<html><head><style type="text/css"></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>I don't think of "teachers" or "teaching" as dirty words. And I don't separate them by age group, profession, or whether parents or not. (Do I have to say that good teachers facilitate learning ....?) There are lots of poor teachers in the world (for many different reasons), but it's important to understand that no child ever invented Calculus, nor did any adult until very recently in our 200,000 years on the planet. Good teachers are vital, and most especially for the powerful invented ideas and knowledge that is less strongly built into our genetically and culturally fashioned brain/minds. So we need good teachers from our peers, our parents, our schooling systems, our vocations, our delights, etc. Best wishes, Alan </div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><hr size="1">From: K. K. Subramaniam <kksubbu.ml@gmail.com> To: squeakland@squeakland.org Cc: Alan Kay <alan.nemo@yahoo.com>; Chunka Mui <chunka.mui@devilsadvocategroup.com>; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes <olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org>; "america-latina@squeakland.org" <america-latina@squeakland.org>; Carlos Rabassa <carnen@mac.com>; Maho 2010 <maho@realness.org>; olpc bolivia <olpc-bolivia@lists.laptop.org>; IAEP SugarLabs <iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org>; OLPC Puno <olpcpuno@gmail.com> Sent: Sun, February 6, 2011 6:36:38 AM Subject: Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric A lot of thought provoking ideas listed in one mail. Wow! On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 5:20:15 am Alan Kay wrote: > For the US, it has been calculated that it is not possible to create enough > knowledgeable K-8 teachers for math and science over the next 25 years, > even for the 30:1 student teacher ratios we have today. It has been > estimated that this problem is much worse in the developing world. Student-Teacher ratio is about teaching not learning. I learnt the hard way that a different mind-set is needed to work with learning. Parents and Family seems to have done a fairly good job in the 0-6 year range. When we get into the next stage (6-12), the learning environment breaks down. Mothers don't go around with a growth chart and taunt their babies with "You should have been crawling by six months. You will get a C for your crawling. Sit facing the wall for the next five minutes!" ;-). In India at least, families are held responsible for their children's development. In the next stage, why not hold teachers responsible for outcomes but facilitate them to achieve their goals using whatever they find appropriate? In one exercise, we worked with teachers across 120 rural schools near Bangalore to attain one specific goal, 'get every student to read Kannada and Division by 7th grade' using whatever means at their disposal, even if they have to take assistance from locals who are not teachers but like being with children. Teachers took the help of external evaluators to detect non-learners in June to create a target set. When the eval was repeated six months later, the number dropped to near zero in 102 schools. Other schools are now catching up. The effect of empowerment spilled over into other topics and boosted the overall morale of students. The marginal funding required for this exercise was trivial. > Computers can represent books and all other media, and they should be able > to actively help us learn to read them (even if we start off not being > able to read at all). Children will learn to read only when they have to read to learn. The thirst for knowledge has to go beyond what they can get from their family or school. This is a challenge in countries like India with dense population and an oral tradition. The chasm between pre-literate to semi-literate is quite large. A teacher in a rural public school narrated a case of a 6th grade student who wouldn't write or read and was at the bottom grade. When we introduced computers into the school, he was attracted to TeX morph in Etoys that typeset multilingual texts. He played with this morph sporadically over four months to generate various letter shapes and words (including misspellings) and then broke into fluent writing and reading. He had stumbled on a strong reason to read. Once he crossed the chasm, he stopped using the computer and switched over to books. Computer became a complex device. This incident had a big impact on the teacher who was, at that time, in her third trimester of her pregnancy. > The great funding in the 60s was done mostly by the government, and for > personal computing and pervasive networks was spread over more than 15 > universities and research companies who formed a cooperative research > community. (The story of this is told in "The Dream Machine" by Mitchel > Waldrop). Given the scale and scope of education, public funding and social participation is the only solution. Private funding comes with too many strings attached :-(. Subbu </div></div> </div> </body></html>