Monday, December 30, 2013

Judging Goldie Blox on its Essentials: Is it Fun?

Putting together the front axle of the parade float.
When the Goldie Blox video went viral, I not only saw it everywhere, but got tagged by a number of friends. Apparently, as the educator, feminist mom of a just-about-to-be-three girl, I was the target audience.

My first thought: yay!  What a cool idea. There's the birthday gift I was looking for!

Then (within what, a day?) the backlash began: Is it feminist enough? (There are princesses and pink and purple pieces!) Creative enough? (Kits encourage not free play but building a particular structure from specific plans.)  Empowering enough? (Parade floats?) Smart enough? (Perhaps the Goldie Blox folks are better at PR than at building toys).

One question I could answer for sure. There was truly far too much talking, writing, blogging, tweeting about this toy.  But, although I gave up my Goldie Blox research without buying a kit, the drama was really just a symptom of my (our?) general toy-buying neuroses. I continued to angst over every toy I did consider for my daughter.  She loves baby dolls, but should they have blue eyes like hers?  Or, explicitly non-blue eyes?  Should they have light skin or dark skin?  Can I buy her a broom and dust pan (as she always tries to use grown up ones and ends up knocking down every picture frame in the house?) or is that gender normative?  Should I buy her letter toys and games? She really prefers (and learns a ton from!) the letter games on the Kindle -- but of course Kindle time is screen-time, which might be frying her brain. And thus, every shopping trip was psychologically fraught.

When I finally came up for air, I thought (as usual) about our students. Kids really have only one criteria for a toy: is it fun?  And, our students' parents -- who come from all walks of life but include a lot of working class and first generation immigrants -- tend to use the same criteria my parents did: is the fun worth the money?  

Seriously. How did this happen?  It just shouldn't be this hard to buy gifts.

In the end I bought very few. Lots of people buy my child too many gifts.  I decided let other people make these decisions and just watch.

And, at her birthday party: GoldieBlox and the Parade Float arrived.

After it was unwrapped, I quietly set it aside.  Despite the angst, I was excited. I wanted it to get a fair shake, not get lost in the morass of wrapping and other small pieces.

So yesterday, I brought the box to the breakfast table.  I wanted to get her excited.  But, I also wanted to prep.  Nothing kills the joy of a new joy like watching a parent read the instructions!

But, no instructions necessary; there was just a molded plastic box of parts, figurines, and a story book.  Every few pages the book presented a new creation with basic instructions on how to build it. The main attraction, the "Parade Float," had a blueprint.

With some prompting (and a number a breaks so that her doll could "help" put pieces together -- tricky with tiny plastic hands), we built each part of the float. Then we harnessed up the dog figurine who was meant to pull the float and we "played."  When I had to go, she called dad in to keep playing with her. The dog pulled the float; the little bear figurine was an "engineer" ( a mechanical engineer or more of a train engineer? -- hard to be sure) and various friends "rode" the float.

The three-year-old's verdict: fun.

The social scientist, feminist, educator, over-angsting mom verdict:
  1. Ruby, the over-dressed, float-riding girl is sort of annoying.  But, Goldie wears overalls.  I can live with it.
  2. The book's illustrations are helpful and clear, but leave enough wiggle room for the kids to figure out some of the details. As an experienced Ikea builder, I give them a thumbs up.
  3. The story is super thin. If you're going to center your product on narrative, can you write a better story?  It reads like such an after-thought.  For a story-lover, that was disappointing.
  4. Why aren't there Goldie and Ruby figures?  When my kid plays, characters are key. The story was weak, so she pretty much made up her own, but it seems like we should have figurines of the two main characters, not just the secondary ones (maybe they come in another set?)
  5. It's all very doable. My just-turned three-year-old did most of the building herself and, while I had to do a lot of pointing and prompting, she followed the directions pretty well.  An older kid could sit down and execute on her (or his!) own. And the pieces are flexible, so the kids do have to fiddle a little to get the pieces of work as they should (unlike, say, a snap together model that has a "correct" fitting for each piece).
  6. My favorite part: there are six more structures drawn out at the end of the book.  We didn't get to them this time, but we will. They are drawn in detail, but do not come with step by step instructions. 
Many of the critiques that I read about Goldie Blox state that it doesn't really encourage inventive thinking because it gives explicit instructions to build an item. Many critics suggest that Legos are superior -- allowing kids to just build.  I disagree.  As a kid I had a Lego house. I loved building it.  But, I didn't really have the creativity to build anything else. I wished they had given me some thoughts for next steps. And, as an educator, I find that a lot of kids are like I was as a kid. The kid who is born to be an engineer is going to build. Give her some tinker toys and she's making vehicles. But what about the kid who may not have innate engineering genius, but who you want to encourage to be an engineer (or think like an engineer)?  She needs some steps. Give her detailed instructions, then some more ideas, and then she will be more likely to make the leap and start inventing herself.
When I teach writing, I find that there are two types of kids. Those who love to write, write. You can teach them style and form but they give you plenty of content to work with. They will take writing classes and listen to their writing teachers and over time their writing will improve. Then there are kids who hate to write. And it's hard to teach them because they produce nothing to give them feedback on. Give then a blank piece of paper and those kids can return to you, in an hour, a blank piece of paper.  

