Archives for October 8, 2014

Teachers reprimanded for speaking out against Common Core

Louisiana Repub­li­can Gov. Bob­by Jin­dal blast­ed reports Tues­day that teach­ers are being rep­ri­mand­ed for speak­ing out against Com­mon Core stan­dards on social media. A teacher in Rapi­des Parish, in Alexan­dria, La., was “writ­ten up” for writ­ing a neg­a­tive post on Face­book about the con­tro­ver­sial stan­dards, accord­ing to Town Talk.

What Is Direct Instruction?

Day 5: Skin­ner Hor­ror Files Skin­ner Trou­bles with Direct Instruction/Mastery Learn­ing The fol­low­ing blog post is an excerpt from Appen­dix XXV of my book the delib­er­ate dumb­ing down of amer­i­ca. It is the sec­ond of a two-part alert series in the late 1990s that com­prised this par­tic­u­lar appen­dix. This is the best sum­ma­ry of what exactly […]

Why Constructivism and Direct Instruction will Damage Your Child’s Brain – Part 3

A Cou­ple Loose Analo­gies Pic­ture total­i­tar­i­an­ism on one end of a scale and anar­chy on the oth­er. Both have issues but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Total­i­tar­i­an­ism is like Cap­i­tal “D.I.” Direct Instruc­tion where they attempt Pruss­ian style edu­ca­tion of forc­ing knowl­edge into heads. Here’s your task, repeat it. Con­struc­tivism is akin to anar­chy. Anar­chy always always […]

Who’s Who and What’s What

Day 4: Skin­ner Hor­ror Files The Next Gen­er­a­tions of Pro­grammed Instruc­tion This post is a his­to­ry les­son tak­en direct­ly out of my book the delib­er­ate dumb­ing down of amer­i­ca, Appen­dix XXV. This appen­dix has two alerts that were sent out in the late 1990s that warned about how Skin­ner’s form of oper­ant con­di­tion­ing edu­ca­tion (the original […]

Why Constructivism and Direct Instruction will Damage Your Child’s Brain – Part 2

In the Schools Today 2004 was my piv­otal year. My old­est was in 3rd grade and I dis­cov­ered that Alpine School Dis­trict was no longer teach­ing the times tables or long divi­sion to chil­dren and hadn’t for at least 3 straight years. What in the world was hap­pen­ing? Alpine and sev­er­al oth­er dis­tricts had partnered […]

Hooking Children to Computers

Day 3: The Skin­ner Hor­ror Files Pro­grammed Instruc­tion: An Intro­duc­tion Exhib­it 1 is from a 1971 text­book Psy­chol­o­gy Applied to Teach­ing by Robert F. Biehler (Houghton Mif­flin Co., Boston). This pho­to illus­trates the ear­ly use of Skin­ner’s PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION in the class­room using a “teach­ing machine” com­put­er. In order to under­stand what has been hap­pen­ing in […]

Failure to pass US surveillance reform bill could still curtail NSA powers

If the Sen­ate doesn’t pass the USA Free­dom Act after the midterm elec­tions, a key sec­tion of the Patri­ot Act could expire Two mem­bers of the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives are warn­ing that a fail­ure to pass land­mark sur­veil­lance reform will result in a far more dras­tic cur­tail­ment of US sur­veil­lance pow­ers – one that […]