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American Millennials among world's least skilled

What are you talking about? What excuses?

We do not have school-age children. Comparisons of our parenting with public school workloads isn't relevant. But TV viewing habits sure are.

Roughly half of married persons with children under six have one parent not working, most of them the mother according to the US Department of Labor. So half of US families can do what we have done, right up to kindergarten. They have plenty of time. They have the same teacher-student ratio we do on average.

For families that have both parents working, they can still cut television just slightly and do the kinds of things we discovered in our research, and boost educational performance by years relative to their peers.

These are things PARENTS are doing in other cultures that put them ahead of other countries.



What have I demonstrated is up with the USA?

Not once have you acknowledged anything as a good idea, as something that can work to improve educational performance - it is all negative, negative, negative. Even though some of it is quite astonishing.

No initiative in researching other countries or comparing states to see what is working, what can be adopted in your own work or in our communities generally. I've barely touched the surface on the literature we've read.

Your answer "you don't know what motivates me" also confirms the lack of motivation. Why would you conceal what is motivating you? Why not just SAY what is motivating you? But were it eagerness to learn things about how to advance Americans educationally, then you would be showing that interests in your posts, and it sure isn't being demonstrated.

Mike3 is demonstrating so.

no, its just you

lol. We've had numerous people state exactly that: doing experiments on our kids. Not only by internet dolts but it was very clear this was one of the things stated to Child Protective Services in formal complaints about us.

So when CPS intimated just that, I reached for the papers that we had pinned to the wall. I said that we were not experimenting, but rather following proven, published scientific papers.

This is just you trying to make us seem weird. I just mentioned Karen Adolph's published work on this very thing and what we get from you as a professional educator is... manipulative put-downs.



One more question. Why do you want to put your kid in school?

Kids - plural.

We are not sure what we are doing. We have open minds and not only plenty of time to decide - but anything we do is reversible.

We don't view it any differently than flashcards for example. We started off with them, didn't like it right away, and went to a different methodology. Now four months later we are doing flashcards. They are the right thing now.

So public school is just a pedagogy option we are willing to try. According to the rules, they are not eligible for the talented and gifted room until 3rd grade. The law says if they enter during the school year instead of the beginning that they have two weeks to be evaluated for what grade is appropriate academic placement. The oldest is already past third grade in everything so this might be an end-run for the talented and gifted room at kindergarten age.

That is our current strategy: enter mid-year kindergarten. Make 4th grade academic evaluation in every area. Get placed in the Talented and Gifted room. Then see how it goes.

Most parents don't think much at all why they enroll their kids in school. We have thought a great deal about it and it is difficult to say what the results are going to be.
 
These are things PARENTS are doing in other cultures that put them ahead of other countries.

So are you ahead of those other cultures (you mentioned being ahead of Asian-Americans), and if so, then why aren't those other cultures as far ahead as you? If ahead, do you think they have a better chance at catching up to you than American culture does?
 
I would like to see the source of this "Americans watch on average five hours of television per day". Considering the number of people who are "cutting the cord" and giving up on television entirely (I did three years ago, for years before watched only very few specific shows), I find it very hard to believe. I suspect this statistic is either bogus, or very outdated.
 
So are you ahead of those other cultures (you mentioned being ahead of Asian-Americans), and if so, then why aren't those other cultures as far ahead as you? If ahead, do you think they have a better chance at catching up to you than American culture does?

The jump-start on the Dawn of Active thought doesn't seem to be known generally. The one place where researchers were observing it was Africa, where the head start not only dissipated after 15 months old, but eventually those kids fell behind because it was in cultures with poor school systems. So nobody but these scientists were looking at them.

In our research we came to the understanding that worldwide school systems don't start until kids can sit still at desks for long periods of time. It is a child management issue, not an educational issue. The kids are perfectly capable of learning - they just can't sit still. We found one school system that has them standing up instead of sitting, and it improved their performance.

We couldn't care less whether they are sitting at a desk - we have them but the kids don't like sitting at their desks. They do school wherever they want, and in the deep winter it is usually on the floor next to the wood stove. But this is typical:

reading%20stance_zpsppvrr6ks.jpg


We started calling that their "reading stance" because they were doing it so much.

We kept asking administrators why our kids were not allowed to enroll in school. Nobody had an answer beyond "It's the law". Even in the correspondence programs taught at home. But why does the law say that? We know from our research that kids generally can't sit still at desks for long periods until five and older, and in pre-schools they have them on the floor, rolling around, fidgeting etc. so this is our inference.

We disagree. Obviously, they can read regardless of whether they can sit still. School doesn't have to be four hours or longer. It can be fifteen or twenty minutes. Do that over even just one year and the kids are way out in front. School doesn't have to be five days a week. It can be seven. You don't need a long summer vacation - if school is only twenty minutes you're practically on vacation all year anyway.

One program deserves comment - the "My Baby Can Read" stuff. We didn't buy any of their materials but looked into it. Our conclusion was that they were mainly exploiting a "look and say" ability that kids have before they understand phonics. They can memorize words long before they can de-code new words with phonics.

It was frustrating for us - especially with the younger boy because he didn't catch on as early as the older boy. He could read really long words like Mommy and Daddy but not do two-letter phonics. He could do the two separate sounds like "D" and "o" but not pronounce them together as "Do".

He didn't really take off until he was four. So he is on a different track. School systems want to wait until the whole mass of kids is ready instead of taking on kids as they become ready individually. They have them all in lock-step by age cohort instead of sorted by ability and academic level. That means even in the Asian systems a lot of kids could start earlier but they don't because of the factory approach to education.
 
I would like to see the source of this "Americans watch on average five hours of television per day". Considering the number of people who are "cutting the cord" and giving up on television entirely (I did three years ago, for years before watched only very few specific shows), I find it very hard to believe. I suspect this statistic is either bogus, or very outdated.

You could have gone to the enormous effort of using google yourself. Why didn't you? We don't even get television. We can use the internet though so we watch one thing as a family before bed, and use subtitles. The kids have asked for "Super" four days in a row and I'm pretty tired of it but they shriek in glee when the guy is smashing people over the head with a pipe wrench for butting in line at a movie.

