What if your kids refuse your help when studying

My son Jack took part 2 of his Maths GCSE today.   Over the last few years I have tried to offer advice on studying and homework but I am afraid it has manly fallen on deaf ears.  I have tried to convince him over the years that doing just a little bit of study and practice in math really pays off but he insisted on doing it his own way.  It was not really until a month ago that he started asking me for help with his studies. He is not a bad student, getting solid Bs,  it is just I know he is getting by without really having to try too hard,  and from my own experience I know this will only last for so long without studying at home.

Now some of you may know me from high school in the US and at University in the UK and will realise this is me calling   black arse to the kettle as I was not what you might have called a model student.  Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow was my motto and I paid for it with some of the grades I got.

My sons school had/has  a really odd homework policy,  and either my son never gets math homework or he is amazing at pulling the wool over my eyes.  I recall in high school regularly getting a page or two of math problems to do,  and I even sometimes did them.

Now I could have tried forcing him to study but with his personality don't really think that it would have worked.  I took my wife's advice and waited for him to come to me. So far so good. Now in the last 3 days I have been able to work with my son to go through and revise some of his math and I think we have also agreed that we will work together on the science and the math and no longer leave it to the school to teach any more taking responsibility at home for what he learns and how he studies as at school he finds it very hard to concentrate.  We have just started going to the Khan Academy to work through some of the videos and practice problems and hope to be able to report back on what difference it makes over the summer.

How we learn and how we think

A number of years ago I was really struggling to understand some of the fundamental concepts in neurobiology.  I had studied the subject as an undergraduate,  but frankly I had learned it by rote long enough to write it down in an exam and promptly forgotten it.  A few years later I returned to university to study for a masters in neuroscience.  There was a bit of overlap between what I had covered as an undergraduate and what we were covering as a postgrad and so the same subject came up a again (for background it was how a membrane potential across a nerve is generated and maintained and how this is governed by the Nernst Equation). The problem I had was my maths had always been a bit ropey, and the physics of it had been bypassed in my science education.  So heads down once again I started out learning it all by rote.  However I still was lacking in a fundamental understanding of why it worked.  So unhappy with the level of understanding I had of the subject I went back to fundamentals and had to learn the basics of resistance and capacitance as well as brushing up on my maths.  In the end it clicked.

Now this got me to thinking about how I had studied in the past and how people study and learn a subject.  If we think about a subject linearly we start at the fundamentals and over the years build up to the more complex topics eventually we may even develop new insights and discoveries in that subject.

When using this model it is obvious that I had gaps in the basics,  which in its self did not stop me learning the topic but it made it difficult for me to understand the subject and so would never be able to develop any new insights into the subject. The more I thought about it and my other experiences in education made me think that instead of a linear model we should be thinking of a spiral-and probably a 3-dimensional spiral at that.  The spiral starts out in the center with the most basic skills that we learn like counting and way way out on the edge is string theory and the unified filed theory. If we still consider a "subject" to have a linear learning path and merge the two models then it can show the dependencies and associations between different subjects aid in the understanding and make it easier to learn.  When I look at my own education my spiral would have large black holes in areas of it where I skipped class did not do the homework limiting my ability to carry on extending my understanding in that subject area.

This made me think about what makes it easy to remember and recall information. If we don't have a solid framework to hang additional information on then our mind does not know how to file the information for and it just gets put in a random folder somewhere in your brain.  However if you have a structure in place it can be filled away, correctly tagged and linked to the other pieces of information relevant to it.  

Now some people are much better at this than others and can recall facts and figures, dates and events with incredible detail. Possibly their brain is better at filing and linking new facts next to the relevant fact building up a nice ordered index of information which is easy to recall. I am not one of those people.  I imagine my brain is probably more like an incredibly messy desk with everything lying at my fingertips.  I know the information is there it is just going to take me a few minutes to find it.  However what I am exceptional at is linking different concepts and finding links and associations between then and developing new ideas -also known as ideation. So is my ability in coming up with new ideas associated with my less than exceptional ability to recall detailed facts?  And is it linked to the way my brain stores and indexes the information I take in.   By having all the information littered across my desk it makes it easier to associate what would at first glance seem like two entirely unrelated pieces of information.  Does this mean that when we explore the way memory works that we will find different types of memory, and different mechanisms? with some people having a more efficient tagging and indexing mechanism and others having a better method of associating information.

