
Things Every Kid Should Master - wallflower
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/02/26/things-every-kid-should-master/uM72LGr63zeaStOp9zGyrJ/story.html
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kenjackson
My son is six and I take him to school each day (its about 25 minutes). He
started asking me to tell him stories on the way to school, so I told him
stories about how I was a spy and the missions I went on.

Eventually I put him in my stories too -- he was member of the Omega Force. At
some point he didn't like how his character was acting in the story, so he
began to tell me what his character should do. Well over the course of about a
month we now do a full on role-playing game on the way to school. The level of
role playing matches nearly anything I did when I played D&D. He now leads the
Omega Force and I lead the Alpha Force. His squad is larger, but mine is more
specialized.

That 25 minutes of rather sophisticated verbal interaction is pretty
incredible. I can weave in interesting scenarios and discussions, and the
level of engagement is great. I have no data to support it, but I feel like
its something that almost every kindergartner could benefit from.

~~~
ngoel36
You should have him write down his thoughts as well - it sounds like his story
development and verbal communication skills are getting a bunch of work, would
be awesome to have his written communication match

~~~
kenjackson
That's a good idea! Thanks.

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zamalek
> Conversation

I know barely any adults (late 20s, early 30s) who know how to do this. The
concept of "conversationalist" is lost in modern society, you have to be
watching whatever junk is on TV in order to communicate with people - god
forbid you want to talk about something genuinely interesting.

~~~
beat
Why else do you think "conversationalist" is lost in modern society? I know
countless people who are wonderful conversationalists.

Something to consider... the first step to good conversation is being
genuinely interested in other people's interests. If they're talking about
something you don't know, take it as an opportunity to learn. Sneering at the
values of others is poor attitude, which leads to poor conversation. If you
really believe people only want to discuss "junk on TV", and that it's not
"genuinely interesting", you're forgetting that it's interesting _to them_.
Declaring an objective view that makes you superior and them inferior is,
well, rude.

A little more about tv, weather, and other "uninteresting" subjects here -
conversation is about finding common ground, something to talk about. We talk
about the weather, or tv, because it's a place to start. It gets the
conversation rolling, to help us discover bits about each other, and
eventually find that "genuinely interesting" common ground.

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cssmoo
Can't say I've experienced that. It always seems to decline into the size of a
celebrity's arse. Even one of my friends, an ex-physicist and current private
jet pilot has nothing to say past the size of an arse.

I just go and read a book now.

~~~
beat
Celebrities are an important part of generic conversation... they give us
someone to gossip about that neither of us actually know. Public shaming is an
important (if offensive) social ritual.

That said, just about anyone can talk about something other than Kim
Kardashian. No one actually cares about her. Talking about something like a
celebrity's arse is a way of _avoiding_ talking about stuff we actually _care
about_ \- as someone else noted in this thread, the fear of being seen as
uninteresting, or weird, or an outsider, if you talk about stuff that matters
to you.

The way to get people to talk about what they care about is to _ask them_.
Your friend the physicist/pilot? Ask him about physics. Ask him about
airplanes. Ask him about his clients as a pilot. Pretty soon, he'll be talking
about much more interesting things - interesting to him, and probably
interesting to you.

And all you have to do is listen, and he'll think you're awesome.

~~~
kaybe
With some people that's really hard. They don't see your interest or
disinterest in a topic at all, even if you make it really really obvious (not
looking at you, one word answers and even descending into rudeness vs making
eye contact and participating in the conversation). Some people just want to
complain about trivial things, even if they could tell you about antarctic
expeditions instead.

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germinalphrase
I find it encouraging that we're starting to discuss skills that allow young
people to teach themselves rather than remaining reliant on guidance of
others.

Some of the skills discussed in this article are difficult to instruct in an
educational setting (though they can certainly be structurally reinforced) -
but I see far too many young people who see 'education' as a task to be
completed/survived rather than a series of personal skills they will need/want
to apply to life at large.

The comments about testing aren't particularly interesting (as other
commenters have pointed out) - but we should certainly be aware of the
distorting effects of high stakes testing on the values/goals of our schools.

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sogen
"Dumbing us Down" by John Gatto is a great eye opener about schooling and how
schools are great at _killing_ creativity.

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afarrell
I would give anything right now to have had someone actually have taught me
collaboration and conversation when I was a kid. I remember crying multiple
nights in elementary school because I didn't have friends and didn't know how
to work with people. At the very least, I wish I'd known about How to Win
Friends and Influence People before high school.