This piece is good for breaking it up by age group and race:

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watches-5-hours-tv-day-article-1.1711954

Guess who watches the least? Asians. Guess who watches the most? Blacks. Blacks average 218 hours a month. Asians average 92 hours. Golly, do you think that matters? Well - it depends on what you are doing instead. We know the Asians are studying. Hispanics watch less than blacks too, but they aren't studying like the Asians.

The group with the lowest performance has the most time on their hands available to study - and this difference is incredible. More than twice as much TV watching. Television is a kind of training too - it inculcates the value of the "quick comeback": the superficial one-line put-down. The inability to concentrate on anything for more than a single second.

I took the time to study all the new programmatic devices of the quick-cut, quick panning, zooming in and out really fast, shaking the camera wildly, and most especially using bright strobe flashes. Guess where you find the best parallels? In psychological warfare. They are designed to disorient and turn the brain off. When people say they want to "veg out" in front of the television, that is exactly what is happening. These tactics make me angry because it is impossible to concentrate on anything. That's the point of them. To make a commercial-compliant zombie out of you.

By age group we can see that age 2-11 watches 24.25 hours per week, then it falls to 20.25, and then increases for the rest of their lives. If children spent 20 minutes a day on school, they'd still get to watch over three hours of television per day.

Grandma and Grandpa watch the most - and our society tends to put them on a shelf instead of being extended family units as in the past. Grandma and Grandpa love being with the kids - they would probably love to teach reading.
 
I have this prejudice about homeschooling being for jesus nuts only. :D

Your CPS story is scary, along with those free range movement experiences.
Visiting Europeans with kids have had the same problems.
 
This comes from Nielsen report, which by definition does not include households which do not own a TV at all, such as mine. That drives the average up, although probably not by much.

You don't know this. 97% of households own televisions, and Nielsen reports that the younger generation has a lower proportion of TV set ownership because they are watching internet TV on their computers.

If we add internet TV and movies to Nielsen's hourly estimate, it could easily increase the average hours. Not just because Millennials without TV are watching it on the internet, but because households with televisions are also watching stuff on the internet they can't get on TV.

You also can't impute zero to people who don't own televisions due to poverty because they can watch television with someone else. The prison population is 2.3 million and they're watching an awful lot of television in their common rooms too. Some even have it in their cells. But they are not part of the Nielsen study and their television watching is not only above average but it is another group that has very low educational performance.

But hey - let's make it zero. What difference does it make? .97*5 + .03*0 = 4.85 hours per day. It doesn't make a difference worth making an objection about. It is really clear that if you were to pick one thing with the US in general and blacks in particular that television is an educational problem.
 
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And even if they're physically not up to to handling factory jobs at 11, they could be allowed to do like desk-based jobs or something, no?

I missed this post before, sorry. Yes, kids could handle working - and why does it have to be 40 hours a week? The instant you put "child" and "work" in the vicinity of one another people assume the worst image they can.

Why is it OK to get broken legs and concussions on the football field but not to process credit card applications part-time? A lot of tech jobs are done from home now and a lot of kids would just love to be working and making money instead of watching TV.


Eat your heart out, Stormfront. This also makes me think about critiques I've read of the "human rights" movement. In particular, that the way human rights is approached now leads to the imperialist-style promotion of "Western" types of values as being better, and the above shows that that is not always the case. One could imagine some do-goody "human rights activist" seeing this, crowing "child abuse" and then ending up actually causing harm to the people they wanted to try and help by getting a "change" through that ends up retarding their childhood development to "inferior" (yupp :) ) Western levels. (Wolfman has touched on things down this alley before here, I believe.) That doesn't mean I'm saying human rights itself is bad -- but the critiques I mentioned do not really say that either, it was more about the current way in which it's being gone about, and the culture and perspectives represented within the movement.

Absolutely. African black infants were making white infants look like retards on these tests. It is literally true that we were doing what Black Africans were doing, and for exactly the same reason: getting them walking earlier.

CPS specifically investigated us for child abuse with this charge: teaching to walk too early. We were flabbergasted. Because what the scientists referred to as African Precociousness our Child Protective Services called abuse.

They demanded we prove walking earlier was not harmful. Our initial response was that this isn't how the law works: they are the ones that have to prove harm, so just look for yourself and show us what the harm is. Are Black African children dying because they walk sooner? Do you see bumps, bruises, cuts, or brains leaking out of ears here?

Then they said that our expectations were unreasonable and that unreasonable expectations could lead to abuse. Here again, that is not what the law says. There has to BE abuse. Our expectations were based on published research and on what ordinary Black infants could do in Africa. How is that unreasonable?

Then the accusation about using your kid for experiments. As if our love for them was not the reason we were trying to give them the best possible educational advantage. They refused to look at the papers we tried to show them.

So for us, this was a lesson in how much joy someone with power has in terrorizing people. There is nothing more horrible than having your children taken from you and it is happening all over the country by police and child protective services. And just like us, it isn't for anything the parents have done that caused injuries, malnutrition, sickness, emotional trauma, etc.

Look at this example:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parents-investigated-letting-children-walk-alone/25700823/

CPS terrorized those parents by kidnapping their children from a park and refusing to call them. There is no law they broke. What is the difference traumatically from the government kidnapping your children and a stranger?

Our research proved what the Free Range Parents of older kids are saying too: if you want stupid adolescents, then don't give them any responsibility, any freedom, and ability to command their own selves. Handcuff them to their seats.

We see all of this as part of the dumbing-down of American kids that results logically in their abysmal performance on the tests like the OP.
 
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Maryland law prohibits children younger than age 8 from being unattended in a dwelling or car but makes no reference to outdoors. A person must be at least 13 years old to supervise a child younger than 8.
Sounds like some kind of panic-law. Like how pocket knives were pretty much banned here after a tourist were stabbed a few years back.

So for us, this was a lesson in how much joy someone with power has in terrorizing people.
There is a saying about small people getting a little bit of power.
Reminds me of a coastguarder looking us over before issuing shore passes.
 
We do not have school-age children. Comparisons of our parenting with public school workloads isn't relevant.

