What is Canva?

Canva is an online design tool that lets you easily create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, infographics, logos and more. If you have ever seen the interface of other design tools, you will probably know how intimidating they seem. Most of us don't really need the level of detail that these softwares provide. Canva’s interface is simple and intuitive. It will probably take you less than an hour to get accustomed to most of the features and functionalities and less than 10 min to create your first design.

We recommend these 2 tutorials to get you started:
- CANVA TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS 2023 (How to start using Canva step by step)

- How To Use Canva For BEGINNERS! [FULL Canva Tutorial 2023]

The first one is short, while the second one is more in-depth.

My favorite features/functionalities:

• ‍Templates (lots of them): One of the biggest facilitations that Canva offers is making your job half ready - through beautiful templates. And 99% of the templates are very customizable.

• Branding tools: If you need to follow your company’s l’s specific branding guidelines, logos, colors, fonts - Canva has you covered. There is the option to add a branding kit so you can customize every template based on your brand.
  

• Resizing: Once you have perfected your design, you might need it in different sizes and the resizing feature makes that pretty easy.
  

• Background remover: Canva has an amazing “remove background” feature that usually does an excellent job at removing backgrounds. I can’t tell you how much time this option has saved me during my design process.
  

• Collaboration: If you need feedback or help from a colleague, you can share a link of your design with them and they will be able to view or edit your design.

• Phone app: Canva also has a phone app that lets you easily edit from your phone or tablet. It doesn’t offer the full functionality of the web version, but it is great for when you are in a hurry and on the go. Here is a short tutorial.
  

• Video editing: Canva is constantly adding new features while keeping the user-friendliness at excellent levels, and there are now tons of video templates that you can customize (or start one from scratch), add audio and beautiful transitions to. If you are wondering about background removal in videos - you can do that, too!!!
  
  

Educational Features

Canva is a great creativity tool for teachers and students. Its templates and collaboration tools offer a way for teachers to engage students in collaborative learning. Here are some important notes on Canva for Education:

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• Integration with LMS (Learning Management Systems) and other tools: You are able to integrate Canva with the following classroom tools: Google Classroom, Schoology, Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle and more.

• The Canva Blog is a great space to learn about Branding, using Canva for specific needs, or how Canva is collaborating with other tools to bring innovation.

• Case Studies: These are technically still blog posts, but they are focused on showcasing how educators around the world are using Canva in their pedagogical work. Some of our favorites are using it for classroom collaboration, to teach students design skills, or empower them to showcase their work.

• Teach with Canva: This is a series of video tutorials specifically aimed at helping teachers design educational materials. For example: How to design brainstorming activities, daily agendas, infographics, parent communications, reports and more. It is a great space to learn, but also just draw inspiration from.
  

Price

Canva is 100% free for primary and secondary teachers and their students! How impressive is that?! We are big supporters of free education here at Socratica.org and it is always amazing to see others offering free resources for teachers and students.

Canva also offers a free version for other individuals, as well as paid options (Canva Pro and Canva for Teams) which offer more customization, templates and design elements.

Final thoughts

If it wasn’t clear so far, we love Canva here at Socratica. It has made our job easier and faster. We will continue to use it and look forward to any new features that might come up.

If you have tried Canva already or will try it after reading this blog post, we would love to hear from you: hello@socratica.com

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What are Jamboard, Miro and Mural?

If five or ten years ago our weekly meetings had a whiteboard and colorful markers at the center of the office where we wrote the school goals, sketched out Venn diagrams, or brainstormed new business ideas…today our virtual meetings have virtual whiteboards. Tools like Jamboard, Miro and Mural are making our team meetings a little easier to manage.

Otherwise known as digital whiteboards or online whiteboards, Jamboard, Miro, and Mural are designed to facilitate collaboration, visual communication, and they can be used in business meetings, educational settings, and creative brainstorming sessions.

Here are 6 features and functionalities typically found in online whiteboards are:
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1. Drawing/Writing Tools such as (virtual) pens, pencils, markers, and erasers, which allow users to write text, create diagrams, and sketches. Text can be formatted in various ways.

2. Digital Sticky Notes that can be added to the whiteboard, allowing you to write down ideas, comments, or reminders, just like you would do with the yellow sticky notes we used to get at the beginning of every year.

3. Templates and Backgrounds are offered by many whiteboard applications to help you structure your content and make it more visually engaging.

4.  Zoom in and out allows you to see the bigger picture, but also navigate to intricate details of the space. No need for erasing or creating multiple boards. Virtual whiteboards are practically endless.
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5. Multi-User Collaboration is perhaps the most practical functionality of online whiteboards. You can join your team in taking notes from all over the globe.

6. Import and Export is possible with most whiteboards. You can bring photos, videos, etc into the board, as well as export the content created in the whiteboard for future reference or sharing.

In this article we introduce and compare the 3 most used online whiteboards - Jamboard, Miro and Mural. Here is how these 3 platforms define themselves:

Jamboard is a digital whiteboard that lets you collaborate in real time using either the Jamboard device (a 55-inch digital whiteboard that works with G Suite services), web browser or mobile app.

Miro is the online workspace for innovation that enables distributed teams of any size to dream, design, and build the future together.

Mural is a digital environment designed to make collaboration visual, accessible, and engaging for your entire team.

But what are the differences between the 3 digital whiteboards? Below we compare our experience in using all 3 of them and discuss similarities and differences in 4 main aspects. Consider them before you choose the one that fits your needs better.

Customization

Overall, Miro offers more customization (colors, tool sizes, image manipulation, etc), while Jamboard and Mural are more simplistic.

Miro also offers more specific access control and permission settings than Jamboard and Mural. If you are dealing with somewhat confidential information this is worth keeping in mind.  

User friendliness

‍When you try out all 3 tools, the interfaces are similar. They work with an infinite canvas, where you can place sticky notes, shapes, etc. You can then zoom in and out of the canvas and navigate with your mouse and/or keyboard. There is no clear winner in this category because all 3 tools, despite their differences, are very similar and intuitive. All 3 offer guides, tutorials, and free templates that you can customize based on your own individual needs.

Integration
Jamboard’s strongest point would be the seamless integration with the Google Workspace ecosystem - it is a Google product after all. However, it is important for us to note here that Google doesn't have the best track record for keeping products in their original form (check out killedbygoogle.com for a list of the “Google graveyard”), and it might not be wise to expect indefinite support of the physical Jamboard display (55-inch, 4k display) that they offer in integration with the digital white board.

Between Mural and Miro, the latter is a bit more advanced in integrations overall and has a more advanced API which helps developers build apps on top of it.

Price

• Jamboard is free with a Google account.

• Miro is free for teachers, although it's limited to 100 users and one team workspace. Students get free access for two years with a student email address.

• Mural offers free versions (no time limit), as well as paid plans.

Other notes

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Video Conference: Mural offers a feature called Quick Talk, that allows board collaborators to jump on a voice call with each other. Miro offers an in-product video chat for up to 25 participants. The quality isn’t  the same as Zoom or Google Meets, but it's workable.

Mind-mapping: One very neat feature that I noticed in Miro is the mind mapping tool, which makes diagrams so much easier than using other tools that these 3 online whiteboards have. Below is a screenshot of this feature in Miro.

How do these 3 tools compare in the classroom?

All the comparisons we introduced above stand true when choosing a digital whiteboard for your (online) classroom as well. However, when discussing their value as educational tools we would add the following additional notes:

• All three are great tools for online collaboration between the students, and for instant feedback from the teacher and each other, as any changes are reflected instantaneously. We have seen teachers use these digital boards to check in on how students are feeling (by asking them to place a colored circle on a graph, or choose an emoji among many), facilitate asynchronous discussions (by using sticky notes to group ideas and comments), or homework assignments (by creating their own whiteboard templates). Each tool has an extensive template library to help you get started and inspired.

• All three are intuitive and don’t have a steep learning curve, however Miro does offer more features and customization, so we would recommend that for grades 8 and above. Out of the three, Jamboard seems the quickest to learn, thus, we find it suitable even for students of grade 4 and above.

• None of the tools are great when it comes to accessibility, specifically related to users of assistive technology or keyboard-only access. It is important to note that Miro seems to be ahead of the others and constantly making improvements. (Find their monthly accessibility updates here.)

To conclude: As you may see, all 3 tools have many similarities, as well as a few features and aspects that might make all the difference depending on your needs. We will leave that choice to you!

If you have tried or will try any of these tools, we would love to hear from you: hello@socratica.com
Subscribe to our periodical newsletter, so you stay in touch with the #SocraticaOwls: https://snu.socratica.com/join

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What is this tool?

Edpuzzle is a web-based tool that helps you turn every video into a lesson. What does that mean?!
Well, suppose you are teaching a Math lesson on Polynomials. In our Socratica High channel you find this video that does a great job at explaining the basics, but you want to add your own examples to it. Or, you are looking for a video that illustrates how Volcanoes work, and though this video is perfect, you want to be able to pause after each section and ask questions to check if your students understand what lava is, what earth layers are and so on. You can easily do all this and more to customize videos through Edpuzzle and match your specific pedagogical needs.

How to use it?

There are 3 easy steps when you decide to use Socratica:

• Find the video you want to use

• Customize it with questions, notes, etc

• Assign it to your students

Though the website is pretty user-friendly and intuitive, it might be a good idea to first go through a quick beginners course offered by Edpuzzle: https://learn.edpuzzle.com/level-1
This helps you learn how to create an account, set up classes, invite students, check their progress and grade their answers.

Examples

We were happy to see that many teachers appreciate Socratica videos and have integrated them into their Edpuzzle creations.

Below are some examples of how Math, Science and Chemistry teachers have used our videos with Edpuzzle.

Example 1: Multiple choice question - Electron Configuration (Chemistry)

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On the right, the teacher has added a multiple-choice question to check if the students understood orbital levels, which are explained in the video.

Video description: Electron Configuration" refers to the arrangement of the electrons in an atom into orbitals. We demonstrate how to follow the Aufbau Principle, filling in electrons into the orbitals of the Aufbau Diagram while obeying Hund's Rule and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.  This video has 6 examples worked out in full:  Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, and Carbon.  We also cover two exceptions to the Aufbau Principle:  Chromium and Copper.  

Example 2: Open - ended question - Quadrilaterals (Math)

On the right, this teacher has used an open ended question to check the students’ knowledge on quadrilaterals’ names.
Video description: Quadrilaterals all have four sides, but they all look a little different.  How many kinds of quadrilaterals do you know?  In this video we talk about the different types of quadrilaterals. These geometric shapes include the square, rectangle, parallelogram, trapezoid and rhombus.  Another name for the “trapezoid” is the “trapezium.”

Example 3: Multiple - choice question - Eclipses (Science)

Another example of a multiple-choice question in one of our science videos.
Video description: What is an Eclipse? You may be a little confused about the difference between a Solar Eclipse and a Lunar Eclipse. You know an Eclipse has something to do with the Earth getting in the way of the Moon -- or, is it the Moon getting in the way of the Sun? Which is for a Solar Eclipse, and which is for a Lunar Eclipse? In this video, we’ll take a closer look.

Example 4: Adding your own notes to videos - Pomodoro Technique (Study Tips)

If you want to add your own notes, links, etc to a video - you can easily do that by adding a Note (under the Add Question button). In this example, the teacher has used a note to suggest a pomodoro chrome extension in our Pomodoro Technique video.

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Other customizations that you can do with Edpuzzle:

• Upload your own videos

• Add voice-over comments

• Share videos with your students, assign deadlines, and track their scores and progress as they watch your videos and answer embedded questions

• Students can watch videos by themselves or via "live mode", where you can show a video as a group activity

• You can integrate Edpuzzle with Microsoft Teams, Clever, Canvas, Schoology, Moodle, Blackboard, etc.

• You can also take advantage of “Edpuzzle Originals” video lessons in the following categories:
  

Cost

Free & Paid versions.

The basic version is free and includes storage for 20 videos. The Pro Teacher plan is $13.50 per month and unlocks unlimited storage and data analytics. School and district plans are available.

