Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Savvy, practical insights on where our Education Establishment went wrong and how most schools can be improved.LET'S FIX EDUCATION explains the many dysfunctional theories and methods operating within our schools. This podcast is intended for parents, teachers, and community leaders who want education reform.
Each week, LET'S FIX EDUCATION examines another problem in our public schools, such as: Constructivism. Learning styles. Sight-words. No memorization. Cooperative learning. Prior knowledge. Reform math. The dilution of knowledge. Common Core. Project-based learning. Student-centered, etc. In fact, there are DOZENS of counterproductive learning and teaching theories, all made worse by ideological motives.
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, and education reformer. He has analyzed the problems in education for more than 30 years. Price is the author of "Saving K-12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" (190 pages) His main education site is Improve-Education.org. For more information about book and author, visit Lit4u.com. Newest novels are "Frankie" (about a harmless robot) and "The Boy Who Saves The World" (about a boy who saves the world).
"Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!” Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of The National Right to Read Foundation
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 115: Great News about John Saxon and his Marvelous Math Books
Episode 115 -- Wed., Sept. 13, 2023
There are good ways and bad ways to do everything. John Saxon was obsessed with finding the best ways to teach major subjects, especially math. Our public schools seem not to share that obsession.
John Saxon has been gone 28 years but his spirit and his famous textbooks endure. Every parent should understand what John Saxon was trying to tell us
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background article: THE LEGEND OF JOHN SAXON
https://rightsidenews.com/life-and-science/health-and-education/the-legend-of-john-saxon-math-warrior/
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wonderful fan letter
"John Saxon's Story" contains hundreds of anecdotes and quotations that illuminate Saxon’s life. Some will bring tears to your eyes. Here is my favorite, a fan letter from a high school teacher:
“I think perhaps there can be no higher compliment to you than to tell you how much feeling my students have for you. After 17 years, I know it is remarkable if a student could tell me the color of his math book — to say nothing of knowing who authored it. The Saxon students trust you and work hard and do well for themselves, for me, and for Mr. Saxon.”·
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"SUPPORT EDUCATION REFORM"
Please help me improve K-12...
Americans should have great public schools.
We could so easily have them....
Here are my solutions and
how you can help.
http://spot.fund/SupportEducationReform
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Podcasts are also available as TRANSCRIPTS
SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:
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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book: Saving K-12
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Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 115 -- Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023
Great News about John Saxon and his Marvelous Math Books
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Nakonia Hayes, teacher and school principal, is famous for writing the biography of John Saxon (John Saxon's Story, a genius of common sense in math education). She sent me this update:
“One sentence that says it all:
John Saxon’s math books have just been given life indefinitely in spite of 43 years of hate led by the math education elites.
Millions who support Saxon Math can easily determine pure Saxon books (NO COMMON CORE) by looking for the names John Saxon, Stephen Hake, or Frank Wang on the front covers.
Stephen is confident that Saxon Math is here to stay.
While Saxon Math will also be offered in digital format, I don’t think we can take over math education. Woke ‘leaders’ of schools won’t go with Saxon. It will still be loved by homeschoolers and charter and private schools. The closer you work with kids, the more you love Saxon.”
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Here's the central drama of the Saxon story. The entire Education Establishment considered him a threat. Could that be because his books taught children to do math? But public school students ended up math-failures. The Education Establishment did everything possible to discredit Saxon and make his books disappear. The most dishonorable thing was that big New York publishers bought rights to Saxon books precisely for the purpose of suppressing them.
Isn't it remarkable that these so-called educators hated the idea of children actually mastering math? Once upon a time it was touch-and-go whether the Saxon approach would be buried forever.
Saxon’s pedagogy emphasizes incremental instruction, constant review, quizzes, repetition, leading to mastery. The idea was to put math in the child's brain so it would stay there. On the other hand, New Math 1963, Reform Math in the 1980s, and Common Core Math circa 2010 were basically the same low-cal nonsense.
Saxon graduated from West Point and earned three advanced degrees. He was a fighter pilot and test pilot for the Air Force. He was a warrior and a thinker; and he built a $100,000,000 publishing empire. He ridiculed the ed professors. When people asked why he wasn’t more polite to them, Saxon said they didn't deserve it.
He offered to pay the expenses of conducting head-to-head contests between his books and the professor books. He predicted he would beat them by an order of magnitude, which is quite a claim. But they didn't accept the challenge.
My own encounter with Saxon happened indirectly. I saw lots of loving references to his books among homeschoolers desperately seeking fresh copies. I realized that people who homeschool don't readily accept pieces of junk put out by the official authorities. If you plan to sit all day at the kitchen table with a bunch of kids, you will gravitate toward the most efficient method. That’s Saxon.
Even after Saxon died (1995) and New York publishers tried to hide Saxon, many homeschoolers remained faithful. There was a strong after-market for old Saxon books from the 1970’s and 1980’s. Now, hopefully, Saxon will be the gold standard for years to come.
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Note that reading pedagogy and math pedagogy are usually thought of as separate. But in bad schools we see that inferior programs in both subjects can embody the same spirit of deception. Professors devised pedagogies that seem feasible but in fact they are dead-ends. For example, Whole Word and New Math are mirror images of each other: attractive presences hide poison pills.
People deeply engaged in the Math Wars or the Reading Wars do not usually see that the other people are their allies, their siblings. They're all up against the same shallow, conscience-free enemies. Only the best propagandists and psy-warriors can confect things like Balanced Literacy and Everyday Math. I have often used the same words to describe them both: balderdash and piffle.
The essential identity goes very deep and both remind us of what Dr. Samuel Orton declared in 1927 about Whole Word. It doesn't work and even worse, it will scar a child for life.
This discussion has two purposes for me. I want to persuade parents that they have to stand between their kids and educational malfeasance. Second, let’s find out if it's possible to make these professors feel ashamed of themselves.
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background article
THE LEGEND OF JOHN SAXON
https://rightsidenews.com/life-and-science/health-and-education/the-legend-of-john-saxon-math-warrior/