Tag: education

Thomas Kane’s “Learning Losses”

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Since 2022—if not earlier—Thomas Kane has been banging a drum for more schooling as a remedy to what he’s calling “learning losses.” He was still banging that drum in 2023, and still is these days, too. Specifically, he argues that kids fell so far behind during in school during the pandemic that they won’t be able to catch up on their own. Kane apparently has pretty hard research showing how much this is the case, measured in “points” and also measured in weeks of school. He tends to argue that kids are so-and-so many weeks behind where kid were immediately …

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The Bloom Effect, Part 2: Tiger Mom Retcon, The Bloom Effect, “Middle 2 Syndrome”, and Resistance in Context

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This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series The Bloom Effect

This post is part of a series. I suggest you start at the beginning, to get the most out of it. Part 3: Hyperschooling and the Tiger Mom Retcon Last time, I talked about the idea of “Tiger Parenting” and how it’s primarily been discussed in the context of American education and upbringing. I talked about the importance of considering education and upbringing within a social context–how parenting is contextualized by society and education, how education is contextualized by parenting and society, and so on. The implications are enormous, of course: a mainstream Korean-styled upbringing in Korea is different from …

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The Bloom Effect, Part 1: Context, Context, and More Context

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series The Bloom Effect

This post is the promised follow-up to my earlier post titled “Two Disconcerting Trends: Korean Kids, School Systems, And Parental Appraisal.” I have split the follow-up into two parts, as 10,000 words seems too long for a single blog post. This is a sprawling essay discussing: The idea of the Tiger Mom, and some thoughts on Amy Chua’s book The importance of social context in determining the outcome of a given parenting style Hyperschooling and why it is a rasdically new thing in South Korea, and why nobody seems willing to admit it to their kids or themselves “The Bloom Effect” observed …

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A Few Things to Realize About Bullying

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Once again the world is talking about bullying. The depressing story of Amanda Todd has shown up in the world news. Even before the Amanda Todd story came out, though, I was thinking about this. I see some problems with the way we’re talking about bullying. Things that really, really irk me. I’m going to try lay them out as clearly and simply as I can:

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The Wow! Moment and Teachers’ Responsibility

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Creative Writing teachers sometimes — not very often, but sometimes — experience a Wow! moment, when they see student work of a caliber that is simply way beyond the majority of the class… a student whom they feel moved to encourage to keep writing, in some capacity or other. Or at least, a student whose talent and hard work deserves recognition. That Wow! moment is even more powerful when you’re teaching Creative Writing in a foreign language. I just finished grading my last pile for the semester — aside, perhaps, from a couple of late videos submitted to Youtube — …

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What is Food To Us?

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Regarding whether New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg is in the right or the wrong in his bid to legislate about what size of soft drinks can be sold in the city, the discussion seems kind  of misguided in my opinion. It seems, in fact, misguided on both sides of the argument. Those who are up in arms for this “infringement of freedom” have some nerve: after all, why complain when sugar is added to an already long list of controlled substances? In America, people cannot ingest marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or a host of other chemicals legally. If a society has …

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Gobble-Gobble

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Yeah, for you Errol Morris fans, that’s a double-gobble: Well, here are some links for you to gobble down, and think about later: I’m a little dubious about the idea we’ll have enough energy to fuel anything as expansive as what is discussed in this video featuring a talk by Jesse Schell (a Carnegie Mellon University Professor), but I do imagine we will be going about receiving points for all kinds of daily activities, and in fact I’ve been thinking about shifting a couple of my courses to an XP-based grading system next semester. I think this notion is likely to work its way …

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Global: What It Really Means in Korea

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In Korea today, one of the great buzzwords is “global”: you hear about “inbound globalization” at educational institutions, you hear about “global marketing,” you hear about “global outreach.” The word “global,” has attained a kind of buzzword status but as one of my students pointed out last semester in a public speaking exam — he gave a speech on the subject — global almost always really means, “Anglo-American.” (Note: by this I mean, English-language of the American subtype. I don’t mean in the sense some Americans seem to mean when they say “Anglo-American”, ie. British American or something.) There’s an …

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So What Next?

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Given that I agree with most of this: … I am asking myself: what next? It’s not just problems in education that have me wondering this, of course: there are other things afoot that have me checking the escape hatch to this orbital sat, making sure my suit doesn’t have any leaks, because hard vacuum is a bitch. But for the record, I think the problems are systemic to education everywhere, but the parts that are exacerbated in Korean education are especially hard for me to reconcile myself with. A colleague in another department I was talking with told me …

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