Try dealing with 30-35 at one time, and doing that 5 or 6 times a day. Apologies if you've already done this. It was certainly an eye-opener for me.

Not once have you acknowledged anything as a good idea, as something that can work to improve educational performance - it is all negative, negative, negative.

Misguided pride keeps me from falling to my knees and kissing your ring.

No initiative in researching other countries or comparing states to see what is working, what can be adopted in your own work or in our communities generally.

You really have no idea if I've done this research.

Your answer "you don't know what motivates me" also confirms the lack of motivation.

That's a pretty big logical leap there. I'm motivated by a simple four-letter word.

But were it eagerness to learn things about how to advance Americans educationally, then you would be showing that interests in your posts, and it sure isn't being demonstrated.

What you mean is, I'm not asking you what works. There's a reason for that. Straw men, mind-reading, innuendo, well-poisoning - these are not techniques that encourage me to engage in good faith.

Mike3 is demonstrating so.

Somewhat ironically, I suspect, but I could be wrong.

Kids - plural.

I know. But you're only trying to enroll one in public school at this time.

We are not sure what we are doing. We have open minds and not only plenty of time to decide - but anything we do is reversible.

So you are experimenting ;)

IMO, all parents do it. I am not a parent. I skipped 2nd grade basically because my mom used flash cards to get my older brother to memorize the multiplication tables. He was smart, but easily frustrated.

That is our current strategy: enter mid-year kindergarten. Make 4th grade academic evaluation in every area. Get placed in the Talented and Gifted room. Then see how it goes.

Am I comprehending this correctly? Enrolling him/her in kindergarten is a strategy to possibly get him/her into the 4th-grade GATE program?

*I am not a parent but*. I would tell the kid, "You're in kindergarten for now, but that might change when they see what you can do." If you want to take offense, fine, but I think it would be good to share that with your oldest.
 
The jump-start on the Dawn of Active thought doesn't seem to be known generally. The one place where researchers were observing it was Africa, where the head start not only dissipated after 15 months old, but eventually those kids fell behind because it was in cultures with poor school systems. So nobody but these scientists were looking at them.

In our research we came to the understanding that worldwide school systems don't start until kids can sit still at desks for long periods of time. It is a child management issue, not an educational issue. The kids are perfectly capable of learning - they just can't sit still. We found one school system that has them standing up instead of sitting, and it improved their performance.

We couldn't care less whether they are sitting at a desk - we have them but the kids don't like sitting at their desks. They do school wherever they want, and in the deep winter it is usually on the floor next to the wood stove. But this is typical:

[qimg]http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn180/lirajeanlogan/reading%20stance_zpsppvrr6ks.jpg[/qimg]

We started calling that their "reading stance" because they were doing it so much.

We kept asking administrators why our kids were not allowed to enroll in school. Nobody had an answer beyond "It's the law". Even in the correspondence programs taught at home. But why does the law say that? We know from our research that kids generally can't sit still at desks for long periods until five and older, and in pre-schools they have them on the floor, rolling around, fidgeting etc. so this is our inference.

We disagree. Obviously, they can read regardless of whether they can sit still. School doesn't have to be four hours or longer. It can be fifteen or twenty minutes. Do that over even just one year and the kids are way out in front. School doesn't have to be five days a week. It can be seven. You don't need a long summer vacation - if school is only twenty minutes you're practically on vacation all year anyway.

One program deserves comment - the "My Baby Can Read" stuff. We didn't buy any of their materials but looked into it. Our conclusion was that they were mainly exploiting a "look and say" ability that kids have before they understand phonics. They can memorize words long before they can de-code new words with phonics.

It was frustrating for us - especially with the younger boy because he didn't catch on as early as the older boy. He could read really long words like Mommy and Daddy but not do two-letter phonics. He could do the two separate sounds like "D" and "o" but not pronounce them together as "Do".

He didn't really take off until he was four. So he is on a different track. School systems want to wait until the whole mass of kids is ready instead of taking on kids as they become ready individually. They have them all in lock-step by age cohort instead of sorted by ability and academic level. That means even in the Asian systems a lot of kids could start earlier but they don't because of the factory approach to education.

So part of this is that some of this stuff isn't well-known, but would I be right in saying that another part is that there is some kind of global standard education format that people don't want to break away from, even cultures like East Asian ones that place a premium on education? Which would make me wonder why -- one would think that in those cultures with such a premium placed on it, they'd be on the lookout for every method they could find to improve performance, no?

Also, where can one find a complete exposition of the techniques you are using here? Does everyone who wants to follow them have to try combing all the scientific literature (how do you know which studies are good?) as you did?
 
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Absolutely. African black infants were making white infants look like retards on these tests.

I can't help but wince at this language. If your kids should ever fall short of your expectations - you wouldn't use this language, would you?

Would you?
 
So part of this is that some of this stuff isn't well-known, but would I be right in saying that another part is that there is some kind of global standard education format that people don't want to break away from, even cultures like East Asian ones that place a premium on education? Which would make me wonder why -- one would think that in those cultures with such a premium placed on it, they'd be on the lookout for every method they could find to improve performance, no?

Also, where can one find a complete exposition of the techniques you are using here? Does everyone who wants to follow them have to try combing all the scientific literature (how do you know which studies are good?) as you did?

That's right - nobody's done it yet: combined all of the best science/cultural approaches from pre-birth through K-12 into one integrated program. I can't say why. When I was martial arts crazy I was studying four different arts at the same time, competing in all of them, and wishing there was a system that combined them all. MMA came along after I retired from fighting and so now I am teaching MMA to my kids in the same way we have been integrating all these different educational approaches.

I didn't understand back in the 1970's why nobody else was seeing the need to combine all of these arts into one but eventually it happened. Maybe the same thing will happen with education. I used to think these arguments about which martial art was the best was extremely stupid. They all have strengths and they all have weaknesses and the thing to do is apply the best one in any given situation. Same with learning. Be an African at the start and be an Asian at the end.


Yes, Countries as a whole do use the format of the "School", but there is one important thing changing.

We just finished a study of the Vietnamese system and their best schools (mostly private) are doing what they call student-centric instead of teacher/lecture format. It is computer-based and interactive so students can work very much as individuals and have more flexibility in the curriculum.

