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LONDON - British children's brain development is being threatened by their failure to work with their hands in school and at home, said a report released on Monday.With woodwork, metalwork, craft, music or car mechanic classes dropped by many schools and children wanting to play computer games at home, the UK is becoming a "software instead of a screwdriver society," said the report, commissioned by the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust.
"Working with one's own hands in a real-world 3-D environment is imperative for full cognitive and intellectual development," said the report's author Dr. Aric Sigman.
[snip]
The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems.
"The findings of this report clearly point to strengthening the role of '3-D' learning and crafts in educational policy-making today," said Sigman.
Working with hands helps develop kid's brains
Temple has been talking about this for years. Her students can't draw (scroll down). By "her students can't draw," I mean her students can't use CAD to make a correct architectural drawing. The reason they can't use CAD, Temple believes, is that they never learned to draw by hand. Older architects who learned to draw by hand and then switched to CAD do fine. It's the younger architects who never did hand drawings at all who are lost.
My sister's husband has seen the same thing. And Carolyn always thought there was something important about hands and math.
Maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.
This could be wrong, of course. But if I had to bet, I wouldn't bet on Project Lead the Way.
Bring back shop.
26 comments:
Don Potter thinks the loss of teaching cursive handwriting is also leading to problems.
I'm going to teach cursive next year, as well as improve the pencil grip and work more on printing.
When we lived in the DC area, we went to the national archives. I was amazed how nice the cursive writing of most of the Presidents was. (Plus the fact that many of them, especially the earlier ones, wrote a lot of things in cursive.)
Everyone in the WWII generation had wonderful handwriting.
It's amazing.
I tried to remediate C's (& mine) & didn't get far.
One of these days I'll get back to working on my own.
I took a look at THE HAND.
He says that switching young children from real objects to computers & mouses is a major change in history & child development.
He doesn't know what it will lead to, and he isn't necessarily alarmed -- but he is fairly negative about the fact that schools have promoted this idea so heavily.
He says he can see why schools wanted to bring computers in (I can't, honestly) but he can't see why schools are so eager to take recess & the rest of it out.
(I'll find the exact quote.)
otoh, here's today's report from Science Daily, which I also believe to be true (and have believed for quite some time...)
Passive Learning Imprints on the Brain Just Like Active Learning
I have no idea how to square these circles.
This is one of those situations where I'm willing to trust my "intuition."
I will add that the difference between me and Columbia Teachers College is that I would not build an entire pedagogy on my beliefs that hands-on is better than computer simulation & passive learning imprints on the brain like active learning and then impose it on other people's children.
The emphasis on handwork is one of the things I really liked about the Waldorf school I toured. Knitting, crocheting, woodworking, bookbinding, probably some other things I don't remember.
I got this book a few months ago, but haven't read it: Will-developed intelligence: The handiwork and practical arts curriculum in Waldorf schools, by David S. Mitchell.
Amazon doesn't list it, but a toystore that does is here, with the following blurb:
Will-Developed Intelligence
Handwork and Practical Arts in the Waldorf School - Elementary through High School. A practical guide to the subjects that make up this curriculum. This book examines how working with the hands opens up neurological passageways that establish the foundation of thinking. Copiously illustrated, this book shows how the conscious development and training of the hands in the Waldorf curriculum, from kindergarten through high school, lead through the heart forces which enhance cognition.
-m, not mark.
I'd also agree the lack of hands-on work impacts math. One thing I see is too many students who can make graphs with Excel or their graphing calculators, but not by hand. That doesn't give them the same sense of how a curve behaves, what a slope is, etc, that we got twenty-five years ago by drawing things.
I remember in my sophomore Physical Chemistry lab, we were required to graph all our data and find slopes by hand. If I did that today, my students would go crazy (although it is tempting, since they also wouldn't produce Excel plots where the x axis is evenly spaced even though the values are 2, 4, 8, 16).
Legos.
You have to be careful. I find that the reason people aren't good in something is because they aren't taught. Manipulables aren't the solution in math. I don't want to see "Manipulables Across the Curriculum" either. I'm stuck with coloring across the curriculum. The school thinks that you can't develop reading comprehension unless you keep drawing pictures of your favorite scenes in a book.
