Why Fixing an Outmoded System Won’t Work

Education reform is (finally) getting its day in the sun, but the parameters in which the debate is framed are scary for two big reasons: (1) There are fundamental differences between today and the time when America was a leader in public education; and (2) The current labor market demands completely different ways of learning and engaging with the workplace than what the current system is designed to provide.

As we saw in the housing crisis and America’s ballooning credit card debt, our education system is proof positive that you cannot have everything and pay nothing. Part of the persistence of this delusion, as I see it, is that there was a time that we could sustain a superior system for peanuts. Like many things in our history, this amazingly sweet deal was sustained by indentured servitude. If we look at the 50s and 60s, when our education system was at its apex, labor was cheap, abundant and qualified. Why? The teachers that sustained our system were women, by and large.

If we think back to the 50s and 60s, we didn’t have a lot of female politicians, scientists, CEOs, lawyers, or professionals. We did have women who were finally getting higher education, but upon doing so, they had severely limited professional options. Furthermore, the paradigm of the American family as one in which the woman took care of the home placed limitations on the kinds of careers women could pursue. One of the most prestigious, family-friendly career options for a newly educated woman (and indeed one of the very few options available) was the classroom. The cream of the crop, lacking other options, were entering classrooms and providing high-quality education to America’s students. Because their options were so limited and their working seemed superfluous to many, they were easily exploited and undercompensated. In this way, we could sustain an impressive education system on the cheap, fueled on cheap, qualified, female labor.

Obviously, this could not last and women have broken glass ceilings in most professions and can take their talents where compensation is higher and personal goals can be realized. Our schools no longer have a monopsony on these highly qualified women, and the system never adapted to a competitive labor market. These qualified women started to leave, and in a profound way. We could either pay more to retain qualified teachers and raise the prestige of the profession, or we could try to sustain the status quo by paying low wages. Having chose the latter, this increasingly in-demand workforce also made its choice and began to leave. This is not to say that great teachers did not remain (nor to say that there are no great male teachers), but simply to highlight that those great teachers who remained would do so increasingly as an act of philanthropy and personal dedication.

As we lost cheap labor inputs to our education system, the system was asked to offer more services to children with greater needs. After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision and the federally supported integration of schools starting with the Little Rock Nine, a system that had been geared toward a thriving post-WWII, and predominately white population suddenly had to accommodate students from different backgrounds. These are children that until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were not even the equals of their white peers and who were the product of centuries of systemic racism stemming from an era in which African Americans were not people, but property. After centuries of being ignored, marginalized and left out of the education and labor market, the mainstream education system had to provide all the more services to more students at the same time as it experienced an exodus of the cheap, qualified inputs that had catapulted it to success.

Worst of all, much of this occurred at a time when the country’s economic success (and ability to invest in education) was changing into the stagflation of the 70s, as agriculture in the US collapsed, and as huge urban migrations occurred from the south to the north and from farms to cities while the US’s inner cities were left to rot.

The system was pretty obviously destined to collapse or stagnate, and that is what we are seeing today. But the rising cost of labor inputs and new demand with diverse needs was not the only challenge that the school system would face. The raison d’etre of the school system was also changing. As the British education thinker Sir Ken Robinson has noted, public education systems were the product of an industrializing world. They functioned as a part of that context too, with most systems acting like a factory in which you essentially built a child on an assembly line of dumping facts into their heads and dropped them into the labor market. It was very much a system that fed a manufacturing country well, but the US was no longer as competitive at manufacturing.

As the US was transitioning into an economy of ideas and services, the system was not particularly exceptional at generating an entrepreneurial class of independent agents that could function as free agents. Not only were the types of jobs changing, but job stability and how workers approached the labor market was also evolving. We are now entering an era in which a career with a stable pension at the end of a pipeline is a pipedream, even as we tell our children that education is a pathway to a stable career. A Bureau of Labor Statistics longitudinal study of workers entering the workforce in 1979 found that they had changed jobs on average 11 times between the ages of 18 and 42.

The education system is predicated on learning concrete facts or reading books for meaning or doing math. This is somewhat quaint in the era of the computer in which these functions are easily automated. Recent reform has focused more on multiple choice testing which only reaffirms this antiquated notion of knowing facts being of much use. The product is that you are learning things that the internet can recall more quickly, more reliably, and with a larger degree of corroboration. If you are learning things that are easily automated, chances are you are preparing yourself for a job that can and will be done more cheaply by a machine. In an information economy with rapidly evolving technology, the education system needs to create creative thinkers, something that the system and the tests that will “reform” it cannot do if they continue to be predicated on the importance of facts over critical thinking, problem solving, interpersonal skills, entrepreneurship, and processes. This is aggravated all the more when you consider that most schools, lacking budgets, have stripped away the few classes that teach things that are not mechanizable or exportable: the arts, languages, vocational skills, home economics, shop, design, architecture, etc. They have also cut back on after-school or extracurricular programming that might promote these key skills for the new labor market. You want the proof of this? Look at America’s most successful entrepreneurs and count the amount of college dropouts or “ineffective” students. They kept going where most people give up and that is why they were great, but our system failed them and it fails kids who lack that kind of ironclad determination (and often privilege) all the more.

Relatedly, the American education system has not evolved all that much from the quaint, local model. This is dangerous in a globalized world in which jobs are increasingly mobile. All the same, the amount of American’s who have no foreign language skills, no exposure to foreign cultures, and no ability to locate their state capital, let alone another country on a map is frankly alarming. As I noted in previous blog posts, learning a language requires thinking critically, being creative, learning process over discreet facts and interacting. To master a foreign language is to be an entrepreneur, not to mention to be competitive and able to communicate in an increasingly interconnected world. A failure to produce global citizens and excuse it with increasingly unsupported American exceptionalism is nothing more than fanciful delusion that we have not been able to afford for at least three wasted decades. If we don’t turn this ship around quickly and recognize that our mastery of the skills of global citizens is the only way to maintain that American exceptionalism.

A Framework for Moving Forward

Now, I am clearly noting that our system is inadequate and that our reform is even inadequate but haven’t given a lot of solutions. So, I think it is worth beginning to figure out how we might move forward. The solutions are a conversation and they will need to differ depending on the locality (I firmly believe that federal government efforts to improve the education system have largely floundered with the one exception of school integration). In this spirit, I will instead attempt to develop a framework for thinking about solutions, as there will be funding, cultural, and political constraints that need to be addressed in developing the specific solutions.

Teachers

1. Make the hiring process more competitive, including how we recruit, compensate, train and offer advancement opportunities and creative license in the classroom. The current system takes the best teachers from the front lines in many instances.

2. Increase focus on training teachers and providing on-going, relevant professional development opportunities.

3. Redefine the role of unions (not eliminate) to ensure that teachers are held accountable in a fair manner, but also that they are able to exercise the creativity they should be inspiring from students. Unions cannot continue to serve the least common denominator among teachers before students or more committed teachers with a proven track record of excellence. There needs to be a balance between protecting teachers from stifling administrators or dismissal because of their salary level (firing the most experienced) while ensuring that there is a process for offering competitive salaries, compelling teachers to be innovative in instruction, and addressing ineffective teachers in a fair manner that is not viewed as impossible. No profession, especially one so critical for our future, should be immune from probation or dismissal.