If you have tried or will try Edpuzzle with Socratica videos, we would love to hear from you: hello@socratica.com
Subscribe to our periodical newsletter, so you stay in touch with the #SocraticaOwls: https://snu.socratica.com/join

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When it comes to education, there are many strategies teachers focus on: standardized tests, assigning homework, projects, essays, and more. However, there is more to student success than these traditional schooling practices. According to research on learning outcomes, it is not only what we teach that matters. The environments we teach in have major impacts on learning too. The layout, lighting, and furniture of a classroom can all affect how students learn and interact with each other.

While activities such as paying attention in class, doing your homework, and studying for exams all matter, there are other factors at play that go beyond the student’s control. Classroom design has been shown to improve students' learning outcomes and impact students’ learning experiences. It is important to design our classrooms in a way that facilitates the learning process. By creating safe and organized classrooms, students are provided all the necessary tools to learn as much as possible. 

Before taking a deeper dive into our current classrooms, let's take a look at where classrooms began. 

For many years, classroom design was primarily focused on functionality and efficiency. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it was not common for educators to place value on creating a comfortable classroom. Education was done in school houses which commonly had one classroom, one teacher, and rows of desks for students. This layout focused on maximizing the number of students that could be accommodated with little attention paid to the impact on learning behavior. These classroom designs were cramped and little consideration was given to lighting, acoustics, or other elements that affect students' ability to learn. 

Today, research shows that we should be paying attention to the basic layout and design of our classrooms. For example, the University of Salford found that classroom design could impact students’ learning by 25%. The catch? This study showed that classroom design had the potential to both increase or decrease student learning. 

So what does this mean? For many of us, it is time to redesign our classrooms. 

One of the first things educators can do to improve classroom design is introduce more natural light into their classrooms. Several studies have demonstrated that daylight has the potential to improve peoples’ health as well as students learning outcomes. Sorbonne University in France examined how students may be affected by exposure to increased or decreased levels of daylight during the school day. This experiment found that students performed significantly better in class when exposed to more natural light. Leaving the blinds open in classrooms as well as creating opportunities for students to get outside during the school day can all help improve students' academic performance. 

Another key way to improve the design of your classroom is to use a flexible classroom design. When students have the opportunity to make small changes to their classroom environment, it allows them to explore under what circumstances they learn best. Some possibilities for this include allowing students to choose their seats and creating spaces in the classroom for collaboration. Each student will have different needs when it comes to getting the best education for them. By introducing a flexible classroom design, each student can customize their learning experience which can ultimately improve their academic success. 

Using color in another great way to improve students’ learning experiences in the classroom. Color can be used to make understanding the classroom as easy as possible. For example, you can use a color scheme to distinguish between each subject. If students have a green folder for science homework and a red folder for math homework, it will be easy for them to keep the subjects separate. By creating clear color schemes, students can spend more energy focusing on course material rather than focusing on where to find their homework. 

At this point, technology is unavoidable: the real question is, how do we use technology to our advantage in the classroom? There are many benefits of having technology in schools. Some of these include an increase in student engagement and increased access to educational resources. By making computers available in the classroom, students are able to quickly answer scholastic questions and expand on how much they are learning each day. Additionally, exposure to technology early on allows teachers to prepare their students for the future. Technology is not going away anytime soon, so why not equip our students with these real word skills as early as we can? 

These are just a few of the ways we can improve the design and functionality of our classrooms; although, it is important to note that every teacher, student, and school can benefit from a wide variety of classroom designs. In other words, there is not just one way to design a classroom.

Anthropologists believe that the design has the power to change the way we experience the world. Classrooms must be built to facilitate a variety of learning needs all around the world. Because of this, classrooms will look different everywhere. 

For example, the Dipshikha school in Bangladesh is made of soil, brick, bamboo, and other local materials. The school was constructed to have large open spaces in order to help students socialize and build collaborative skills. These lessons are important because of the rural location of the school—people must rely on one another for help. 

Additionally, the Baan Huay Sarn-Yaw Post Disaster School in Thailand had many considerations for construction. This region of Thailand is prone to Earthquakes so designers and architects needed to build an earthquake proof school that also facilitated strong learning. Architects were able to build a low cost, earthquake resistant space while also considering students learning. Classrooms contain bamboo shelves, plants, and high exposure to sunlight. 

From just a few examples we can see that classrooms look different all around the world so feel free to experiment with your classroom design in order to find what is best for you and your students. 

Classroom design plays an important role in a student’s ability to learn. Recent research demonstrates that being intentional with how we design our classrooms can drastically change learning outcomes. Factors such as natural light, classroom flexibility, color schemes, and the introduction of technology can all impact the educational wellbeing of students. Students show increased levels of interest, motivation, and academic achievement when these factors are taken into account. As we look to the future, it is important to continue asking how we can improve classrooms to enhance students' learning. Ultimately, the design of our classrooms holds the power to transform the educational experience for students. How will you make a change?

Citations 

1. How Does Classroom Design Affect a Child’s Ability To Learn (2018) 

2. Then And Now: How History Has Changed Classroom Design 

3. The Impact of Classroom Design on Pupils’ Learning: Final Results of a Holistic, Multilevel Analysis (2015)

4. Why is Natural Light so Important in School Design? 

5. Impact of Lighting on School Performance in European Classrooms (2013) 

6. Four Ways Classroom Design Impacts Executive Functioning (2022)

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New Years is right around the corner which for many people means it is time to make some New Year’s Resolutions! All around the world at the start of the New Year, people make goals to change or improve different parts of their lives. Some common New Year's Resolutions include learning a new language, making healthier eating choices, and exercising more regularly. 

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If it’s supposed to be a year-long goal, why have I forgotten about my resolutions by July?

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‍Resolutions are hard to keep for people all around the world. Today, we are not only going to explore how resolutions vary around the world, but also discuss how to stick with your resolution and learn that language you have always wanted to learn! 

First, let’s go back to the beginning and take a look at how New Year’s Resolutions began. The first ever recorded New Year’s Resolutions date all the way back to the Babylonians 4,000 years ago! The Babylonians celebrated the New Year in March which was when they planted their crops. During this time, they held religious ceremonies and celebrated their Gods. In fact, the Babylonians would make religious promises to their Gods and were expected to keep these promises to stay in the Gods’ favor. Clearly, New Year’s Resolutions have been around for a long time, so why haven’t we learned by now how to keep them?

You’d think that after 4,000 years we would have it down, but unfortunately, this is not the case. In the United States, 41% of Americans report making a New Year’s Resolution but only 9% report maintaining that goal for the entire year. Resolutions are often challenging to maintain because people are not specific enough with their goals; additionally, people do not tend to plan ahead for their resolutions as much as necessary—but, more on this later. 

While many people consider New Year's Resolutions to be an American or Western tradition, they actually take place around the world—they just might look a little different. 

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For example, in Colombia, at the start of the New Year, people make “deseos” which translates to “wishes.” When the clock strikes twelve, many people make twelve wishes for the following year and eat twelve grapes. This tradition originated in Spain but it is said the Colombian people believe each grape will bring you good luck for every month of the following year. 

New Years is also a major celebration in China but rather than taking place on January 1st, it lasts for two weeks beginning on January 21st. Instead of setting “resolutions,” people in China make choices which “ensure luck and prosperity.” 

In Russia, New Years is a huge deal and some people consider it to be Russia's most important holiday. Similar to the Colombians, many Russians make wishes at the start of the New Year. People write down their wishes on a piece of paper, burn them, and put the ashes of their wish in a glass of champagne and drink it! 

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Celebrating the New Year takes place all around the world, and many countries even have their own versions of New Year’s Resolutions. 

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In addition to many countries having their own unique version of New Year’s Resolutions, a project from Google shows that the content of people’s resolutions may vary as well. In 2012, Google launched a project called “Google Zeitgeist Resolutions” which asked people from all around the world what their resolutions were. These resolutions were charted onto a global map to create a visual representation of people’s New Year’s Resolutions. 

The resolutions were organized into seven categories: love, health, career, finance, family, education, and other. This map demonstrated how people all around the world were looking to make some kind of change to their personal life. From a purely observational standpoint, health resolutions were more common in the US, education resolutions were more prominent in Russia, and resolutions related to love were more common in Australia and Japan. It is important to note that this project was in no way a scientific study but rather an observational project looking to put cross cultural resolutions on display. 

Clearly, New Year's Resolutions are common all around the world and many people struggle to keep up with them. So, what are some good strategies to actually keep our New Year’s Resolutions this year? One of the biggest mistakes people make each year is setting resolutions that are too vague. Rather than setting a resolution to “learn a new language,” resolve to “practice Italian for 15 minutes each day.” Creating specific goals that you can keep up with every day is one of the best ways to maintain your New Year’s Resolutions all year long. 

Another great way to keep up with your New Year’s Resolution is to keep track of your progress. If you make a daily, weekly, or monthly checklist and cross off your accomplishments as you go, it can be much easier to complete your resolution. By tracking your progress, you can gain a clear picture of what you have completed so far as well as what still lies ahead. 

And finally, tell others about your resolutions! By talking about your New Year’s Resolutions with the people in your life, you create a natural support system of people. Your friends may ask you how your resolutions are going which, for many people, helps to maintain motivation. 

Every year, people all around the world set New Year's Resolutions. From making wishes in Colombia to ensuring luck in China, it is clear that regardless of where you live, people hope to experience improvements in their lives at the beginning of the New Year. Making personal changes and setting goals for the New Year have been a part of human cultures for thousands of years. This year, take a step back and reflect on what you would like to change or improve upon. Whether that is learning a new language, studying a little bit each day, or something else, remember to create specific, achievable goals, to track your progress, and to tell others about your New Year’s Resolutions. If you do these things, maybe you will still be thinking about those yearly goals this time next year! 

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References

1. The History of New Year’s Resolutions (2020) 

2. Studies Show 91% of Us Won’t Achieve Our New Year’s Resolutions (2022) 

3. A Psychotherapist Says There Are 3 Common Reasons So Many People’s New Year’s Resolutions End in Failure (2021) 

4. 5 Reasons Why Most New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Stick According to a Psychotherapist (2021) 

5. 11 Most Interesting Columbia New Year’s Traditions (2022) 

6. How People From Around the World Make Resolutions (2021) 

7. Google Zeitgeist Resolutions (2012)

8. New Year’s Resolutions for Students - Study Tips - Good Habits (2018) 

9. 10 Tips to Help Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

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What are you grateful for? Some of the first things that come to mind when I’m asked this question are my family, friends, health, and home. But are we forgetting something?  Did education come to mind when asked this question? For many people, this is not the case, when in reality, expressing gratitude towards education can actually have a major impact on learning outcomes. 

Gratitude is generally described as a feeling of thankfulness as well as a “readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness”. The specifics of gratitude are debated by scientists and anthropologists, however—this is because gratitude is both felt and expressed differently cross-culturally. For instance, verbal expressions of gratitude such as “thank you” are more common in the US than in other places around the world. In fact, some cultures do not use verbal phrases of gratitude at all! 

Recognizing that gratitude takes many different forms around the world helps inform scientific inquiry on how to study gratitude in the first place.

But first things first—where did gratitude begin? Anthropologists point to underlying evolutionary origins and argue that gratitude may have been a part of human life since the beginning. It’s possible that the feeling of gratitude evolved to drive social reciprocity. Social reciprocity is essential for human survival; without it, humans could not properly communicate personal needs or recognize the needs of others. 

Unlike many other species in the animal kingdom, humans must rely on one another a tremendous amount in order to survive. For example, babies are completely reliant on their mothers for milk and other resources. Also, humans commonly divide labor which allows people to provide a variety of necessary resources to the community. For these reasons, anthropological research argues that the feeling of gratitude evolved alongside the evolution of social reciprocity. In other words, feeling grateful for help motivates us to help others too. 

In a 2005 study on emotion and trust, researchers found that when people feel grateful, it increases the amount they are able to trust strangers and individuals they are not especially familiar with. Additionally, social psychologist Sara Agloe argues that gratitude is a key player in forming close relationships with others.

