<p>Now remember, this is just my opinion.
Oh, I certainly did not intend to California bash. It just seems there are some fundamental problems there. Without a doubt, if a state the size of Cal. is having budget problems the ed. system would be first to suffer. And I do not know the scope of the problem. Also, I got the impression his comments were pertaining to California but if they are pertainly to N. Carolina I could see that too. There are deficiencies in N.Carolina.Which is another point about the paragraph, education is subjective to it’s state or region, the quality differing from place to place. I don’t really think anyone can say kids are so and so becuase that differs from area to area.But that is just my opinion! Gee, Calmom, you made some excellent points and I agree with you, there are just a few technicalities! I don’t know if I explained myself well here.
I haven’t read the book and I do not doubt he is an excellent in his field. It just seems like the programs already exsist and have for some time. That it isn’t anything new.Districts have been working very hard to put kids in the field for a long time.
I don’t think you could say that someone is bashing an author if they read a paragraph and say, hey, this isn’t anything new.I also got the idea that his program, the 4 Is was lecture based. I don’t see how that would work in a classroom.</p>
<p>Hey, think I am going to look for Levine’s book!</p>
<p>BHG, I don’t know where you would have gotten the idea that someone doing a radio interview on WNYC would have been talking about California. Last I checked, that was still on the opposite coast. </p>
<p>In any case, I actually don’t see the things Levine is complaining about as being much of an issue in California, for cultural reasons. That is, the majority of my own kids’ classmates are Asian, Filipino or Hispanic, and I would tend to attribute young adults living at home around here as being more likely influenced by their respective culture than other factors. The majority of kids I know locally do not have parents who can support them indefinitely, so when they are at home they usually are working and contributing to the household. </p>
<p>I think what Levine is talking about is more a symptom of a certain segment of upper middle class families who he feels either overschedule or overindulge their kids, leaving them without much in the way of inner reserves and initiative when they get out of college. Levine spent the last decade or so working with adolescents, so it might be that his patients are now grown up but not doing so well with the transition to adulthood, and he’s looking for reasons why in what he knows of their family background. (And of course, his patients invariably had the kind of parents who would spend thousands of dollars to travel across the country to his clinic for the sake of getting his advice and help – which may be why he perceives these kids as being the product of over-involved parenting).</p>
<p>“inner direction, or self-awareness; interpretation, or understanding the outside world; instrumentation, or the acquisition of mental tools; and interaction, or the ability to relate to other people effectively”</p>
<p>I haven’t read Dr. Levine’s book, but aren’t these the things I’m teaching when I lead my students in discussions of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Morrison, and DeLillo? </p>
<p>In my years of teaching English to bright high school kids, I’ve noticed that my students often respond most positively to the works I had my biggest doubts about, works that I thought would be too difficult, too challenging. This speaks, I think, to the deep desire in bright kids to be taken seriously, to meet the adult world on its own terms (in the case of English, by reading books by grown-ups for grown-ups) and see how they manage. The ideas of Dr. Levine are intriguing, but what I fear is that they will yield a curriculum that seems overly practical and explicitly didactic, giving the kids the feeling that they are being talked down to, that their worlds are narrowing, not opening up.</p>
<p>spoonyj, the students in your classes are fortunate and I couldn’t agree with you more about the “deep desire in bright kids to be taken seriously…” </p>
<p>It’s interesting to me that most of the people posting on this topic seem to feel that this interview and the book are zeroing in on the schools, whereas I didn’t feel that way at all when I listened to Leonard Lopate interview Dr. Levine. I do want to add that I didn’t particularly feel that this malaise or feeling “stuck” was something that was happening to the majority of twenty somethings… </p>
<p>When I posted, I was really thinking of the thread as more of an alert to an interview that sounded promising to me…and wondered if anyone had actually read this most recent book.</p>
<p>spoonyj-- I agree that the current curriculum in some classes is providing “4 I’s.” Now that I think about it the engagement as ‘adults’ analyzing & discussing adult themes is probably exactly why I loved Eng in HS and majored in Eng in college…</p>
<p>I don’t think Levine is trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. </p>
<p>He isn’t against classes with good critical thinking skills at their core, nor offering electives that match kids passions… but he would probably have a problem with the “teaching to the test” focus of some HS classes, and he might want to see fewer core requirememnts. Mostly I sense he’s against the the over-scheduling that goes on in “free” time.</p>
<p>I haven’t read about the book but Mel Levine has been an advocate for kids that learn differently.
As the parent of two girls who do, I can tell you the traditional model of having students study the same material in the same way, just longer- doesn’t often work.
We can’t give up on these kids, so we have to find a way that does work.
