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Children

The Story of “First Words”

By Terence Gillespie November 13, 2018

On a recent trip to Colombia, I was determined to teach our two boys Spanish. It was a six-week trip, and I quickly ran into two problems.

Immersion was Unavailable

The first problem was the Spanish speaking children our boys found to play with saw them as an opportunity to practice their English. We’d flown all the way to South America to be immersed in Spanish, but we couldn’t escape English.

The second problem was me. I didn’t know the language well enough to provide parental services in Spanish only. In other words, hanging out with dad was no immersion experience, either.

An Optimal Beginning?

What I needed was an optimal way to begin. If the first thing presented to the boys was frustrating, they might lose interest in Spanish altogether. That’s what happened to me in high school, college, and three other Spanish courses that seemed promising. Something didn’t click, and I didn’t know why.

With my children’s language acquisition at stake, I was determined to get to the bottom of flaws in the traditional approach that hadn’t worked for me.

Eureka!

While scouring the web for solutions, the eureka moment came when I discovered A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Mark Davies. Davies used computers to analyze 20 million words of Spanish across three “registers” of fiction, nonfiction, and radio. His dictionary lists the top 5000 most frequently used words in the Spanish language. All the more stunning is how important these words are to new language learners.

Using English as a comparison, Davies estimates that you would understand ~90% of every word spoken or written in Spanish if you knew the top 3000 words. And, your comprehension would rise to 95% if you knew the top 5000 words.¹²

What better way to learn a language than by focusing on learning the most frequently used words first?

Purifying the Gold

Merely presenting Davies list to the boys would have been great, but I wondered if we could do better. After scouring through all 5000 words, I noticed that many of them were similar to the same words in English. In fact, every other word had similarities.

In all, I found ~10% of them (532 words) were nearly identical in spelling and meaning in both Spanish and English. Such words are called perfect cognates, and there are lots of them on Davies’ list.

What if I focused the kids on learning these related words first?

Even Better

With 532 perfect words to begin learning Spanish, I wondered if I could make the boys learning experience even better.

My studies revealed how pronunciation and ear tuning is crucial to language acquisition. Was it possible to have each word pronounced for the boys in perfect Spanish?

Yes! I could ask their grandmother to present the list to the boys. She is a native Colombiana and would pronounce each word correctly!

For my own learning, I switched my smartphone and tablet settings to Spanish. Words and sentences could then be highlighted and read aloud in Spanish. I don’t know if Paulina or Juan are real people, but they taught me how to pronounce thousands of words in Spanish!

From Gold to Platinum

Since returning from our trip, I’ve found four more ways to improve on the optimal first words we discovered for learning Spanish. Each improvement stems from observing the best learning techniques I could find:

Associate each word with a picture.
Have each word read aloud, automatically, using Native pronunciation (in case your Colombian grandmother isn’t available.)
Keep track of progress and the words they have trouble with and present those words differently.

To accomplish the first three, I found a digital flashcard app called Anki (the Japanese word for memory.) Anki does 1,2 and 3 and uses an algorithm to show the words you’re having trouble with more frequently until you get them down. Words you have no problem with are only displayed when you’re just about to forget them (which turns out to be the best way to improve your recall.)

Anki is free and works on all platforms. Here’s what some of “First Words” looks like on the desktop, smartphone, and tablet:

The 4rth Improvement

The 4rth improvement was discovered by going back through Davies’ list. What would be the next ideal batch of Spanish words to learn?

By allowing for words that have up to three characters difference between English and Spanish (but still have the same meaning) it wasn’t hard to find a second optimal batch of 500 words. These allow for minor spelling changes such as replacing the ’t’ with ‘c’ in ’edición’ vs. ‘edition’ and ‘nacional’ vs. national. They also allow for an ‘o’ or ‘a’ after the word as in ‘humano’ vs. ‘human’ and ‘diferente’ vs. ‘different.’

It’s a rare (non-existent?) student who might be thrown off by the minor spelling changes I’ve allowed for in the ‘non-perfect’ portion of the list. But the payoff is enormous!

If you combine the first (532) and second (500) word lists, 787 of them are in the top 3000. These words are used so frequently in Spanish, you’ll rarely read or hear a sentence formed without one!

Hiding in Plain Sight for 100 Years

Before 2006, these words were hidden in plain sight due to the absence of a robust frequency dictionary.³ Since then, “First Words” may be the first serious effort to identify all cognates in the top 5000 and present them in an optimal learning format (Anki digital flashcards.)

It took a while, but I eventually input all 1032 words into digital flashcards. Each word has just the right picture, and each is pronounced by a native Spanish speaker. Words you learn easily are only re-presented when you’re just about to forget them (to optimize recall.) Words you find harder are presented more often until they are learned.

The results have been worth it. Not only are my boys off to an optimal start, but the cards can also be made available to others to set upon their own optimal start in learning Spanish!

Suitable for ALL Ages

In case you’re wondering what this looks like, here’s our youngest going through his Spanish cards for the day.

Many of the top 1000 cognates are advanced words that young children may not yet know in their native English. Nevertheless, they are the most frequently used words in the Spanish language and, therefore, pure gold for anyone learning Spanish.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Spanish, Routlegde: “Nation (1990) has shown that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 percent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech. While Nation’s results were for English, they do at least present the possibility that, by allowing frequency to be a general guide to vocabulary learning, one task facing learners – to acquire a lexicon which will serve them well on most occasions most of the time – could be achieved quite easily.” ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩
There have been a number of other frequency dictionaries and lists for Spanish (Buchanan 1927, Eaton 1940, Rodríguez Bou 1952, García Hoz 1953, Juilland and Chang-Rodríguez 1964, Alameda and Cuetos 1995, Sebastián, Carreiras, and Cuetos 2000), but all of these suffer from significant limitations. ↩

Children

Free at Last from Spanish Gender Noun Prison!

By Terence Gillespie September 25, 2018

One of the banes of my “Must Learn Spanish” existence has been the INSANE practice of assigning a gender to EVERY NOUN in the language! As a native English speaker, I didn’t know how good I had it, to be free of this nonsense.

The only thing that used to calm me down on the “issue” was knowing how many other great languages share the same burden: Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian.