Their poor rural schools can't do it and the top schools are REALLY expensive (for the Vietnamese). But it is something the USA could do. We started doing it on our own and then decided to see if there was a name for it. They call it "student directed learning" or "self directed learning" in the USA. It has been tried in a few places experimentally like Pittsfield but Vietnamese private schools seem to be going for it on a much bigger scale. Computer-based learning systems may be the way to turn a brick-and-mortar school format into a much more flexible learning platform.
 
That's right - nobody's done it yet: combined all of the best science/cultural approaches from pre-birth through K-12 into one integrated program. I can't say why. When I was martial arts crazy I was studying four different arts at the same time, competing in all of them, and wishing there was a system that combined them all. MMA came along after I retired from fighting and so now I am teaching MMA to my kids in the same way we have been integrating all these different educational approaches.

I didn't understand back in the 1970's why nobody else was seeing the need to combine all of these arts into one but eventually it happened. Maybe the same thing will happen with education. I used to think these arguments about which martial art was the best was extremely stupid. They all have strengths and they all have weaknesses and the thing to do is apply the best one in any given situation. Same with learning. Be an African at the start and be an Asian at the end.


Yes, Countries as a whole do use the format of the "School", but there is one important thing changing.

We just finished a study of the Vietnamese system and their best schools (mostly private) are doing what they call student-centric instead of teacher/lecture format. It is computer-based and interactive so students can work very much as individuals and have more flexibility in the curriculum.

Their poor rural schools can't do it and the top schools are REALLY expensive (for the Vietnamese). But it is something the USA could do. We started doing it on our own and then decided to see if there was a name for it. They call it "student directed learning" or "self directed learning" in the USA. It has been tried in a few places experimentally like Pittsfield but Vietnamese private schools seem to be going for it on a much bigger scale. Computer-based learning systems may be the way to turn a brick-and-mortar school format into a much more flexible learning platform.

So where would I get ahold of all the techniques you have tried (the ones that have worked successfully, not the ones that did not work), or the combination method that has been used? Or what do I need to be able to put together something similarly effective? Or ... I don't have any kids, but if I have some someday, then considering how much I don't like the world wasting human potential, I want to do something to help change that, add yet another person to help create that change.
 
Misguided pride keeps me from falling to my knees and kissing your ring.

Wow, do you have an ego problem. That certainly isn't how we viewed all the people who did these awesome science papers on early infant learning or the Africans who were producing stud horse children.

Anyone who brings our attention to such research we are indebted to.

You really have no idea if I've done this research.

Sure I do - that's why I can reel off a conveyor belt of articles, researchers, educational systems, test scores, studies of why different educational systems do better on which test scores etc.

Whereas you make cryptic remarks like this instead of providing citations. What person that does research keeps it secret in a discussion about that research? :rolleyes:

I know. But you're only trying to enroll one in public school at this time.

No, that is not true. We tried to enroll both of them before and nobody would take us because the law forbids it.

Am I comprehending this correctly? .

Nope.

I can't help but wince at this language. If your kids should ever fall short of your expectations - you wouldn't use this language, would you?

Would you?

Pfft. Of course I do. They call me retard too, or moron, idiot, nincompoop, etc. We have a whole different slate of terms in MMA - "little girl" is the favorite for hitting the bag like... a little girl.

They know about politically correct word police and their shaming/guilt-tripping tactics. They also know about diplomacy in social settings outside the home.
 
So where would I get ahold of all the techniques you have tried (the ones that have worked successfully, not the ones that did not work), or the combination method that has been used? Or what do I need to be able to put together something similarly effective? Or ... I don't have any kids, but if I have some someday, then considering how much I don't like the world wasting human potential, I want to do something to help change that, add yet another person to help create that change.


We were keeping a blog with lots of great papers we were reading and talking about what we were doing, but that got us raided by Child Protective Services so we killed the blog and saved none of it. Then we just kept to ourselves and shared nothing, saving nothing until the kids were much older. Sorry about that, but it was self-preservation.

But here's some advice: take the publications in the popular literature and burn them because what they do is look out at what the average development is and not only keep you safely in the middle - but tell you not to worry if they are way behind. Here is an example of that:

http://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestone-walking_6507.bc

Most babies take their first steps sometime between 9 and 12 months and are walking well by the time they're 14 or 15 months old. Don't worry if your child takes a little longer, though. Some perfectly normal children don't walk until they're 16 or 17 months old.

lol. That's exactly what is wrong: looking at what the results are for no training. If you don't teach your kid to walk, it might be 17 months instead of 8 independently and four or five months with you assisting them with balance.

Get as much literature as you can on baby exercises and start reading on locomotor development. The neck is especially important early on and we developed our own exercises for that. Look up "step reflex". Look into swimming (they started these experiments at three weeks); walking in the newborn; crawling exercises, etc.

Just the fact you make the decision you are going to train and look up information on how to do it puts you way out in front. This is what people who study the Asian systems come away with: the simple observation that their expectations are higher. So instead of telling the kids how they can't handle anything, how hard life is for them, how they should stay children as long as they can, etc. they are challenging them. Training.

So there's plenty of literature out there on teaching phonics, and the thing to do is start much earlier. If they can't handle something, you just come back to it a little later. Just the fact you are working twenty minutes a day or whatever puts you way ahead of most parents.

Develop a love for training and drill. Expect that people are going to cut you down and say nasty things because you are doing things differently from them. Look at what they say about the Asians - how "all they are doing is rote memory". Well yeah, the alphabet, numbers, math rules, spelling, etc. is all rote memory. People are such luddites that they are going to make a good thing sound like a bad thing. Yeah, isn't it terrible my kid knows the alphabet?


Toke - thank you for the words of empathy. Our society really is tilting towards what you saw in the totalitarian states where Schadenfreude ruled the day: they didn't have big police states. What they had was a public that relished turning their neighbors in. These laws bear no relationship to data on child abuse or child abductions. But they are things people can dial 911 for and have families destroyed, while pretending they are acting in society's best interest.

I was in the former Soviet Union right after the wall came down (Yakutsk) and they told me a joke that summed it up: A man finds a bottle, and when he uncorks it a genie comes out.