~~~
beat
Nice to see a shout out to the greatest book ever written on being a good
conversationalist! "How to Win Friends and Influence People" ought to be
required reading in high school.

My wife struggles with introversion. She hates talking to strangers and non-
friends, calls networking "schmoozing", and generally sees only the negative
in meeting new people. I've tried to get her to read this book for years, but
she fights me on it.

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xtrumanx
I read that book and I've gotta say fans of it have really oversold it. It has
some good advice but I found some tactics questionable due to appearing as
insincere to me.

I also find it weird that you characterize your wife's introversion as a
struggle like introversion is some sort of abnormal condition. Some people
just don't enjoy random conversations about random topics because randomness
is usually not a great way to select for quality.

~~~
beat
Really? I thought sincerity in conversation was the entire point of the book!
He says quite explicitly that if you're insincere, people will sense it and
distrust you.

As for my spouse... yes, it hurts her, and she's aware it hurts her. It limits
her effectiveness as an artist, and it limits her career options. You can't
"cure" introversion (it's not a disease, it's a personality), but you can
compensate for it. And part of that is just cultivating internal attitudes -
for example, not thinking of networking as something deceptive and selfish
("schmoozing"), but rather as something sincere and generous.

~~~
visarga
As an artist, introversion has its benefits too. Extraversion reduces time
spent pondering, employing imagination and intuition.

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Lancey
I feel like the writer doesn't fully understand how deep some of the flaws in
our educational system can run. Take, for example, the section on
collaboration which hints only at educator behavior influencing students to
exclude others. There are so many other factors that would cause a child to
segregate and organize themselves into cliques, and as much as our educators
may impact the social structure of the students, the behaviors of parents,
guardians, caretakers, and other adults in a student's life play just as
important a role in their development, especially if students spend more time
with them than their teachers. This issue extends beyond the scope of our
education system and is not easily remedied through changes in the
institution. Some of these habits may not be fixable.

This isn't to say the article doesn't raise good points, especially that
elementary and early school years should focus more on developing social
skills than academic ones. However it fails to assess how varied children can
be in terms of background, home life, opportunity, and development. Would it
be fair to assess a student to whom English is a second language on the same
scale as one that grew up in an English speaking country? Can we compare a
student on the autistic spectrum with a socially and verbally mature student?
The author makes these topics seem simpler than they actually are, and that
hurts the message that they're trying to get across.

~~~
tokenadult
_good points, especially that elementary and early school years should focus
more on developing social skills than academic ones._

I hold that United States schools are stultifyingly boring for a great many
pupils, because the lessons are too easy,[1] and as a consequence many pupils
languish in their social development because they are not allowed the
opportunity to pursue development of knowledge and skill while engaged in
group work at school. One reason I think this is that I know a whole country,
where my wife grew up, where most school pupils were instructed in school in a
second language that they didn't speak at home[2] and where the school lessons
were much more challenging. That seemed to produce better social results than
have ever been found in United States schools.

[1]
[https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201...](https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2012/07/10/11913/do-
schools-challenge-our-students/)

[2] My wife is part of the majority population of Taiwan in her generation
that grew up speaking Taiwanese at home but was only permitted to speak
Mandarin at school. (Mandarin is approximately as different from Taiwanese as
English is from German, or as Spanish is from French.) The school lessons in
Taiwan were, and are, much more ambitious in promoting deep thinking than
United States lessons are, and include a mandatory requirement to begin
studying high-school-level algebra and geometry by seventh grade--even for
below-average pupils. Oh, and of course school pupils all over the world begin
study of modern foreign languages--usually English--by much earlier ages than
most pupils in United States schools, even if they are going to school in a
second language, as many school pupils do in many countries. United States
schools are too wimpy academically to fully develop young people socially.