"I can't think of anything to write," they will wail.  And no matter how many blank pieces you give them, they won't write.

And, all rambling evidence to the contrary, I was one of those kids.  Now, when I teach writing, I steal techniques from Ms. Dexter, the teacher who taught me to write. Give explicit assignments (in my writing camps, we start by replacing adjectives in someone else's stories, then move on to "Show-not-tell" essays -- write an essay that shows me that the teacher was boring without ever using the word boring!, then exposition pieces where they explain something they know how to do). We take tiny steps to help them get words on the page. After time and practice the  blank page is not so daunting and, via baby steps, all of the kids in my writing camp write a personal essay by the end of the week.

So, although Goldie Blox is far more explicit than creative, I think it serves a purpose. Goldie Blox gives structure to a kid who could learn to love building but may not be bursting with ideas. And, yes, it uses pink and purple, but whoever said that a feminist can't enjoy pink and purple.

So, although it's not the perfect toy, I'm going to stop reading about Goldie Blox and just keep playing with it. I think it's kind of fun.


Monday, August 19, 2013

Can we really make kids want school to start?

Back to school: ubiquitous letters above the board
and maybe even some chemistry!
Los Angeles Unified went back to school last week and our students have been trickling in.  It's always fun for us to see them -- see how they have literally GROWN over the summer -- and get back into what feels like a normal routine for us.

But what about them?

As summer comes to an end, we hear a lot of groaning.  And, as most of our students have to be at their campuses before 8am, I can't say I blame them.

But one of our students, just starting 10th grade surprised me yesterday.  In response to the standard, "So how was the first day?"

She said, "Great...well, not really...I guess not that good."

When we pressed, it wasn't that anything bad had happened, but rather nothing really happened at all.

She explained how last year she was so excited to go to school, so excited to be a 9th grader and start high school... and how she presumed that feeling would come back: "And then in 11th and 12th, you're almost done, you're making progress, but 10th grade..."

It made no sense, of course, as 10th is still closer to being done than 9th grade was...

But, on the other hand, it made tons of sense.  What was there to be excited about?  Same old school, same old friends, a very long road until graduation.

What made me sad was, what about what she'd learn this year?  World History is one of the most fun and interesting and eye opening classes in the high school curriculum.  Chemistry is the class where you actually get to mix stuff in test tubes and live with the possibility of disaster.  French 2 means she'll actually get to speak a little French, the language of fashion, her first love.

And that's it.  We do not think of school in terms of what we'll learn.  We think of schedules and friends and environments. We obsess on location, whether a kid can handle a block schedule, if a teacher will be a good fit.  The last thing we tend to think about is the curriculum.

And we know the curriculum.  For each grade we know what every teacher in the state of California (and every state using the Common Core!) will teach.  There's no reason not to get pumped -- and help our kids get pumped -- about what they're learn this year.

Before she starts 4th grade, I want to take my kid to the San Fernando Mission and let her know that this year, she'll learn about the Chumash, and Father Junipero Serra -- and she'll probably build a mission of her own!

Before she starts 2nd grade, I want her to be excited to learn about fossils (and if the class doesn't go fossil hunting, I want to promise her a trip to the Newport Back Bay where I did my fossil hunting as a kid).

Before she starts 3rd grade, I want her looking forward to learning about electricity.  And, if they don't build circuits in school (oh please, let her go to a school where they will build circuits!), off to Radio Shack to get some circuit building gear (for anyone who loves electricity less than I do, Lakeshore Learning has some lovely electricity kits that you don't have to assemble from scratch).

Second grade: paragraphs!  Fourth grade: fractions!  Kindergarten: letters and words and addition and subtraction.

Why can't these be some of the things we get excited about?  Why do even we, educators, seem to focus more on the social than the educational?  My resolution: I will focus more on the learning.  Less on people, less on grades, more on what they learn (ok yes, and they need to get the best grades they can while they're learning... some things can't change that much...).