Well, I’m here to say that I’m FREE AT LAST from the gender-noun Spanish prison! And you can be too, by reading the short 197 words I’ve written, below, to break our family out of this jail. It’s as close to a get-out-of-jail-free card that you’re ever likely to find.

Masculine and Feminine Nouns

All Spanish nouns and pronouns are grammatically linked to the masculine (m.) or the feminine (f.) gender (“Gender” is a grammatical property and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with biological gender.)

It’s important to get these gender associations right because adjectives, articles, possessives, and demonstratives must also agree in gender with the noun or pronoun to which they relate. Therefore, getting the gender of a noun “wrong” can become an amplified mistake.

Fortunately, this arbitrary (and somewhat ridiculous) language burden is ** dramatically** eased by the following consistent patterns:.

Nouns referring to males are masculine.
Nouns referring to females are feminine.
Nouns ending in -o, -or, -aje, -men, -gen are masculine.
Nouns ending in -a, -ad, -ed, -ud, -ión, -umbre, -ie are feminine.
Many abstract nouns ending in -ma are masculine, (el problema, el tema, ‘theme,’ el clima, el drama, el problema, el sistema, el programa.)

Since the gender of a noun is arbitrary and their number is infinite, I disagree with teachers who say it’s best to learn the gender of a noun along with the noun itself. It’s far easier to internalize the patterns, above while taking note of any exceptions. Here’s the pattern for making nouns plural:

21 Flashcards

It took 21 flashcards to review the complete gender-noun pattern in Spanish. I made the cards using Anki’s SRS (Spaced Repetition System.) As each card is flipped, the example sentence is read aloud in perfect Spanish.

It won’t be long before they are able to forget about gender for the rest of their lives!

Bonus: Plurals in 75 Words

If a noun ends in:
1. A vowel, add -s (libro/libros, puerta/puertas.)
2. A consonant, add -es (pared/paredes, profesor/profesores.)
3. -z, change it to a -c and add -es (lápiz/lápices, luz/luces.)
4. The masculine plural is used if a group involves one or more masculine nouns: (e.g.,
Tengo muy buenos amigos (m. pl.), I have very good friends (where the friends may be male or a mixture of male
and female.)

Español

500 Optimal First Words to Learn in Spanish (that You Already Know)

By Terence Gillespie September 7, 2018

What are the most optimal first words to learn in Spanish for English speakers?

After putting more thought into it than I care to admit, the answer seems obvious (in retrospect.) Actually, you already know them, but probably didn’t realize they were Spanish words as well as English. More importantly, they are high frequently words. Spanish speakers use them all the time, and so will you if you learn Spanish. In fact, you already use them all the time, but in English.

Three Optimal Things

Three things about these words make them optimal first words to learn in Spanish:

They are very frequently used.
You already know them.
You can focus exclusively on learning to pronounce them (since you already know them.)

Too good to be true? That was my first reaction when I created the list. As you’ll see, it’s more like “the time has finally come.”

Hiding in Plain Sight for Centuries

These words have been hiding in plain sight for centuries. They are perfect (285), and near-perfect (226), high-frequency English-Spanish cognates. That is, they have the same spelling and meaning in English and Spanish and are (very) frequency used in both languages.

What’s kept them hidden is not knowing which cognates (of thousands) are the most frequently used. All the words on the 500 Optimal First Words list are in the top 5000 most frequently used words in Spanish. And 277 of them are in the top 3000! That makes them pure gold for the student first learning Spanish.

To put that in perspective, you would understand ~90% of every word spoken or written in Spanish if you knew the top 3000 words. And, your comprehension would rise to 95% if you understood the top 5000 words.[1][2]

All this, and yet, for English speakers learning Spanish, it gets (much) better.

50% of the Top 5000 Words in Spanish are Cognates!

Yes, it’s true. English speakers who want to learn Spanish get a 50% head start on the most critical words in the language.

After learning that they exist, and how to pronounce them, English speakers can say plenty (in Spanish) after learning a bit of grammar. That’s a reversal of the common complaint of being made to learn grammar and having no vocabulary with which to say anything.

To get to 50%, the top cognate verbs must be included. Verbs make up 477 of these 2500 cognates in the top 50%. As in any language, you’ll have to learn how to use verbs. But, 477 of them will be words whose meaning you already understand.

Why Doesn’t Every Spanish Teacher Start with This List?

They probably will. But, until now, it’s been impossible to formulate such a list without a decent frequency dictionary.

There’ve been six efforts to create a Spanish frequency dictionary starting in 1927.[3] They all suffered from significant limitations before Mark Davies’ breakthrough version in 2006 (book title here). That was only 12 years ago.

It takes exposure and lots of time to incorporate new information into accepted pedagogy. To my knowledge, even online curriculum providers are just starting to integrate Davies’ work into their approach to teaching Spanish.

The Cost of Cognate Acquisition: Pronunciation

You already know what they mean, how to spell them, and how to pronounce them in English. But you can’t use them in Spanish until you can pronounce them in a way that a Spanish speaker can hear them. And you have to tune your ear so that you can hear and understand them when spoken in Spanish, as well.

English and Spanish share an almost identical alphabet. But Spanish is pronounced differently enough, that the same exact word (spelled the same, with the same meaning) is unlikely to be understood if you don’t pronounce it, correctly.

Listen to a Spanish Native Speaking Perfect English

If you don’t believe me about how important pronunciation is, (and have a smartphone or tablet) go to your settings and change your language to Spanish. Then, highlight an English sentence and have it read aloud to you by the Spanish voice (which uses the Spanish rules of pronunciation.)

Don’t be surprised when “Juan” or “Paulina,” says something incomprehensible. How could that be? You’ve highlighted a correctly written English sentence to be read aloud!? Yes, and you’re hearing how a native Spanish speaker would pronounce that English sentence using the Spanish rules of pronunciation. It sounds like gibberish to an English listener.

By the way, that’s the way you sound, in reverse, to Spanish speakers when you pronounce correctly written Spanish sentences using the English rules of pronunciation.

Same Words, Worlds Apart

When in Colombia on a recent trip and talking with my aunt (who only speaks Spanish) I was finally able to form perfect Spanish sentences and was excited to say something that involved the word ‘video.’ Imagine my surprise when she had no idea what I was talking about!