Emotions of gratitude allow us to identify who has helped us in the past and who we may want to help in the future. 

Now that we know a little bit about how gratitude began, we can explore some of the impacts gratitude has today.

Gratitude is clearly important: it exists all around the world and has been a part of human societies for thousands of years. Therefore, many people believe gratitude can be used in a way to positively impact people in a wide variety of settings including the home, the workplace, and the classroom. The question is, how do we do it? Gratitude science is a steadily growing area of research in which people are looking to understand the true power gratitude can have on people every day.

Kerry Howells is a gratitude researcher and educator. In her book Gratitude in Education, she shares her perspectives on the ways gratitude can influence both students and teachers. Howells recounts her personal experiences as a teacher and the difficulty that comes with conveying the importance of the information she had to share. She found that students would resent learning and wondered if there was a way to change this.

In her classroom, she began to implement gratitude strategies and she soon found that her students were reporting increased interest in the subject, increased understanding of the topics, as well as overall improvements in performance. This anecdotal evidence drove Howells to pursue gratitude research. Today, Howells is well known for her global education research on gratitude as well as her books sharing with people how they can use gratitude strategies most effectively.

In a 2014 study on student-teacher relationships, Howells found gratitude may be capable of improving student-teacher bonds. Additionally, her results show that implementing gratitude is effective in improving teachers' experiences in the classroom and within the school domain.

But the research does not end with Howells—many other researchers have been exploring these ideas as well. In a 2022 network analysis of gratitude in education, researchers examined students' messages in an online undergraduate course. In this course, students were advised to express gratitude towards other students’ comments and questions. Analysis shows a strong relationship between instances of gratitude messaging and prosocial behavior. Additionally, in a four year longitudinal investigation on middle school and high school aged students, researchers found that implementing gratitude strategies increased positive social behavior. These studies are just the beginning when it comes to understanding the benefits of gratitude practices in education. 

What does this mean in the classroom? Gratitude has been observed to improve students’ sense of belonging, improve students’ learning outcomes, and even increase students’ prosocial behavior. Teachers should consider incorporating gratitude into their lesson plans. Additionally, schools should reflect on the ways they can push their student communities to feel and express gratitude. These kinds of small changes can lead to large shifts in students and teachers all around the world.

‍So what does this research mean for you and me? In a world of technology, social media, and world news at our fingertips, it is easy to see what is wrong with the world and even easier to forget all there is to be grateful for. Reading these articles has pushed me to start journaling about what I am grateful for before starting my workday. Whether or not you decide to start a gratitude journal, start saying “thank you” more often, or decide to tell others you are grateful for them, I urge you to consider implementing gratitude practices into your life—it only takes a little bit of time but has the power to make a lot of positive changes. So…what are you grateful for?

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References:

1. Oxford Languages & Google

2. Universals and Cultural Diversity in The Expression of Gratitude (2018) 

3. Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust (2005) 

4. Find, Remind, and Bind: The Functions of Gratitude in Everyday Relationships (2012) 

5. Gratitude in Education: A Radical View (2012) 

6. An Exploration of the Role of Gratitude in Enhancing Teacher-Student Relationships (2014)

7. Network Analysis of Gratitude Messages in the Learning Community (2022) 

8. Gratitude’s Role in Adolescent Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior: A Four Year Longitudinal Investigation (2017)

What does literacy mean? The ability to read and write may come to mind. However, what if I told you it was more complicated than that? Commonly, people have understood literacy as a binary concept—you are either literate or you are not. But it turns out that literacy looks different across the globe. 

Put simply, literacy is a way of thinking which allows individuals to speak, listen, read and write a set of beliefs or ideas¹.

Literacy has been deemed one of the strongest predictors of individual success, and it allows people to finish schooling and secure jobs all around the world². Literacy also has the power to impact individual well-being and increases life satisfaction. 

The meaning of literacy quickly transforms into something more complex when we consider how its meaning changes from one culture to the next. In other words, being literate in one culture does not necessarily mean you are literate in another. 

Why is this? Because different cultures speak different languages, use different writing systems, and hold different values and practices! In order to capture a more well-rounded definition of literacy, anthropologists have begun to examine what literacy looks like in different cultures around the world.

Anthropologists reason that literacy is a way of thinking which is deeply intertwined with both social and cultural practices around the world. In other words, we must study literacy “in context³” and remember that literacy depends on the culture we are examining it in. ‍

For thousands of years, culture and language have coevolved, allowing societies to develop the perfect language for their cultural needs. 

Because of this relationship between culture and language, it is impossible to separate their profound impacts on one another. When it comes to learning how to read and/or write, individuals are learning how to reproduce their own cultural knowledge in a tangible way. Each culture around the world has had a unique history of language and literacy, so in order to understand literacy more thoroughly, we must examine it on a culture-to-culture basis. ‍

In this way, we see that language and literacy have grown to suit the needs of the culture it is from. For example, some phrases do not translate directly from one language into another—this is often the case with humor as well as unique cultural expressions or sayings. Linguistic anthropologists claim that while not all phrases can be seen across all languages, each language still has all the necessary tools to communicate their needs effectively⁴. How we learn to read and write directly corresponds to the needs of the culture in which these skills were learned.  

For example, the Zafimaniry are a group from Madagascar well known for their wood carving, art, and music. Currently the Zafimaniry population is estimated at about 25,000 all of which is distributed into approximately 100 villages. Anthropologist Maurice Bloch describes how when literacy is being constructed in a region, there are many forces acting all at once; this includes socioeconomics, local environment, cultural values, traditions, theories, and many others. A large part of the Zafimaniry culture includes knowledge of the body: how it grows, when it matures, and understanding that the body is a part of the “living world.” Bloch displays how much of what people learn to read and write about is culturally specific. The Zafimaniry learn about different facets of the body, growth, maturity and more depending on what phase of life they are in⁵. Blotch’s work with the Zafimaniry people is one example of the ways literacy differs around the world. 

On the other side of Africa, the Mende people of Sierra Leone are known for practicing crop rotation⁶ and their secret societies⁷. The Mende people have access to learning both English and Arabic and use literacy in these languages to strengthen the power of their secret societies⁸. Anthropologists Caroline Bledsoe and Kenneth Robey explore how the Mende people use their knowledge of the Arabic language to facilitate secrecy within the culture. Individuals who are adept with Arabic use the language as a tool to acquire knowledge and exchange confidential information with others. In this context, literacy is a vessel for secrecy and ultimately restricts the exchange of private information. In fact, one of the greatest crimes for the Mende people is sharing the secrets of their tribe with another! Clearly, how the Mende people use literacy is extremely different from how the Zafimaniry people use literacy.‍

As mentioned previously, literacy grants individuals the ability to reproduce cultural beliefs and ideologies and the possibilities for this are endless. Some more obvious examples of this may be writing a book, reading a poem, or singing a song. But, these simple forms of literacy can quickly transform into powerful and world-changing activities such as producing a political campaign, sharing a religious text, or even suggesting a new economic model. ‍

With the ability to reproduce cultural information also comes the power to change it. 

If people have the ability to read and write about their culture, they also have the power to propose new ideas. Over time, what cultures believe, as well as which topics they consider to be the most relevant change. This allows people to use literacy to read about, write, and create new ideas for the culture to share. Even further, literacy can redefine entire cultural values over time. This includes the ability to reshape traditions, reconstruct values, and even redefine power dynamics. How we choose to teach learners to read and write has an immediate impact on how an entire culture’s values and traditions will grow and change. Reading and writing has a major impact on individual lives and can propel people into success. Small changes over time will ultimately lead to large cultural shifts in the future—and it all starts with literacy! 

Our understanding of literacy is transformed when evaluated with an anthropological perspective. It becomes clear that literacy is not the same all around the world but rather a skillset that varies from culture to culture. Charities such as Reading is Fundamental, Reading Partners, The World Literacy Foundation, as well as many others are doing great work when it comes to increasing literacy rates around the world. But, there is always more that can be done! As literacy rates continue to climb, it is important to study literacy with the consideration that it looks different for everyone and includes much more than the ability to read or write. Literacy allows individuals to replicate, and redefine cultural ideologies and will continue to have an impact on what and how we learn in the generations to come. So next time you hear about literacy, take a moment to ask yourself, how do you use literacy to impact the world around you?

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References:

0. National Literacy Trust, What is Literacy 

1. Street, Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (1993)

2. African American Registry, The Mende People—A Story 

3. Reinhardt, Mende Secret Societies and Their Costumed Spirits (1979) 

4. Bledsoe & Robey, Arabic Literacy and Secrecy Among the Mende of Sierra Leone (1986) 

5. Solomon & Bloch, Zafimaniry: An Understanding of What is Passed on From Parents to Children: A Cross Cultural Investigation (2001) 

6. Cabrera, World Reading Habits in 2020 (2020) 

7. Project Literacy, The Importance of Literacy 

8. Ottenheimer & Pine, The Anthropology of Language, (2019) 

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Maybe one of the trivia whiz kids who appeared on popular 1950s programs like Quiz Kids (and parodied as washups like Donnie Smith, played by William H. Macy, in 1999’s Magnolia)?‍

Game Show Quiz Kids 1951 - Vintage Game Shows Full Episodes‍

Maybe the modern-day Doogie Howsers who entered Arizona State with 4 associate degrees at 15, or Elliott Tanner, who at 13, is going to begin a doctorate in Physics this fall?

Or does it have to be tied to academics at all? Is it someone who excels young in a specific field — perhaps Augustin Hadelich on the violin or the up-and-coming track star Jordynn West?‍

13-Year-Old FASTEST Track Star | Future Olympic Gold Medalist?‍

One comment on the latter might sum up how many of us feel about the dichotomy between “gifted” kids, however we define them, and the rest of us:‍

Her at 13: Literally expected to be a gold medalist
Me at 13: Liking my own comment

It’s a self-deprecating joke, yes, but it harbors a deeper truth — in a world obsessed with sorting people by ability from an early age, and setting them on a “track” as real as the one Jordynn sprints around, the entire concept of giftedness has found pushback.

Who gets overlooked?‍

Think of it as the risk of committing a Type I statistical error:‍

A type I error (false-positive) occurs if an investigator rejects a null hypothesis that is actually true in the population; a type II error (false-negative) occurs if the investigator fails to reject a null hypothesis that is actually false in the population.‍

If the null hypothesis is that a given student is developmentally and academically “normal” — literally, near the middle of the bell curve for their age group, there’s some evidence that in academic terms, some students who are in fact academically gifted in this country do not receive the support they need. 

There’s also the issue of what exactly to do with a child once their parents/violin teachers/trivia coaches (paging Ken Jennings!) identify a kid with an unusual talent. Let’s look at the state of gifted programs in the United States; why nerds cornered the market on the “gifted” label; and what we can do to serve promising young people in the future.‍

A tale of the teacher’s pet (kinda)‍

First off, being gifted — having a high I.Q., say — does not in any way predict that you’ll be accelerated in any other area of life. 

Take your author as one anecdotal example. I attended a small private school that valued obedience, minding your manners, and good penmanship. While by no means a poorly-behaved kid, I was pretty hyperactive and not challenged by my grade-level work. The school administrators got together and decided to have me skip a grade in the middle of third grade. From above, the school I attended was shaped like a letter “H” – one day I was in the East Wing; the next I was in the West Wing, and my third grade classmates pretty much thought I’d been nefariously disappeared. (In their defense, they were 8.) 

In my new cohort, I kept up just fine academically — in fact, I was at the top of my class through high school. However, being already a late bloomer physically made the year-plus difference pronounced as an adolescent — on my first day of ninth grade, I was directed towards the elementary building. Overall, I think the pros of skipping a single grade outweighed the cons — being bored by school is a risk factor in being disengaged and I found my tribe by my sophomore year. However, the thought of still being a literal child and starting, say, college, is where I think the line was for me — I needed to, well, grow up, and I was 25 when I was finally emotionally mature enough to earn my bachelor’s degree and start a “real” career. 