The genie says he will grant a wish. So the man says "my neighbor has a cow". The genie says you want a cow too, right? The man says "no - I want you to take the cow away from my neighbor."
 
Having taught and being observant I do not at all think it is a myth - though I truly wish it was.....
An amazing number of Americans have managed to be successful by being good in one or more of those things and still managed to be quite creative and innovative. It's a skill....

Most people which were successful were so more by a combination of luck , innovation , skill and/or networking of individual to various degree. An amazing number of American underestimate how luck and networking did actually is involve in their success.
 
I'm a 'Millennial'.

I can't speak to skill levels between various countries, but I do have experience regarding different aged workers within the US.

Like any group there are Millennials that are basically useless. They are barely able to read and write. Can only do the most basic math. Are able to use smartphones but can't troubleshoot anything when it goes wrong. Etc etc.

However, I constantly work with people who are twice my age but are worse at doing just about everything. I'm constantly fixing their mistakes. I have to remind them how to do things that they should know, especially considering they've worked there years if not decades more than I have. Many are also abysmal with technology and have no ability to figure things out on their own and can basically only do what they've been trained to do step by step.

I see this sort of thing about Millennials all the time. So while there is likely some truth to it, I wish everyday I could replace my co-workers with clones of my Millennial self so that work would be so much easier and less stressful.

Where I work , in development I see the contrary trend. My older coworker (which trained me thanks for their patience) has so much knowledge and understanding... That msot millenials dumps as "old methods" only to reinvent the wheel and make a lot of errors costing a lot of money.

I wish I could replace many of those millennial with my older 50-60 colleagues.

Training somebody on a new tech when they already get the programming older tech is far easier in my experience than having a younger folk potty-trained-to not reinvent the wheel and not try to make his "imprint" with his unmaintanable "cleverness" try to train them to ask us old fart maybe a things or two.

It is very sad to see the same error going on again and again and again...
 
Try dealing with 30-35 at one time, and doing that 5 or 6 times a day. Apologies if you've already done this. It was certainly an eye-opener for me..

Sure have. All ages too, all kinds of formats from sports to summer youth camp activities, and school. What is it you are trying to say? It isn't a complete coherent thought.

Insofar as the infant development, nobody works with these kinds of numbers. For primary and secondary education, Singapore is at the high end (largest class sizes) and just scored first place in the test being discussed on another thread.

Look at all the places with more students per teacher that out-score us:

photo-1-24.jpg


I taught classes with up to 140 students. I never administered a single multiple choice exam my entire teaching career and I made them do term papers in all college classes. I did not have teaching assistants.
 
Wow, do you have an ego problem.
Really?

That certainly isn't how we viewed all the people who did these awesome science papers on early infant learning or the Africans who were producing stud horse children.
"Stud horse" children? Jeeminy. Hook 'em up with a few decent brood mares and you'll be that much closer to producing a master race.

Me: You really have no idea if I've done this research.

Sure I do - that's why I can reel off a conveyor belt of articles, researchers, educational systems, test scores, studies of why different educational systems do better on which test scores etc.

Score another fallacy. Non sequitur. You know I haven't done the resource because you have done the research.

Whereas you make cryptic remarks like this instead of providing citations. What person that does research keeps it secret in a discussion about that research?

Poisoning the well.

Pfft. Of course I do. They call me retard too, or moron, idiot, nincompoop, etc. We have a whole different slate of terms in MMA - "little girl" is the favorite for hitting the bag like... a little girl.

Way to go. Name-calling - a beacon we can all turn to for enlightened discussion. You are adding more fallacies with every post.

They know about politically correct word police and their shaming/guilt-tripping tactics. They also know about diplomacy in social settings outside the home.

There is no greater love than passing the gift of hypocrisy on to one's offspring.

Your arguments sicken me. You may be a delightful person, but your arguments sicken me.
 
We were keeping a blog with lots of great papers we were reading and talking about what we were doing, but that got us raided by Child Protective Services so we killed the blog and saved none of it. Then we just kept to ourselves and shared nothing, saving nothing until the kids were much older. Sorry about that, but it was self-preservation.

So what do I need to do to rediscover it all so I can get any kids I have up even well past Asian level? (The bit about CPS makes me think about that maybe I should move to a foreign country with different laws if I want to try this.) And if everyone has to rediscover it all for themselves, how is this ever going to become commonplace?

But here's some advice: take the publications in the popular literature and burn them because what they do is look out at what the average development is and not only keep you safely in the middle - but tell you not to worry if they are way behind. Here is an example of that:

http://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestone-walking_6507.bc



lol. That's exactly what is wrong: looking at what the results are for no training. If you don't teach your kid to walk, it might be 17 months instead of 8 independently and four or five months with you assisting them with balance.

So that's which publications not to look at. Where do you find these publications to look at? How do you deal with contradictory publications? E.g. I looked up "step reflex" (mentioned below) on Google Books but it didn't turn up any books that looked like they would deal with using it in some form of training, which I presume is what you're getting at by mentioning it. That suggests to me this stuff is hard to find.

Get as much literature as you can on baby exercises and start reading on locomotor development. The neck is especially important early on and we developed our own exercises for that. Look up "step reflex". Look into swimming (they started these experiments at three weeks); walking in the newborn; crawling exercises, etc.

Just the fact you make the decision you are going to train and look up information on how to do it puts you way out in front. This is what people who study the Asian systems come away with: the simple observation that their expectations are higher. So instead of telling the kids how they can't handle anything, how hard life is for them, how they should stay children as long as they can, etc. they are challenging them. Training.

But what about going well beyond the Asian level? If you can go "well beyond", even going Asian is leaving a great amount of potential on the table and we humans need to wring every bit of potential we can from our kids if we want to make a place for ourselves in the galaxy someday.

Also, I'm curious: how does early motor development help to create development of the intellectual faculty? That is, scientifically, what is the mechanism?

So there's plenty of literature out there on teaching phonics, and the thing to do is start much earlier. If they can't handle something, you just come back to it a little later. Just the fact you are working twenty minutes a day or whatever puts you way ahead of most parents.