The problem? I pronounced ‘video’ like the English word that it is. In Spanish, ‘vidéo’ has an accent over the second syllable. Trust me when I tell you that ‘video’ and ‘vidéo’ mean the same thing, but are worlds apart when mispronounced from your listener’s point of view.

Unless each speaker adjusts their pronunciation to the listener’s language, even perfectly formed sentences using the same alphabet (In either English or Spanish) sound like gibberish!

We might remember this when tempted to criticize each other’s “accents.”

Perfect and Non-Perfect Cognates

285 words in the 500 Optimal First Words list are perfect cognates. They have the same meaning and are spelled the same, in English and Spanish. I’ve allowed for the Spanish accent mark placed over the same letter, e.g., mamá vs. mama, réplica vs. replica. I’ve also allowed for words spelled with two letters in English, ‘accessible,’ but only one letter in Spanish, ‘accesible.’

The 226 non-perfect cognates on the list allow for minor spelling changes such as replacing the ‘t’ with ‘c’ in ‘edición’ vs. ‘edition’ and ‘nacional’ vs. national. They also allow for an ‘o’ or ‘a’ after the word as in ‘humano’ vs. ‘human’ and ‘diferente’ vs. ‘different.’

It’s a rare (non-existent?) student who might be thrown off by the minor spelling changes I’ve allowed for in the ‘non-perfect’ portion of the list. I’ve kept it strict to enable the student to focus almost exclusively on pronunciation.

But What about Verbs & Grammar?

Cognates should come first. Every cognate you learn (to pronounce) in the top 5000 is pure gold! In fact, you rarely hear a Spanish sentence without one.

I’m teaching my children to go as far as they want with cognates until they’re ready for a change of subject or pace. Besides that, they are only 9 and 5 years old, and many of the cognates are words they are learning in English for the first time. That’s double points for homeschoolers!

Verb Cognates

There are 477 near-cognate Spanish verbs in the top 5000. But verb endings in the infinitive are “foreign” to the English ear, and more than two letters need be modified from their English counterpart. Therefore, the low-hanging fruit of noun and adjective cognates should come first, in my opinion. Only then can the student focus exclusively on pronunciation (crucial skill #1) and ear-training (crucial skill #2) from the start.

Grammar Madness

Putting grammar before words is demotivating. Why put students through a grammar lesson when they have no words with which to apply that grammar?

By learning cognates first, the student emerges with lots of words and excellent pronunciation.

The First 100

Here’s the first 100 of the 500 optimal first words list. Four words appear twice: once as a noun, and again as an adjective. The fact that these words (solo, final, presente, and total) appear twice in the top 5000 words makes them pure gold. Instead of being disappointed that they’re the same, celebrate them as getting two high-frequency words in one. But, just in case it makes you feel cheated, I’ve added four more to the list for a total of 104.

The First 100 Optimal First Words to Learn in Spanish
Word	IPA	Function	Frequency
solo	’solo	adv.	102
momento		m.noun	108
solo	’solo	adj.	160
problema		m.noun	169
historia		f.noun	192
idea	i’ðea	f.noun	193
familia	faˈmi.lja	f.noun	201
importante		adj.	207
humano		adj.	218
posible		adj.	225
general	xene’ɾal	adj.	227
relación		f.noun	230
situación		f.noun	268
social	so’θjal	adj.	280
español		adj.	285
final		mf.noun	307
condición		f.noun	341
color	koˈloɾ	m.noun	359
experiencia		f.noun	361
diferente		adj.	365
natural	natu’ɾal	adj.	414
atención		f.noun	441
real	re’al	adj.	462
ocasión	oka’sjon	f.noun	463
favor	fa’βoɾ	m.noun	468
principal	pɾinθi’pal	adj.	496
animal	a.niˈmal	m.noun	497
base	’base	f.noun	498
posición		f.noun	503
nacional		adj.	507
superior	supe’ɾjor	adj.	535
función		f.noun	543
grave	’gɾaβe	adj.	548
decisión	deθi’sjon	f.noun	549
música	ˈmu.si.ka	f.noun	550
expresión	ekspɾe’sjon	f.noun	555
producto		m.noun	589
personal	peɾ.soˈnal	adj.	590
imposible	im.poˈsi.βle	adj.	592
plan	’plan	m.noun	598
origen	o.ɾiˈxen	m.noun	606
interior	in.te.ˈɾjoɾ	m.noun	614
profesor	pɾo.feˈsoɾ	m-f.noun	621
total	to’tal	adj.	629
opinión	o.piˈnjon	f.noun	632
profesional	pɾo.fe.sjoˈnal	adj.	640
capital	ka.pi.ˈtal	mf.noun	651
material	ma.teˈɾjal	m.noun	656
simple	’simple	adj.	661
normal	noɾ’mal	adj.	664
actual	äk’twäl	adj.	676
información		f.noun	682
popular	popu’laɾ	adj.	709
error	eˈroɾ	m.noun	738
reunión	rew’njon	f.noun	746
final	fi’nal	mf.noun	771
civil	θiˈβil	adj.	774
doctor	d̪okˈtor	m-f.noun	778
construcción		f.noun	794
presente		m.noun	802
director	di.ɾek’toɾ	m-f.noun	816
radio	ˈra.ðjo	mf.noun	824
educación		f.noun	845
operación		f.noun	848
particular	paɾtiku’laɾ	adj.	854
solución		f.noun	871
intención		f.noun	876
control	kon’tɾol	m.noun	889
conversación		f.noun	892
generación		f.noun	906
visión	bi’sjon	f.noun	908
labor	la’βoɾ	f.noun	930
revolución		f.noun	957
maestro	ma’estɾo	m.noun	961
plaza	’plaθa	f.noun	1020
sensación		f.noun	1023
obligación		f.noun	1040
total	to’tal	m.noun	1043
región	re.ˈxjon	f.noun	1050
discusión	dis.ku’sjon	f.noun	1055
central	θen.ˈtɾal	adj.	1062
televisión	te.le.βiˈsjon	f.noun	1078
moral	mo.ˈɾal	adj.	1082
crisis	ˈkɾi.sis	f.noun	1085
presente		m.noun	1088
sector	sek’tor	m.noun	1096
accidente		m.noun	1098
oficial	ofi’θjal	adj.	1099
intelectual	intelek’twal	adj.	1103
institución		f.noun	1115
conclusión	konklu’sjon	f.noun	1138
exterior	eks.teˈɾioɾ	adj.	1163
cámara	ˈka.ma.ɾa	f.noun	1172
creación		f.noun	1173
internacional		adj.	1189
original	o.ɾi.xi’nal	adj.	1191
profesión	pɾofe’sjon	f.noun	1206
honor	o’noɾ	m.noun	1211
organización		f.noun	1243
café	kaˈfe	m.noun	1250
americano		adj.	1261
interior	in.te.ˈɾjoɾ	m.noun	1263
cultural	kul’tuɾal	adj.	1277
hospital	os.piˈtal	m.noun	1298