4. Provide teachers ongoing training to ensure that they understand the evolving needs of the labor market and society and are able to design lessons to develop those skills in their students.

5. Ensure adequate planning periods and time for parental/community engagement, as the kinds of lessons that prepare kids for higher levels of thought and interpersonal interaction are more highly demanding than the kinds of lessons that merely convey facts.

Administration and Boards of Education

1. Ensure that instruction begins early enough to meet developmental cut-offs, moving towards stronger early education and earlier introduction of skills with time horizons like foreign language.

2. Protect equality of opportunity for all students: that a “public” education system tends to systematically fail the poor and minorities and that schools in certain districts are inherently worse than those in other districts, shows that we are failing as a society. Jobs aren’t relegated to a locality, so why should school funding be relegated to the tax base of a district? Labor mobility is and will increasingly be key to a functioning market, so why shouldn’t students be mobile to ensure that schools are more balanced in the kinds of challenges they face?

3. Rethink how schools are funded, as the benefits to society of an educated and employable graduate go far beyond parents (if you are an employer, a coworker, the consumer of any good or service, you are benefiting from a functioning system. Additionally, lower crime, disease, and dependency rates reduce your tax burden in other ways. Sorry resentful single people, but you have a stake in public education).

4. Use master teachers in the most challenging circumstances, putting new teachers in less challenging environments. Education experts tend to agree that you put anyone in front of a classroom and they will not become good for about 2 years and excellent for about five years. Programs like Teach for America are a bandaid that tries to once again sustain a failed system of cheap, qualified teachers and that perversely puts people at the most selfish point of their life with the least experience in the most challenging environments (I say selfish here in the sense that at age 20-30 you SHOULD be trying to figure out your place in the world, defining your identity, finding a family and friend group, etc., and it is hard to balance that and teaching in a high-pressure environment).

5. Limit interference in schools to ensuring equality of opportunities, protecting children from transgressions (which should not include unique teaching methods), ensuring adequate supplies/funding, increasing community involvement, and raising the profile of educators.

6. Develop guidance counseling programs that focus on helping students to set, plan for, and realize goals and should help kids to understand the trade-offs of future decisions students may be making without realizing their full consequences.

Parental and Community Involvement

1. Develop more flexible and suitable means of reaching a diverse body of parents and finding ways to engage them in the school community, regardless of socioeconomic status or ethnic background.

2. Create stronger bridges between the labor market, social organizations, and schools to ensure that graduates are well suited for the market, including increased use of internships, volunteer positions, and interaction with innovators, social organizations, and employers.

3. Find alternative ways to provide assistance to struggling children and finding ways to match those who can provide voluntary assistance with those who need it.

4. Implement government regulations to ensure that more parents are compelled to participate in their child’s education unless they are absolutely prevented by health reasons. This needs to be met by flexible policies for involving parents who are poorer and may be working, but my mom worked sometimes 14-hour shifts for 2 weeks at a time and managed to be sufficiently active in my education. I envision policies similar to those that make work flexible on election day, wherein workplaces must allow flexibility on parent-teacher conference days to parents so they can be involved.

Infrastructure and Classroom Materials

1. Determine the role of the traditional textbook and seriously reevaluate whether it really serves the goals of a successful education system. Similar to standardized tests, the role of the textbook industry needs to be vigorously questioned. That the bulk of textbooks come from one company or state is problematic.

2. Provide more flexible and dynamic class space that facilitates improvisation, creativity, and most importantly, interaction.

3. Ensure that students have access to specialized supplies like art supplies, musical instruments, lab equipment, technology, home economics, shop space and materials, etc. to develop hard skills and production. I believe we cannot survive without reviving manufacturing or developing solid production and life skills that will diversify our idea economy into one that also produces actual outputs.

4. Secure school facilities and the principal routes by which children arrive.

5. Make school environment conducive for a child to be prepared to learn.

6. Offer healthy school feeding programs to ensure that all kids are prepared to learn.

Testing and Measuring Success

1. Transition the measurement of success away from a model in which a student’s ability to regurgitate facts in isolation is the definition of success towards measuring interpersonal skills, problem solving, creative approaches, and leadership.

2. Expand the “ideal” outcome of schooling beyond graduation or college enrollment. College is not necessary or desirable for everyone or for every profession. By making it the idealized goal, we are setting kids up for failure, sucking them into a world of debt, and isolating their learning from real-life experience and productive contribution to society longer than perhaps necessary.

3. Design testing to reinforce and apply learning (which is not new from a pedagogical perspective). It will require as much thinking to design, update, and score these tests as it does to take them (right now tests are often graded by machines, so that should tell you about how we are training the students taking them).

4. Decouple mandated testing from self-perpetuating businesses and lobbies.

Curriculum

1. Make classes that teach concrete skills such as drafting, design, shop, and home economics more widely available and required so that students have experience carrying out projects.

2. Teach global citizenship, particularly interacting with diverse cultures and communicating in foreign languages.

3. Assign coursework that solidifies problem solving, creativity and understanding of processes that can be widely applied. Move away from worksheets and output-oriented assignments.

4. Transition from individual work to interpersonal work (I am an only child that hates group work, but it is the only way to effectively learn how to work in a team, which in turn is the only way to effectively carry out tasks that require multiple personalities and expertise).

5. Reevaluate whether lessons that teach things that are readily available on the internet are worth learning.

6. Define the appropriate role of technology in instruction and how much responsibility schools have for making students competent users of new technology.

7. Look at what the labor market requires in terms of hard skills, personal attributes, and factual knowledge and develop those skills in class.

8. Move away from wasting scarce class time non-interactive lessons (book reading, individual writing exercises, long individual tests) toward more interactive lessons that take advantage of the value-add that a classroom setting provides (social skills, interaction, teamwork, communication, specialization of tasks, etc.).

Speak out!

This is certainly not a comprehensive look at the problems our system has faced, why it is no longer working, or what is needed to fix it. That said, I would love to hear about problems you think have contributed to the collapse of our system and potential solutions that you think I’ve missed or inadequately addressed.

Be a Better Learner of Foreign Languages

My last post focused quite a bit on the failures of language teaching, but if you took away from that article that the failures of students (or yourself) to learn a foreign language are going to be completely remedied by improving teaching, you are kidding yourself. There are exceptional teachers that will waste all their effort to help their students and that will get jack squat in return. I know, we all love to blame teachers, cut their benefits, and pretend like parents and students couldn't possibly be part of the problems our education system faces...turns out, that's probably a little misguided. This post is designed to compliment the article on foreign language teaching with proactive strategies that language learners (or those supporting a language learner) can use to prepare themselves and better acquire a new language. And teachers, giving your students the tools to effectively learn is something you can do to set them up for success, so this article is also directed at you.

