A nation engaged in real reform?

Finland's Educational Success? The Anti-Tiger Mother Approach

Apparently, Finland's educational system focuses on developing teacher talent with competitive salaries and programs, and then they get out of the way. They don't pretend standardized testing is the be-all and end-all of teacher performance measurement, and they don't track kids. Sound familiar?

My favorite quote? Glad you asked:

You don't buy a dog and bark for it," says Dan MacIsaac, a specialist in physics-teacher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo who visited Finland for two months. "In the U.S., they treat teachers like pizza delivery boys and then do efficiency studies on how well they deliver the pizza."

One caveat: there's a little bit of an apples and oranges problem when you compare a nation like Finland to the US. Our problems are very different than theirs, and they have an across-the-board investment in education that makes their adult population pretty different than ours. So not everything Finland does for their kids is automatically good or automatically something that would work here. But there's certainly some food for thought.

Time 4 Reading

Our colleague Dan has started up his own blog about reading, and my favorite part so far is the way that he describes the feeling of being alone with whatever book he's reading. It reminds me that a passion for reading is primarily about the pleasure a good book brings on so many levels. Dan gives that sensory, tactile experience of reading the book, unlike reviews I've read before, which focus more on the practical. I think Dan's approach makes for better writing on his end and for a better sense of what might motivate you to pick up the particular book and keep your nose in it.

It also doesn't hurt that his most recent entry covers Danny the Champion of the World, one of my favorite childhood books, written by my hands-down favorite childhood author, Roald Dahl.