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

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.

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.

My kids no longer use Starfall. But I have a six-year-old and I just went back to update this post for 2019.  Sure enough, Starfall has expanded its mission and it has some great new math programs that extend out to 3rd grade.  I don’t really think it is true 3rd-grade math.  It looks to me a bit more like early 2nd-grade math.  It is far from perfect.  It is not adaptive to the child’s individual learning and aptitude like so many modern educational sites and apps do.  Still, I love the feel of the website and I think children are drawn to it.

The site is free but to get all the programs it costs $35 a year.  It really is a steal.

Reading Bear is a wonderful tool for young readers

While Starfall does have more advanced stories as readers progress, they are not nearly as much fun or as well done as the original stories with Zach the Rat, Gus the Duck, and their colleagues on Startfall that I have learned to love so much. Starfall’s more advanced stories are hard for “young but advanced readers” because they are dry and don’t maintain interest.  My son is easily bored by these.  Also a factor: you have to pay to get these stories from Starfall.  I still recommend buying the upgraded Starfall because there are good counting and math games we like to use.  But the extra reading is just not fun like the characters in original (and free) stories.

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.

This webpage from Hamblen County, Tennessee (I’ve never heard of it either) has a great collection of different standardized tests administered in different states. I’m a big fan of the California Achievement Test which is on there. I remember the fateful day it replace the Iowa tests when I was in the 5th grade. Or something like that.

A lot of the links are down on this page but most of them work and there a just a lot of good tests here.

There are a lot – a lot – of iPad math apps for kids. They are multiplying like rabbits in the App Store. The problem is that most are just a replica of the last one.

I’ve used hundreds – literally – of math apps with my kids. The math iPad app I believe in the most is Splash Math. That’s a big statement. Not surprisingly, it is also the most expensive math app we have in our arsenal.

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.

Two area schools made the list. Coppin State came in at #11 (which had to be bitter it was not a Top 10 list) and the University of the District of Columbia came in at #2. The big winner was the Southern University at New Orleans which has 75.8% of its students receiving Pell Grants and 4% of its students walking across the stage. Admittedly, it has cheap tuition – $3,906 a year – but I would like to hear a good explanation as to why this school is allowed to remain open.

FlowMath is a really good iPad math app that helps your child take the leap from memorizing math facts to making use of that knowledge. It is a great bridge from facts to a real math application.

FlowMath gives you an answer. Let’s say it is 11 like the picture here. How do you get to 11? Your child might know that 5+6=11. But, can they figure that out given a bunch of numbers from which to choose? You can choose the numbers and the type of operation – start out with just addition if you child is doing something like this for the first time – and see how fast you can make your way through this twist on arithmetic tables.