Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

Some may think the (and students) means I consider student needs secondary behind teachers' needs. Not true. I wrote it like that because most students don't really understand what they NEED most, and what they need most isn't necessarily what they want out of school.  The classroom is different today than it was five years ago. When we sent kids home in 2020 and told them to hide under the covers and we'd give them an A...for doing absolutely nothing...for learning absolutely nothing...for nothing...nothing, when that happened, a shift in expectations occurred. And it hasn't shifted back yet, at least not everywhere. Teachers (and students) need that to shift back, and they need it now! Kids got used to having great grades for doing almost no work. Kids got used to having a high GPA without learning. To make things worse, when they came back in the fall of 2020, we sent them home for two weeks at a time when they heard the word Covid in the hallways. Over and over ...

Years ago, my wife worked in a factory, where one of her jobs was to verify the hours on employee time cards in the part of the plant where she worked. She told me about a guy who consistently complained about his pay, claiming it wasn't enough to live on. He told her, "If they paid me more, I'd work harder." She tried, to no avail, to explain that his view was exactly opposite the way it actually works, that he would likely be paid more if he worked harder. Unfortunately, many like that guy exist pretty much anywhere you go.  There's an attitude analogous to that fellow's view in education. "If we had more money, we could provide a better education." I've always had a problem with this approach. I've always been of the mind that if we provide a better education, we'll have more money. Why? Because schools and districts that provide a quality education to those they serve will draw parents and students like sugar draws ants. Today, we hav...

In his 2022 book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale , economist John List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago , defines the Sunk Cost Fallacy as the idea that one must continue to pursue an idea based on money previously invested. The basic idea is that the money previously spent is already gone and no longer recoverable. As humans we have a tendency to feel like that money is wasted if we decide to abandon the effort we spent that money on, even after the project appears doomed for failure. Too often, people continue to pour good money into a failing effort, because they don't want to waste the bad money they've already dumped into it. Teachers are prone to this same fallacy. The year was 2019. I sat for the ACT for the first time since I was a junior in high school, way back in 1984. Thirty five years had passed since the one and only time I'd ever actually SEEN the test. Ov...

 From a letter to Abigail, 1775. "It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."  Education matters!

  Unpopular opinion. We've been making up snow days as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I remember going to school on Saturday. I remember going past the last scheduled day. I remember lengthened school days, all to make up time lost to snow days. One thing we know for sure. Very few kids ever learned anything on AMI days. Heck, our school would not allow teachers to cover any new material for the same number of days we missed when kids came back from AMI days so they could catch up on the work they were supposed to do on AMI days! (Yes. What was the point of AMI days?) We also know that practically everyone bemoaned the fact that AMI days meant no more real snow days, even though most kids didn't do a lick of work while they were gone on AMI days. We KNOW these things! Now people are complaining that we have to make up the days. (Even though most schools have snow days built into their calendars and don't even know yet exactly how many days will be made up.) Now p...

 They're not necessarily ghost towns, but maybe a modern day version of ghost towns. Rural America is dotted with near-dead towns and communities. Once bustling town squares are now a ragtag collection of vape shops, tobacco stores, and second-hand thrift stores. The ruins of buildings that once housed successful small businesses stand dilapidated next to the new bright shiny Dollar General. Next to nothing is produced here. Most of what is consumed comes from miles away. Small towns that decades ago were almost fully self-supporting are barely surviving on a an IV of government handouts.  It's not a new phenomenon, but one that has been getting worse and worse for decades. Towns close enough to metro areas became bedroom communities for their large neighbors, but opportunity eludes those communities more distant. Rural America has been dying for a long time, kept on life support by a dwindling few who refused to leave. Those few commute long distances to make enough money to ...

*Today I received an email from the Association of American Educators seeking input on the nationwide problem of chronic absenteeism. I wrote what follows. Before reading, understand my criticism is directed at the entire education system, not my own district. Even the anecdotes described are not intended to criticize my district, as the issues described were essentially prescribed by politicians and policymakers far above the school district level.  ********************************************************************************* It's a serious problem, perhaps the most serious problem we face in education today. How can we teach students who don't show up? Who don't make up missed work? Who don't take advantage of the vast resources available to help them learn when they aren't in class? Because that's where we are. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10% of class days, is making it virtually impossible to educate this post-Covid generation.  We ...

 Yesterday I had an opportunity to meet Arkansas's new Secretary of Education, Jacob Oliva. If you're involved in Arkansas education at any level in any capacity, you know the elephant in every room is Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders' attempt to overhaul the state's education system, the LEARNS Act that became law earlier this year. Even though LEARNS is in a state of limbo while it's being challenged in court, smart money says it will be the law when school starts in the fall. Oliva is tasked with implementing LEARNS, which makes him very unpopular with a lot of people. But my first encounter convinced me he's not the bad guy many have painted him. We were at an Arkansas State Teachers Association (ASTA) Member Leader workshop. ASTA is a non-union, apolitical professional organization dedicated supporting to student-centered, teacher-led education in Arkansas. ASTA member leaders serve as points of contact and recruiters for ASTA in schools across the state. Me...