Not everyone will be able to use some of my strongest tools for studying foreign languages like being a dork and having a job that requires me to travel to other countries. Not everyone would be willing to live in a neighborhood where an FL is spoken. But there are ways to approach building vocabulary, using increasingly complex grammar structures correctly, and even pronouncing words in a way that approximates a native speaker that students can use to speak a language better. I offer some of the strategies I've used to study FLs to stimulate a discussion of strategies for learning other languages and to hopefully improve your retention of foreign languages. Even if you hated high school Spanish, I guarantee that many of you are sad that you didn't get more out of years of language study. Hopefully this will inspire some people to take up another language.

Memorizing vocabulary is a big challenge for a lot of people. It is boring to sit and learn lists of words, often words you don't care about right now (and may or may not ever care about). Some people just don't have great memories. The following are some strategies to improve retention (because at the end of the day, most things that are worth doing require some grudge work and you DO have to learn words, which often involves memorization if you are not immersed in the language).

Vocabulary Retention:

Use all four pillars of language learning to improve retention: read, say, listen to, and write the new word.

Don't memorize like a translator ("ok, perro is dog, perro is dog, perro is dog"). This sets you up to translate in your head, which will slow you down and impede fluency. Only say the word in the target language and instead of thinking of the equivalent in your native language, try:

• imagining a picture of the word (envision a dog and say "perro, perro, perro");
• thinking of things you associate with the target word as you say it (think of doghouses, collars, picking up poop, dog food, fighting with cats, tom and jerry, etc. while saying/writing/reading/hearing the word "perro");
• using examples of the concept you are learning (for example, if you want to learn the word for white in French, think "blanc/blanche" and then think of bedsheets, teeth, piano keys, chess pieces, paper, Germans, etc.); and,
• attaching the word/concept to a memory or a sensory perception (if you want to learn bread in Arabic, think khubz and then think of the smell of baking bread, your mom giving you bread with soup when you were sick ate age 5, etc.). Connecting it to your memories embeds it in a neural network AND gives the word some meaning to you.
  
• All of these strategies avoid setting you up for one for one translation and get you in the habit of thinking in the foreign language without any native language crutch. When you speak your native language, you don't think of words, you think of images, memories and concepts...so why would you try something else in the target language?

Time your studies and refreshers in a way that is compatible with how the brain commits things to memory:

• Study before you go to bed, as you may dream about the target language or in the language and you are helping your hippocampus to convert that new material to long term memory.
  
• Try to remember the vocab you studied before bed in the shower the next morning (if you don't shower in the morning, you can do it while eating breakfast, on the train/bus, etc...or you could start showering; your friends will thank you).
• Refresh the material you studied a couple of days after to reactivate the material (you start forgetting material about 48 hours later if it is not used).
  
• Continue to review a week or month out to keep it active.
  

Use that new vocabulary, even if it doesn't always make sense:

• Slip the new word into conversations, even with people that may not speak or even care about the target language (warning, you run the risk of saying "y'allah" or "vamonos" when you want to get your friends to get going).
  
• Go to neighborhoods where the target language is spoken and use your new vocabulary (and old stuff, but try to make an effort to be creative and slip in the new stuff. It helps to retain it, and it gives you practice being creative in expressing yourself in the target language, a key part of negotiating meaning when you can't express yourself exactly).
  
• Go to places that might have items that you just studied (if you just studied food vocab, go to a restaurant or grocery store, for animals go to the zoo, for clothes go to Target, etc) and then try to identify items you see in the target language.
  
• Teach someone else words. The most effective learning strategy is teaching someone else, so find some poor sap to convert into a foreign language learner and you will be doing yourself an epic solid.
  

Stop studying when you cease retaining, and don't think you'll be effective right after a study marathon or reading 100 pages of a novel.

Use words in sentences, even simple ones, in the target language that help you to recall the meaning of the word without making it a one for one translation.

Find a friend who is learning the language to be your conversation buddy. Speaking and listening are often intimidating with native speakers at first and you will simply not get enough practice if you depend on your class. A friend is a low-pressure way of practicing and simulating immersion while talking to someone you care about about topics of interest. Further, it is a great way to talk about people without them understanding you. My friend Derrick and I are both fluent in Spanish now because we would talk smack about people in high school (and we eventually got so comfortable in Spanish that regular conversations felt just as natural in Spanish as they did in English.).

Building vocabulary is much more effective if you set your own pace/goals:

• Don't wait until your teacher or textbook introduces something. If you need to say something or want to say it, learn how and use it. It'll stick better because it is relevant to you present tense.
  
• When you hear a song, see a tv show or movie, read a sign, etc., try to say it in the target language. For what you can't say, create a list of things in your environment that you'd like to be able to say and then learn that in parallel to class vocab.
• Bring outside vocabulary to a lesson. Your learning bolsters the learning of others and when you use those structures/words in class and someone doesn't understand, you create a teaching moment. When you teach, you retain, so it helps you and helps them. It is also a more natural circumstance for your class, as you gain vocabulary in your native language by encountering it not by memorizing it (despite what the GRE and SAT might have you believe).
  

Use natural overlaps between your language and the target language to guess new vocabulary:

• Cognates: Languages with similar roots often share similar words. For example, the word cotton comes to us from Arabic via romance languages: Al-qutn (arabic) --> el algodon (spanish), el cottone (Italian), cotton (english), etc. Most words in Spanish that begin with al, actually come from Arabic. Spaniards incorporated the Arabic article for "the" (Al) into the word. Alcohol comes from Arabic, so take that Saudi Arabia. This can sometimes backfire, but in general will help you to understand what is spoken to you. Just remember that you want to be careful about how you say embarrassed and excited in Spanish, as you might say I am pregnant or horny if you use a cognate. Portuguese speakers should be careful about asking to hold a Spanish-speaker's baby, as you are likely to use a false cognate and say "Can I hit your baby?"
  
• Comparable Structures: Sometimes you can learn how to say a whole slew of words by learning the pattern for that structure in the other language. Many words that end in -tion in English are the same in Spanish, except they end in ción. Information = información. Knowing this, you can say the word action, traction, fraction, satisfaction, etc. It isn't a perfect system, but it will allow you to guess a lot. Can you guess what the words dignidad, humanidad, and ciudad are in English? What is the English ending that corresponds to the Spanish "-dad?" (again, not perfect, as pidad is not the word for pity, e.g.)
  
• Borrowed words/neologisms: As many new concepts (like democracy, technology) developed in a globalized era and many languages borrow, you may already know how to say words in the target FL using your language with little modification. Democracia in Spanish and DemocraTiyya in Arabic are not hard to figure out, neither is computadora or combiuter. Turns out English borrows heavily, so you've got a lot, despite President Bush's unfortunate assertion "It's a shame the French don't have a word for entrepreneur."

Find ways to immerse yourself:

• Visit neighborhoods, stores, restaurants or even countries where the target language is spoken.
  
• Create a conversation club
• Join a meet-up group
• Find native speakers
• Listen to movies, tv, and music in the target language (and let me just say, The Mummy is pretty damn amazing in Spanish. Turns out the title, La Momia, is also a cognate).
• Date people who speak the target language (it'd probably be nice if you were attracted to them or say wanted to be with them, but love, like FL acquisition, is a complicated matter).
  