I went to the West Wing of my school a couple years before the debut of the fast-talking Sorkin series — 1997. The year before, this report showed how far G&T programs (Gifted and Talented, not gin & tonic cocktails for you yacht-sailors) had spread since the alarm was first raised by A Nation at Risk, a rather panicked report put out about the present and future of U.S. K-12 education the year I was born.

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A Nation at Risk of What?‍

According to a retrospective, my earliest years were a time of panic about students in the U.S. falling behind — behind their own parents at a similar age, behind other nations in a rapidly globalizing world, and behind our cherished ideal of #1.

First misconception to debunk: the U.S. was never the top scorer in education. Let’s take data from the mid-’60s, the era when my parents were born:‍

In 1965, the Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducted a study of mathematical achievement in 12 countries. Students were asked to solve 70 problems. Among math students, the top scoring countries were Israel (a mean score of 36.4 correct items), England (35.2), Belgium (34.6), and France (33.4). U.S. students placed last, with a mean score of 13.8.‍

The American Boomers were dead last! So the nation was “at risk” in mathematics education long before we Millennials appeared on the scene.

PISA began collecting cross-country data on performance in math and reading tests in 2000. Did the various educational reforms of the past 35 years amount to us rising to number 1?

Spoiler alert: no.

According to a 2010 report by Eric A. Hanushek, the U.S. is not creating a notable number of students who score highly in mathematics:‍

Unfortunately, the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the U.S. generally compares itself. No [fewer] than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.‍

A somewhat unpredictable collection of states, however, do perform well above the average when isolated. 

“Vermont is just ahead of Iceland! Utah closing in on Italy, which Wyoming has inched ahead of! New York and the United Kingdom are neck and neck!”

Gifted education, almost by definition, focuses on students like these who are advanced in a subject — in this case, mathematics. It’s not necessarily realistic to uproot your life and move to another state to take advantage of accelerated programs — at Socratica, we believe that geography should be no barrier to access to challenging STEM material.

But what misconceptions might be hobbling students who are capable of great things?‍

False dichotomies and insidious preconceptions‍

A barrier to accessing gifted academic programs could simply be a matter of temperament — call it conscientiousness, call it people-pleasing syndrome, call it being a try-hard, but the type of children who are often put into the “smart kid” track are the type who fit the stereotype of being a good student, in more ways than one.‍

This article examines the types of students who might get overlooked for G&T programs:‍

David Mog, later a physics and chemistry teacher at Sidwell Friends School in the District, remembered his working-class parents couldn’t figure out how to deal with his high school. It would not put him in the accelerated chemistry class even though he was shining in accelerated math — and later got a doctorate in chemistry at Caltech.‍

Oof. My mother, although by her own admission not unusually academically brilliant and a dropout of State U., did have the social capital and free time to carefully monitor every aspect of her children’s K12 education before her unfortunate death from cancer. I bring this point up not to score sympathy points, but to illustrate the kind of barriers that an otherwise middle-class, college-track family can encounter unexpectedly. 

Navigating the healthcare system and cancer treatments with two children still in school (including my brother, who quite easily got recruited into the accelerated chem program) was clearly a huge stressor for my stay-at-home suburban mother — so just imagine the roadblocks for other parents, whether they’re single parents, working class, not native English speakers, or worst of all, a net negative in their children’s lives through neglect or abuse. 

When you picture a gifted student, do you picture someone in prison?

Students from low-income neighborhoods already face stress from their circumstances. Turns out, although academically gifted students are found among every group and income level, those who don’t happen to be well-off suburban kids face huge barriers to obtaining the kind of challenging coursework that will keep them engaged and on track, both in school and in their life outcomes. Unfortunately, that can include jail time.‍

Furthermore, high ability students from low-income backgrounds, as compared to their more advantaged peers, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Dropping out triples the likelihood of incarceration later in life.‍

This bundle of stereotypes — that students from low-income or urban school districts aren’t likely to be academically gifted, leads to a negative feedback loop; these districts cut their funding for accelerated programs, the brightest kids get bored, may drop out, and then become more likely to have trouble with the law; those who harbor stereotypes point fingers and fail to see the potential of students who come from the “wrong” side of the tracks, and affluent districts continue to get their privately funded robotics labs and immersive college prep summer camps. The COVID-19 pandemic only worsened this gap in education.‍

Federal funding disparities and twice-exceptional students

‍Unlike most other economically developed nations, the United States has a patchwork of parallel educational systems, with a mix of federal funding, state funding, and private education.

Special education — aimed at students with disabilities that necessitate tailored instruction — has seen a continuous increase in federal funding. Compared to the funding for gifted/accelerated programs, the latter is a drop in the bucket: $11.5 billion with a B for special education, versus $5 million for gifted programs. That’s four-tenths of one percent for you whiz kids doing the mental math.

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Scott Barry Kaufman is a prolific author and creativity researcher — I loved his book Wired to Create.

Little did I know that he was what’s called twice exceptional: he was both academically gifted and had struggles with auditory information and anxiety. He debunks the idea that students are either “gifted” or “losers:”‍

Society still has this false dichotomy of, you're a superior human being or a weak loser with bad genes. -Scott Barry Kaufman‍

Students can be gifted in one area but on the other end of the bell curve in another — students on the autism spectrum (formerly known as Asperger’s syndrome ) might be predisposed to becoming inventors but flunk out on other aspects of the school experience. The successful actor and podcaster Dax Shephard has pronounced dyslexia — and very much felt like the “dumb” kid because of it. Perfectionists, as I’ve seen in my own family, have higher suicide rates — one doesn’t directly cause the other, necessarily, but rather, perfectionism can increase the negative effects of the underlying neuroticism in a high pressure environment. Challenging a student shouldn’t tip over into unrelenting parental or societal pressure to succeed at all costs:‍

Such expectations send a message to the child that whatever he or she does is never quite good enough, and that the child must be flawless in order to win approval and love.‍

Gifted programs should be designed like those described by Tricia Levy above: ​​encouraging exploration, creative thinking, and yes, even failure or not knowing the “right” answer. If you’re in a truly demanding field, whether you’re on stage at Carnegie Hall or the Olympic racetrack in Milan, it’s important to have a wellspring of true confidence that doesn’t come from external validation. 

One gets the sense in the presence of true greatness — watching Hilary Hahn in performance, Leslie Odom. Jr. as Aaron Burr, Betty White nailing the punchline as one of the first comediennes in television, Michael Jordan being Michael Jordan — that they enjoy their gifts.  It’s important to remember what Donnie says in Magnolia, that not enough gifted children hear when they’re young:‍

I won't punish you if you get the answer wrong.

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One night, the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes was staring at a fly on his ceiling. (Ain’t no party like a mathematician’s party … we think it’s safe to say he leaned toward the introverted side.) He wanted to be able to describe this fly — or anything, really — given a fixed point in a two-dimensional plane. It was this seventeenth century eureka moment we have to thank for the Cartesian plane.

‍Now there are four flies on the ceiling! Must be August.‍

We also have René Descartes to thank for the variables we most commonly use in teaching algebra: x and y. By convention, x is the independent variable: the thing you “put into the function box,” and y denotes the dependent variable: the output once you substitute an x (“plugging it in”).

Why x and y? It was because they were close to the end of the alphabet. The letters a, b, and c often denote constants (known quantities). And just for fun, m for slope comes from the French: monter (pronounced roughly mohn-tay) means “to climb.”  

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Think of a negative slope like this one as skiing “downhill” from left to right; positive slopes mean you montez the line upwards. 

Maybe you found Algebra I (oddly enough, the standard textbooks often use Roman numerals, rather than the more à propos Arabic numerals, in their course names) to be a breeze when you took it as a distinct course, probably in middle school, manipulating the variables until you found the slope of the line. Maybe you felt like Peppermint Patty, and just started writing 11. 

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Regardless, this is a very North American, Anglosphere way of thinking about math instruction. In fact, when researching this topic, there seem to be four broad regions in terms of the when and wherefore of teaching algebra. Let’s take a stop in each, examining the pros and cons.

The Continental Way: L’art de la spécialité 

When I was teaching college admissions exams in Mexico, one line that always got completely baffled responses was that I put myself through a degree in French Literature by working in a DNA Sequencing lab. The US education system is one of the broadest in terms of not only not requiring specialization at a young age, but requiring a balance of courses in literature, mathematics, science, and social sciences through age 18, with almost all liberal arts colleges requiring the same type of broad coursework in your “generals” in your first year of university.

It is not thus among Western Europe (and Mexican universities, in this respect, most closely resemble the educational system of Spain). You get tracked much earlier, which would be like declaring a major or going into an apprenticeship in the Yankee context, between age 14 and 16. Take a look at this tree of educational tracks for French adolescents from a research paper by Megan McGurl at a liberal arts college in the U.S. state of Georgia). 

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In the U.S., any student from any high school can apply to any university in the country. Once there, you can change your major several times. Your author recently appeared on Jeopardy! — the champ from my game is now a math teacher who, as an undergraduate at UCLA, cycled through such unrelated fields as biochemistry, philosophy, physiology, and finally ended up in statistics. This educational journey would never happen in France, especially at a highly selective university.

If you wanted to be a statistician, you’d have to be placed on the statistics track. Philosophy? One of the most competitive majors in the land of Sartre and de Beauvoir. And higher math would not be seen as necessary for a successful life outside the sciences.

So, at what age do Western European students learn algebra as a distinct field? The answer is … they wouldn’t recognize “algebra” as a distinct year that is divorced from other math courses. It’s all just … math class, taught in what we might term an integrated curriculum. In Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and yes, France, home of Descartes, algebraic skills are taught throughout the entirety of secondary school: and the stronger you are at STEM, the more likely you are to be encouraged on the STEM track.

How does Western Europe compare to the US in how its 15-year-olds perform mathematically? In the most recent PISA mathematics results, Switzerland was the top-scoring country outside East Asia, Italy was exactly the mean score for OECD countries, and the US was below average. It seems like integrated math is, at the very least, not correlated with lower performance, and very likely outperforms the standard U.S. curriculum. 

Our neighbors to the Frozen North 

What about Canada’s math results? ​​

I audibly said “wow” when looking at the following table, so you know I’m about to be invited to a wild fly-watching party à tout moment. Take a careful look at which province stands apart:

Prince Edward Island, well-known to bookish sensitive gingers for the setting of the Anne of Green Gables series (set in the 1870s), showed the greatest increase from the baseline. Anne herself became a teacher after going to a “normal” (education) school on a full-ride scholarship, and ended up marrying Gilbert Blythe, a doctor, with whom she frequently battled for top of the class. This excerpt shows that even in the era of puffed Gigot sleeves in the late 1800s, Canada’s English-speaking math curriculum was split into discrete courses that wouldn’t seem unfamiliar to a competitive secondary student today:‍

Oh, Diana, if only the geometry examination were over! But there, as Mrs. Lynde would say, the sun will go on rising and setting whether I fail in geometry or not. That is true but not especially comforting. I think I'd rather it didn't go on if I failed!

     Yours devotedly,
     Anne

Although rural PEI’s increase from 2010 to 2013 to 2016 in the pan-Canadian competition is impressive and would likely give Anne and Gilbert a run for their trapezoids, francophone Quebec is the clear standout in all three years.

In this article, Paul W. Bennet examines the reasons for the Québecois math advantage.

Fewer topics tend to be covered at each grade level in Quebec, but they are covered in more depth than in BC and other Canadian provinces. 

In other words, the original settlers — New France vs New England — brought certain attitudes towards math education to their new land that grew surprisingly deep. As long ago as 1827, Harvard required algebra to enter — Puritans didn’t like this as it felt too mercantile, but it stayed in the curriculum. For two centuries since, we have taught Algebra with a capital A as a separate “thing,” often forgotten afterwards, since our numeracy and abstract reasoning skills are below average.

According to the report, Quebec schools feel no particular compunction to graduate every student  — they have much lower graduation rates than the rest of Canada. In other words, more positive attitudes to math and more comfort with “tracking” could help explain the difference in outcomes.