Anki Deck with All 500 Words

I’ve made an Anki flashcard deck with all 500 words. Anki is a free digital flashcard program that enables the use of pictures, audio, video, and has lots of other great features to optimize recall. The cards can be viewed on a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

After you’ve viewed a card twice, Anki uses a spaced repetition algorithm to show you the card again at just the right time to optimize recall. This is called SRS or spaced repetition system and it was invented by Dr. Piotr Wozniak.

Each word in the 500 Optimal First Words deck has a picture, audio pronunciation in perfect Spanish, the IPA symbol, the function of the word, and its frequency rank in Spanish.

There are two cards for each word so they can be viewed forwards (Word on the front, picture and sound on the back) and backward (Picture on the front, word and sound on the back.)

These flashcards are suitable for anyone learning Spanish. The pictures are the best illustration of the word I could find and are also child-friendly. Here’s what the cards look like after both sides have been revealed.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Spanish, Routlegde: “Nation (1990) has shown that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 percent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech. While Nation’s results were for English, they do at least present the possibility that, by allowing frequency to be a general guide to vocabulary learning, one task facing learners – to acquire a lexicon which will serve them well on most occasions most of the time – could be achieved quite easily.” ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩
There have been a number of other frequency dictionaries and lists for Spanish (Buchanan 1927, Eaton 1940, Rodríguez Bou 1952, García Hoz 1953, Juilland and Chang-Rodríguez 1964, Alameda and Cuetos 1995, Sebastián, Carreiras, and Cuetos 2000), but all of these suffer from significant limitations. ↩

Children

Aventuras de un Papá Educando en el Hogar Parte 5: Tomando Vacaciones en un Idioma

By Terence Gillespie June 27, 2018

Nuestras vacaciones familiares este año son para Colombia, Sudamérica, para visitar a familiares y aprender español. Afortunadamente, nos quedamos con la familia todo el tiempo. Sin gastos de hotel, nuestro viaje de seis semanas costará poco más que un viaje a Florida.

Bienvenido A Colombia

En contraste con la imagen que la mayoría de los estadounidenses tienen de Colombia, dos tercios del país y todas las ciudades principales están en las montañas. Estamos hablando de grandes montañas cubiertas de nieve con retiros de cabañas de estilo suizo. Por ejemplo, la elevación del terreno en Bogotá es de 8.660 pies o 1/2 milla más alta que Denver. Aunque nuestra visita está más cerca del ecuador, todavía está en las montañas. Incluso cerca del ecuador, aquellos con los medios para vivir a mayor altitud pueden escapar del calor tropical.

Idioma y Familia

De todas las muchas razones para visitar Colombia, este viaje es sobre familia e idioma. Es hora de que nuestros muchachos readquieran el idioma español al que han estado expuestos desde su nacimiento. Eso les permitirá hablar con sus familiares mientras disfrutan de muchos otros beneficios de saber español.

Puntos de Partida

Mi esposa habla español e inglés perfecto sin acento detectable en ninguno de los idiomas. Sus padres tienen un acento en inglés, pero lo han estado hablando con fluidez durante décadas.

Como los padres de mi esposa viven con nosotros, nuestros hijos han estado expuestos al español y al inglés desde el momento en que nacieron. Como era de esperar, su discurso fue “retrasado”. Sin embargo, su español comenzó a desaparecer desde su primer día de escuela privada. Mi esposa y yo estamos ansiosos por traerlo a la superficie más pronto, en lugar de más tarde.

He incursionado en español desde la escuela secundaria y he podido viajar cómodamente en América Latina. Puedo leer español razonablemente bien, pero gran parte de eso se debe a la familiaridad con las raíces latinas y griegas. En cuanto a hablar el idioma, las ilusiones de fluidez desaparecen rápidamente entre los taxistas chilenos. No hace falta mucho esfuerzo para no entender una sola palabra en los últimos 30 segundos antes de darme cuenta de que no estoy hablando efectivamente con nadie.

Para ser justos, el español chileno y el argentino se hablan notablemente rápido y tienen muchos modismos. Pueden dejar desesperados incluso a hablantes nativos de español por una consonante bien definida o dos.

El Vínculo Débil, Padre o Ambos

Cuando se trata de hablar español, soy el eslabón débil de nuestra familia. No creo que eso importe tanto a los chicos si yo no fuera su padre. Por alguna razón, el lenguaje del padre parece tener un efecto más fuerte en el lenguaje de los niños que el de otros miembros de la familia. Por ejemplo, soy un lector voraz y mis amigos dicen que mi vocabulario (en inglés) se está extendiendo a los niños. Desafortunadamente, el hecho de que solo hable inglés en la casa también está contribuyendo a su falta de interés en el español. Por el contrario, el español perfecto que mi esposa y parientes políticos hablan continuamente no les está llegando a los muchachos.

La responsabilidad, por lo tanto, está en mí. Si quiero que los niños aprendan español, voy a tener que aprenderlo primero. Afortunadamente, he tenido un comienzo bastante largo y prolongado.

Cerrando el Laguna Inglés

Cuando mi esposa y parientes políticos hablan entre ellos, siempre es en español. Hablan inglés solo cuando estoy cerca. Los niños usan esto como una escapatoria para escapar de las dificultades de aprender español. Una de nuestras tácticas es cerrar esta laguna. Para hacer eso, papá necesita hablar español en la casa.