This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it will give you several possible ways to improve how you learn new vocabulary and get you to give an FL another chance.

Conjugating Verbs and Declining Nouns

It is often really difficult to wrap your mind around conjugating verbs or declining nouns when your language does not do this, but if you want to speak any romance language, German, any Slavic language, and Arabic (among others) well, you will need to figure it out (do we do this in English? Turns out yes).

1. It is much better if you use sentences instead of a chart because the chart isolates the concept from its usage. Create sentences like "I study at the library" and "She studies at the library" rather than saying "I study, you study, he studies, she studies, we study...etc). That way you are practicing usage and grammar together.
2. If you feel like a chart is the way to go for you, it is easier to develop a pattern if you make sure that all the words are chantable and fit into a rhythm. For example, I tried to learn the plural form of you in a chant form, but saying "you all, vosotros/ustedes" was tripping me up because every other English pronoun (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) is monosyllabic. I started using "Y'all" for you plural to keep that rhythm. As a result, this Chicagoan says y'all. I also say howdy, but I can't blame that on an FL.
   
3. Start by learning the regular verb pattern (if it exists) and emulating it with all verbs you encounter. You will make mistakes, but remember how kids go from "I goed" to "I went?" The same will be true for you. You will hear the irregulars being used if you are practicing with people and start to correct/refine. Also, sometime the regular pattern sounds really awkward/cumbersome and you get the idea that it is wrong: In Spanish, you should conjugate verbs ending in ir in the first person (I do, I eat, I read, etc) with -o. The verb "ir," however would just be "o," and you get the sense that there must be a better way to say "I go" and learn "voy" is the right way, not "o."
4. Learn tenses you need, don't wait. The sooner you add a tense to your practice, the more versatile you will get and the better you can express yourself. This will give you confidence and make the language more useful to you, and thus enhance your desire to keep going. Again, you will make mistakes without formal studies, but you will start the refining and retention process all the sooner and you will be inspired more because you learned when it was relevant.
   
5. Learn objects, prepositions and word order along with the verb (one reason I recommend sentences over verb charts). Some things that take indirect objects in English (I listen to her) take direct objects in Spanish (Yo la escucho). Sometimes a different preposition is used, I may "dream of/about you" in English, but "I dream with you" in Spanish (the verb soñar goes with the preposition "con" (with) rather than "de" (of). If you create an example sentence that includes an adverb to learn where they are placed in the target language, any prepositions that are needed, how direct/indirect objects are handled, you have a template to fall back on when in doubt.

Pronunciation!

So often, pronunciation is neglected, and this is sad because you may never sound like Antonio Banderas, but you don't have to sound like you learned Spanish at Walmart or Applebee's either. Here are some tips that may help you to sound more like a native speaker, even if you started to learn the language after the cut-off for acquisition (puberty):

1. Listen critically to how a word is pronounced. Where does a native speaker put emphasis? How do they make a vowel or consonant sound?
2. Watching a native speaker make sounds/say words is also underrated, but it will help you to make sounds if you see how natives form them. Look at how they hold their mouth, if they use their tongue or teeth. For example, I had a big breakthrough when I noticed that most Arabs don't move their upper lip all that much while speaking to form sounds. I was better able to use the language because I knew that more effort should be done by the positioning of the tongue and moving my lower jaw instead of my upper lip.
   
3. Practice manipulating sounds in your mouth. Change where you say the sound from the front to the back of your tongue, from the throat to the nose, using more tongue or more teeth, etc. Find where it sounds most like what you hear a native speaker saying.
   
4. Learn the geography of your mouth and locate how sounds are formed in that new geography. The alveolar ridge (the ridge on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth), the glottus, the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the throat, and the nasal cavity all play a role in proper pronunciation, and it will help you to mimic a native speaker if you understand how your mouth words. In Arabic, there are two different D, S, T, and K/Q sounds that vary based on whether you use your teeth or whether the sound is more in your throat or on your tongue. Similarly, there are three th sounds! It will impede you if you say them all the same, so you need to figure out what the difference is. Once you get that, you will be able to hear that difference better too.
   
5. The use of tone and expression of emotions varies across languages, and you need to be very careful not to use your native region's way of talking if you want to sound fluent in the target language. This is tough for me, as I am a very excited speaker and I use emphasis and inflection heavily. That said, doing that in Chinese completely changed the meaning of what I was saying because it is a tonal language that uses tone to change words (the inflection on the word ma can lead to five different meanings...and referring to a Chinese guy's mom as a horse will probably not be well received). Even in non-tonal language, an authentic sound requires expressing emotions differently. My default, hammy way of talking may work great for an emphatic language like Italian, but if I cross the border into France, I am immediately an outsider as French is a language that is smooth, streamlined, and does not have a bouncy, sing-song quality to it. The import of this smoothness is so great that French will have some silent letters pronounced if it will enhance the flow of words in a sentence. Some languages use different words to convey strength of meaning rather than changing the tone: in Arabic, there are forms of a verb that are more intensive and so I would use a different form of the verb to convey "to slice" than I would "to cut to bits." This is important if you want to understand the difference between slicing bread or Charles Mansoning your family (yeah, I verbed him).
   
6. Music, authentic conversations, immersion, multimedia and anything that allows you to practice conversing or listening or speaking will inherently be the best ways to hone your speaking and listening abilities, and thus your pronunciation.

Hopefully these strategies for learning a language will prove useful to you or to someone you know (or teach) that is learning an FL. And, to give everyone the catharsis they need after reading many of those pronunciation tips..."that's what s/he said."

There are some things that make the way we learn languages really problematic at a systematic level, but that you can't necessarily change as a learner forced into this setting:

1. Kids should learn languages starting in infancy when their minds will learn the proper sounds that make up a language naturally, you probably started learning too late because schools start in high school.
   
2. You learn on a block schedule and thus practice maybe 50 minutes a day if you are lucky.
3. You learn once or twice a week and thus have too much time between lessons to forget what you learn.
   
4. There is not enough speaking/conversation/listening built into the system.
5. Textbooks are poorly written or offer exercises that don't stimulate learning.
6. Your teacher uses ineffective strategies.

Knowing these problems exist and developing strategies to work around the system or a bad teacher will help you to be a more effective learner. If you have irregular classes (twice a week, say), create a space in between to avoid language decay.

Now, you also may have poor study skills or habits that are not just related to FLs and you need to identify and fix those (it is sad that more teachers don't help kids in this regard, as it is essential to their approach in any class):

1. You have bad study skills and haven't bothered to think about what conditions are most conducive and least conducive to your studies for a given subject (or all subjects). Libraries work for many people, but I can't study in an overly silent environment. Additionally, it is difficult to study a subject that requires you to speak and listen in a quiet environment. Write out a list of places, times, and conditions that work and don't work for you, and try to develop a plan for how to study in a way that works for you. Be aware that one condition may work for some subjects, but not for all subjects.
   