On a separate issue, does anyone know anything about the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE) run by Daggett, McNulty, and Gloeckler? A group from our schools went to their Model Schools Conference and our superintendent is applying to have our schools become "Model Schools". I went to their web site and can't find out anything about what this really means. Apparently, they've found out how to make:
"High schools, middle grades programs, and elementary schools that are highly successful at providing every student with a rigorous and relevant education."
We all know what "relevant" means.
Speaking of hands-on, one of the math projects the ICLE pushes on their web site has to do with desiging a bird house.
Speaking of hands-on, one of the math projects the ICLE pushes on their web site has to do with desiging a bird house.
The Waldorf schools have you beat there...they design and build an actual house over the course of a school year, although I'm not sure they include it as part of the math block.
My kids used to go to a Waldorf school. Looking back, the knitting, woodworking etc. is the one thing I believe they actually had right.
"We all know what "relevant" means."
I was digging around the ICLE (Daggett) site and found the promotion of an ICLE book on the new three R's (rigor, relevance, relationship) selling for nearly $300 (pocket change if you have license to waste taxpayer money with abandon).
http://www.leadered.com/pdf/Lead%20for%20RRR%20kit%20Excerpt.pdf
The book contains examples of rigor/relevance in grid form. For math it teaches that knowing the multiplication table falls into the low rigor/relevance slot.
Guess what's in the high rigor/relevance slot? Estimating a large number of objects without counting, e.g. beans in a jar.
Incidentally, the new three R's is the rationale used by the Gates folks to transform high schools here in Chicago.
Catherine-- I've corresponded with Frank Wilson, author of The Hand, and he seems to think that there isn't *enough* hands-on learning in the schools; whereas I would say there's altogether too much. I don't think he's spent any time in a Reform Math classroom.
Re Passive Learning Imprints on the Brain Just Like Active Learning, my collaborator and I, working with children with autism, have data suggesting that this is not the case with language learning. We find that autistic children do much better passively identifying grammatical sentences than actively generating them. There's also an article by Lightbown (I forget which journal it's in) discussing comparing how native French Canadian students faired with a reading and listening only English curriculum vs. one where they had to actively produce English; the latter group of students did significantly better.
Lefty---
I've corresponded with Frank Wilson, author of The Hand, and he seems to think that there isn't *enough* hands-on learning in the schools; whereas I would say there's altogether too much
right
no surprise there
we are DOOMED
Ed read the WSJ article about college degrees & income this morning & said "No K-12 educator is going to read this and think,'kids need a quality liberal arts education."
What do you think about the "passive learning" study?
I think there's something to it, but I don't know what. I agree with you: my own experience has always been that unless I try to do something myself, I'm in trouble.
Language production is absolutely that way. I can read Spanish & French quite well (not now, but I'd get it back if I practiced for a while) --- but have never been able to speak either one.
Except....are we talking about a memory effect?
Retrieval is always more difficult than recognition, isn't it?
The reason I'm inclined to think there's something to the watching idea is that sports people seem to think it's the case (although I don't think research has necessarily backed them on this...)
Sports people will tell you that intensely watching a good tennis player will produce a jump in your own playing.
In The Ape & the Sushi Master Van der Waal claims that sushi apprenticeships are all watching. The apprentice watches the master for years & then does his first cut expertly.
I find that a little hard to believe...but I'm open to the idea.
rigor, relevance, relationship
Did I mention we're DOOMED?
My kids used to go to a Waldorf school. Looking back, the knitting, woodworking etc. is the one thing I believe they actually had right.
Well, that's the way I feel (though, again, I have no idea whether this is true or not).
What I definitely object to is all the ersatz, simulated cr** on computers.
Our kids here are taking "Exploratory Art," which means Photoshop, instead of studio art.
That's bunk.
Project Lead the Way especially makes me crazy. Four years of computer software simulations of designing and building stuff.
I'd also agree the lack of hands-on work impacts math. One thing I see is too many students who can make graphs with Excel or their graphing calculators, but not by hand.
