Miller & Zois Kids Blog

Researchers from three Canadian universities claim that the popular gym class game dodgeball is a tool for certain students to oppress their peers.

This isn’t the first time you have heard this.  People have been talking about dodgeball for a while.  There are two camps: (1) the sissification of American camp, and (2) the dodgeball is a bullying tool of evil.  I see both sides of this and I don’t totally know where I stand as I start this article.  Let’s see where we end up. (Spoiler Alert: I come down softly in favor of dodgeball.)

The Anti-Dodgeball Argument from This Study

Does summer vacation affect children’s overall academic performance? National Summer Learning Association argues that by 9^th grade, two-thirds of the achievement gap between low and middle-income children is due to summer learning loss.  I’ve been hearing these types of arguments forever and have pretty much accepted them as fact.   In part because of this, my wife and I double down on the summer academics to make sure we are moving forward and not backward.

New Study Case Doubt on Theory

Paul T. von Hippel, an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas recently published a study that casts doubt on this assumption that summer break negatively impacts academic performance.  This is important because there is a movement against summer vacation.  Because there are social and economic reasons to preserve summer vacation, we certainly don’t want to change the system that we have unless there is a strong educational reason to do so.

Kindergarten used to be a place where you really honed in on your napping and fingerpainting skills.

No longer. My youngest son graduated from kindergarten a few weeks ago.   The academic requirements of a kindergartener in 2019 are significantly greater than those placed on my 13-year-old son when he was in kindergarten.

I think this is a good thing.  I think getting ahead academically helps prepare kids for the future.  I’m convinced that not starting from ground zero is a huge help when learning a topic.  I’d rather have my kids doing first-grade math with some early exposure to the concepts. If you can add numbers from 0-9 easily, it will be easier when you are trying to regroup numbers for subtraction.  Certainly, early repeated exposures to the concepts make rote learning much easier.

I look so hard for these on-line. Annoying, North Carolina has some that you can’t print out. So you can put them on line but you take off the print function. I would love to see the meeting where that was decided.

Anyway, I discovered today that the great state of Maine really saves the day. Here are a ton of tests that they have that go back to 2005.

They value in these tests, in my opinion, is that they mimic the kind of testing that these kids are going to see for the rest of their lives.  People eschew standardized tests because they do not represent what they want the world to be.  Fair enough.  I agree.  But the biggest tests our kids are ever going to take is the SAT and any graduate school entry tests (MCAT, LSAT, GMAT) they need to take. These standardized tests are just a ramp up to these tests.  It certainly is the not the most fair system.  But it the system we have and we have to have a children ready to face the challenges these tests bring.

There has been a lot of debate of late about whether college is for everyone. Robert Samuelson, a noted economist, wrote a editorial in the Washington Post a few weeks ago arguing that the ” college-for-all crusade” is one of those utopia dreams that should come to an end for the good of the U.S. economy.

I agree with this premise: there is little economic utility in trying to get every student to go to college. But I think Samuelson fails to fully appreciate that there is more to life than economics. If a student tries two years of college and fails, he is likely to make less money over the course of his life than if he had gone to, let’s say, trade school. Okay. But is he a better and happier person for the experience? In 2012, we seem to funnel everything through economics. Isn’t there more to life than just money? Couldn’t we at least talk about it?

Anyway, MSN Money put out today a list of the 11 worst public universities by graduation rate. In spite of my little speech above, schools have to give students some chance of success. If kids are just taking out loans and not being properly supported in the path to graduation, that is no opportunity at all.

Continue Reading