~~~
Lancey
Yes, in my experience elementary school was hellishly boring, but I believe
that comes from them being focused on teaching mechanical processes, such as
the times table, rather than thought processes. In that way it'd be just as
beneficial to a student's social faculties to teach critical thinking as
critical thinking would benefit from the teaching of social skills. Having to
simultaneously master another language provides students with a direct method
of developing their communication skills and requires them to better
rationalize their thoughts, so naturally it would foster better social habits.

To also touch on one of your notes, I also think that the United States is
slow in teaching foreign language, and exposure to other cultures and
languages would help to dispel the myth in American culture that the U.S. is
the center of the universe. Perhaps American schools should start teaching
only in Mandarin as well. :p

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Delmania
How about empathy and self control? How about humility? These 3 skills are
sorely needed.

~~~
mtbcoder
I very much agree with the Buddhist thought process that compassion, empathy
are pivotal to well-being. I was a bit disappointed that these were absent
from the list. In my opinion they are foundational in regards to points 4
through 7.

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kleer001
Misleading title. Should have been "Things every child educator should
master."

Children _should_ be children, it's the adults that are messing up.

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inanutshellus
This article seems to be flame-bait for the standardized test world, rather
than pointers on how to direct children.

e.g. "If only our standardized tests measured this amorphous thing!" rather
than "Here are tips for promoting [inquiry] in children".

Looking at BG's comments show the article's content is ignored and instead is
people blasting their opinion of the current state of educational reform.

~~~
Lancey
I agree with this. By opening with a diatribe on standardized tests, and
focusing on assessing skills that are inherently difficult to assess, Engel
moves the discussion from helping children to condemning our education system
(it's bad, but this article shouldn't be about testing or schools at all).

~~~
300bps
_By opening with a diatribe on standardized tests, and focusing on assessing
skills that are inherently difficult to assess, Engel moves the discussion
from helping children to condemning our education system_

Exactly. The article just comes across as so silly. Take this part:

 _There are several ways we might measure a child’s disposition to inquire. We
can easily record the number of questions the child asks during a given
stretch of time._

It's been a while since I've been in a classroom but I would probably jump out
the window if every class period each student had to get their average 1.4
questions in to maintain their grade.

It's like the article writer lives in a fantasy world.

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jff
"Testing these concrete things is bad, let's instead attempt to test these
poorly-defined subjective things."

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astrodust
Nothing about being a creator rather than a pure consumer? Too many are caught
up in the cycle of chasing grades and completely forget what the _point_ of an
education is supposed to be.

~~~
beat
What _is_ the point of education? Not the point of learning, but the point of
schools and degrees and such?

One could argue that it's mostly about learning obedience, how to worship the
clock, and how to tolerate doing things that are arbitrary and stupid. School
isn't to make us good people. It's to make us good employees.

~~~
vitd
Is it learning obedience and worshipping the clock, or is it patience and
self-control?

I went to lunch with some coworkers the other day. The restaurant we went to
told us there would be about a 5 minute wait because some machine or other was
just repaired. One of my coworkers had a little freak-out about how long it
was taking and stormed out to go to another restaurant. (And this was a "fast
food" restaurant we were already at.) I'm pretty sure he hadn't finished
walking to the next restaurant by the time we got our food, but waiting an
extra few minutes was too much for him.

The rest of us had a minimal amount of patience and it was no big deal. He
wasn't a slave to some clock and he didn't have to obey anyone telling him to
wait. But he also didn't get what he claimed he wanted (to be served faster).

~~~
beat
Why can't it be both?

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luxpir
Was pleasantly surprised by the article. Turns out there's some excellent
guidance for the new parent there, given that very few of us can expect these
lifeskills to be taught at school; folks can at least take a stab at teaching
these at home.

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omegote
Boom, I was expecting to find "Programming, every kid should know how to
program" at any point in the article. Glad I didn't.

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davidbanham
This is a great start and very well intentioned. I worry that all of the
assessment methods, though, are very geared towards extroverts.

A shy kid just won't perform well on most of those metrics. If a kid isn't
comfortable with the tester, they'll be unlikely to pepper them with
questions.