Ontario, British Columbia and the other English-speaking provinces have all been greatly influenced by American educational theorists, most notably John Dewey and the progressives.

My very American small-l liberal arts education in French literature (with a long stop at molecular biology) means that I in fact knew Dewey in Jeopardy!: the true mark of a well-rounded mind in our English-speaking society is, perhaps, knowing a little about a lot of subjects. In Quebec, their version of Jeopardy! lasted only two years. 

2200 years of history: teaching algebraic thinking early 九章算術- The Nine Chapters

Above Switzerland are the usual suspects: East Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea, and (arguably) China. The history of algebra is not one of a singular moment of revelation, but rather an observation in the world of amounts that gets increasingly abstracted. If I say that the amount of butter in the recipe for cupcakes will need to be doubled because the guest list for a birthday party has twice the number it did before, that’s algebraic thinking. The translation of the “word problem” to figures is where many English-speaking students get slowed down significantly.

Mainland China has a mixed record on the apples-to-apples comparison in international surveys: they have a large amount of internal migration, and have even more extreme tracking than Europe. Even at the college level, your major is completely determined by entrance exam scores — according to a recent New Yorker piece by an expat writing teacher, students were almost universally disappointed with their results.‍

When a student applies to university, scores are all that matter—no teacher recommendations, no list of extracurriculars.

Students in China are taught math facts such as 4*8=32 at a young age — 7 — and the curriculum emphasizes memorization. Take this analysis from a UK perspective (hence “maths” and “different to”):‍

The goal of maths education in China is to develop conceptual and procedural knowledge through rigid practice. In comparison, the UK maths curriculum is less focused and consistent. China uses whole-class instruction, engaging all students in the material and prompting feedback. This is different to the UK model teaching of maths, which is more focused on small groups and individual attention.

Chinese students are taught to understand numerical relationships and to develop and prove their solutions to problems in front of the whole class. This means students understand whole concepts of maths, allowing them to apply previous knowledge to help them learn new topics.

Proofs in the English-speaking world are confined to Geometry class, if they’re taught at all. By contrast, the nine chapters form the basic math curriculum that has remained unchanged for 2200 years. So, algebraic thinking is introduced from the very earliest ages in China, and you’re put through a zero-sum competition that makes Anne Shirley’s geometry tests in her late teens look like a cakewalk.

Is algebra necessary for a well-lived life?

The U.S. from the very beginning has tended to prioritize skills divorced from their intellectual traditions — in a society where there is an ideal of limitless self-invention, and a sideways glance towards authority, something as seemingly rigid and uncreative as y=mx+b can induce a yawn, at best, and Don’t Mont-ay On Me at the far end. Peppermint Patty wouldn’t just randomly put 11 on her exam were she in Shanghai, and she would probably be a high school dropout in Quebec. Even de Tocquevile would recognize her anti-authoritarian rebel streak as uniquely American. 

So, if we want to improve our results in algebra from San Diego to Charlottetown, one idea would be to bring back its mercantile usefulness. Algebraic thinking can help you in economics, balancing a checkbook, and the favorite advice to confused Gen Zers — learning to code.

Additionally, Americans have built some of the most selective and prestigious universities in the world — if we get the word out that Algebra is not just a textbook for 13-year-olds, but an entire way of thinking that can be introduced in childhood and reinforced throughout one’s education, then we will be more competitive on the world stage and lift the floor for all students.

At Socratica, we agree with this take in Cal Matters: ‍

“There’s a huge problem with math instruction right now. The way things are set up, it’s not giving everybody a chance to learn math at the highest levels.”

REBECCA PARISO, MATH TEACHER, HUENEME ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DISTRICT

Anne Shirley was a 19th century orphan who nevertheless was deep in the college admissions arms race — as evidenced by her single-minded competitiveness with her classmate, Gilbert.‍

"I'd rather not pass at all than not come out pretty well up on the list," flashed Anne, by which she meant—and Diana knew she meant—that success would be incomplete and bitter if she did not come out ahead of Gilbert Blythe.

(Turns out they tied for first, helping her to secure a place in college she couldn’t have afforded otherwise.) Although fictional, their story is a compelling argument to introduce algebraic thinking early in publicly funded K-12 schools. If she didn’t have the chance to learn algebra and geometry when she was clearly ready to do so, she would have been constrained by the traumatic circumstances of her childhood abandonment. Isn’t it better for the Annes of today to have access to a curriculum that challenges them? Students like Gilbert, from comfortable middle class homes, have always had more access to higher education, regardless. 

Descartes’ demise

A sad postscript about why Descartes perished in his 50s, a cautionary tale for night owls:

His habit of sleeping until 11am had been brutally disrupted by Queen Christina of Sweden, who persuaded him to go to Stockholm in 1649 and wanted to do maths with him at 5 o'clock every morning. Descartes endured the early mornings and the Scandinavian cold for a few months, but eventually contracted pneumonia and died. Source 

Sleep as late as you need, bundle up, and learn algebra with our videos here.

At the height of the financial boom of the 1920s, American journalist and humorist Robert Quillen proposed the following definition of living on credit in the good ol’ U.S. of A.:

‍Americanism: Using money you haven’t earned to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.

Do you find that rings true even 94 years later? 
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The inverse of this trend would be to invest whatever capital you do have, more or less wisely, to provide financial security for you and your loved ones. 

So, how’s that going with two “once in a century” economic downturns in just the past fifteen years?

A decidedly mixed picture

Answering which countries teach students about managing their money depends how you frame the question. Some possible avenues include:

• Surveying teens about basic financial literacy topics, ranking them

• Mandating economics or personal finance courses at the secondary level

• Following up with adults to see how much they know about personal finance

• Relying less on self-report and more on retrospective macroeconomic data

Regardless of which method you use, some trends emerge. Richer countries, whose citizens have more money, score more highly than poorer countries. The countries with the very highest scores in knowledge of personal finance tend to be prosperous democracies with solid social welfare systems — raising the chicken-or-egg question of which comes first. And while the U.S. may not be #1, it’s not nearly as bad as doom-and-gloom prognosticators would predict, with some positive trends for the future.

Let’s look at some nitty-gritty details.

Europe and Oceania punching above their weight

Like surveys of happiest countries or popular tourist destinations, the countries which include the most financially literate citizens are dominated by Scandinavia, the former colonies of Great Britain, and other democracies. Considering Switzerland’s reputation as an international financial hub, it’s actually good news that the United States is tied with the Swiss at 57% of adults who are financially literate, according to this personal finance site’s comprehensive nationwide results.

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Still, 7 in 10 for Scandinavians is a C-minus in terms of grading adults. What does the rest of the world look like on this measure?

Not great. 

Basically, almost all of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not producing a majority of adults who are financially literate. Even some countries with top-10 GDP numbers like China or Japan don’t produce a high percentage of adults who are considered financially literate. What gives?

Delving into the details of the report, financial literacy trails behind for women, the elderly, and the poor. This fact makes a persuasive case for unleashing the power of educating women, building safety nets for retirees (poverty in seniors in the U.S. declined from half to about ten percent in the 70 years between the Depression and Y2K), and lifting more citizens out of poverty. 

A tale of two countries

France has households with consistently higher savings rates than the U.S. The figures below for savings rates are about double in a typical year in the same time period for the U.S., where the saving rate has never been high. 

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In The Razor’s Edge, a masterpiece set during the post-World-War-I boom and bust years, Maugham captures this American devil-may-care attitude to savings acutely:

You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection".”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Is this French relative financial conservatism down to better education about financial topics? That’s debatable. Let’s expand the comparative financial literacy graph to include France.

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Botswana and Myanmar have a tiny fraction of France’s GDP or education levels … which raises the question whether it would be better for an individual to have a passing knowledge of compound interest in Nay Pyi Daw or Nantes — and to score slightly higher on a quiz or to have double the Euros in a secure account. 

Where did the kick for including personal finance in the secondary curriculum come from? 

Jump$tarting the future

Like the singer formerly styled as Ke$ha, the Jump$tart coalition does indeed include a $, but it’s not at all clear it’s an ironic gesture in their case. Started in the ‘90s by the CEO of the Ford Motor Credit Corporation, Jump$tart is a lobbying group with its hands in a lot of pies — including, controversially, partnering with a subprime lender as a sponsor. I’m writing this on the last day of so-called Financial Literacy Month in the U.S. (like Thanksgiving, Canada reminds us they’re in fact separate by celebrating politely, in November), and like a lot of ersatz holiday months, this one has plenty of corporate conflicts of interests pushing it, such as big banks and credit agencies, whose business models depend on burying fees and high interest rates in the footnotes. 
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Lost in the Discourse about “financial literacy” — a term coined by the very corporations who most profit from a miasma of uncertainty around financial products, including students loans and teens’ credit cards — is the fact that in 2009 Ford, for one, took a $6 billion loan from the Federal government (in other words, we the taxpayers) and … wait for it …

They still have the debt!

During good times, automotive analysts said, Ford could have socked away money and paid off debt in anticipation of bad times. That didn't happen.

"This is now very unpleasant and very difficult," said Elson.

Huh. Maybe before they go scolding teenagers (who respond well to personal finance education by the admission of many studies) for mismanaging their babysitting or lawn-mowing allowance, the Ford Credit Corporation should look at the ten-figure beam in their own eyes. 

How not to sell your soul to the company store

Like the cobbler’s children who have no shoes, having an ace understanding of the theory of compound interest or being able to define EBITA, much less making a giant pile of cash in no time, is no guaranteed shore-up against personal financial disaster. 
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Let’s go back to Kesha, formerly styled as Ke$ha. No, really. 

Ke$ha - TiK ToK (Official HD Video)

She was an absolute icon of the Great Recession era club-music revival. Whether or not her heavily autotuned music and self-consciously rebellious lyrics bring you back to your college years or make you think that all the Millennial hate really was justified, you can’t deny one fact: Ke$ha absolutely exploded her net worth during a huge economic slump through the sheer force of a pop star hitting the sweet spot of right place, right time.

Frankly, with that level of growth, the CEO of Ford should have been hiring her for financial advice. 

She also was a very young professional singer in an industry that has an, ahem, spotty track record on how it treats female stars.

What happened next is a morass of high-profile lawsuits and countersuits (warning: the allegations include assault) between Kesha, as she styles herself now, and her producer that are ongoing and played out against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement. 

Regardless of what the courts find in terms of who is legally culpable in this legal battle, I agree with what the critic Amanda Petrusich said in the New Yorker about the reaction of Kesha’s fellow female artists to maltreatment by their workplace: 

The ruling [channeled] ambient outrage about the institutionalized sexism so often evident within the music industry.

We can’t all hit up Taylor Swift for a cool quarter million should we be dragged into a legal dispute. But Kesha’s financial and cultural rise and fall took place against a backdrop of a society that especially didn’t value women’s financial independence or literacy. 

In the years since, it has, thankfully, become conventional wisdom that, for example, Britney Spears should have legal control over her finances. Women’s fight for independence includes the financial kind.

Remember the three categories of people who scored below others in knowing how to manage their money, both here at home and in France? The poor (who have less money to manage), the elderly (who are past their peak earning years) and … women.

Since we’re unlikely to get a federal pay gap bailout any time soon, the best thing for women — and anyone else seeking to take control of their own finances — is to sit down and get a clear picture of their financial situation. If you’re long out of high school, there are a lot of reputable, free resources, from NerdWallet for adults or Banzai for teaching kids. Basically, financial stability comes down to nuts and bolts — budgeting, living within your means, avoiding predatory lenders if at all possible. But that doesn’t sound like the American way, we’re afraid … but we hope that things are changing, with more and more Gen Zers demanding to be taught the financial facts of life.

Do as he said, not as he did …

How did things turn out for Robert Quillen, the coiner of the tongue in cheek “Americanism?”