I agree absolutely (with the proviso that this is my experience --- !)
There's something about poking numbers into a calculator that keeps you from really "getting" it.
I've done a lot of graphing by hand at this point, & I'm glad.
Manipulatives in math are a bad idea until junior high, when fraction manipulatives apparently help according to that one study, the citation for which I don't have at the moment & am too lazy to look up.
In math, paper-and-pencil ARE the appropriate manipulatives.
A group from our schools went to their Model Schools Conference and our superintendent is applying to have our schools become "Model Schools".
Hey!
Congratulations!
(I'm joking.)
I read the Waldorf book. Aside from the layer of mystic Steiner content that is the hallmark of Waldorf education, the core ordering of handwork and practical arts, and what is to be gained out of them was pretty interesting. Aside from the key points of specifically working with the hands themselves, there were a lot of character/life lessons that are instructed at the same time.
Things like:
* recovering from mistakes (no, you don't throw your work out and start over)
* completing work (eg, finish one sock, you still have to make the second!)
* dealing with unexpected events (eg, you dribble wax in making batik)
* end-to-end project in a supported environment
* proper usage of tools of all sorts
* practicing to automaticity (20h of tapping to make a copper bowl in HS!) and the beauty/consistency that comes from it
* planning as best you can, but then moving into action and dealing with the results in real-time in *blacksmithing* work ("strike while the iron is hot" is not just a metaphor!)
The school I toured was Kish-8, so didn't have the high-school facilities on site for a lot of this stuff, but another part of this that I found really interesting was that this emphasis on tools/handwork/comprehending the technology being used is why they have *no* computers for students until HS, when they have to "build their own" (I don't know how far down to the metal they go ;-)). That was another attractive factor.
For me, Waldorf ed is really interesting to read about, but I wouldn't send my kids to a Waldorf school for their full academic program. If they had a Saturday school program for the extras(which I think would actually be philosophically inappropriate in their model), I'd consider it.
-m, not mark.
The only thing I remember about Waldorf was that my friend's son baked bread every day for a year. At first, it was fun. Then, he was over it.
The other thing that struck me odd was that this particular school didn't believe in teaching formal reading before the age of 7.
SusanS
For the years we were at the Waldorf school, I tried to convince them to offer a Saturday handwork curriculum or summer school for non-Waldorf kids. I thought the school could be a great community resource, and it could sure help their struggling botton line! That idea, as sensible as it probably sounds to all of us, fell on deaf ears. In fact I have never in all my years and study of the Waldorf curriculum seen a school that offered this to outsiders. This should tell you something about the power of that overarching "mystic Steiner" influence . . .
About not teaching reading before the age of 7: it's not just that school, it's every Waldorf school.
About the breadbaking: this is part of the kindergarten curriculum. My kids loved this! They made their own mid-day snack every day--stone soup, rice, millet (yes millet--my sons' favorite) and bread, on a weekly rotation. That part was pretty cool.
I've read of the idea of Waldorf Saturday school, but it was only in the context of "backfill until a real Waldorf school can be built in the community." I don't remember which book it was in; it might've been from the UK.
-m, not mark
Right. A Waldorf Saturday school, pre-school, etc., is formed to prime the pump for a full school. It's not the same as offering their rich resources in handwork to the community at large, which I've never seen them do. Too bad.
What they do in first grade with handwriting is interesting. They concentrate on "form drawing" where the kids spend lots of time drawing shapes, mirror images, etc. In this context they learn the letters of the alphabet. But the form drawing is so slow and laborious that some kids, like mine, get totally stuck in it. To this day my high school age son cannot print because it is so slow and laborious. He learned cursive in a public school in third grade and that freed his hands up. Now whenever he writes with a pencil, it has to be cursive only (this is a problem with making maps, etc.!).
Another odd fallout; so few kids learn cursive these days that many cannot read it. So when he exchanges spelling tests and other papers for in class correction, many of the kids can't read what he's written (although his cursive is beautiful).
so few kids learn cursive these days that many cannot read it
That is especially ridiculous given the fact that apparently LD kids often write more legibly with cursive than with printing (or so we were told by a teacher we thought was terrific)
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