And, yes, it's true, the standards are vague and teachers vary a little (especially in science and social studies), so here's my other commitment to my someday-going-to-be-school-aged-daughter: when we go to Back to School night, we're going to stop by to see the teachers for the next year, to say hi and grab a handout.  Let's learn, from the teachers' mouths, what we can start to look forward to.  And then let's start looking forward to it.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Is great technology making it harder for our kids to learn to CREATEtechnology?

It may seem counter-intuitive, but is it possible that the more our kids use current technology, the more they lose their ability to create the technology of the future?

Today, I'm pondering the file path.  What does the following line mean to you?
C:\Sites\edboost3_site\images\focus.jpg
For anyone who builds websites or writes computer code or even just digs around in computers beyond the opening screens, that path is a map -- it tells you exactly how to find a file (in this case the image file "focus") on my hard drive.

Would that path mean anything to your kids?  It would read like a foreign language to most of our students.

When my students finish working on a document, they typically just click the "disk" button to save.  They don't even think about where they're saving it. Our computers default to saving that file to "My Documents." When my students want to work on that file again, they go to "Recent Documents" and click it.  But our computers are in a computer lab, and if that particular computer has gotten heavy use from other students and a student's document doesn't appear in "Recent Documents," we get a freak out, "Someone erased my homework!"

Many of us who grew up in, as my students like to call it, "the 19s," played with BASIC or LOGO as kids. We may have even used a computer without clickable menus!  Even if we never played with programming, we at least remember having to navigate "Save As..." to save our documents to a specific file on the hard drive or -- gasp -- a floppy disk!

Today's kids just click buttons. They barely even use menus. Some have even given up computers entirely for tablets.  The beauty and ease of these amazing machines mean that the kids barely ever have to think about what they're doing.  They simply click and magic happens.

And then, when they try to do something more complex, they're stuck.  They can use a program to create a beautiful website (we use both commercial programs like Dreamweaver and free programs like NVu, which allow them to type and format and insert photos), but when they upload the page, they can't figure out why their images turn into those ugly red Xs.  My students don't understand that when they "insert" an image they don't actually insert the IMAGE into the page, but rather a path to an image -- and when they move the page from their computer to an online server, they have to change those paths.  I find that when I try to explain, they don't even know what a path is! (Yes, sites like Blogger eliminate this problem by having you upload images directly to the server -- but you can't do much web design at all before you run into the problem of broken images and links caused by incorrect paths.)

At EdBoost, our students know theoretically that they need math and logic to get into computer programming (and yes, half of our students want to write video games for a living!), but they don't realize that they'll need basic computer literacy just to get started.

How can we get our kids to start to understand how computers and websites and programs actually work?

For one, I'm going to make my daughter use an actual computer when she gets a little older (as opposed to just the Kindle that she loves but which obscures all of the paths and directories that must exist inside that little Kindle brain).  I will let her use a computer and give her her own folder and make her save her documents there.  I want to make her click around and be deliberate about where she puts things.  Computer programming is all about precision (As I tell my students all the time, "It's a computer. It only does what you actually tell it to do, not what you meant to tell it to do").  And, I will make a conscious effort to point out things like paths in MS Explorer and in URLs. I want her to ask, "What do those slashes mean?" and I want to be able to tell her the answer.

Next, I really want to show my daughter the code behind the web pages she's viewing.  If you open any website in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, you can see the code behind the page.  Just go to the menu (three little lines on the far right of the menu bar on Chrome; the Orange Firefox bar on the left on Firefox), click Tools (in Chrome) or Web Developer (Firefox), then click View Source (Chrome) or Page Source (Firefox) and there it is, the html for the page you're looking at.  Scroll down a bit and you'll see the text on the page.  You'll also see the paths for the images and links.  Once you know what you're looking at, you can parse it out.  It's pretty cool!  And, even after a very basic web design class, a kid could really dissect a page of code like this.  I'm hoping to get to do this with my daughter (I need to start studying if I hope to answer all the questions I bet she'll have!).

If I get really ambitious, I want us to play some open source video games and then download the source code to take a look.  These are huge files, but they do give some insight into just how much goes into writing a video game. I hope by then my programming skills will have improved enough so that I can actually teacher her what's going on!  But even if you can't make heads or tails of the code, just seeing the black and white type that make up really complex games is incredible.

Step three, if my daughter is even mildly interested in computers of video games, I will absolutely find her a computer class -- the younger she is, the better. Programming languages are just that: languages.  They have vocabularies and syntaxes and I can only imagine that they are best learned when the learner is young.  All kids -- but especially kids who are interested in creating for computers -- should understand how they work.  I'd love for my daughter to become a programming expert -- but I'm going to take responsibility for at least giving her some basic programming skills that she can build on.

