Parents assume that pushing academic learning earlier is better for children - stimulating their minds - and certainly does no harm.  But what if it does? There's extensive research showing that young children learn best through play and there are no studies showing that ACADEMIC preschool results in more successful students.  Preschool itself certainly does - because children learn independence, conflict resolution, group participation and more.

What's the harm?

Early "instruction" in writing could lead to more children having trouble learning to write neatly (print or cursive).  Counter-intuitive, but a group of elementary school teachers shared their frustration with me.  See - when preschool children play with crayons, they hold the crayons however they like and they scribble.  But when they make a letter, they're forcing their hands into a repetitive motion. Some preschool teachers know how to teach the appropriate grip and some preschool hands have the fine motor skill to do it.

But the other children often develop an awkward way of holding their crayons/pencils/markers.  And that grip becomes a habit that needs to be broken.  Breaking a habit is a lot harder than learning from scratch.

In kindergarten - at age 5 or so - the fine motor skills are there and the teachers are skilled in developing proper grip.  Without a proper grip, it's hard, but not impossible, to write neatly.  And there's really no rush - learning to write well in kindergarten and into first grade will serve our children well.

Scribbling and playing with writing is great fun.  Learning to write letters is more exacting. What do you think - should they be writing letters in pre-school?  Or should we wait for kindergarten to teach kids to write?

I believe the purpose of school and education is to establish brain circuitry that enables our children to absorb and evaluate information, make choices and act upon those choices. So – does cursive have a role in wiring the brain?  If yes, then it likely needs to be taught.  If no, then it’s an antiquated tradition.  Today, I explored the science, rather than the opinions. 

Our local newspaper, SF Gate – the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle, published an opinion blog today on the question of cursive instruction.  The problem is the debate is between personal opinions and preferences. Most of the debate is belief-based – ranging from cursive is a traditional part of elementary education to "I hated cursive/ never use it/my child hates it/isn’t typing a better use of time".  Full disclosure – I take copious notes in all my meetings and they are all in cursive – it’s simply faster for me.

Andrea Gordon of ParentCentral from the Toronto Star sources some excellent research on the impact of cursive on neurological development.  Read her full article.

According to Toronto psychiatrist and neuroplasticity expert Dr. Norman Doidge - When a child types or prints, he produces a letter the same way each time. In cursive, however, each letter connects slightly differently to the next, which is more demanding on the part of the brain that converts symbol sequences into motor movements in the hand.

That sounds like brain development.

In the September 2007 issue of Brain and Language USC Neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Hellige and Stanford/VA Aging Clinical Research Center post-doctoral fellow Dr. Maheen Adamson published a study of "hemispheric asymmetry for native English speakers identifying consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) non-words presented in standard printed form, in standard handwritten cursive form or in handwritten cursive with the letters separated by small gaps".

These results suggest a greater contribution of the right hemisphere to the identification of handwritten cursive, which is likely related visual complexity and to qualitative differences in the processing of cursive versus print.

Also sounds like brain development.

Andrea Gordon sourced another neurologist who ties cursive writing to emotional circuitry as well. 

Dr. Jason Barton, a neurologist and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, whose research focuses on the role of the human brain in vision. Barton's findings, using brain imaging, suggest we recognize handwriting the same way we distinguish faces, triggering similar emotional responses.

His studies, among the first of their kind, show that while the left visual word form area perceives and decodes words for their meaning in written language, the right side is where we interpret the style of writing, allowing us to identify the writer rather than the word, just as neighbouring areas in the right brain play a key role in allowing us to recognize faces.

As soon as that recognition kicks in, it activates what's known as a memory trace – a biochemical alteration in the brain created by something learned – and fans out, setting off other sensory memories.

"Once triggered by perception – whether of a face, a voice or handwriting – memory reverberates through all the senses and in all the corridors of your brain, bringing back emotions, knowledge, all the different facets of information and experiences with that person stored from the past," Barton says.

Our children will learn to type.  And email, IM, txt are all very impersonal – wrought with opportunities to be misunderstood.  Cursive may be tedious and as adults we may choose not to use it, but it helps our children’s brains develop and it can be fun.  It can be taught when they are in pre-school and kindergarten and apparently, it’s better for lefties and children struggling with dyslexia. So I vote for teaching cursive.

My children are excited to  learn cursive and our school uses Handwriting without Tears - which seems to be true.  They're also learning to type.  I don't really care what they use as adults - but I care that they think through what they plan to say and ensure that the reader can understand it (because it's relatively neat and coherent).  What do you think – should school make us learn things we might not use as adults because it develops our brain pathways?



I've spent the last few days at the first cross-movement conference for Jewish Day School educators - as a lay leader, certainly not an educator.  It's pretty cool to observe from the inside the thoughts, challenges and aspirations of people in North America, Israel and South Africa who have committed their lives to Jewish education. The evening keynote featured a renowned scholar in the study of education - Dr. Lee Shulman from Stanford University and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Dr. Shulman has studied the educational process of creating doctors, lawyers, nurses, clergy and more - but his talk was easily graspable by a lay person like me. And his lifetime of research discloses some very obvious, but odd ingredients for success in school.