UK Ofsted Report and The Math Debate

Last week I listened to discussions of the Ofsted report into the teaching of Maths in secondary schools.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18152706

Quotes from the article highlight the issues:

• "Our failure to stretch some of our most able pupils threatens the future supply of well-qualified mathematicians, scientists and engineers."
• "Too many pupils who have a poor start or fall behind early in their mathematics education never catch up," he says.
• "The 10% who do not reach the expected standard at age seven doubles to 20% by age 11, and nearly doubles again by 16"
• "Schools must focus on equipping all pupils, particularly those who fall behind or who find mathematics difficult, with the essential knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the next stage of their mathematics education."

I came across a video on TED from Salman Khan which used a brilliant analogy to describe what happens when students struggle in Maths and I would extend it to include the sciences as well.

A slightly edited version of Salman's narrative is below.
"Imagine learning how to ride a bicycle, I give you some lessons and then let you go away and practice for a little bit and then you come back and I assess your bike riding ability.  Now your have real trouble with left turns and you can't quite stop, so I assess you as an 80% bicyclist and give you C.  Now we move on and start to learn to ride a motorcycle."

In essence what he is saying,  is that we are asking students to move onto the more complex subjects when they have not mastered the pre-requisites for what comes next.  I experienced this throughout my education with chemistry.  I struggled with math for a long time because during my early education I jumped from school to school, first in New York, then Belgium, Scotland, Wisconsin.  The end result is I never really got my head around a whole bunch of basic math functions, and had to pick them up along the way. It was finally when doing my Masters in Neuroscience that I worked out why,  and started going back and relearning from scratch some basic math.  Once I had done that everything else started coming easier.

The flip side of this problem was experienced by my brother.  He was in school in New York as a kid and was marked out by his teachers as being lazy and disruptive.   Truth of the matter was he was just bored.  He knew all the math subject they were teaching him.  It was only when he was assessed that it turned out he was about 2 years ahead of the rest of his class,  and he skipped two grades.  By the time he got to Madison Wisconsin he ended up having to take Math classes at the University of Wisconsin when he was 15 years old. Now although intellectually my brother was ready to go to University socially he would probably agree he was not.

We will always have classes of mixed ability, the question we have is what we do about it.  By having teachers with a fixed lesson plan with subjects like math we force everyone in the class to learn at the same pace.  This is fundamentally wrong to expect this of children or even of adults.

So how do we address this.  Salman Khan's suggestion is that we flip the class. Which means that the students get the lesson as home work by watching a video where the topic is demonstrates and the problem is worked through with examples. Then what would traditionally be homework-lots of math problems- are done in class where the teacher can guide and help.  This echoes what I suggested in previous posts- teachers would be responsible for learning and leave the teaching to the high quality professionally filmed and illustrated videos.

Now this suggestion is not new.  In fact it is the principle behind the Kumon approach to teaching math.  Kids don't move on to the next subject until they get 100%. The Kumon "teachers" are there to facilitate and encourage.

The Khan Academy
If you have children I I really suggest you take a look at the Khan Academy.  What Salman has done is not only record an enormous number of videos and exercises starting from telling the time to 2nd Order Linear Homogeneous Differential Equation,  he has also built up a curriculum to take students through the subjects to lead the student through the subjects.

Combine this with a dashboard for parent or teachers to monitor the students progress what you have is an alternative to a one size fits all lesson for children in schools.

Go to Khan Academy, tell your friends,  show it to your children's teachers, school Govenors and start a discussion on how it could be used.  At the moment it is a bit US centric on the curriculum,  but I believe a future upgrade will allow people to create their own custom maps like the one above.  It is amazing to start with and will only get better.   http://www.khanacademy.org/