Our technological lives are getting so easy, it doesn't seem impossible that a huge proportion of the next generation might lose the basic abilities they need to push technology to the next level.  I'm hoping I can help my kid be one of the technologically savvy ones!

Any other thoughts on how to get it done?

UPDATE: Many thanks to Ed Stabler, EdBoost's volunteer computer guru (and sometimes computer teacher), for the link to this blog, which makes my point, perhaps better than I do:
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Can we raise kids to be more efficient?

We talk about efficiency a lot in our learning center.

Our homework help program is filled with students, from third to 11th grade, who generally spend two to three hours a day doing about 45 minutes worth of homework.  That's not to say that they don't occasionally get slammed with tons of work, but most of the time, they just take forever to finish.

Why?

Unlike parents trying to get their kids to do work at home, we have no TVs and don't allow social media on the computers.  There's no g-chat or Tumblr calling their names.

How, in that environment, can kids be unfocused?

Let's see... Everytime someone walks past the room they're working in, they look up.  Every noise from outside sends them racing to the window (so much so that, when we hear the screech of brakes, we wait a beat and then automatically call out, "Sit back down!").  Every time a tutor explains something to another student (even it's a rerun of a lesson that same student could not bear to listen to when it was her homework last year) it's head-turning and riveting.

But, perhaps more than anything else, every time our students phones buzz, they have to look ("What if it's my mom?").  No matter what.  They have to look.

Let me pick on Jonny for a classic example.  He's a 9th grader and his geometry homework is hard. Not every tutor can help and sometimes he has to wait until a math expert is free. I can see him, stuck and annoyed, trying to wait patiently until I get get to him. I finally do. I read the question. I ask him what he knows and he shows me his work.  "There -- that's where I'm stuck," he'll tell me, pointing to his scratch paper. I lean over, make two, maybe three pencil strokes on the paper, and his pocket vibrates. He grabs it, "Sorry" he mumbles, getting up and stepping out of the room.

He's utterly polite.  He knows the rules.  He steps out so that he doesn't distract others.  But there's no question that he will stop what he's doing to look at it and find some reason to answer that phone (they're only supposed to talk to parents and rides, but then there are friends who need homework assignments and various other ways they get around our rules).

And yes, it's probably his mom. And it's probably something "critical," like her telling him that she'll be there in 30 minutes.

He slides back into his seat, "Sorry." But he knows as well as I do that I couldn't (well, I wouldn't) wait for him and I've started helping someone else. He'll have to wait again.

This scenario plays out daily -- with each and every child who has a phone.

And it's not just their phones.  I rarely carry my cell phone when I'm working with students.  But occasionally I have it on me because I was showing someone a photo or a video and it was faster than setting up a computer. Or, on a rare day, I'm on call for someone or waiting for a call. On those days, if my phone rings or buzzes, EVERY kid in the room will tell me, "Your phone's ringing."

I know it is.  And when I tell them, I'll look at it when I'm done doing what I'm doing, they look at me with their mouths open. Why in the world am I not answering it RIGHT NOW?

They also go crazy that we don't always answer the office phone.  In fact, we almost never do.  I figure, if we're working with students, that's the first priority.  Anyone else can get a call back.

But, for the kids, the response is Pavlovian.  They are entirely and completely at the beck-and-call of their phones (and, I imagine, when at home, to whatever chat or messaging program causes missives to pop up on their screens).

It's not like the problem is unique to teens and preteens.  Everyone one of us who works at a computer knows how we can fritter a day away with silly messages. Most of us have our own strategies for blocking off some periods of time without distractions.  We all have those moments when we're irritated to have our concentration broken, frustrated to have a work-roll broken by a phone call or email.

My biggest worry is that our kids don't have those feelings of frustration. For them, the phone comes first.  I try to explain to them: People call you when they have nothing to do!  They have time, but it doesn't mean that you do!  A scroll through their text messages attests to this truth:

"What r u doing?"
"Homework," types our student before we confiscate the phone.
"Me too.  Doesn't it suck?"

And if the phone were not taken by one of our eagle-eyed tutors, the inane conversation would go on.  Neither student doing work or having any meaningful conversation-- just wasting time.

And they KNOW that most of the texts they get are nothing -- just chatter.  And still, they have to look every time it buzzes.

As the mother of a toddler, I have to ask why.