Now, we should _definitely_ be trying to give that shy kid the tools they need
to deal with that situation. In-person collaboration and meeting new people is
a vital skill. We can't let our entire testing regime be blocked behind that
skill, though.

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VLM
"Why not test the things we value, and test them in a way that provides us
with an accurate picture of what children really do, not what they can do
under the most constrained circumstances after the most constrained test
preparation?"

Because the purpose of testing is to use it as a weapon to punish political
opponents and brag about your own accomplishments. Also it can be used as a
weapon to reduce funding, if you want to reduce funding and need to provide an
acceptable theoretically 3rd party evaluated reason, ditto if you see firing
people as an inherent good. Along the lines of security theater logic, the
more painful and obnoxious and offensive the testing is, the better it must be
and the more the school must care about kids, for a similar example see the
logic behind corporal punishment in schools from decades past (we only beat
the kids because we love them or somesuch nonsense). Finally if you carefully
design racially biased tests or socioeconomic biased tests, then even a proud
liberal can select the lilly white rich subdivision for their kids "because of
the test scores" in an abstract public sense, not the highly politically
incorrect race and income data.

The analogy with security theater is the truly critical point from above.
School testing exists to improve schools in exactly the same way TSA jackboots
molesting women at airports improves security.

~~~
me1010
I strongly disagree.

The latest round of standardized testing, Common Core, is quite good. However,
_some_ schools and teachers and administrators will always act like:

> TSA jackboots

This doesn't mean that the testing or the test material is a bad idea.

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slimetree
This is an excellent thought experiment I genuinely wish were reality. That
said, the root problem with standardized tests is that they're inherently
hackable. Standardized tests are like desktop software: you write once and
ship everywhere, and once you do people start reverse engineering it.

Any sufficiently hackable test will appear to work in the short-term if you
just place it in front of admission to prestige, because of the large subset
of high-achieving people whose lives' missions are to game any test placed in
front of them, which drastically skews how well the test appears to predict
achievement.

The things mentioned in the article are excellent things to test, but if you
start measuring e.g. the number and type of of questions a kid asks within x
minutes, cram schools will just adapt, and in a few years you'll hit the end
of another cycle.

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NoMoreNicksLeft
> The educational philosopher Harry Brighouse has suggested that the ability
> to think about something for 20 minutes at a time (sustained focus) may be
> one of the most powerful cognitive skills we acquire in school.

What school did this guy attend? The one I was sent to as a child was little
more than a zoo. If anyone left there able to concentrate for 20 minutes
(myself included), it had nothing to do with the curriculum, the teaching
methodology, or even the values espoused by the teachers and administration.

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johnchristopher
I am surprised about the lack of math/algebra emphasis.

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seanfchan
The traits that we should be testing for in this article are great but what do
you think it would take to adopt this type of testing?

It seems like public school are stuck continuing with the current tests
because these tests are used to procure federal/state funding. For schools to
change, the country's consciousness needs to change about how society defines
a "well rounded" individual

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qnaal
Where does "who invented the cotton gin" fit into all this?

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s_henry_paulson
#7 is arguably even the most important.

If only administrators and those above them would be made to understand that
there is more to child development than standardized test scores.

~~~
markbnj
My reaction was the opposite. Of course well-being is important, but it's a
state isn't it? How do you learn it, or teach it? It sounds perilously close
to the whole "self-esteem" thing that became prominent in elementary schools a
few years back. As if self-esteem was not something developed through
accomplishment and the subsequent increase in self-confidence, but rather a
piece of information to be conveyed by an instructor. "Shazam! You now esteem
yourself."

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sp332
Lots of people with impressive accomplishments don't have self-esteem.
Impostor Syndrome, Dunning-Kruger etc. If you don't have self-esteem, you'll
let yourself get pushed around because you think you're not really worth
anything. But with it, you'll start to see your own potential, which is a good
motivator to start working toward it.

~~~
rustynails
Self esteem is a double edged sword as it does not consider empathy and may
lead to narcissistic values. That's the flaw with the self only aspect.

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neumino
Empathy is probably the most important thing kids should learn.

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senthil_rajasek
play