Alcanzar la Fluidez de la Base

Yo diría que la capacidad de llevar a cabo los asuntos cotidianos de la casa en español (solo) califica como fluidez básica. Los profesores de español dicen que esto requeriría ~ 2000 palabras de vocabulario, la capacidad de conjugar 10 verbos esenciales en el tiempo presente, pasado y futuro, y la comprensión de una lista relativamente corta de reglas gramaticales críticas. Sin embargo, dado que no estoy empezando de cero, me gustaría llevarlo un poco más allá.

Sobreaprendizaje

Me encantaría poder traducir mi escritura al español y, algún día, escribir en español. Usando el vocabulario en inglés como un indicador aproximado, conocer las 5000 palabras utilizadas con mayor frecuencia permite comprender ~ 95% del texto escrito.¹

Nation (1990)² ha demostrado que las 4,000-5,000 palabras más frecuentes representan hasta el 95 por ciento de un texto escrito y las 1,000 palabras más frecuentes representan el 85 por ciento del habla. Si bien los resultados de Nation fueron para inglés, al menos presentan la posibilidad de que, al permitir que la frecuencia sea una guía general para el aprendizaje del vocabulario, una tarea que enfrentan los estudiantes: adquirir un léxico que les sirva en la mayoría de las ocasiones la mayor parte del tiempo. podría lograrse con bastante facilidad.

Sería molesto no entender una de cada 20 palabras en inglés (95% de comprensión). Sin embargo, suponiendo que las mismas estadísticas se mantengan generalmente en español, estaría encantado de tener esa instalación con Español.

Para la perspectiva, el vocabulario para el porcentaje de comprensión del inglés se desarrolla de la siguiente manera:

1000 palabras: 85% del habla
2000 palabras: 92% del discurso
5000 palabras: 95% del texto escrito

La curva exponencial comienza en 1000 y se aplana en 5000 palabras. Estoy excediendo el objetivo de fluidez de base e intentando 5000 en este viaje. Teóricamente, eso me permite tener que buscar solo una palabra de las veinte al escribir o hacer traducciones entre inglés y español.

Espero aprender pronto (sentir y experimentar) cómo estas estimaciones resultan útiles para escribir, hablar y traducir. Sin duda, se necesitará una buena cantidad de gramática para desatar el poder de todas estas palabras nuevas.

Una ventaja de aumentar mis metas para la fluidez en español es que aprenderé en exceso el idioma necesario para las conversaciones en la casa. Incluso si lleva mucho tiempo alcanzar mis metas más altas, hablar en español por la casa para el beneficio de los niños será una brisa relativa. También me inclinaré menos a “hacer trampa” cuando esté bajo estrés para communicarme.

Primeros Pasos para Los Chicos

Mientras trabajo para cerrar el laguna inglés, les he dado a los niños una lista ilustrada de 625 de las palabras más usadas para aprender en español. En realidad, su abuelita les está ayudando a repasar la lista. Ella está haciendo que todo sea divertido y pronunciando cada palabra como un Colombiana nativa. Eso viene naturalmente a la abuelita porque ella es una Colombiana nativa.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A frequency dictionary of modern Spanish, Routlegde ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩

Homeschooling

Adventures of a Homeschooling Dad Part 5: Taking a Language Vacation

By Terence Gillespie June 15, 2018

Our family vacation this year is to Colombia, South America, to visit relatives and learn Spanish. Thankfully, we’re staying with family the whole time. With no hotel expenses, our six-week trip will cost little more than a trip to Florida!

Bienvenido A Colombia

In contrast to the image most Americans have of Colombia, two-thirds of the country and all of the major cities are in the mountains. We’re talking big snow-covered mountains with Swiss-style chalet retreats. For example, the ground elevation in Bogota is 8,660 feet or 1/2 mile higher than Denver. Although our visit is closer to the equator, it’s still in the mountains. Even close to the equator, those with the means to live at higher altitudes can escape the tropical heat.

Language & Family

Of all the many reasons to visit Colombia, this trip is about family and language. It’s time for our boys to reacquire the Spanish language they’ve been exposed to since birth. That will enable them to talk with their relatives while enjoying many other benefits of knowing Spanish.

Starting Points

My wife speaks perfect Spanish and English with no detectable accent in either language. Her parents have an accent in Engish but have been speaking it fluently for decades.

Since my wife’s parents live with us, our sons have been exposed to Spanish and English from the time they were born. Their speech was predictably “delayed” as a result. However, their Spanish started to disappear from their first day of private school. My wife and I are keen to bring it back to the surface sooner, rather than later.

I’ve dabbled in Spanish since high-school and have been able to travel comfortably in Latin America. I can read Spanish reasonably well, but much of that is due to familiarity with Latin and Greek roots. As for actually speaking the language, illusions of fluency disappear quickly around Chilean taxi drivers. It doesn’t take many spurts of not understanding a single word for the last 30 seconds before realizing that I’m not effectively talking with anyone.

To be fair, Chilean and Argentinian Spanish are spoken notoriously fast and have lots of idioms. They can leave even native Spanish speakers desperate for a well-defined consonant or two.

The Weak Link, Father, or Both

When it comes to speaking Spanish, I’m the weak link in our family. I don’t think that would matter so much to the boys if I weren’t also their father. For some reason, the language of the father seems to have a stronger effect on the language of the children than that of other family members. For example, I’m a voracious reader and friends say my (English) vocabulary is spilling over to the boys. Unfortunately, the fact that I speak only English around the house is also contributing to their lack of interest in Spanish. In contrast, the perfect Spanish my wife and in-laws talk continually is not getting through to the boys.

The onus, therefore, is on me. If I want the boys to learn Spanish, I’m going to have to learn it first. Happily, I’ve had a rather long and drawn out headstart.

Closing the English Loophole

When my wife and in-laws talk to each other, it’s always in Spanish. They speak English only when I’m around. The boys use this as a loophole to escape the difficulties of learning Spanish. One of our tactics is to close this loophole. To do that, Dad needs to speak Spanish around the house.