I think that there are two reasons:

  • First, their parents get angry when they don't respond immediately. So, the "good kids" have been trained to check all calls and texts immediately.
  • Perhaps more importantly, our students live in a world where everyone is at the beck-and-call of their phones.
Number one is a problem.  I've had tutors go down to our parking lot to ask parents to please stop calling their kids during tutoring (a tutoring hour that the parents are paying for!).  It seems critical for parents to try not to "bother" their kids more than they have to during work time.  It also seems important for parents to understand that although students are often messing around, sometimes they are focused, and, if that's even a possibility, parents should give them time to respond.

But I think number two is the more pervasive problem.  As adults, we have all become enslaved to our phones. In meetings with parents, even consultations that parents are paying for by the hour, they often have to stop to check their phones. We use our phones so casually -- calling and texting at any time of day and over any small issue.  We know how trivial many of our texts and calls are and yet, when we're on the receiving end, we feel utterly compelled to reply immediately.

And, while, as adults, we probably all remember fighting over NOT having to get up to answer the kitchen phone (it's probably not for me anyway!), kids live in a world where people's phones are always at hand and always for them.  

I know that my kid will grow up in a world where she will be expected to be reachable a lot of the time.  But, more than likely, she will be like me, someone who needs to be generally reachable, but not a cardiologist or a first responder, not someone on whom lives depend.

So, I want to train her to prioritize the people she's with and the work that she's doing, over the potential of the phone.

How can I do it?  Explaining and instructing does NOTHING.  I talk to our students until I'm blue in the face.  Still the buzz of a phone pulls them from any work, any lesson, any conversation.

For now, with my two year old (who will not have her own phone for a good long while), all I can do is be wiling to ignore my phone.  When we're playing and the phone buzzes, I work hard not to look at it until we're done.  I try to make sure that she knows she's more important than whatever is coming in (and, I admit, yesterday, it was sort of killing me when my phone was beeping out of sight!).  

I also try to let the phone go to voicemail, and I tell her why.

We were at the beach yesterday and my phone rang.  When she heard it, her little head popped up immediately, "Is it Grandma?"  I was lucky.  I could tell from the caller ID that it was the drugstore, "No, Bug, it's not grandma. It's the drug store. I'll listen to the message later."  But, even when it's someone I do want to talk to, if it's not a good time, I try my best to let the phone got to voicemail and give a call back later.

I don't know if I can make my child an efficient worker, but I will try my best not to train her to give up her own enjoyment and focus in the service of a cell phone.  

Of course, by the time she's old enough for a cell phone, who knows what kind of technology I'll be up against!

Friday, July 19, 2013

Learning what? From whom?

Some of our crazy students.
I imagine that most educators have the same thoughts: Is raising my own kid going to be like managing dozens of other people's kids?  Is my kid going to turn out like that? How can I get my kid to behave like that?  And, of course, that child we want our kid to emulate one moment, and is the same one we would consider the worst possible role model the next moment.

When you teach (or run an after-school/tutoring/college counseling program like I do) you meet a lot of kids (and tweens and teens).  You adore a lot of them.  You can't stand a few of them.  And you get to see them from all kinds of angles.  And because you aren't related to them, you are burdened with none of that unconditional love, you see aspects of kids that their parents often don't, or can't, see.

So, what can you learn about parenting kids from kids who are currently being parented?

I think about it ALL the time.

My colleagues and I talk about it ALL the time.

That whiny little sibling in the hallway who won't let his mom get a word in edgewise? How do you make sure your child doesn't do that?  And, now that you have a two year who shouts, whenever you have an adult conversation, "Stop talking!  I want to talk!" does that mean that's the road you're headed down? Is your child destined to become that whiny child?

Then there's the kids you're in awe of.

I make dozens of types of cookies and brownies and blondies and candies for our end of the year Summer Celebration.  We throw in a bit of savory junk food for good measure.  Then last year, I decided to add orzo salad to the mix (I use this recipe, but swap out parsley for green onions, toasted almonds for pine nuts, and up the lemon juice -- it's delicious, but a decidedly adult kind of delicious) Given the choice of chili, pizza, nachos (replete with velveeta), and scores of cookies and treats, one 7th grader could not get enough of the orzo salad.  When he saw it again this year he said, "That's my favorite!" How exactly do you raise a child with a palate like that?

And, let's not forget the pre-teen or teenager who ALWAYS says hello when he arrives and good-bye when he leaves, who always smiles and asks how you're doing, who always says please and thank you. You have to love that kid.  He's so personable and polite.  Yet, how do you make your kid that kid?

So, for years, I'm been talking about "when I have a kid..." or "if my kid ever starts to..." And then I had a kid.  And now she's two and a half.  My little baby has turned into an actual kid (it's true -- she's short but she's definitely a kid) and it's time to see where all musings lead.

Can I learn how to be a better parent by watching my crazy students?