According to Wikipedia, there was nothing more American than Quillen’s pouring good money after bad into a doomed passion project:

Despite years of ill health, Quillen continued to smoke and avoid doctors. Meanwhile, he engaged in a "never ending struggle" to make the Fountain Inn Tribune pay its own way. With fewer than a thousand subscribers, the newspaper itself was probably never profitable, but Quillen used the ideas generated in Fountain Inn as the basis for pieces that appeared in scores of leading national magazines and newspapers. Twice, frustrated with the time it took to run the weekly, he sold the paper (notoriously in 1926 for one dollar) and twice bought it back. In 1929, Quillen called the Tribune "my hobby—my substitute for golf."

May we suggest a more health-promoting hobby than smoking and lighting your money on fire, instead? Subscribe to Socratica to develop your number sense and the math mojo you can only get here: after, of course, you hit up Taylor Swift for a small personal loan.

Twelfth-century Andalusia was the nexus of a cosmopolitan world whose realities are little remembered today. Merchants sent their wares as far away as India. Caliphates ruled much of present-day northern Africa and southern Europe along the Mediterranean, overseeing societies where speaking more than one language and traveling by ship hundreds of miles was common for the educated classes. Córdoba itself had a golden age around 1000 CE:

Córdoba had a prosperous economy, with manufactured goods including leather, metal work, glazed tiles and textiles, and agricultural produce including a range of fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, and materials such as cotton, flax and silk. It was also famous as a center of learning, home to over 80 libraries and institutions of learning, with knowledge of medicine, mathematics, astronomy, botany far exceeding the rest of Europe at the time. (source: Wikipedia)

It was into this bustling, globalized metropolis that the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was born circa 1135 CE. In addition to working as a personal physician to an Egyptian sultan and being well-trained as an experimental astronomer, Maimonides has an impact on contemporary education that might surprise you.

Even a millennium later, schools in Israel use a rule of thumb first proposed by Maimonides: a teacher can manage a classroom of up to 40, but then, halve the size. If you have 40 students, hire one teacher. 41? Divide the pupils into two classrooms of 20 and 21. As quoted in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The importance of Maimonides’ rule for our purposes is that, since 1969, it has been used to determine the division of enrollment cohorts into classes in Israeli public schools. The maximum of 40 is well-known to school teachers and principals, and it is circulated annually in a set of standing orders from the Director General of the Education Ministry.

Classroom size in the U.S. is a hotly debated topic, with many arguments conflating correlation with causation. Regardless, 40 students in one room would be unusually large in an American classroom — we’ll get more into median statistics, but most classrooms are around 20-25 students. Israel, on the other hand, has an average of 27 students per class. This article will examine this debate, and raise the question: are we asking the wrong question? Is reducing class size the best use of state-level funds in the U.S.?

The One-Room Schoolhouse: Building a Mythos

Fast-forward a few hundred years and trudge north a few thousand kilometers. You’re now in the middle of nowhere in Norway. The year is 1739. If you can’t imagine it, basically imagine the rural portions of the Disney film Frozen. Brrrrr. 

Just six years before, Christian VI, the king of Denmark and Norway, introduced the Stavnsbånd, a quasi-serfdom that forbade young men in Denmark between the age of 14 and 36 from leaving the estate on which they were born. Too many peasants had been trying their luck in the cities. Can’t start getting ideas! Norway proper had its own strict system of social stratification and splitting up of estates. The majority of Scandinavian emigrants to the Midwestern states of America came from this beleaguered social class. 

So when a decree comes out from the King in 1739 that your children have to attend school, you would be forgiven for grumbling that you could use some extra hands on the quickly-dwindling farm before you’re called up to go fight in a war against Spain. Reciting the confirmation might have seemed tangential to the realities of your life. Only 1 in 5 men could sign their names in your region in 1720. But the traveling teachers seem insistent, so you let your child go get some book learning.

It was this almost accidental policy change that led to a shocking rise in literacy in Scandinavia. By 1800, almost all Norwegians were literate. 

What does that have to do with the one room schoolhouse? A lot, it turns out. This form of instruction — imagine Little House on the Prairie, for the ‘70s TV fans — where students of multiple grade levels are all taught by one teacher, was by far the most common in the Midwestern states, where the realities of small, isolated rural communities and the cultural inheritance of the immigrants themselves meant this was a common, even iconic, form of instruction from about 1850 to the Second World War in the U.S. and Canada, especially in so-called flyover country. What was viewed as “normal” instruction — at home or out of the home, coed or single sex, religious or secular — varied greatly by region in the U.S. until the 1940s. Much of the Western world underwent programs of educational modernization whose effects can still be felt today.

Explosive growth and gradual decline in size of classrooms

Multiple trends converged to increase the average classroom size from 1850 to 1900. Child mortality, happily, fell dramatically, which contributed to the overall U.S. population more than tripling in that time span.

The United States rapidly industrialized — the nation went from 85% rural to just 60%, with a majority urban populace by 1920. And the U.S. was an early adopter of universal compulsory public education.

This led to huge classrooms by the turn of the 20th century. Classrooms of 50 weren’t unheard of in New York City, and the average size was 35 across the country. But Maimonides would get his wish: class size has steadily decreased since its peak. 

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In the past thirty years and projecting into the future, this trend shows no sign of slowing down.

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What are the reasons behind this decline?

One of the clearest is declining birth rates. With fewer children, classrooms will shrink unless they are consolidated. Another is mandates. More than half of states have laws limiting the number of students in homerooms in public schools. 

Making a smaller class comes at a price — hiring more faculty. If you split your 40 students into two classrooms of 20 students, you must hire an additional teacher. Repeat that ad infinitum, and Classroom Size Reduction ends up being a costly educational reform — to the tune of billions of dollars, on par with Title I. 

Are there any high quality studies that show that further reducing classroom size in the U.S. is worth the investment?

Are these mandates worth the investment?

STAR was an experiment in Tennessee in the late 1980s that was unique — it was well-designed, longitudinal, and introduced controls. Students were taught in regular-sized classrooms or dramatically reduced-size classes. 

The upshot of the study is that you have to dramatically, not slightly, reduce class sizes to see lasting improvements in test scores. When it came to the reported income of the students once they reached adulthood, there was no clear benefit.

In other words, one question policymakers will have to grapple with is what are they hoping to achieve with reductions in classroom size. Better scores? Better behaved students? Better life outcomes? If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which path you take, to paraphrase one Cheshire cat.

A natural experiment, by no means a true control group, but a parallel track in the U.S. educational experience, is worth noting here and reflecting on.

An age-old model, on the rebound 

Not discussed so far? Private, formally known as independent, schools. Until the universal education mandates of the 19th century, most formal education resembled home school or parochial school.

All evidence points to a privatization movement that is growing. Charter schools (publicly funded, but privately run) now comprise 7% of enrollment. About 10% of students are in independent schools.

What’s the picture on classroom size? Prep schools do indeed have smaller classroom sizes — in their glossy brochures, it’s often one of the first things they advertise. (This author, resident in the state with the largest classroom sizes, is an alumna of a high school that has a tiny 9:1 student-teacher ratio.) Charters, on the other hand, are much more variable, but often have comparable classroom sizes to publics, if not slightly larger.

So what's the cause, and what's the effect? COVID disruptions heavily impacted education in every area and type of school in the U.S. — but urban school districts were hit harder by every measure than suburban schools where students could more easily isolate and learn remotely. Many parents who could pull their children from public schooling, did. Enrollments are indisputably up outside the public education system. 

But do students at independent schools — especially top-ranked, ultra-competitive, eye-poppingly expensive elite schools — perform better on standardized tests, go to better-ranked colleges, and earn higher incomes as adults BECAUSE their classrooms were smaller … or was it more like correlated with other factors in their lives, such as parental income and education, safety of their home ZIP codes, and intangible expectations of their social set?

Basically, how can educational researchers control for the most fickle of variables: luck?

No magic wand: modest proposals for thinking about class size

The research seems to most clearly indicate that you get the best bang for your buck in classroom interventions at the earliest ages. Restaging a STAR-like study with true experimental conditions would be an excellent way to gather data about small versus medium sized classrooms. 

Regardless, this debate often devolves into caricatures — as if the only options are the crowded conditions of a 1901 tenement school battling cholera and a rosy picture of your child contemplating the Decameron in the Italian in a five-person seminar while gently cradling a lacrosse stick on their way to the Ivy League.

Reality rarely resembles these extremes — and it’s worth acknowledging that U.S. class sizes are about average among OECD countries. Some systems have very large classrooms, such as China and Korea, and see high test score results. Countries as different as Bangladesh and the Netherlands see private school enrollment rates above 80% — others, such as Cuba and Finland, have virtually zero private schools, and completely different social systems and outcomes.

In other words, we might want to borrow some wisdom from Maimonides again, and admit that at the moment, we need more information about the “ideal” classroom size before drawing sweeping conclusions:

Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress. -Maimonides

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Welcome to the The-ah-tah

During my freshman year of high school, I took a three-part theater course.

During the unit on Movement, Mr. Parmley had us rolling around on the floor and closing our eyes to get in our bodies, because theater ultimately takes place in person, in three-dimensional space. For a dancer, I’ve never had the strongest proprioception (the sixth sense of your own body in space), so it was a useful exercise, even if I felt somewhat self-conscious at first blush.

During the unit on Acting, we had to arrange a scene with a scene partner. Dillon, my lackadaisical partner, could not have had a more 180° attitude from me towards scholastic achievement — and my increasingly panicked badgering taught me valuable skills in negotiation and the adult reality of working with others both on and off the proscenium.

During our last unit, on Speech, I was introduced to the International Phonetic Alphabet — IPA. I instantly fell in love. Foreign languages were my favorite subject (I later won the school’s foreign language award upon graduation which launched me towards a degree in French Literature), but this system of writing unlocked my own native language and writing system — English, normally written with the Latin alphabet — on a deeper level.

IPA can help theater actors know how to tackle what are colloquially known as “accents:” the way your own language is produced in different regions. Take the IPA transcription for a standard UK accent,  for the phrase “on a deeper level:”

ɒn ə ˈdiːpə ˈlɛvl

Compare this to the standard US accent:

ɑn ə ˈdipər ˈlɛvəl

The schwa, ə, is an unstressed vowel that is much more common in English than many of its European cousin languages. (Imagine you’re pronouncing the Italian city of Portofino with an exaggerated cowboy twang — Port-uh-fine-uh — and you’ll hear the schwas.) A British-born actor will not say deepER, with a so-called “hard” R, but DEEP-uh. IPA standardizes this difference by assigning each phoneme a glyph (what you may think of as IPA’s letters).

Hooked on phonemes

The “phon-” in telephone, phonograph, cacophony, saxophone, phonetic, and phoneme all come from the Greek word for sound, φωνή (transliterated phōnḗ).

Phonemes are the basic units of IPA. But to understand teaching English through phonics, we need to clear up one common misconception:

ENGLISH IS A LARGELY PHONETIC LANGUAGE.

Yes, it’s true that English has many more sounds than Hawaiian, and has more unpredictable spellings than Italian. However, English is closely related to German, and you don’t hear anyone claim that German is a language with a random or unpredictable relationship to its spelling.

Mark Twain, of course, expressed his view on attempting to learn to speak German with his usual dry wit:

[German] opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm. -The Awful German Language‍

This stereotype goes back at least as far as Pygmalion author Bernard Shaw with his joke that you could spell fish as “ghoti”, because cough ends in “gh” and nation is fully palatalized (more on that later) in some accents.

The problem with these jokes is they’re focusing on exceptions that prove the rule. Over 50% of English words are purely predictable from their spelling, and another 36% are only ambiguous from one vowel. Importantly, that’s knowing how to spell English from hearing it spoken. The band Phish and regular fish are homophones — two different spellings, but sound the same.

If I hear “sandilla” or “sandia” quickly without context in Spanish, I might mix them up. However, I would have no problem reading those words on a sign in Spain on my way to Port-uh-fine-uh.

Likewise, you can sound out words in English from seeing them in black and white. Maybe you pronounce that last color with a strong “hw” at the beginning, or maybe it’s simply “w.” Those are what are called allophones. But no one begins the English word for the color of snow with a “f” or “bl” sound. It’s not random, and when students are taught to sound out English systematically, they become literate at a younger age, struggle less in other school subjects, and even have higher earnings as adults. 