Reaching Base Fluency

I’d say the ability to conduct everyday affairs around the house in Spanish (only) qualifies as base fluency. Spanish teachers say this would require ~2000 words of vocabulary, the ability to conjugate an essential 10 verbs into the present, past, and future tenses, and the grasp of a relatively short list of critical grammar rules. However, since I’m not starting from scratch, I’d like to take it a little further.

Overlearning

I would love to be able to translate my English writing into Spanish and, someday, write in Spanish. Using English vocabulary as a rough gauge, knowing the most frequently used 5000 words enables one to comprehend ~95% of written text.¹

Nation (1990)² has shown that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 percent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech. While Nation’s results were for English, they do at least present the possibility that, by allowing frequency to be a general guide to vocabulary learning, one task facing learners – to acquire a lexicon which will serve them well on most occasions most of the time – could be achieved quite easily.

It would be annoying to not understand one out of 20 English words (95% comprehension.) However, presuming the same stats hold generally true for Spanish, I’d be thrilled to have that facility with Español.

For perspective, the vocabulary to percentage comprehension of English breaks out as follows:

1000 Words: 85% of speech
2000 Words: 92% of speech
5000 Words: 95% of written text

The exponential curve starts at 1000 and flattens out at 5000 words. I’m overshooting the goal for base fluency and trying for 5000 on this trip. Theoretically, that well leave me only having to look up one word out of twenty when writing or doing translations between English and Spanish.

I hope to soon learn (feel, and experience) how these estimates pan out for writing, speaking, and translating. No doubt, a fair amount of grammar will be needed to unleash the power of all these new words.

An advantage to raising my goals for Spanish fluency is that I’ll be overlearning the language needed for conversations around the house. Even if it takes a long time to reach my higher goals, talking in Spanish around the house for the benefit of the kids will be a relative breeze. I’ll also be less inclined to “cheat” when under stress to communicate.

First Steps for the Boys

While I’m working to close the English loophole, I’ve given the kids an illustrated list of 625 of the most frequently used words to learn in Spanish. Actually, their abuelita is helping them go through the list. She is making everything fun and pronouncing every word like a native Colombiana. That comes naturally to abuelita because she is a native Colombiana.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A frequency dictionary of modern Spanish, Routlegde ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩

Children

The Co-Opting of Salman Khan and His Academy

By Terence Gillespie May 19, 2018

Seven years ago, I had Kahn Academy slated as a near perfect mathematics curriculum for my sons, when they were ready. The testimonials of grade-schoolers doing college calculus were impressive. That they were doing so by watching videos at their own pace was all I needed to hear.

Then, something awful happened.

Sal Kahn Met Google, then Bill Gates

Not long after discovering Kahn’s videos, I saw him discussing “Innovation in Education” with Bill Gates.

What did Kahn have to learn from Gates about education? Gates had skipped out of college to become a billionaire. And his common core was failing miserably?!

In fairness to Kahn, the outcry against common core, introduced in 2010, was not yet nation-wide. At the time of their meeting in 2012, it was not the anti-endorsement of Gates for “innovation in education” it would soon become.

In retrospect, the co-opting of Kahn and his academy began in 2010 when he received $2 million from Google for creating new courses and translating content into other languages.

They Even Got Math Wrong

Ironically, the worst complaints about common core are in Kahn’s area of expertise: mathematics. Isn’t math the easiest subject to get right in a curriculum?

According to common core expert James Pesta, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, the curriculum:

Changes math into writing and drawing. Instead of solving math problems, the students must draw circles, tubes, and squares to solve a problem.
Takes the natural parts and makes them non-intuitive.
Pushes exposure to algebra out to high-school from the usual start in 6th or 7th grade.
Shifts the purpose away from getting the right answer to getting a group consensus on what the correct answer might be.
Turns math into a subject for which even parents who are experts in math cannot help their children.

That’s great for kids who want to avoid math, altogether. But it’s a complete waste of time for kids that do.

Professor James Milgram, who did the calculations for the Apollo moonshots, explains why he wouldn’t sign off on common core math:

How could an expert in math like Khan, who’d made his reputation by helping grade-schoolers do college-level math, be fooled?

The Core of Common Core

In an interview on the Tom Woods show, Pesta says the unstated goal of common core is training parents to accept that only the state can teach their children, properly. Pesta also believes that common core is a vehicle for teaching children a one-sided ideological view:

Why else would they have children reading executive orders from President Obama and EPA tracts instead of the classics of literature?

The premise of Common Core, when you boil it right down, is that the state owns your kids, not you. And we all should be very worried about that.

Is Kahn’s Academy Salvageable?

It’s best to let Kahn speak for himself on whether his academy is a non-common-core alternative. Here’s Khan in 2013:

“…When we looked at the standards, when we looked at the items coming out of the assessment consortium, smarter balanced, we realized that this is a very very very good standard.”

“Right now, we have a team of teachers, of professors, of graduate students who are working closely with us, working very closely with many of the authors of the common core itself, to make sure that we intentionally create content that really hits at the conceptual spirit of the common core.”

Conceptual spirit, Sal?

Do you mean the “conceptual spirit” of forestalling algebra until high-school? The “conceptual spirit” of having children read presidential executive orders and EPA tracts instead of classic literature? The “conceptual spirit” of the most centrally federalized education scheme ever devised?

A popular question on Khan’s website is “Do you have content for non-Common Core users?”

After two paragraphs of stalling, the answer is:

Due to the small size of our content team, we don’t currently have the resources to pursue a curriculum alignment with non-Common Core standards.

2016 Update from Sal

“Now we have 150,000 exercises and many thousands of videos vetted by the authors of common core!”

Can I Trust You to be Alone with My Children?

Curriculums are best chosen the same way parents decide on a tutor. Trusting them to be alone with your children is a good start.

Would you trust a tutor who did any of the following to be alone with your child?

Leaves gaping holes in essential subjects.
Confuses them with lots of words when a simple answer will do.
Uses methods that even expert parents don’t understand.
Trains them on political agendas instead of teaching them the subject at hand.

Some accuse parents of using school as a babysitter. But, would even those parents hire a babysitter who behaved in such ways?

Failure to Who?