Develop a love for training and drill. Expect that people are going to cut you down and say nasty things because you are doing things differently from them. Look at what they say about the Asians - how "all they are doing is rote memory". Well yeah, the alphabet, numbers, math rules, spelling, etc. is all rote memory. People are such luddites that they are going to make a good thing sound like a bad thing. Yeah, isn't it terrible my kid knows the alphabet?

So how do you get the kids to enjoy drills? I know I did not like arithmetic drill, for example, when I was younger. What is needed to make it something likable that they'll want to keep coming back to and doing more and more of? You say develop a "love" for it so there must be a way to make it likable. What is that method?
 
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Where I work , in development I see the contrary trend. My older coworker (which trained me thanks for their patience) has so much knowledge and understanding... That msot millenials dumps as "old methods" only to reinvent the wheel and make a lot of errors costing a lot of money.

So where do you get these tried-and-proven old methods from? I like computer programming, and if there's a method I am missing, then I'd like to find out what it is.
 
And if everyone has to rediscover it all for themselves, how is this ever going to become commonplace?

It's much worse than that. People are terrorized for doing something different from the norm.

Where do you find these publications to look at? How do you deal with contradictory publications? E.g. I looked up "step reflex" (mentioned below) on Google Books but it didn't turn up any books that looked like they would deal with using it in some form of training, which I presume is what you're getting at by mentioning it. That suggests to me this stuff is hard to find.

I had access to science journal search engines at my University. Try Google Scholar. But let me just tell you about the stepping reflex.

If you hold an infant with their feet just above the ground, they will on their own initiate steps. They lose this ability if you don't foster it early, so do it by the first month. I don't know why they do this, but it is an evolutionary imprint that all babies have.

Very gradually you can start putting them in contact with the ground, and as they step you move them forward. So they learn that stepping gets them moving. At the same time you can do exercises with them to strengthen their legs.

There is a nerve impulse we discovered that you can use for this. If a baby is lying on its back and you put your thumbs on their feet, with your fingers just above their knees, they will in response to light pressure above the knee push with their legs against your thumbs. We have never seen this published anywhere but it was what got us a much stronger stepping action than Zelazo's papers in Science. You do the left, then right, then left, then right in alternating fashion and it is pretty amazing how quickly this builds up a very strong stepping action.

Look up walking in the newborn-zelazo. You can do more than twice as good as they did with this little trick. Once we learned this was possible, we discovered other little nerve impulses in different parts of the body we could use to strengthen different muscle groups.

This is the kind of thing we were publishing on our blog and I have completely forgotten a lot of it. The malicious creepy people were trying to say we wanted a bodybuilder baby when developing the intellectual capacity was the motivation, and developing abnormal human strength was not even remotely of interest to us. You want them able to sit up, roll from back to tummy, crawl, walk, etc. Not lift barbells.

Once they are strong enough to be on their feet we put my chin-up bar across the door at their waist level with their toys on top of a tub on the other side. They use the bar to keep upright by holding on with one or both hands. We surrounded them with pillows. You put a toy out of reach to the right or left of them and they figure out how to move over to it. This is called "cruising" in the literature. Even if they can't walk, but can go from a foot-rest to a shelf to the bed, etc. then they are developing their brain already. They have to figure out what path they are going to use getting from where they are to where they want to go. So once we learned "cruising" was a thing we needed to foster, we figured out how to get it going a lot earlier on our own.

We discovered that if I played guitar at the same time they would do this just about forever. If I did not play guitar, they wanted to quit after a little while.

My goodness, we had all kinds of data on spreadsheets on the blog. We timed them, counted steps, recorded all kinds of different exercises we were doing - all this data available to people but malicious predators were out there trying to make it sound like child abuse. We had videos of our happy, smiling and bubbling little boy but they want to conjure up an image of a wailing, whimpering torture victim.

Look at the professional educator above: pretending he is "sickened", lol. It takes no intelligence to frame someone in a negative light. A parent fosters the stepping reflex they learn about in scientific papers, saying they are doing it in order to promote the Dawn of Active Thought, and the malicious onlooker says you are trying to produce another Little Hercules. (That actually was a boy whose father was putting steroids in his breakfast cereal and DID turn him into a bodybuilding sensation as a child).

These negative attacks from the professional educator above are important to understand. He can't bother himself to read a professional paper that is linked to in this very thread. It isn't difficult at all, but it is too much effort for him. Saying that you are "sickened" takes a few seconds and makes you feel like you have put someone in their place. That is what a lot of people are going to do with you.

Just saying that you want your kid walking around assisted at two months old for a few minutes a day is going to have people just like him saying they are "sickened" by it. Well, he isn't sickened at all. This is just an abusive thing you can say to someone you don't like.

When they tell a story about you to someone else, they're going to lie about the context, even when you carefully explain it to them. You can bet this guy above is going to tell other people how overbearing we are, how we put our kids down, call them names and maltreat them. Black people call each other the n-word and it is a term of endearment, but if you have malicious intentions then you remove the framing and just say a guy uses the n-word when speaking about black people and you have him framed as a racist. That's what he is doing. Lots of people have pet names for their spouses that we can pretend are horrible put-downs when they are likewise terms of endearment. Explaining this to a person motivated by malice is of no use. They know already. But their intentions are bad, just like the people calling the cops on Free Range parents. They aren't trying to rescue kids. They want to see the family terrorized, and at the same time pretend they are rescuing them.

People with an ego problem also want to put you on the defensive. So they make a stupid accusation and try to get you blubbering in defense. The fact they do it at all means there is another stupid accusation coming on the heels of the one you defend yourself against.

Expect this.


But what about going well beyond the Asian level? If you can go "well beyond", even going Asian is leaving a great amount of potential on the table and we humans need to wring every bit of potential we can from our kids if we want to make a place for ourselves in the galaxy someday.

If we did it, anyone can. I can't tell you how important it is just to be willing to try. When you have a baby on your own you will see how handling them in different ways fosters reactions you would like to encourage. Nobody taught us about these nerve impulses we discovered. Just the fact we were looking for things to foster development meant anything we observed that seemed useful could be taken advantage of.