2. You don't set goals for yourself and don't measure those goals. Why do you want to learn the FL? What do you want to get out of the studies? What do you want to be able to say? By when? What steps do you need to take? How will you know you've succeeded? If you can answer these questions, you have come pretty far in articulating a plan of action that will help you to measure progress and identify areas where you are struggling more to better focus your efforts and areas where you rock to encourage you to press onward.
3. You don't take the subject seriously or find it personally useful. Stop being an ass. Find out how this will benefit you and how you can use it (and you can often use an FL) and remind yourself of it when you get discouraged.

Speak out!

- Do you have a strategy for overcoming a language learning difficulty? Post it!
- Can you think of examples for some of the suggestions I gave above? Post them!

Act on it!

- Go back to a language you've given up on and try some of the above strategies and see if it yields better results!
- Learn a new language!
- Try out your Spanish at Chipotle or the bodega on the corner. Try out your Amharic the next time you go out to eat Ethiopian. Revive that rusty language study that is lurking in the cobwebs of your mind.
- Are you a teacher? Try to provide some of these tips to your students and add your own. Start your students off right by helping them to identify their study style and to set and realize goals (and measure progress). It is a lot more useful to them to measure on their own terms rather than based on test scores. Intrinsic rewards, rather than arbitrary numbers will win every time.
- Are you a parent or friend of a language learner? Help them by giving them strategies and reminding them that they are just as big a part of success as their teacher is. Work with them to develop a study plan. Serve as their student so that they teach you and thus learn more. Take them to places where they are more likely to be immersed.
- Do you speak a foreign language that someone in your community doesn't speak? Teach it! Volunteer as a tutor, teach ESL (English as a Second Language), answer a question, offer constructive feedback to a non-native speaker that makes a mistake (see my previous post on language teaching to do it in an effective, specific and non-discouraging way).

Improving Foreign Language Teaching

One of the most disheartening and sadly common things I hear is, "I'm just not good at foreign languages." This attitude kills me, and it reflects the large failures in how we approach learning and teaching foreign languages.

I have no special aptitude for foreign languages: Nobody in my family speaks a foreign language; and, I started learning after age 13, which is considered a "cut off" for fluent language acquisition. That said, I managed to learn four languages to a highly competent level and speak two others conversationally. So, when people marvel at my impossible facility for languages as if it were an impossible innate talent, I want to shake them by the lapels. I have some advantages that arise from my circumstances: I do have a good ear for music which probably helps with languages; my school did randomly teach Latin (which I do not speak) which may have served as a place-holder; I grew up in a Mexican neighborhood; and I was a total geography dork. That said, I think far too much emphasis is placed on some supposed innate skill and not enough on the failures of language teaching.

Foreign Languages (FLs) are a passion of mine--not only have I learned several, but I taught English as a Second Language (ESL) in both Panama and the U.S.--so, I would like to see more people succeed in what is often an investment of 2-4 (or more) years. I think that the reason why so many people leave four years of Spanish class unsure whether "¿Cómo estás?" means "How are you?" or "Where is the bathroom?" is because of severe failures in how we approach the teaching of FLs and a complete failure in how we learn them. For this reason, I want to start a conversation on strategies for improving the likelihood for language learning success by first looking at failures in the approach to FLs, then looking at problems with how they are taught and some fixes I see. In a separate post, I will offer advice on how to better approach language learning (I know, to be continueds are the worst!).

Obviously, the way you approach anything is a big determinant in your level of success, and I am convinced that the approach to FLs is erroneously thought to be "word for word translation" taught by compartmentalizing vocabulary and grammar structures. If you think about how you communicate and how you learned your native tongue, you should have an intuitive sense that something is wrong with such a strategy. For one thing, you picked up your native tongue by babbling about experiences, hearing what those around you were saying, and by mimicking...not by segregating content or carefully applying what you learned. Additionally, direct translation defies the key point of communication: being understood by others. If I say I haven't drank anything for hours or if I say I am thirsty, you get the general idea. I could probably even tell you that without words. The following are the grave consequences of our translator's approach to FLs:

1. No two languages express all words or concepts in the same way or words, so expecting direct translation will often result in getting stuck.



2. Translation is a special, difficult skill because it tries to most faithfully communicate the exact meaning in another language. If you try to do this in everyday conversation, however, you tax yourself and limit the amount of things you convey because you've divided your brain's activities between creating and evaluating material simultaneously (which you know is a bad idea if you've ever tried to edit a paper you just wrote at 3am the day before it was due). It also is laborious to your listener to wait for you to get something out.



3. Think of all the times you forget words in your language. Do you give up when you can't remember the name of a saw? No! You take what you know and remember and engage in what I call negotiating meaning, which 99% of the time works perfectly. ("I used that thing that cuts wood to make a 2x4" is just as effective as "I used a saw to make a 2x4." NOTE: I am not a carpenter.)



4. Languages are not like a calculator where you put the elements in and get the right answer. Languages are like putting on 3-D glasses, giving you a new way to see the world and changing how you interpret what you see. Some things need to be learned through context or experience because there is no direct equivalent. Some Inuit cultures have several different words for snow because it is so relevant to their reality, but others have none. My friend complained that even though Argentina was big on beef, they did not have as refined a system for ordering meat as rare as he liked because it wasn't done there. He had to negotiate meaning to communicate what he wanted.



5. Language is culture. To ignore that Arabic was codified in the Qu'ran means that you don't understand the limitations of the language to its religious roots or its temporal context. This becomes really important when you think of dialects, as the fixed translation approach will make you unable to get on a bus in rural Panama until you realize that the "chivo" is actually public transit not it's literal dictionary translation as "goat."



6. Language does not have isolated concepts. You can divide in math without knowing how to calculate the area of a triangle and vice versa, but not so in a language. Words and structures flow across one another to form a web that you use to convey and interpret your reality.



7. Non-verbal communication should not take a backseat to verbal/written communication. Ask any Italian speaker. Most of what we understand is from context clues like tone of voice, expression, gestures, and you are cutting out 2/3 of language understanding by treating it as a fixed translation concept.

This failed approach accounts for a lot of the issues we see in FL teaching. Let's look at some of the biggest problems with FL teaching and some possible solutions (I welcome your additions and corrections, too!):


Problem #1: Almost every FL book you will read begins each lesson with a vocabulary list that prompts brute memorization, rather than webs of understanding or context-based understanding of usage.

Solution 1: Use pictures wherever possible so that the learner associates the foreign word with its meaning, which goes a long way in promoting communicating without translation because you don't associate árbol (Spanish), shajjar (Arabic), or albero (Italian) with an English word but rather with a big wooden plant with lots of leaves or thistles that populates a forest (you now can say _____ in three FLs without me telling you the word).
Solution 2: When you have a word, use it in a sentence before giving the English meaning. Students are more likely to retain a word that they guess and they are better able to reproduce it because they have seen it in action, not in isolation (I did this in solution 1).
Solution 3: Try to link related words and concepts to things a student has already learned so that they form associations and thus stick better. Nets catch more than wires do.


Problem #2: Concepts taught in isolation create a fractured approach to language and inhibit the learner's ability to use them together to convey the meaning they need. How many times have you taken a Spanish or French test that often blatantly says "use the correct form of the subjunctive to complete the following sentences" or "pronoun quiz?" There is a reason why you can properly use the past perfect tense in English without knowing that that's what you call it.