<a href=“http://www.allkindsofminds.org/[/url]”>http://www.allkindsofminds.org/</a></p>
<p>I think the book may have a useful message for us. I also think that school may not be the best place to learn some of these needed skills and approaches. And I think that rather than looking for a resume buiiding summer activity, kids would really benefit from getting a job. I was pleased to hear a panel of college adcomms say just that, as we were worrying that our S’s choice to have worked (so boring, not a hook, etc.) might work against him. But for so many reasons, it was such a good experience. </p>
<p>I know that jobs are hard to come by, and that some high achieving kids may really need a summer of academic enrichment to supplement a mediocre curriculum and/or to be around kids who value learning as they do. </p>
<p>My S was lucky enough to get a job at a department store between his soph and junior years. In his words, I learned more at work in a day than I do at school all year. Surely an exaggeration but it really was a defining experience. After the first summer, he was eager to make lots of money as a high commission-making saleperson. By the end of the second summer, he realized he couldn’t do that - if he was to go into sales or marketing, he had to sell something he believed in and he needed to do something that would help people. </p>
<p>Beyond that, he saw how differently the maintenance staff were treated, how the bottom line was the driving force, and the competition between employees. He learned how to function in an adult environment, with people who could barely pay their bills to those working for no other reason than to get a discount at their favorite store. He has always been a frugal kid but he really learned about the value of money - how long it would take him to pay for that longboard. He learned how to dress for success. </p>
<p>He learned a lot about college too, as he interacted with other summer staff who were generally back from college somewhere. </p>
<p>All in all, it was a fabulous experience and I think he gained a maturity which we now see everyday, in how he is approaching college and career choices. I will be surprised if he finishes college uneasy and unclear about what to do next - but even if he does, he will never lose the lessons he learned, and I believe they will help him figure it out a little bit sooner.</p>
<p>This may be a little off the topic of this thread, but it is related, I think. My son’s job/internship last summer was in a city distant from both our home and his college, and the company he worked for did not set up its summer students up with housing. He needed to find a place to stay (with another intern), sign a lease, rent a car (which was shared with other interns), make all of the arrangements with the utility companies, grocery shop, pay bills each month, etc. Although his job was a wonderful one where he learned a lot, I definitely feel that the most educational part of the whole experience was that he is now aware of all of the details and responsibilities involved in living on one’s own. Students graduating from college who have lived in dorms for all four years likely often have no concept or experience in this aspect of everyday life.</p>
<p>Spoony - I don’t think that these are things you teach via books or a class discussion - I think that these are things that are taught through action & experience. That is, my son’s high school probably did more toward teaching the 4I’s by requiring 100 hours of community service and an independent senior thesis, than through any item on the curriculum. (I doubt that anyone at my son’s school had ever heard of the 4I’s – but it was a Coalition of Essential Schools program, and there is probably a lot of conceptual overlap). </p>
<p>Like Blumini, I didn’t get the sense from the interview that Levine was talking about school curriculum so much as parenting; to the extent that he was talking about schools he might have been focused more on the way schools “track” students (either intensely academic college prep, or vocational … not much overlap) and the ways which that ultimately limits some college bound students in terms of developing the sort of life experience that will help them define their own career goals and gain workplace skills.</p>
<p>“I don’t think that these are things you teach via books or a class discussion - I think that these are things that are taught through action & experience.”</p>
<p>Calmom,
If you’re right–if Dr. Levine is referring to things that can only be taught through action and experience–then that just underscores the fear I expressed in my post. If “life prep” were taught, as it was in your son’s school, through community service and independent projects, I’d support it enthusiastically. I just worry that such solutions would be unwieldy and impractical for many schools–both public and private–with limited budgets, leading to classroom courses in “life prep” that would substitute for academic requirements. These are the kinds of courses that could easily devolve into something that feels didactic and condscending to a bright high school kid. </p>
<p>I have broader concerns as well. In my mind, education serves two opposing ends. It must both prepare us for our world and give us the means to critique it. Given that American culture already privileges the practical, I fear educational trends that, if not handled with great care, could further this imbalance even more.</p>
<p>Spoonyj - I honestly don’t know what Dr. Levine had in mind for schools, since he talked mostly about parenting and not so much about schools in the radio broadcast (or at least that was what I picked up on - I admit my attention was divided as I listen) – and I honestly don’t have the time or inclination to try to research his web site to figure it out.</p>
<p>But I think he may be focusing on a certain type of student who ends up with a lot of book smarts but not much in the way of life smarts. I don’t think it requires formal changes to a curriculum to make sure that schools are also helping teach or direct students in the way of developing the life smarts – I mean, this is a kind of thing for the guidance counselors to be aware of more than the teachers, and a lot can be done via afterschool programs and activities. It is not dumbing things down for a school to invite a career counselor to come in and work with kids, for example. Another thing my son’s high school did was that there was one week during the spring when regular classes were not held, and the kids instead signed up for a special course that basically was something different, and usually fun. The course could be anything – basically the teachers could design whatever course they wanted - so it could be cooking, or hiking, or art work, or visiting museums, or traveling to visit colleges. One year my son took a software course using Micromedia Flash – this was only one week out of the entire school year, so it in no way detracted from all the academics, but it gave my son a chance to learn a software program that could potentially be income-producing (since I make my living running web sites, I was quick to see the $$ value in that one). </p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a matter of money, because I don’t think that the kids at the inner city schools are the ones missing out on life’s lessons – many of them have more of “real life” to deal with than anyone would want. </p>
<p>I don’t know if the issue Levine raises is pervasive, or how many young people he sees that fit that bill – but I think all he is saying is that we need to provide the resources for developing well-rounded young kids, and while academics are very important, some kids are missing something along the way.</p>
<p>Thank you calmom, you’re obviously much better at explaining the interview than I.
</p>
<p>I don’t understand why several posters have gotten so upset and assuming that Dr. Levine is trying to revamp the school system or that he’s speaking of the population as a whole. I merely posted this as food for thought, mainly for parents who might find themselves in the situations Levine has described. Certainly there are many students who do not graduate from college and find themselves in suspended animation living at home or in frustrating jobs that are not really paths to the “careers” they’ve imagined themselves in. Thank goodness the parents on this board are not in that position - or, even better still, their children are not, but there are indeed adult children out there who are in this boat and perhaps Levine may have something to offer them.</p>