Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

Website Wednesday

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/ 

Some back story: I'm sitting inside the Kumon waiting room yesterday while the boy is in the classroom working on math. Now, usually I sit in the car because the boy is very tall and really doesn't appreciate any parental units tagging along to classes. However, it was beastly hot yesterday and someone would have definitely called PETA if they had seen me sitting in the car for an extended period - even with the windows cracked.

So there I am, with the same parents I saw the last time I was there over 6 months ago and I'm listening to them talk about the Kumon program. Then they start praising the John Hopkins math program, which, as I listen, I discover is eerily similar to the University of Chicago math program our school system disastrously uses. I'm hearing stuff like: Oh, he really likes that program because one week they do negative numbers and the next it's fractions so he never gets bored......... And I'm thinking: Oh boy, that's our math program and it's the worst math curriculum for elementary school kids. That type of math program is the reason we're here at Kumon because one week the boy would get tessellation (yeah, I know, every 5th grader needs to learn that) and then LCM or GCD, negative numbers, graphs, mean, median, and mode... and by the end of a marking period he may not be bored but he didn't learn basic math either. (You really can't discover LCM without basic math skills.)

Unfortunately, there are certain basic skills you must practice and practice and practice. Kumon works that way: every student is taken back to the beginnings, basic addition, and then progressively released into the next learning area when the previous one is absolutely mastered. For years, I worked with the boy on multiplication and never got a fast response to questions like: 8 x 6 or 9 x 7. In 9 months of Kumon, he's moved way beyond multiplication mastery, is at least at his grade level in math and now, even after if he makes a math mistake, he can look at the question quickly and see his error. For me, the prevailing meme that "Ivy" programs are the best, is completely disproved by our experience (and many other in the school system) with Kumon. But, I also know, the meme bests the truth every time.

Thus ends the back story. All of which brings me back to my website pick today. I first came across Freakonomics as a 2010 documentary which gave you examples of current socioeconomic thinking and showed if it were true and if it worked. For example, Freakonomics explored the practice of paying under-performing students and asked the question: Can a money incentive lead to better grades? They also depicted a sumo wrestling scandal and how the industry dealt with the corruption (Move over, Wall Street.) Watching the documentary, I can imagine them tackling: Ivy League math programs sold to school systems: great results or the lure of prestige names.

On its About page, Freakonomics asks and answers questions. I like this one:

Q: Does everyone like your books?
A: Ha! Not by a long shot. Here is an early catalog of people who hated Freakonomics. In the U.S. alone, there are probably enough Freakonomics haters to fill up the Rose Bowl. Which is why you’ll never find us walking past the Rose Bowl without an armed guard, at least not at night. Also, our global-warming chapter in SuperFreakonomics caused downright apoplexy among a certain quadrant of environmentalists.

You may not agree with everything you read at Freakonomics but they're doing some "out of the box" thinking and they are holding a mirror up to some of society's most sacred cows.

A current article, Are Voters Just Rooting for Clothes?, starts with the unhappiness with Obama among the uber-rich, moves on to discuss the color of jerseys as a factor in the like/dislike of sports players, swirls into scientific studies and concludes some pretty obvious facts about the herd mentality. What's an added bonus for me is the intelligent comments which follow this article. (Note to self: Stop reading the comments in the Huffington Post, so many have descended into FOX News scurrilousness.)

So I recommend you bookmark Freakonomics and keep visiting it, especially in these times when the media is gushing over the emperor's new clothes but we all know better.