Solution 1: Encourage students that pull from future lessons or outside sources by helping them to identify generally what that is and let them play around with using the concept (even incorrectly). Eventually, children move from "I goed to the store" to "I went to the store," and so too will your language learner.
Solution 2: Test understanding and context and reading and writing rather than multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks about a single concept. Mix it up! If you really want to test their knowledge of a concept, don't tell them the concept or they will do a robo-fill and not learn on the test (tests are actually a learning tool not a torture device; done well, they reinforce learning). Give them an example sentence and then ask them to do something similar by giving them a couple of words and asking them to create a related concept. (for example, if I am teaching the subjunctive, I might give a sentence that says Quiero que vayas al supermercado. and then give my student two verbs (Esperar, entender) and ask them to create a similar sentence. Be careful not to mark students wrong if they don't create the subjunctive and instead say "Espero entender la lección," if they have made a grammatically correct sentence.)
Solution 3: Remember to weave in old concepts and words regularly into new lessons so that the student (a) doesn't forget, (b) builds linkages, and (c) builds off a base rather than reinventing the wheel.


Problem #3: Teachers often correct things that are correct or that are incorrect but not terribly problematic. You need to strike a balance here, as you want kids to learn a given concept, but if you discourage them when they are right, you'll never have the opportunity to correct them later. Likewise, if they say several incorrect things, overcorrection could dishearten them and thwart them from persisting.

Solution 1: If they haven't used the concept you want them to use, ask follow up questions or encourage them to expand on an idea as best they can to try and prompt it rather than just saying "Remember we are using the preterite!"
Solution 2: If they made a boatload of errors, focus on the key errors. Don't necessarily just correct them, but rather ask them questions and try to lead them to identifying and correcting the error themselves. Additionally, you focus too much attention on one student all at once, which can embarrass them and can deprive others of a chance to try their FL skills out in class.
Solution 3: Whenever a student makes a mistake, make them repeat the correct version of what they said or wrote to commit the correction to memory. The extra attention may make it stick out in their mind the next time and having corrected it means they'll have an example in their head. Too many times a teacher corrects a student and they say "ok" and then they continue focusing on the rest of what they are trying to say rather than committing the correction to memory.
Solution 4: Abolish negative feedback like "wrong" from your correction strategy and replace with questions. Saying "no, that's wrong, Peter" is much less effective than saying, "Okay, Peter, you want to say you went to the store. Let's see if that's what you said. Is 'to go' regular or irregular in Spanish? Okay, do you remember how we say it in the past? No? Okay, well, do you remember how we say 'I was' in the past tense?" In other words, guide them. Feedback should always be specific (teaching anything, not just an FL) and actionable.


Problem #4: Teachers use WAY too much class time on writing, reading and worksheets. These are solitary activities, which makes them ideal for doing and correcting outside of class. Wasting class on solitary activities cuts into the already limited time students have to practice their listening and speaking skills.

Solution 1: Assign as much reading and writing and worksheets (which are often way less effective than you think) as homework or extra practice and do the corrections as your prep work. I know, this makes your job a lot harder, but you are really doing your students a solid.
Solution 2: Vary what students are assigned to read and have them talk to each other about it in class. That way, they are learning new words and structures and teaching each other rather than you having to do all the teaching. It is very empowering for them to be able to teach something, they are much more likely to remember it, and I've saved you some prep time to use for all the extra writing you'll be correcting outside of class time.
Solution 3: If you want to correct things in class, this can be made effective by making it an oral, student-run exercise that aggregates mistakes you notice the class making and leaves time for additional questions that may arise. Nobody is embarrassed and the class works together to improve their understanding/communication skills.


Problem #5: Pictures, music and video are often used much less than books and articles (ever have "Lab day" only once a week?), but this means you are using tools designed for reading/writing skills which will inherently move your instruction style toward those less communicative, interpersonal skills that should be the focus of class.

Solution 1: Invert it! Make 3 days a week lab days or conversation parlors and only use one for direct instruction or reading or writing (and try to make it as oral and interactive as you can so as to improve communicative pillars of language in class).
Solution 2: Prepare supplements that use pictures or music that cover words or concepts from a lesson (let's face it, cumbersome textbooks aren't going anywhere soon) to correct for the deficiencies of the tools you have as a teacher in a budget-scarce school.
Solution 3: Use these tools to elicit more than just the stuff in your lesson. Shakira taught me all sorts of body parts and verbs while reinforcing things I already knew. She has songs that use words for nose (which you are likely to learn earlier on), but also for elbows (how often do you talk about elbows?). To this day, I associate her with body parts...and not in the same way that most people do.


Problem #6: Teachers often neglect the cultural aspect of a language, but that is the most exciting part that will capture a student and remind them that no group of people is homogenous. Panamanians don't eat guacamole!

Solution 1: Look for amateur troops or cultural associations in your locality and bring them into the class (many are more than happy).
Solution 2: Assign readings and assignments from the arts, literature, or culture sections of news outlets. Get them to replicate cultural practices as an oral assignment or have them write a song/rap/play in the style of a famous performer or group.
Solution 3: Celebrate holidays from the cultures that speak the target FL. Because holidays usually involve celebrating, food, and social interaction, a lot of great vocab and expressions are lurking there. Plus, if your student goes to a country where that FL is spoken or meets someone who speaks the language, they have some credibility and something exciting to engage about.
Solution 4: As I noted before, music is amazing. Walking people through a song can help them learn new words and appreciate a new artist. Additionally, if you get them translating, you will very quickly reveal to them how bad one-for-one translations are.


Problem #7: Don't cut your students off or finish their thoughts! You want your kids to be Macgyvers: maybe they don't have a lock-pick, but they can get the door open with a credit card. That is to say, they need to be able to navigate around words they don't know and use what they do know to make themselves understood.

Solution 1: If they are stalling for a long time, ask them questions to see if you can help them to find new words or to say it differently.
Solution 2: If they are stuck on a word, have a policy where they can "phone a friend" in the native language. They shouldn't be able to get out of using the language saying "How do I say monkey in Spanish?" They should be asking for help in Spanish. Then make them repeat the entire sentence once they've completed it to cement the new word. You may wish to give these trouble words an appearance on an upcoming assignment or quiz to reinforce them.


Problem #8: Don't let your best speakers dominate conversation OR self-segregate. You have to be careful here, as you don't want to dampen their enthusiasm, but you need to be sure that the weaker speakers get MORE practice to improve.

Solution 1: Pair strong and weak speakers in group/pair work, as your strong speakers will get a chance to teach and feel good about their skills. They will also reinforce concepts that the weak speaker gets wrong. The weaker speaker will gain from learning new words and structures from a stronger speaker. CAUTION: Be careful that you structure the conversation enough that both students/all students must engage to complete the assignment. If you do "two truths and a lie" and force both to present on their partner, neither can dominate or slack to complete the assignment."
Solution 2: Socratic method cold calls rather than hand-raising keeps people on their toes (which sometimes prompts more studying), ensures equitable distribution of answering opportunities, and doesn't allow people to count ahead and prepare for a specific question.
Solution 3: Do skills stations and consider carefully how you divide into groups. This allows you to pick off the students that need help in a given area and you can rotate slower or faster based on how much help is needed.
Solution 4: Oral tests. So often, the bulk of testing is written, so you can't blame students for putting effort into writing over speaking/listening. It shows that speaking and listening are important skills worth testing, not a tack-on to a written test.