A METHOD TO THE MADNESS

Some kids (raises hand) seem to pick up reading very, very easily and quickly. This might give the impression to parents or teachers of reading that any student can learn to read “passively,” without formal instruction, as children (barring learning disabilities) pick up speech. This is simply untrue, and not backed by science. Research shows that all students can learn alphabet-to-sound correspondence, and there’s no shame in students learning to read aloud around Kindergarten. 

John McWhorter, one of the country’s foremost linguists, persuasively argues that the sounding-out method of learning to read works. He and his wife are academics, and their children are surrounded by books and printed texts of all kinds, and his daughter did not just “pick up” reading passively. He had to have her sound out each letter: H-A-D. (Make the “huh,” the short “a,” and then “duh” sounds slowly, and then string them together. Compare that to D-A-D. Try it on your nearest pre-literate child and see if the light goes off!) He could supplement this with Socratica videos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAqk1NnPU_I‍

Learning English’s odd system of short and long vowels will also prove useful to students who feel less confident sounding out words. The difference between “B-A-R” and “B-A-R-E,” “P-U-R-R” and “P-U-R-E,” and “B-I-T” and “B-I-T-E” are short and long vowels. The way I learned this was that the final (silent) E makes the first vowel say its long vowel (as heard in the letter names — remember the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland? The ‘50s were a different time, but the song can help you learn long vowels!)

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Double consonants, as in merry, borrow, and flatter, almost always make the preceding vowel short. Contrast that sound to what the first vowels sound like in here, bone, and fate. As I said, there is a method to English’s madness.

But why so many exceptions?

As McWhorter himself said in the title to one of his books, ours is a magnificent bastard tongue — English, much like Turkish or Mandarin, became a language of empire after having contact with many of its cousins.

If you pick up a work of Old to Middle English from Beowulf to Chaucer, and you can sound out the letters, you’ll notice it sounds more like German or Dutch. This is what English would have sounded like had England (Land of the Angles) not been repeatedly invaded.

Perhaps the most significant invasion for England linguistically was that of the Normans.

Just look how many Latinate words are in that sentence:

Significant
Invasion
Linguistically

“Perhaps” and “most” are nice, solid ancient Germanic words. Time travel to Beowulf, and he could figure it out once you said it a few times. So could a medieval German villager isolated from the printing press. Try sounding them out. They are said like they’re spelled. No silent letters.

Then you get a Frenchified word like invasion. This is where many teachers of reading or harried parents throw up their hands and say, “I don’t know, guess!” 

But let’s take a deep breath, dodge any Norman arrows on the battles of the reading wars, and look at it more closely.

You made it from Spain over to Italy. You’re enjoying some delicious margherita pizza and see a Doric arch with this word in the inscription:‍

Invasionem‍

I have a gut instinct that if you’ve made it this far in the article, this wouldn’t be like seeing an Egyptian hieroglyph or proto-Chinese or Mayan character with no prior context. Those writing systems are not phonetic (the scratches on the papyrus or paper or stone do not correlate to the sounds, any more than the swoosh tells you how to sound out N-I-K-E).

But Latin not only IS phonetic, it’s the language whose alphabet English borrowed!

So French, which really is just badly-learned Latin by leurs ancêtres les gaulois, contributed 29% of its vocabulary to English, and Latin directly contributed 29% more. Significant is a typical example. The German-root word is bedeutsam.

However, children’s books specifically feature fewer Latinate words than adult books because the most (there it is again, M-O-S-T) common words in English come from our German substrate. Make that bedrock. B-E-D-R-O-C-K.

When your child encounters a more difficult, longer word like “linguistically,” encourage them to slow down, sound it out, and then say it quickly. Many of the conventions of spoken English will click once they can master simpler one-syllable words such as C-L-I-C-K. (C and K were borrowed separately from Latin and Greek. You’re welcome.)

𐐝𐐹𐐯𐑊𐐨𐑍 𐑉𐐮𐑁𐐫𐑉𐑋 𐐮𐑆 𐑀𐐳𐐼

No, that’s not Thai, Klingon, or a Unicode error. That’s the phrase “Spelling reform is good” in the Deseret Alphabet. I was introduced to this flawed but interesting precursor to IPA as a child at the local history museums. 1850s Utah was a magnet for immigrants who did not speak each other’s languages, not all of whom were literate in their own languages. The founders of Utah attempted to transcribe English phonetically with an alphabet of their own invention.

Besides the fact that Utah is geographically isolated, something that prevented the innovation from catching on more widely is the difference between a sound in isolation and in sequence. You very likely don’t realize “isolation” as (long) I-S-O-L-(long) A-T-(long) I-O-N. The ending sound is swallowed as a “sh” followed by a schwa, more like an unstressed “shun.”

Palatalization — your tongue is physically touching your soft palate — is not unique to English by any means. However, it’s a level of sound that does not necessarily need to be portrayed in writing except in formal linguistic contexts. Newly arrived immigrants, then or now, benefit more from learning the alphabetic system that’s actually used and then perfecting their speech the way children do — by speaking. Rhyme isolation with lion and someone will correct you. But never learn what the letters mean, and you will be up the C-R-I-C-K, or more formally, C-R-E-E-K, without a P-A-D-D-L-E (doubled letters!).

Literacy emergency — another COVID casualty

Here at Socratica, we’re concerned to see that early-reading programs are in crisis, especially where they’re needed most. 

Children from low-income or immigrant households start their formal education at a lower level of phonemic awareness on average for all kinds of reasons — including the leisure time needed for reading long texts for pleasure, and the inherent challenges of learning a foreign language, especially if it’s far distant from your native tongue. (I’m a language nut and hardly sounded anything but foreign attempting Spanish in Mexico, much less how lost I’d be in Vietnamese or Xhosa). 

Instead of sacrificing children’s futures on the altar of yet another pedagogy war, why not listen to the science and train elementary teachers in phonics, ditch the whole-word method as a myth that doesn’t help any children and actively harms those with conditions like dyslexia, and share phonics resources with kids and their caretakers?

I promise, unlike closing your eyes and really inhabiting the mental space of a seagull flapping your arms as a self-conscious fourteen-year-old among your peers, learning to read English through the phonics method is F-U-N.

Mathemaphobia: the Hidden Origins of a Meme

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My first question when researching this topic — is math anxiety even a thing? — yielded somewhat surprising results. Like disco and gas rationing, the phrase “math anxiety” was a meme in the late 1970s, and just as quickly, fell out of fashion.

Just look at its precipitous rise and steady decline in published books indexed by Google, and compare that with the steady rise of the idea of anxiety disorders — still only half as popular as math anxiety was at its peak!

Source: Google ngram viewer


If, like me, you weren’t alive during the Carter-to-Reagan years and don’t remember this meme firsthand, it was truly ubiquitous forty years ago. The narrative went like this: we Americans had divided the world into “math people” and “non-math-people.” Elementary educators, not trained as specialists in advanced mathematics or engineering, themselves internalized a phobia about math and teaching its fundamentals to young children. Thus, the cycle perpetuated and the Cold War stakes ratcheted up as we also had anxiety about our relative performance against rival nations in STEM.

But who first put this idea into print? It was a nun—Sister Mary Fides Gough (O.P.) —who taught math at Catholic schools from sixth grade through the junior college level. She published her article on mathemaphobia in 1952. Her term for an internalized negative reaction to math (a portmanteau of mathematics and phobia) never really took off, but the underlying concept did three decades later. 

She claimed that “Mathemaphobia needs no defining.” With apologies to Sister Gough, we will now do just that.

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Defining Math Anxiety — What It Is, and What It’s Not

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During the initial fad surrounding “math anxiety,” the term covered wide ground — everything from what we would now recognize as dyscalculia, a learning disability, to a simple aversion to doing mental math. Sally Brown from Peanuts was something of a standard bearer for the latter camp — her wild guesses and obvious distaste for the subject supplied creator Charles Schulz with plenty of humorous moments. 

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The most likely precipitating factor of math anxiety among the general public was the rise of the so-called New Math: just as ubiquitous and even more controversial than Common Core standards in our own century.

New Math was shorthand for far-reaching changes to how math was taught, especially at the elementary levels, in the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by the academic work of Nicolas Bourbaki, New Math eschewed the “traditional” elements of teaching math that emphasized rote memorization — for example, the times tables — in favor of more abstract approaches, such as set theory. Morris Kline, himself a professor of mathematics at NYU, penned a bestselling book, Why Johnny Can't Add: The Failure of the New Math, in 1973.

Regardless of the merits of this method of instruction, it makes sense that parents who had been taught elementary-level math using the “Old” Math methods were baffled by their children’s textbooks asking about parts of whole sets and other abstruse concepts.

Even Richard Feynman had this to say in a textbook about New Math:
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If we would like to, we can and do say, 'The answer is a whole number less than 9 and bigger than 6,' but we do not have to say, 'The answer is a member of the set which is the intersection of the set of those numbers which are larger than 6 and the set of numbers which are smaller than 9' ... In the 'new' mathematics, then, first there must be freedom of thought; second, we do not want to teach just words; and third, subjects should not be introduced without explaining the purpose or reason, or without giving any way in which the material could be really used to discover something interesting. I don't think it is worthwhile teaching such material.

We've bolded the portion that stands out to us — in the middle of the 20th century, students were simultaneously told that improving their STEM performance was essential to a cultural and real victory in the Cold War, and their parents, instructors, and fellow students were often hazy at best on what their math textbook was even talking about.

(Here at Socratica, we like to think that we approach set theory in a more dynamic, intuitive way — but we also believe that students need a basic number sense before grappling with this more abstract material.)

In other words, Math Anxiety is best understood when you firmly plant it in the era and circumstances under which it was first identified.

Math anxiety is NOT a psychological disorder, and it need not be a lifelong impediment to learning and even enjoying math as a subject and discipline.

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Math Anxiety in Pop Culture, and by the Numbers

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Every culture has its taboos and the topics about which polite society deems it acceptable to not enjoy. If you have a full-blown phobia of, say, flying, that is holding you back in your professional or personal life, there are recommended therapies (usually of the cognitive-behavioral school) to help you address the underlying phobia. The research is clear — flying is much, much safer than the drive to the airport, but evolutionarily, our brains may look out a plane window, see that you’re 10,000 feet above solid ground, and your limbic system might freak out.

With math, different countries’ students report far differing levels of anxiety both before and during assessments of mathematical performance. There’s not a tight, predictive correlation between reported math anxiety and actual math performance. As this Atlantic Monthly summary of a PISA report for 2014 shows, the countries with the highest performance in math (all in East Asia, including China, Singapore, and South Korea) had students with slightly-above-the-mean levels of math anxiety.

Where were the worst mathemaphobes?

It was a diverse list: Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Jordan, and Mexico. There’s no obvious unifying pattern to these countries

Math anxiety is dominated in the popular press by culturally-specific US examples. Just take this cartoon from Gary Larson of the Far Side:

From miles per hour to two major American cities, it’s obvious this joke is by and for students in the United States. However, as educators, it’s worth examining our own biases: and being open to what does work around the world.

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Teaching the Teachers: Addressing Math Anxiety and Its Myths at its Roots

Math pedagogy has mostly moved on from the heyday of New Math, and so have social attitudes. The Barbie doll saying “Math Class Is Tough!” has been replaced by many movements to get kids into summer camps for learning to code.

The perception of math has changed in the past half-century from something only for nerds to something that can unlock greater career opportunities. In a society with steadily rising income inequality since 1980, parents are much more likely to encourage their children to pursue a degree in STEM in the United States, with its promise of a likely high-paying career path. However, initially-declared STEM students are the most likely to change their major during college, with Math being the major with the highest rate of attrition of all.

In short, “Math Anxiety” is not as commonplace of a cultural meme, but underperformance in math and a lack of confidence in the subject, even at the university level, still appears to be. Here are Socratica’s brief but not exhaustive suggestions for the mathemaphobes in your life (even including you, if that applies):

1. Watch your language. Whether it’s trying new foods or making new friends, children pick up on what their parents say. Barbie may well have felt that her math class was tough — but does that mean that she will necessarily perform worse than her classmates? Being encouraged to not give up during challenging experiences will serve students well as more resilient adults, regardless of whether they solve math problems on the back of napkins. 