To parents that want the best education possible for their children, common core is a failure. However, it’s not a failure to Gates. His goals have little in common with those of individual parents.

Gates wants to impose “standards” on children, worldwide. Here he is admitting that doing so requires making a range of compromises that will hold many children back.

The uniform approach, sort of monolithic state-by-state approach that we have, yes that probably holds things back. But politically, to get that to change is very hard. I mean, charter schools at California shorts their charter schools in a way that most of them are are financially unstable right now. And, you know, the Union often are used for the status quo, whether it’s against charters or against personnel systems. So, it’s very very tough because everybody wants a minimum standard. And using a market-based approach you worry that you won’t hit that minimum and so you get these kinds of rigid approaches.”

That’s fair warning to all discerning parents. Common core cannot (and was not designed to) match the results of homeschooling or private schools. Neither must compromise with a union, take rigid monolithic approaches, or meet only minimum standards. All three of those “requirements” for Gates is tantamount to failure in a homeschool or private school.

Gates says that using a market-based approach makes him “worry that you won’t hit that minimum and so you get these kinds of rigid approaches.” Prior to his co-opting of Kahn, Sal’s market-based approach was mopping the floor with any educational innovation Gates had ever dreamed of. But, now he’s worried about turning education over to the market from which Kahn’s Academy emerged? This is either willful ignorance or another checkmark in the unqualified column for Gates on “innovation in education.”

Making Common Core Irrelevant

As tragic as it was to watch the co-opting of Salman Kahn and his academy, the work he began is being carried out by other teachers. Their classrooms are free of “rigid, monolithic, minimum” standards. And, the fruits of their market-based labor have already put any child with web access only a few clicks away from escaping Gate’s “innovations.”

Even with the many superior curriculums, already online, common core will not become irrelevant until parents become aware of them. They must also dare to walk away from so-called traditional models of education. Of course, referring to common core as traditional is like referring to an 8-year-old as a great great grandfather.

Outliers’ Perspective

Khan let his academy be co-opted by billionaires and “standards” with a regrettable “Conceptual spirit.” Thanks to other teachers who’ve taken up the work Kahn set out to do, the impact is minimal, if not zero.

Professor Pesta describes common core as “the most centrally federalized education scheme ever devised.” Unfortunately, states have a long history of injecting themselves into the arena of education. Aside from the Cathedral schools under Charlemagne in the early 9th century, state intervention in education has produced lackluster, and lately catastrophic, results.

Today, western civilization is still recovering from the Prussian model that replaced education with mere training. Common core takes the Prussian model and adds ideological indoctrination, the forestalling of exposure to essential subjects to early adulthood, and unnecessary confusion to straightforward subjects like math.

Remarkably, though still unvalidated or tested, common core consortiums managed to push their “standards” into the SAT college admission tests in 2016. Even parents dead-set against common core now believe they must go along with it lest their children are prevented from getting into college. This is false, but a topic for a separate essay.

The Solution is Yours

It is the responsibility of parents, not the state, to provide their children with an education. The shirking of that responsibility invites third parties into the mix.

Fortunately, all underperforming third parties can be disinvited if parents educate their children without relying on the state. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing it yourself but making it happen. If you can afford them, there are still excellent private schools “out there.” Alternatively, more curriculums arrive on the scene, every day.

Most property taxes are justified in the name of paying for local public schools. This will almost certainly mean forgoing the benefit of property tax money for the public schools your children will not be attending.

Update: After watching ~450 videos, I can wholeheartedly recommend three courses in the Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum: Western Civilization I & II, and Government 1B. I’ll hold off on further recommendations until I’ve taken the course, personally. That also helps ensure my kids don’t get ahead of me, anytime soon!

BTW, those three courses are also available as bonuses when purchasing the “Master” level of Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom.

Children

16 Things Parents of Expensive Boarding Schools Want for their Children’s Education

By Terence Gillespie March 27, 2018

Take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs a single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or St. Paul’s could. — John Taylor Gatto

This article is a summary of the Boarding School part of J.T. Gatto’s speech: “What Does ‘Educated’ Mean?” If you’ve got 90-minutes to spare, I highly recommend downloading the transcript and listening to the entire speech.

(Note: Rather than put everything in quotes, I’d prefer to make this article more readable by keeping John’s words in normal text. I have shortened and condensed John’s speech for quick reading but these are his ideas and words. I’m the beneficiary of John’s wisdom and experience while making them more accessible to other homeschooling parents who may be on the same path.)

16 Things Parents of Expensive Boarding Schools Want for their Children’s Education

Now let’s take a look at what the parents at the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent.

The schools have had an enormous effect on 20th century Society through the efforts of their graduates. Because of that importance, I’ve reduced the practices in these places to a formula so that you can see clearly that there’s nothing they do that isn’t easily within your reach. The formula looks like this in an elite boarding school.

But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or St. Paul’s could.

Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So the manors would be reflexive. That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person.
The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down.
Elite private school parents want their children to be advised only by people that they personally respect and Trust.
The next thing elite private school parents want is that their children be taught love and appreciation for the land, for the natural world of plants and animals, not for the scientific knowledge but because they recognize that unless you have a relation with nature, that’s easy your life becomes lonely and barren and abstract. That’s why these rich kids ride horses and sailboats. Not for the competitive sports aspect of it, because it puts them in touch with nature.
Next, they want their children to develop a public sense of decorum so that they can adapt naturally to every setting they find themselves in without provoking anger or opposition.
They want a common core of Western culture taught, not so they can pass tests, but so that all the generations the grandparents the parents and the children are certain to be comfortable with a shared set of ideas and tastes and values.
Elite boarding school parents want leadership exercises taught to their children. That’s an important ongoing theme of curriculum. They are not interested in their children being part of a managed herd.
A major concern of boarding school parents is that their children get individual attention.Their children are in small classes. By small, I mean nine or less.
They want continuous pressure put on their children to stretch their individual limits. That is, if you find four or five talents emerging, you don’t allow the kid to be satisfied with minimal performance.
There’s an emphasis in elite schools on hands-on, face-to-face experience. You never go to a book if you can go to the person who wrote the book or someone close to that person. You get as close to the origin and the idea as possible.
There’s an emphasis on writing. Homeschoolers read well but they don’t necessarily write so well. 300 words is good enough for a lot of uses. But if you can write a thousand words you can hold your own in any sort of debate, you can write op-ed pieces for the newspaper …it isn’t very hard to do.
They want kids at elite schools to develop the power of accurate observation. They don’t have to be Picasso or Rembrandt. They have to accurately transcribe what they’re able to see. The reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is.
Have experience with the master creations of music, of painting, of sculptor, of architecture, dance, poetry, the other arts. And have a familiarity with folk art as well.
Scientific knowledge of the sky above and the earth below.
Practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from, it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England.
The development of a determination to demand the highest quality performance from yourself. Even if other people say hey that was wonderful, and you know that it’s a lot less than you could have done I think you’re better off.