Dr. Shulman found that all successful educations revolved around developing three habits in a way that served the profession being taught. The habit of the intellect - learning the facts about the subject.  The habit of the hand - practicing the techniques of the profession. And the habit of the heart - learning the ethics and moral guidelines for the profession.

Dr. Shulman also found that two activities, done in concert, cause students to develop these three habits. The winning combo is a consistent and predictable routine combined with active, unpredictable discussion. In fact, ensuring that students must listen to and build upon the comments of their colleagues creates anticipatory anxiety that leads to better preparation and better command of the lessons. This makes sense to me as a graduate of HBS because it's their model too.

As a parent whose children are in Jewish Day School, I found the lesson in how Jewish education currently and historically leverages predictable routines and respectful debate intriguing. Our educational model for generations (literally, hundreds if not a thousand years) is one where students study a text predictable, develop an intepretation and must listen to, build upon and debate other's intepretations to lead to a collective conclusion. At our school, the children start doing this in kindergarten when they talk about literature. It is fascinating that we are creating education that is substantive and relevant in the digital age using a process and text that often is ancient.

At home, we believe deeply in routines as they give our children guaranteed times to be playful and be creative.  In addition to our routines, I'm going to try adding active debate into our family rubric - at predictable intervals.  Perhaps we'll discuss a current events topic or a portion of the Torah that the children studied at school.  I'll definitely ask each of the boys to build on what the other contributed - which should be interesting too. I'm curious to see what will happen at home and what habits we might develop adopting this proven educational model. 

What do you think - how can or do you combine routines with discussion in your family?  How does your school develop the three habits in your child?

California isn't known for the quality of it's elementary and secondary schools - which is sad because they apparently were state of the art many years ago. I realize that we don't have snow days out here and that the children are in school for 180 days by law.  But did you know that 90 minutes can constitute a "day"? I think we can expect more.  Including single week (ok- 9 day) holiday breaks.

In New Jersey, where I grew up - near the Jersey Shore that is being ridiculously parodied by a reality TV show - we did have snow days and we didn't have two week school vacations.  In fact, we went to school through to December 23rd and returned on January 2nd unless one of those days was on a weekend. 

Here are the problems with two week school vacations. First, that's a long time for the kids to get out of the school rhythm.  Consequently, they are likely to have an actual adjustment upon returning.  One week off is enough to get a mental break without forgetting how to work or be in school.  Ah yes, work is the second problem.  If both parents work or have some semblance of a life during the day there are now two full weeks to fill.  And that's a very expensive extended vacation or a recipe for cabin fever.  Third - starting and ending every vacation on a weekend leads to some expensive travel as every family traveling flies those days.  There's nothing wrong with starting mid-week.  Third, the camps and other activities add more cost to families - unless a parent takes off from work (or other responsibilities) for two weeks. Which is a long time to be off work too.

The public schools in our area give two weeks (or more) off for Winter Holidays.  I think that led our private school to do the same thing.  My kids are loving the winter sports camps I found for them - and we'll leave for vacation in a day or so.  In the spring, my school will close for two weeks again because of Passover - which occurs mid-week.  It's helpful for people traveling to family and maybe that's the majority. But I'm not sure two weeks off from school is a good idea.  Save that treat for college. What do you think?

We all look for insurance - health insurance, life insurance and to some extent "parenting insurance".  The challenge with parenting insurance is that we're really trying to affect the outcome of someone else's life and they have more than a little to say about the matter.

Last week, I moderated a lively teleconference on kindergarten readiness. It's available as a podcast and well worth the listen.  But the listeners were mostly shocked at the message - that kindergarten readiness is an artificial construct created by upper middle class parents seeking to ensure their children have an edge.  Parenting insurance.  The research favors starting children on time - and even a little bit on the young side.  

Tutoring companies and elite elementary schools prey upon our need for parenting insurance.  We legitimately want to give our children all the opportunities and cultivation they need to succeed in life.  Measuring success by academic achievement and collegiate acceptances. Which seems to be as much about proving that we are amazing as parents as it is about them knowing how to be successful.

Articles in Nurture Shock (my new favorite book on parenting) aggregate the research and show that intelligence testing of young children is incredibly unreliable - up to 30 points of IQ swing is regularly noted between ages 5 and 14.  30 points in IQ measurement is HUGE.  The research also shows that children routinely told they are smart often have a harder time in high school and college - because they think if they don't "get it" instinctively, it's an issue of intellect and not of diligence and hard work.  Einstein said - 95% of brilliance is just showing up.

My feeling is that there is no parenting insurance.  There's no schools that ensure our children will get into colleges we can brag about.  There are schools that teach critical thinking and personal responsibility - but those schools will only have an impact if we as parents value and teach the same thing - which means letting our children make decisions, make mistakes and deal with the consequences of those mistakes.  I think it must get very scary when your child is a teenager or young adult and takes many more risks than my young kids...so my philosophy is to instill the values and foundation now that will, hopefully, guide them through the risks that inevitably will come their way.  

What's your parenting insurance?  Did it work?