So when you have a baby, a lot will just come to you so long as your attitude is right. The insight that evolution has imprinted certain reflex-actions in children is something we were looking for in general, and that is probably the one thing that gave us such a huge head start, and something that isn't generally known, now that I think about it in retrospect. Once you find an impulse-generator above the knee, you know to look for the one in a parallel place (above the elbow) on the body. It helped having a martial arts background and eastern concepts like acupuncture/acupressure to work from.

Also, I'm curious: how does early motor development help to create development of the intellectual faculty? That is, scientifically, what is the mechanism?

The ability is already there. Once a baby realizes it can go places, it starts to think about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. If they are lying on their back in a bassinette that prevents them from going anywhere, there is no motivation for this and there is no learning.

Just imagine if people were kept in bassinettes until ten years old. You'd have idiot ten year olds. The first person to have their kid out of a bassinette at a younger age is going to have a smarter child. But that person is going to be accused of child abuse. People will manufacture all kinds of horrible images - but they could fall down! They could tumble down stairs! The family dog might chew them to pieces! Etc.


So how do you get the kids to enjoy drills? I know I did not like arithmetic drill, for example, when I was younger. What is needed to make it something likable that they'll want to keep coming back to and doing more and more of? You say develop a "love" for it so there must be a way to make it likable. What is that method?

Kids love what their parents show joy over. Kids love attaining competency.

If you think flashcards suck and hate doing them, your kids won't like doing them either. But ours ask for flashcards. They ask for math exercises.
 
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Look at the professional educator above: pretending he is "sickened", lol.
If you can read my mind, it surprises me that you cannot identify my gender.

It takes no intelligence to frame someone in a negative light.
On the contrary, I think you are quite intelligent. But you are a walking encyclopedia of logical fallacies.

These negative attacks from the professional educator above are important to understand.
:rolleyes:

He can't bother himself to read a professional paper that is linked to in this very thread.
You have literally no way to know this. It's possible this is some defense you have mounted out of distorted thinking.

There is nothing I could say that would make the situation clearer than your own post.

It's not only irrational to continue to engage with you; it might be dangerous.
 
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Kids love what their parents show joy over.
Reminds me of a visit to "Lejre forsøgscenter", a historical reshearch/exibit centre.
The iron age village were populated by a couple couples of archaologists or such and their small kids. The kids had no context and were obviously having great fun cooking period food over a fire and playing on the small lake with the dugout canoe.:)

(Perhaps being born to a hunter/gatherer life helped.)
 
Mike3

Here is a collage of the kinds of things we were doing that got us raided by child protective services, but in reality quickly put our kid a full year ahead of his cohorts in development, especially intellectual. There is so much I have forgotten about that we had all nicely written up in sequence. A lot of it has to do with things we found that motivated them way more, like the music.


Collage_zpsdxtmpfel.png


Upper left - we discovered looking out the window was so fascinating to them that they would practice standing up for long periods there with balance help from mommy.

Upper right - split the upper and lower mattress so he could hold onto the lower mattress and cruise eight feet following mommy, who is singing to him on the upper mattress.

Next left - we discovered putting them in front of a mirror got them walking to the mirror while holding on to your fingers. This is a two month old baby walking across the room to look at himself in the mirror. He just needs to hold on to your fingers for balance.

Next right - I sewed up a harness I designed myself to help hold his weight up while he was practicing crawling, walking, cruising. It kept his hands free. One month old.

Lower left I think he is one month old still. If I put my thumbs up above the knee, and my fingers as shown that would stimulate the nerve impulse to get him to push. You can do it either way - sit them in your lap this way or be facing them and flip your hands around. After a couple of weeks you don't need to use the nerve impulse anymore. They just push.

Lower right - after they are doing this exercise for a while you can stand them up and they do the pushing exercise against mommy's hands as she supports him.

So by three months old you are in a foreign country because you have fled from Child Protective Services because people like the professional educator above will do just what he is doing now - saying you are dangerous.

But your pediatrician on the other hand is encouraging you and these PhD researchers want to see videos of what you are doing, which we happily sent to them, and they made comments for us in addition to giving us more papers to read and tips like developing obstacle courses and challenges that make him evaluate risk.

People are going to say your child is being treated like a dog because he has a harness on him - yes, people said that. It is just so easy to frame you as a crazy person because you are doing things outside the norm. You have police and child protective service agents only too happy to raid your home and demand you prove it isn't dangerous to do the things PhD researchers are doing in publications pinned on your wall. They won't read the papers if you try to hand them over because they are just enjoying exercising power over you, just like the professional educator is enjoying saying that I am dangerous.

But if you persevere against the social antagonism, you might have a five year old reading at the high school level before he is even in kindergarten.
 
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It's much worse than that. People are terrorized for doing something different from the norm.

However, what about if you move to a foreign country with different culture, different expectations, different laws, etc.?

If we did it, anyone can. I can't tell you how important it is just to be willing to try. When you have a baby on your own you will see how handling them in different ways fosters reactions you would like to encourage. Nobody taught us about these nerve impulses we discovered. Just the fact we were looking for things to foster development meant anything we observed that seemed useful could be taken advantage of.

So are you saying that you don't need tons and tons and tons of research to figure this out enough to get to those beyond-Asian levels? If "anyone" can do it then they shouldn't need to be an expert researcher, no?

Kids love what their parents show joy over. Kids love attaining competency.

If you think flashcards suck and hate doing them, your kids won't like doing them either. But ours ask for flashcards. They ask for math exercises.[/QUOTE]

So does this mean there's an unbreakable transgenerational trap if as a child you had a problem, then the next generation will unavoidably have that problem, and so on down the line and there's no way out? (E.g. I cannot go back to my childhood and make it so I liked arithmetic drills, so what should I do about the next generation)
 
However, what about if you move to a foreign country with different culture, different expectations, different laws, etc.?

Absolutely! I see things getting worse here with children in general so a LOT of countries are going to be better just on the basis of not having police state tyranny over children, regardless of how they feel about education.


So are you saying that you don't need tons and tons and tons of research to figure this out enough to get to those beyond-Asian levels? If "anyone" can do it then they shouldn't need to be an expert researcher, no?

