Nerd is not a dirty word at these schools

After I wrote "Nerdy words that aren't dirty" and "Blaming the schools for what they can't control" I found out that I had an article on my coffee table that sort of tied the two blog entries together and went even further.

Wired 17.09 contains "Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education" by Daniel Roth. Several schools have found that by breaking the kid culture, by plenty of adult supervision and by having students work in teams, that kids will do much better academically and more likely to go on to college. This can even happen in schools with mostly lower-income families.

I would say that good education is going to come from the bottom up with many experiments and not from the top down with one size fits all.

If anything is going to come from the top down, it should be the President highlighting a school or a group of schools every month. No money, no laws, just a little bit of publicity.

Blaming the schools for what they can't control

Laura Rowley wrote that self-control is a better predictor of grades or other successes than IQ. See “Why I Canned the Cable”.

College students who multitask heavily fare worse than those who multitask less. See "Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off", Brandon Keim, Wired, 2009-08-24.

If a kid lives in a two-room apartment where the TV is always on and there is at least one conversation going, will he or she do as well in school as someone who has his or her own bedroom in a reasonably quiet house?

Only the most dedicated and clever teachers can work successfully with children with little self-control living in a "busy" home. Especially when there are 30 or more kids in the same room.