts. Girls use the cerebral cortex, meaning that these abstract concepts are unified with everything else they could be thinking about. Boys use the hippocampus, which is isolated from the rest of the brain. So when teaching about numbers, it’s useful to use different pedagogical methods. He uses a fascinating example using Fibonacci numbers that I can’t do justice to, but basically the boys get excited by pure numbers, and then are led to see their application in the wider world. Girls start with the wider world, and then are led back to number theory.

Girls have sharper hearing than boys, so a boy in the back of classroom may appear inattentive when really he just can’t hear his female teacher. A girl sitting in the front of the classroom may think her male teacher is yelling at her.

How Children Learn by John Holt

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Synopsis:
John Holt’s diary of classroom observations.

Review:
How Children Learn is far too dense for me to critically analyze. Suffice to say I am really enamored of his respect for children, and inspired by his philosophies on facilitating learning. The closing paragraph of the book sums it up:

In my mind’s ear I can hear the anxious voices of a hundred teachers asking me, “How can you tell, how can you be sure what the children are learning, or even that they are learning anything?” The answer is simple. We can’t tell. We can’t be sure. What I am trying to say about education rests on a belief that, though there is much evidence to support it, I cannot prove, and that may never be proved. Call it a faith. This faith is that man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.

How to Raise a Modern-Day Joseph by Linda Massey Weddle

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Synopsis:
A guide for parents for Bible study activities from age 2 through the teenage years, centered around Biblical knowledge and moral character.

Review:
I thought that How to Raise a Modern-Day Joseph had some good ideas for educational activities for parents, but after reading Christless Christianity I read it with a much more critical eye. Modern-Day Joseph does contain the semi-Pelagian notions that we “make a decision for Christ” and that just doesn’t fly with Reformed (read Calvinist) me anymore.

What I thought was so interesting was her use of Joseph’s parents, Jacob and Rachel (and by extension Leah). Though Joseph was raised by very fallen people, nevertheless he loved the Lord and sought to serve him with his life. She does acknowledge that God had something to do with this, yet the whole book is riddled with the notion that parents are responsible for creating these modern-day Josephs.

Linda Massey Weddle raises an important question: “Why do so many children raised in evangelical churches leave the faith?” Like so many, unfortunately, her fundamental assumption is that it’s because we haven’t tried hard enough. Michael Horton’s book shows a deeper problem–children are leaving the faith because the churches never taught it to begin with.

Assumptions aside, I do think that this book has a lot to offer. Her methodology offers a big-picture plan for teaching the Word to children and teenagers–and by extension back to parents. She also has good insights into developmental stages. I don’t think I will use this book myself with Superfast Toddler–we will use the Westminster Shorter Catechism as our guide–but I think it’s a worthwhile resource.

How Children Fail by John Holt

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Synopsis:
The journals of a teacher reveal how the mistakes that children make reveal a lot about how they are failing to learn–and how schools are failing to teach.

Review:
How Children Fail was riveting reading. I loved how John Holt paid attention to the kids he encountered so that he could help them learn. He came to realize that teachers were seeking to impose structural forms on the minds of children, where children are best served by being led to develop those forms for themselves.

Since I am hoping to homeschool Superfast Baby, this book was incredibly instructive. It was initially published in 1965, so I would hope that schools have changed some and that its critique is out-of-date. The insights into the process of learning (or “not-learning,” as it were) were fascinating. The techniques he employed for teaching math reminded me a lot of the Montessori school I went to, and I will definitely explore those methods when that time comes around for us.

John Holt on Learning to Read

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From Learning All the Time:

There are two diametrically opposite ways of opening to children the world of books. One was is to start them with the names and sounds of individual letters, then with small words, then with small groups of these words joined to make small sentences, then with small reading books, and then other books, each a little harder than the one before, until the children supposedly have enough reading skills to read any book they want. The trouble is that by this time most of them wouldn’t care if they never saw another book in their lives. Gaining entry into the world of books this way boils down to surmounting a long row of obstacles, each a little larger than the one before, or going through a series of locked doors that open only when you say the correct password, only to lead you, of course, to still another locked door.

The other way of opening the world of books to children is the way it has been done for Anna. The world of books was first opened to her, she became a citizen of it, when for the first time she clutched a book in her hand and thought, “This book is mine!” Instead of beginning with a tiny idea, the sound of a letter, she began with a big and important one, that books belong to people and could belong to her. In time she filled in this big idea with smaller but still large ideas: that books have stories locked in them, that they have written words in them, and that the stories are somehow contained in the words, so that somehow figuring out the words is the key to unlocking and taking possession of the stories, and that these stories can be shared with, given to, other people.