Well it sure helped us but just having higher expectations alone changes everything.

So does this mean there's an unbreakable transgenerational trap if as a child you had a problem, then the next generation will unavoidably have that problem, and so on down the line and there's no way out? (E.g. I cannot go back to my childhood and make it so I liked arithmetic drills, so what should I do about the next generation)

That isn't what I meant. Regardless of whether you liked flashcards when you were young, if you think doing flashcards with your kids is a lot of fun then they will enjoy doing it with you.
 
It is just so easy to frame you as a crazy person because you are doing things outside the norm.

My evaluation of danger has nothing to do with the exercises you perform with your kids. It's the increasingly browbeating tone of your responses and the contortions of logic you employ to identify me as another of your persecutors.

That doesn't mean you're a bad dad.

The skeptic's field guide to spotting fallacies and deceptive arguments
http://www.skepticsfieldguide.net/2013/01/browbeating.html
 
So how do you get the kids to enjoy drills? I know I did not like arithmetic drill, for example, when I was younger. What is needed to make it something likable that they'll want to keep coming back to and doing more and more of

Here are a few ideas - with a caveat relating to the topic of this thread:

For an app that can be used to teach algebra to kindergarteners, check out DragonBox2. There maybe be a new version out. It cost me $10 last year but that might have changed, or there might be a free-sample type version.

In the low-tech arena: Use games with small incentives - multiplication bingo, for example. Show two cards and have students multiply, then see if that number is on their bingo card. Use loose change as markers, then once a kid gets a bingo he or she gets 5 pennies or can add to an account book. Play "store," with real or fake money. The incentives shouldn't be too high. In one small group kids would compete to see who got to use the purple marker. They will get turned on by the smallest things - be on the lookout.

For addition facts, blackjack would be interesting. My mom taught us with Diamond kitchen matches, but there's something satisfying about stacking up chips (or real coins), plus you can play with them, stacking into groups of 5 or 10, for example. It involves more of the senses - smelling the pennies or touching the little ridges on poker chips. Think of using an old-fashioned adding machine: the sight, sound and touch factors. Calculators today are amazing, but I like the old machines.

In a small-group setting, watch to see how kids organize themselves - how they assume roles - and use that dynamic. Play to their strengths, but rotate duties. Some children are naturally fastidious and like to play the role of fact-checker. But mix it up so that they get practice in other roles.

A match game with equivalent fractions (with a graphic representation as well - a circle or bar showing "one third" and "two sixths") can be created out of index cards, with images available online or hand-drawn by students who are good at dividing a figure into equal parts.

Get them to verbalize what they are doing, so they get used to using words to explain or describe what they are doing mathematically. Once they can do this, get the student to explain to classmates or siblings.

In general look for opportunities to make activities more interactive, with more engagement of the senses and small, sustainable incentives. Mix activities up and observe different learning styles. Leverage their strengths and look for opportunities to have them teach each other.

These suggestions are for younger kids, but they can be adapted for use with older children or groups.

Now the caveat: As topics get more abstract, games and whiteboards might be used intermittently as a break from pencil-and-paper math. IMO, students must also learn values of patience and persistence. That will come naturally to some students.
 
My evaluation of danger has nothing to do with...

It has nothing to do with reality. Go ahead and list these dangers you claim you are subject to from this discussion. You are on an anonymous forum.

We've had our home raided and were under threat of having our child taken from us. Yet you try to make us seem delusional with this manipulative language of yours and pretend you are facing some kind of danger.

You're pretty handy at manipulative rhetoric, but not in doing research in a thread specifically about your professional career.

It's not only irrational to continue to engage with you

So by your own assertion, you are irrational. Because you have continued to engage.
 
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Go ahead and list these dangers you claim you are subject to from this discussion. You are on an anonymous forum.

Not a danger to me. Something about your style reminds me of someone I know who has an explosive temper when challenged. There are other, more benign issues that could explain your posts.

Yet you try to make us seem delusional with this manipulative language of yours ...

Not "us"; I don't have an opinion about your wife. But your belief in the straw men you erect, your characterizing me as a manipulative persecutor, do make me wonder about your claims of persecution in general. I've never expressed an opinion about your work with your kids.

So by your own assertion, you are irrational. Because you have continued to engage.

You've got me there. Touche.
 
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your characterizing me as a manipulative persecutor,.

You are manipulative, and your incessant use of the term "persecutor" when I have never once used that term nor even suggested it with you is a perfect example.

Suggesting I am dangerous and like someone who had an explosive temper is ridiculous of course, and the fact you are a professional public educator shows us what you do in the classroom. You don't know the subject matter here nor show any willingness to do research on it. What you seem to specialize in is attempting to characterize someone who has as some kind of dangerous crazy person.
 
... your incessant use of the term "persecutor" ...
So in your universe "incessant" means once - twice, if we stretch it. And being terrorized by malicious attackers who enjoy exercising power over you in a tyrannical police state isn't persecution.

... and the fact you are a professional public educator shows us what you do in the classroom.

There you go again, fantasizing about my life.

I don't like that you call your little boys "retards," "morons," etc. and justify these expressions as terms of endearment.

The rest - the techniques that you say double the early-walking potential described by PhD researchers - I don't have an opinion about. But I did wonder about this:

It was frustrating for us - especially with the younger boy because he didn't catch on as early as the older boy. He could read really long words like Mommy and Daddy but not do two-letter phonics.

I didn't understand why that would be frustrating to you - I didn't understand why it was about you to begin with.
 
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Making a comment yourself might be a good way to get a conversation going. Otherwise it's just a link (and thanks for that).

Also, it's difficult in general to draw people to this part of the forum. Some subjects take off, but a lot don't.

Always meant to thank you for the advice, Minoosh, but explain that I didn't really care if the topic got any traction. I just thought, being the father of a millennial, it was interesting and made a rare attempt to share it. Imagine my surprise when I just checked it out to see if I missed any of the posts, and I realized this thread got more views than any other in this sub-forum over the last year. :boggled:

Thanks to all who expressed some interesting insights on the subject. A shame it got kind of personal at times, but then that is par for the net nowadays imo. :(
 
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