Problem #9: Teaching that there is one correct answer. I cannot belabor this point enough, there's no wrong way to eat a Reese's and there's no wrong way to express yourself unless it is not understood. You can make grammar or usage errors, but if you someone says something correct but not in your lesson plan, encourage them! Further, if a student gets clever and says something raunchy, only correct it if they say it incorrectly (e.g. If you want to teach went is the past tense of "to go," it should be just as good for them to say "My mom went to the store" as it is to say "My prostitute went to the brothel." Either way the concept is conveyed and it is correct.).

Solution 1: Always remember and stress to yourself and your students that the point of learning a language is to express an idea in a way that is understood. Correct grammar, not content.
Solution 2: If you want to check comprehension of a concept, ask leading questions to get them there rather than saying, "ahem, this is past pluperfect time, not preterite!"
Solution 3: Ask them or someone else if they can think of another way to convey the same idea. This underscores how one approximates meaning and navigates a language to get the idea across without punishing correct communication.


Talk about it!
There are many more than 8 problems, but I wanted to focus on some big ones. I'd love to hear more about some of the problems you've had from your FL classes, what fixes you can think of, or additional solutions to (or critiques of) the problems I posted above.

Act on it!

• If you are in a position to teach someone an FL, whether in the formal setting of the classroom, while volunteering, or while helping a neighbor with a second language, try to take some of these ideas into consideration.


• If someone you know is learning an FL, ask them about some of these problems and suggest some of these (or other) solutions to their teacher.

Heck, post your replies in a foreign language as best you can to practice!

Righting Writing with After-School Tutoring in the Private Sector

Anyone who has read the McSweeny's magazine probably knows that Dave Eggers is amazing. He gave a TED talk (which is well worth watching) on this innovative idea to create a forum in his San Francisco publishing space for tutoring kids that needed help with writing called 826 Valencia. Combining amazing urban planning principles with community service, Eggers took street-front retail property and multi-purposed it into a publishing house, a writing tutoring center, and a pirate goods store. The idea has since spread across the nation, combining insane, fun, welcoming (opposed to places that are out of the way or appear remedial and thus embarrassing to kids) spaces with dedicated and talented writers to create a place where kids feel comfortable to learn in the heart of a business community with many professionals well-positioned to offer the exact help those kids need. I just discovered that I used to live above one of the spin-off 826 Centers (Museum of Unnatural History in Columbia Heights in DC).

For those without the time to watch the whole video, here are the key features of this neat model:

• Make volunteering as easy as possible: Writing professionals can offer tutoring right where they work.
• Make tutoring less embarrassing: set up a fun themed store as the streetside venue so that kids are not entering a remedial center, but something like a pirate store.
• Word of Mouth Marketing: By using a teaching professional in schools to encourage kids to go and then creating fun, interactive writing activities during and after school, they were able to capture kids and parents using word of mouth or direct demonstration, as if they were a business.

The model is incredibly intriguing because the use of professionals in space they already were paying for to do their publishing, a creative store that generated interest and eventually profits, and word-of-mouth/school professionals for advertising contributed to a low-overhead cost with a huge pay-off. This creates a community space, reduces likelihood of truancy, adds extra educational programming to a child's day, and bridges gaps between the educational and professional communities. It does so in a fluid environment that serves a variation of pace and skill levels in a way that a single-teacher classroom could not.

Talk about it!

If you were to start an 826 Franchise in your city, how would you set it up?

Do you think the model could be used for other school subjects and/or served by other types of professionals? Are there subjects or fields that might be limited in their ability to carry out this model?

Act on it!

Visit the 826 Group and donate materials or time to a local branch!

Find a way to bring your professional skills closer to a child so that they are better integrated with the labor market and are able to hone their knowledge using your skills!

Reviving a Passion for Reading

Last Friday, I went to DC’s Politics and Prose bookstore for an author talk by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith about their book Van Gogh: The Life, which I highly recommend. Apparently, Van Gogh’s family was big on reading. According to Naifeh and Smith

Every evening at the parsonage ended the same way: with a book. Far from being a solitary, solipsistic exercise, reading aloud bound the family together […]. Anna and Dorus read to each other and to their children; the older children read to the younger; and, later in life, the children read to their parents. Reading aloud was used to console the sick and distract the worried, as well as to educate or entertain.

While I would love to delve into the big problems of the education system, this passage reminds me of how becoming passionate about books was one of the biggest advantages I had in overcoming my circumstances. Let’s face it: we may want teachers to save our kids and prepare them for the future, but it is unrealistic to expect such miracles from even the best of teachers when they get at most 6 or 7 hours with a kid. So, I firmly believe that finding ways to engage kids outside of the classroom in a constructive way is essential to their development. One of the most important ways to do that is to go beyond just getting them to read, but rather getting them to love reading.

Growing up in Chicago, one of the best places to go in the heat of summer or icy winter was the library—and Chicago has a large network of libraries, some with great selections. We also had a phenomenal program called Book It! Pizza Hut would give you a personal pan pizza if you read 6 books in a given month. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my mom would often read to or with me and would save up money to buy me new books.

Mom didn’t limit what I read much either. When it came time to buy that book for being good, it was often a book out of the Goosebumps series (no disrespect, R.L. Stein). My teacher contacted my mother to “let her know the kinds of things I was reading” (ironically for that Book It! program). My 3^rd grade teacher was slightly taken aback when my mom calmly said, if Ryan wants to read a book—even if it is Stephen King’s Needful Things—then I’m not going to stop him.” While adolescence may have made my mom question her choice, in the end I think she was dead on. Not only did she empower me to make decisions for myself, but she also gave me ownership over reading and allowed me to enjoy it by choice not force.

When I taught in rural Panama, I faced a very different culture: reading was viewed as drudgery necessary for school at best or utterly useless in many cases. When I had spare time between planning lessons, I would often lay in the hammock under the mango tree with a book (and one of my host siblings and a bunch of chickens running around). My host mom would marvel at the amount of reading I did. She loved to ask the neighbors coming through the house, “can you guess how many pages Ryan read today?” They’d guess a “ridiculously high number” like 15 and then she’d drop the bomb, “No, 80.” I may have been responsible for a small number of aneurysms that year.

When adults and kids share the idea that reading is something that is inaccessible, irrelevant, or downright boring, it deprives the whole community and it makes it incredibly hard for teachers to be effective. Teachers often have to waste class time trying to force kids to read items that should have been read at home, often at a slower pace because the kid does not have the passion for reading or the focus that previous reading experience brings. That reduces the amount of interactive time among students and teachers, and denies kids the benefit of having a structured activity outside of the classroom to continue their learning. So much learning attrition occurs during the summer for kids that lack such structure, so it is particularly critical that they have this passion to bridge the time between lessons (especially for breaks over 24-48 hours) in a meaningful (and ideally enjoyable!) way. (Read more about summer attrition in learning and how it particularly affects low-income kids on the School Fest Blog.)

