Asians seeking creativity

We've heard this story before!

Students in a Loudoun County laboratory studied tiny, genetically altered plants one recent afternoon, drawing leaves and jotting data in logbooks. Meanwhile, visiting scientists studied the students.

In spiral notebooks, the visitors recorded how long the teacher waited for students to answer questions, how often the teenagers spoke up and how strongly they held to their views.

The scientists had come thousands of miles from the island nation of Singapore to the Academy of Science in Sterling in search of ways to improve their teaching. This could be considered surprising, given that Singapore's eighth-graders rank No. 1 in science and math globally and those in the United States rank ninth in science and 15th in math, according to the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

But rankings aren't everything -- how America teaches is admired.

In a 21st-century economy that rewards quick thinking and problem solving, many educators in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia worry they are creating a generation of scientists who can memorize facts but can't keep up. These educators want to go beyond teaching facts and concepts that appear on tests and start teaching skills that are harder to gauge.

Hungry for new scientific and technological breakthroughs, Singapore's government has been asking this question. And it is rethinking lesson plans in a public school system for a country of about 4.3 million. In an initiative known as "Teach Less, Learn More," Singapore has trimmed its curriculum in recent years to focus on quality of instruction rather than quantity and to give students more time to think. And its educators are circling the globe to hunt for new methods.

Loudoun's Academy of Science weaves together math and science concepts and stresses hands-on learning through real-world applications. Teachers use the "inquiry approach" to education, giving students tools and guidance rather than step-by-step instructions. The goal is to have more " 'Gee whiz!' and 'Holy mackerel!' " moments and "to inject a love of science in addition to the facts," Wolfe said.

"How do you measure excitement? How do you measure creativity?" asked George Wolfe, director of the two-year-old public magnet school in Loudoun. "There's so much publicity about Americans not scoring well on tests, but few people ask the question: Then why are we producing so much innovation from our scientists?"

source:
Asian Educators Looking to Loudon for an Edge

I have the answer to that question.

Number one: We're manic depressive.

Number two: Our scientists are from Asia.^*


here's the real answer

In 2005, a report commissioned by the U.S. Education Department compared math teaching in the United States and Singapore. It found that U.S. texts place less emphasis on understanding math concepts in depth and that U.S. teachers are less likely to clearly understand the subject. William Schmidt, a Michigan State University education professor, said the United States could learn a lot from Singapore. He said the success of scientists here owes more to a business and cultural environment that rewards risk-taking than to the U.S. education system.

Actually, risk-taking is hypomanic behavior.

I have no idea how much the genetics of temperament has to do with it, but I do think it has an effect, and I think we know that Americans have higher rates of hypomania and bipolar disorder.

Or not.

A Hypomanic Nation?

Energy, drive, cockeyed optimism, entrepreneurial and religious zeal, Yankee ingenuity, messianism, and arrogance—these traits have long been attributed to an “American character.” But given how closely they overlap with the hypomanic profile, they might be better understood as expressions of an American temperament, shaped in large part by our rich concentration of hypomanic genes.

If a scientist wanted to design a giant petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A “nation of immigrants” represents a highly skewed and unusual “self-selected” population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn’t. “Immigrants are unusual people,” wrote James Jaspers in Restless Nation. Only one out of a hundred people emigrate, and they tend to be imbued “with special drive, ambition and talent.”

A small empirical literature suggests that there are elevated rates of manic-depressive disorder among immigrants, regardless of what country they are moving from or to.17 America, a nation of immigrants, has higher rates of mania than every other country studied (with the possible exception of New Zealand, which topped the United States in one study). In fact, the top three countries with the most manics—America, New Zealand, and Canada—are all nations of immigrants. Asian countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, which have absorbed very few immigrants, have the lowest rates of bipolar disorder. Europe is in the middle, in both its rate of immigrant absorption and its rate of mania.18 As expected, the percentage of immigrants in a population correlates with the percentage of manics in their gene pool.

While we have no cross-cultural studies of hypomania, we can infer that we would find increased levels of hypomania among immigrant-rich nations like America, since mania and hypomania run together in the same families. Hypomanics are ideally suited by temperament to become immigrants. If you are an impulsive, optimistic, high-energy risk taker, you are more likely to undertake a project that requires a lot of energy, entails a lot of risk, and might seem daunting if you thought about it too much. America has drawn hypomanics like a magnet. This wide-open land with seemingly infinite horizons has been a giant Rorschach on which they could project their oversized fantasies of success, an irresistible attraction for restless, ambitious people feeling hemmed in by native lands with comparatively fewer opportunities.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who traveled throughout America in the 1830s, was among the first to define the American character. He found us to be “restless in the midst of abundance,” and the proof was that we were always moving. Tocqueville was astonished to meet people moving from east to west and west to east. That so many people would surrender the comfort and safety of their home in pursuit of an “ideal” struck him as odd. And we are still the most voluntarily mobile people on Earth. The average American changes residences every five years—more often than the inhabitants of any other nation. We change jobs more frequently, too.19 Tocqueville “found an entire people racing full speed ahead, and we’ve kept on racing for more than three hundred years,” wrote Michael Ledeen in Tocqueville on American Character.

update from Paula

Yes, Loudoun County is on the cutting edge or so the newspapers continue to write. One of my son's former teachers said, "Loudoun County has really ramped up its way of doing things. This is no place for the average student."

I wanted to laugh. My third grader's KUMON center is packed with kids. Asian kids. There are a few white children attending the center. I think I've seen two black kids. That is it.

Yet, Loudoun County boasts about all of its students being above average. Really?

Before enrolling my son at KUMON, I emailed Bill Quirk and he said do not tell the school I am placing my son in KUMON. Let the teachers think it is their teaching that is enhancing my son's education. Perhaps other parents as well have heeded this advice.

Singapore Math comes to Abington


^* I have no idea what I'm talking about. I do know that when you look at graduate programs in math & the sciences you see a lot of foreign students. A whole lot.