2. More collaboration between majors and departments. I got my start as a one-on-one math tutor, working with the same age ranges as Mary Fides Gough did. I encountered some resistance from one colleague who had specialized in math at the university level; I knew I was qualified for the role, having performed well at the school where I was teaching. However, his backhanded compliments stung. General-subject teachers and math specialists should share their learnings in a spirit of open collaboration. 

3. Make math fun. MIT announces its admissions on Pi Day — one day a year, March 14th, where a mathematical concept is celebrated with delicious carbs. How can you introduce math to your students (or yourself) in a way that feels joyful? At Socratica, we're big fans of videos … And memorizing the digits of pi might be enough to keep any skeptical nuns or cartoonists in your thrall.
   

Origin Story: The Oracle and the Sidekick

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EXT. — DELPHIC TEMPLE, 450 BCE, HIGH NOON

Chaerephon, a jumpy, malnourished man approaches. The wise Oracle eyes him suspiciously.

         Chaerephon
    Who is the wisest of men?
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         Oracle
   (pausing for effect)
   There is NO MAN wiser than Socrates.

She smirks and returns into the temple.

Socrates’ Methods — Controversy and Success

This is a reconstruction of a real encounter. Socrates did mull over the Oracle’s ambiguous statement, and it’s what launched his career as a public intellectual in Athens. He was considered physically unattractive, with a snub nose and a pot belly, and did the reputation of the less-than-hygienic absentminded professor no favors with his rather sloppy habits. However, he became a famous, influential philosopher even in his own lifetime — and so infamous that the state ordered his execution.

Many of us are familiar with at least Socrates’ name, and might know that he was a mentor to Plato. But what exactly were his famous methods — and how are they used in education today?

An important concept for Socrates was aporia — a concept with no strict analogue today, but which could be approximated as an unresolved internal tension, brought about by raising a series of questions. For example, a student, a visiting foreign diplomat, or even a local woman (Socrates was unusually democratic for a man of his age and class) would define some concept, such as courage or virtue. Socrates would poke holes in the argument, until his sparring partner would often concede that the original statement was logically flimsy.

Even at the time, the method attracted detractors. For one, although it’s excellent at uncovering internal consistencies in an argument, it has less to say about the truth claims of the argument itself. For instance, if your child asks you why the sky is blue, and you reply, “well, it just is,” or make up some logical-seeming but ultimately false reason, that doesn’t negate the fact that the sky does indeed appear blue during the daytime. Watch this Socratica video if you want to come to this dialogue prepared.

For another, when this method isn’t judiciously employed, it can lead to certain students hogging classroom time. In a 2004 study from Harvard Law School, the investigators found some troubling disparities in who is speaking up:

The study also showed that 10 percent of students accounted for nearly half of all volunteered comments in first-year law classrooms.

That means that 90 percent of students in those classrooms at the time were barely piping up. This author was of those outspoken types — to the point that my rather strict elementary school decided to just have me skip a grade, because I had a tendency to finish my work quickly and yap away with my fellow 8-year-olds. Understandable, perhaps, but when this dynamic persists in law schools decades later, it can feel unbalanced.

And who are the students hanging back?

More recently, according to a 2012 study at Yale Law School, men made 58 percent of comments in the classroom, while women made 42 percent.

While progress has certainly been made in the past decade towards awareness of how the classroom can be a welcoming place for students of all backgrounds, some students will naturally hang back, whether through temperament or a phobia of public speaking. In my graduate program, one of the most diligent students and one of my friends was an international student. She confided in me that it took her a minute to gather her thoughts, and she strongly disliked the more combative nature of our classroom discussions in this course. It's important to keep these sorts of differences in mind before evaluating students' participation in Socratic-style seminars.

Socratic Method Adapted for the Modern World

A lot has changed in the 2500 or so years since Socrates’ times. Slavery is outlawed. Women have legal rights as citizens. There’s no state religion in the United States mandating what gods you must worship and how to sacrifice goats accordingly. Many of these changes arose out of the Enlightenment philosophy of the 1700s, which sprang from engagement with ancient texts on the nature of freedom and human rights. 

In light of this, how can you use the Socratic method in your own teaching? Here are some ideas we have from our experiences as Socratica educators:

1. Personalize your teaching. An often-overlooked aspect of Socrates’ methods is that he was as comfortable working as a one-on-one tutor as lecturing to an outdoor lecture hall. When you engage with a student personally, he or she has the opportunity to raise thorny questions or simply ask for clarification that might feel too embarrassing in front of peers. Keep your actual or virtual office hours open for these sorts of open-ended discussions.

2. Manage the “know-it-alls:” Some students are naturally more extroverted, chatty, or assertive than others. It’s always been the case, and a gifted teacher knows how to keep the classroom discussion moving without letting one or two students hog the discussion floor. This article has some ideas on how to keep a zigzag feeling going in the room.

3. Admit when you don’t know something. In the above example about why the sky is blue, one of the best things the parent could do would be to admit they’re not sure, but to say the magic words: “let’s find out together.” Socrates wasn’t ashamed to poke holes in his own assumptions either, and that is the spirit of all open-ended searches for truth.

4. Have your students generate their own questions. In the game show Jeopardy!, the answers are stated, and the contestants must generate the question. Flipping the script in a similar manner can take your classroom discussions down interesting new avenues. Young children are naturally curious, but many of us lose the flair for asking questions for fear of it seeming obvious, or looking foolish. Create an environment where inquiry is welcomed.

5. Always be open to questioning your own assumptions. One of the most potentially rewarding aspects of teaching is becoming a lifelong learner yourself. Whether it’s researching different camps duking it out during the U.S. suffrage movement, finding different ways to visualize the rotation of interlocking gears, or discovering new findings in plate tectonics, it’s a duty of educators to stay current in their field and to be willing to dig deeper when students have questions for us. Remember, this process should be fun!

Why Socratica?

We get lots of questions here at Socratica HQ about our name. Like the Oracle’s utterance, it might seem like a head scratcher. Where did this name come from? And how do you even begin to pronounce it?

We say it like this: So-KRAT-i-ca, as an homage to the Socratic method. We believe that learning for one’s self is ultimately the only way to truly learn anything. When watching one of our videos, we always encourage you to pause, think about what you've just learned, consider if it fits in with what you may already know, and dig into any seeming paradoxes.

Questioning your own assumptions, not worrying too much about what other people think, and knowing your own deepest convictions — these aspects of Socrates’ life and teaching methods were what inspired our company, and we hope to inspire millions of lifelong learners to attain the wisest versions of themselves possible.

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Why did we start the Socratica Foundation?

What follows is a very frank discussion about money. If you are squeamish about such things, you would be wise to leave now. But for the stout-hearted amongst you, prepare to hear about the stark fiscal realities of online education.

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Socratica was started by Kimberly Hatch Harrison and Michael Harrison, two Caltech grads who were very thankful for their chance at a world-class education. We knew that not everyone had that access to education, although we firmly believed that everyone deserved the opportunity to learn as much as they wanted.

Education deserves to be funded.

We've been making educational videos for Socratica on YouTube for about ten years now. For most of that time, we have been self-funded. We have always loved learning, and you should support what you love. So we quit our jobs (Kimberly was a scientist and educator; Michael was a mathematician and computer programmer) and dedicated ourselves to making free educational materials for the world.

We created hundreds of high-quality videos teaching math, science, and programming. Over the last decade, we grew our main channel to over 750,000 subscribers. Combined with our smaller channels (Socratica Kids, Socratica Português, Socratica Español), well over a million people have chosen to learn with us. For former classroom instructors, having that kind of reach is mind-blowing.

Important note: we did not draw a salary. Everything we made, we put right back into Socratica.

We learned how to operate our online educational business on a shoe-string budget, doing everything ourselves: writing, filming, and editing. We were self-taught filmmakers and first-time small-business owners, so of course we made lots of mistakes along the way! But over the course of ten years, we learned a lot of important lessons about what we could do on our own.

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“Support what you love”

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Here's how we funded our work:

0. Our personal savings.

1. A small percentage of our viewers support our work on Patreon.

2. Occasionally we would win a contract to do special work that was funded—for instance, Socratica was selected by YouTube to make a learning playlist about SQL programming. Another time, we were hired to make a series of educational videos in VR180.

3. Our videos make a small amount of ad revenue on YouTube. It's much less than you think—it takes at least 100,000 views for us to "break even" on a video.

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Many videos will never pay for themselves, because they are about niche, in-depth, specialized STEM educational topics. As educators, we recognize that it's more important that our video truly teaches a topic, rather than chasing viral popularity. At Socratica, the learning always comes first. We like to say with Socratica, you #LearnMore.

Next comes the hard part.

What part of our Socratica work simply cannot thrive on its own, without philanthropy? 

Socratica Kids

Our Socratica Kids channel has SMART + FUN videos for the youngest learners, teaching kids (grades K-5) about our world—with the help of some puppet friends. We've made videos about animals, planets in the Solar System, how computers work, and all sorts of topics for curious kids. We were growing steadily, gaining views and subscribers every month, when the big bad wolf came after us: COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act).

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began enforcing rules against advertising on kids' programming in January 2020. Google/YouTube was fined the astronomical sum of $170 MILLION for violating COPPA regulations. As part of their settlement agreement, YouTube instituted a number of restrictions on kids' channels, including prohibiting targeted ads that paid well. Other cuts included turning off the comments, channel notifications, and community features, removing the merchandise shelf,  and blocking the ability to add any kids' videos to playlists or to save a video to "watch later." The larger kids' entertainment channels that had "brand deals" with toy companies survived, but effectively, our humble educational channel was out of business.

Socratica High

High schoolers are a special set of learners. They're ready for more sophisticated content than what we present on our Socratica Kids channel, but at the same time, they're not being served by our fast-paced, "college-and-beyond" lessons on our main Socratica channel. High school represents a unique opportunity to reach people at that moment when they first learn about advanced ideas in math and science. It can either go very badly (just think of how many people have math phobia) or it can be the beginning of a beautiful adventure.

Because of the specter of COPPA (we were badly burned before) and the possibility of even more onerous rules being introduced for viewers up to age 18, we shelved our plans for a new channel to teach STEM to high school students. Socratica High would remain only a twinkle in our eye, until the formation of the Socratica Foundation made this work a possibility once more.

Our first project for Socratica High will be Algebra. Stay tuned!

Socratica Português and Socratica Español

When we first started our Socratica YouTube channel, we were ambitious and naïve. We made all kinds of videos, for all kinds of audiences, including people who spoke Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Russian. We quickly learned that each audience wanted their own channel. We listened, and set up separate channels, with hosts who were native speakers, delivering carefully translated scripts. This was greatly appreciated by the viewers who were unfortunately very used to getting "hand-me-down" content, made from poorly dubbed or subtitled English media.

But now we had a new problem—we were faced with juggling production for seven channels. We realized that we simply didn't have enough hands to keep all those balls in the air, so we focused on just those channels with very engaged audiences: Socratica, Socratica Kids, Socratica Português, and Socratica Español.

Sadly, we arrived at the conclusion that while we could eke out enough income to keep the lights on at Socratica and Socratica Kids (our English-language productions), we were always in the red for our Portuguese and Spanish channels. YouTube ads for these channels paid only a small fraction of what we earned on our English channels. We tried Patreon campaigns, but they suffered from the same underlying issue—we could only raise about 1/4 to 1/5 as much funds as our English-speaking channel, yet production costs were the same (actually higher, because we had to include the cost of translation).

We decided to pause production on these channels. To this day, on our main English channel, we get comments asking us to return to Socratica Português and Socratica Español. The audience is there, eager to learn.

Where do you come in?

If you agree that everyone deserves the right to pursue knowledge, you can join us in our efforts. When you support the Socratica Foundation, you give people around the world the chance to learn and grow with us.

Thank you for listening.