There are many benefits to reading, especially when you are poor:

1. Reading requires and develops an intense sense of focus, as you need to recall plot, character development, themes, dialogue, and bring them together to get the most out of a story. Unlike Facebook, TV, and computers, reading demands and cultivates your ability to give your undivided attention. This skill of focus is what ultimately allowed me to become so good at studying foreign languages, completing complicated tasks, and realizing long-term goals.
2. When done with others, it opens spaces for conversation and discussion. It is a great way for a parent to engage with their kids on complex issues, events, characters’ decisions and morality that may not otherwise present themselves. This social aspect (which is an important part of the quote I shared from the Van Gogh book) in turn makes reading more interactive and enjoyable and reinforces a kid’s love of reading.
3. Reading a book gives you an opening to make a new friend when you see others reading the same book or a book you’ve already ready (just don’t be a spoiler).
4. It reinforces your knowledge of grammar and builds your vocabulary. This in turn makes you better able to express yourself, communicate, and write. Importantly, it gives you alternative ways to communicate. Surviving poverty can require a lot of ingenuity, but all those talents are often unrecognized because others don’t take you seriously when you sound “uneducated.” Be yourself, but also know how to show the world what you've got to offer.
   
5. Reading often requires that you bring something to the table to get the full story, usually a vivid imagination and a willingness to engage using your memories and experiences. In a country when start-ups and small businesses account for about 80% of job creation, we want people who are constantly engaging their imagination because exercising their creativity makes them more likely to come up with that product or service that will fill a great need and employ some people.
6. The process of choosing reading prepares people for self-directed study and research, which can serve in schooling but also when you want to teach yourself how to fix a roof. In general, it creates an opportunity for kids to improve in their decision making and to take ownership over their learning outside of school.
   
7. It gives you a form of escapism in new situations or a sense of belonging when a character or occurrence reminds you of something you've felt or lived.
8. It is a quick way to experience many other ways of thinking and acting.
9. Where there are libraries or free newspapers, it is a relatively low-cost or free form of entertainment.
10. Reading has become intensely democratic: I could read Tolstoy on an annual income of $20,000 and a few years later Oprah Winfrey and millions of Americans of various social strata, backgrounds, and ages read the same book. I can also brag about reading Anna Kerenina before Oprah, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.
11. Books are always better than the movie.

Now, if you are a volunteer, a teacher, or a parent, here are some tips from Missouri State on how to get your child to love reading that I think provide a good start (so too is the Van Gogh biography quote in this post). The gist is that you need to model behavior of loving books and reading whenever possible, being mindful of any potential vision impairments that may be preventing your kid from reading. I can’t help but think if only more kids got addicted to books instead of drugs or booze…okay, okay, I’m admittedly a dork. Nonetheless, it is never bad to give kids a leg up, a new hobby, and a chance to be Oprah’s equal without having to give an audience full of people new cars.

Act on it!

If you have kids, set aside a time where you read with or to them. Give them an opportunity to choose a book they are excited about, and read with them, ask them questions about the book, and see where it leads. You can strengthen the appeal of reading by creating a special, cozy place for reading or by making it a night that you do something special like bake cookies so that reading is embedding in a web of positive associations.

If you don't have kids, consider volunteering at a library, hospital, bookstore, or school.

Donate used books that have been sitting on your shelf (not just those romance novels, send some of those good ones, too) to public libraries and schools so that more people can use them!

Support your local bookstore and for your next night out, bring your friends or family and get them excited. There are amazing institutions like Politics and Prose around the country that need your support to compete with e-readers to stay afloat and offer cool programming that helps get people behind the text of a book or find that bridge between books and real life.

If you are in a position of authority with kids and notice they don't like or are uncomfortable reading, try to get their vision checked or look for conditions that may impede reading. Often times, it is an undiagnosed physical problem that makes a kid unable to enjoy reading. (read more about these problems at the Children's Vision Information Network.)

Insist that libraries are not cut from your local schools at their PTO/PTA/PTSA or with local government officials. Work with the community to find funding or alternatives when government or school budgets become tight. (Read this amazing article from Washington DC's City Paper about a woman who shaped libraries in an admittedly problematic DC Public School System).

Start a book club and let your kids know about it! Let them join or do a family book club too.

Start a book swap or find one and become active.

If you hear a child being belittled for reading or doing something bookish, subtly show admiration or praise to reaffirm that what they are doing is right (confronting the bully may not be the best strategy because it could lead to more teasing). Sometimes kids just need a role model to give them that extra push when other kids are mean and potentially could curtail a love of books and learning.

In the meantime, read something: you never know who is watching and might catch the bug.

Discuss it!

What are some ways you've gotten your kids to read?

What strategies help you to read?

How have you gotten involved in creating a culture of reading in your home or community?

Do you know a kid with a vision problem that affected reading? Share a story of the struggle and how you worked to overcome it!

An Educatee' Perspective

I have few credentials to blog on education in a society that values them ever more highly: I am not a teacher; I have no Masters or Ph. D. in Education; I have never been an administrator; and I don't have children, let alone kids in school. While I have taught in Panama and Honduras, I was not a full-time teacher, and the kids' success or failure was not my responsibility at the end of the day. I taught courses in college, tutored kids, and have taught English as a Second Language (ESL), but these are all fixed gigs. Volunteering is valuable and necessary, but it does not replace a functioning system. Suffice to say, I don't have "credentials," but I still feel like I have something to offer (or at the very least, some griping to do) because education was my salvation.

You see, I was born to a single mother who had not finished secondary school herself. After stints on welfare, countless evictions, being attacked by gangs on the way home from school, going to bed without dinner some nights, I statistically should not have finished school. As luck would have it, I have a Masters degree, speak several foreign languages, and have a pretty cool job that takes me around the world and hopefully helps people.

Luck, perhaps, is not the right word. While I have been lucky to have many opportunities, hard work, a passion for learning, and a hard-earned recognition that I needed to take advantage of the experiences being put before me allowed me to jump from being another statistic to being an outlier. My hope is that by starting a conversation on education, we can create a path forward for more kids who are in my situation or in far worse straights. I want to unearth more of the best practices to ensure that more kids share my passion for learning. I hope to figure out how I was fortunate enough to move past poverty and use that to help others.

In the coming posts, I hope to start this conversation by talking about my experiences. I will draw on my own experiences teaching and learning in the classroom. I will talk about what has motivated me and how I learn. I will analyze compelling articles, videos and books on education. I may relate tales of friends and colleagues who work in the classroom or on education policy. Most of all, I hope to get you talking, sharing your stories and ideas, and offering solutions. After all, we have all gone to school, and we all have something to contribute.

You see, we are a nation that is spurning learning. The only way to move past our failing education system and dying passion for discovery and innovation is to care enough to talk and to get involved. Agree with me, disagree with me, build on what I say...the important thing is to speak.