Conclusion

Nothing I thought was an education, and nothing that the wealthiest people in the country think is an education costs anything at all. Fifty million public school children in the United States could be reared this way. It wouldn’t cost anything.

Children

The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto

By Terence Gillespie March 12, 2018

In 2012, Richard Grove conducted and produced a 6-hour video interview with John Taylor Gatto. For those who don’t have the time to read and digest J.T. Gatto’s excellent work in book form, this interview provides an alternative. I’ve found it to be ideally listened to at double-speed! That makes it an ideal use of the next 2.5 hours of your time as John is a game-changer in the area of education.

The transcript of the interview is 41,500 words. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Tragedy and Hope and please consider supporting their work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube.

The excerpts, below, are 1/20th of the entire transcript. They are not a summary of the presentation.

RG: is Richard Grove
JTG: is John Taylor Gatto

RG: Is there any connection between frustration and aggression? And what effect does schooling have on that?

JTG: Well, you answer your own question by asking it. The connection is intimate. School removes your volition in all important ways, even who you speak to. Are not they arts of association as valuable or more valuable than anything else you learn when you’re young?

Getting Into Harvard

I read how executive hiring is done and it almost never has to do with your training in whatever you’re been hired for. I’m thinking of Apple now, I believe. Is this the person we’d like to have around three years from now, bend an elbow with, or play golf with or just talk with? And that’s why you’re passed from set of executives, to set of executives. So they can sign off, yeah he’s ok, you know… We don’t tell kids that. It’s people who have the highest grade point average in the highest SAT scores. Well I spent an hour, not so long ago, within 10 years, with the admissions officer of Harvard College and, about 30 years ago an hour with the admissions director at Princeton. And let me tell you their polite dismissal of grades and SAT scores was intimidating to listen to. As if you’d have to be crazy to let somebody in.

Let me see if I can condense how you get into Harvard or Princeton. Of course, you can get into both by donating a building but how do other people get in? They are being analyzed on the basis of their ability to either become wealthy or famous. Either one will work. Fame is like wearing a billboard saying I went to Princeton. There’s that actress Jodie Foster, “I went to Princeton”. Look at where the rest of the actors and directors went, they didn’t go anywhere (laughter). But Jodie did so that’s one we hear about. The Harvard lady said, “we look for a record of excellence and what this excellence consists of.” It’s sometime in the first 18 years of your life, figuring out how to add value to the people around you. She didn’t say this in a way that catches public attention, so you might walk across the United States or bicycle the perimeter of the country or row across the Atlantic Ocean, as a physical way. You might start a little charity or set up some weather service or some pollution monitoring around Hartford. There are a substantial number, a small fraction but a substantial number, of kids doing this as we sit here. They’re writing a record of being able to add value to the community around them.

Hobbies

And then the other fellow, the Princeton guy said the same thing in different words. I asked him in 1968 roughly, asked him what part of a resume submitted to you do you look at first. The answer metaphorically caused my jaw to open. “Hobbies,” he said. I said, “I’ve been taught all my life to leave that off because it’s not germane.” He said, “on the contrary, it’s the only honest information you’re likely to get.” How did someone spend their time when it’s their free choice to spend? He said “it’s a window into their mind and their heart”.

What Kind of Hobbies?

I said what kind of hobbies? He said, “well ideally someone would have a physical hobby, an intellectual hobby and a social hobby”. That would show they are exploring these large… well, physical hobbies you mean football, baseball? Well, he said “it’s better than nothing but we would prefer not to see team sports”. I said I’d been told all my life that team sports identify your ability to work in a team. He said what happens in a team sport is if you decide to dog it, it’s very hard to tell which guy on the line has dogged it or not, or which running back has gone down quicker than he should have gone down. He said we prefer solo hobbies that involve physical danger. You mean you want kids to put their necks at risk? For example, what? He said well horseback riding is a dead giveaway. The horse weighs a half ton or more. If you do trail riding and you don’t know what you’re doing, your head gets caught on the branch and you’re the headless horseman. If the horse doesn’t like you it’ll roll over on top of you. I know immediately because the last time I rode a horse was down in Veracruz, Mexico and the horse didn’t like me and took me out on the main highway with crazed Mexican drivers going a hundred miles an hour in 18 wheelers. And it laid down on top of me. I was terrified! I could see these trucks coming. I didn’t like it and it’s the last time I rode. So he said you have to actually know what you’re doing. You can’t say is this an A job, or a B job . If you live in are intact, it is.

Then he said, “sailing a small boat”. These little 12 footers outside of land. If you don’t know what you’re doing you wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, you know. Or if wind comes up you can’t see landmarks because of the waves. I said, but those things are associated with the prosperous classes. What can somebody in ordinary circumstances do? He says well, we just let somebody in and this is probably one of the nicest factoids in my mind, in my life. We just let someone in who invented his own sport and kept records competing against himself, his past performance, his present performance. It was–get ready for this, visualize this—seat-less unicycle riding over broken terrain. If I had 10 lifetimes the plot of doing that wouldn’t occur to me. Aside from getting on a unicycle, let alone without a seat, let alone riding it over broken terrain. So they let him in because they knew he was on the fast track.

So we tell these lies and, of course, many of the people who tell the lie, believe the lie. Well surely they’re going to take valedictorians. Well, last year Harvard turned down eight out of every ten valedictorians who applied. And the two they took in, they didn’t take in because they were valedictorians. So by removing this component from the student imaginations y, u can control to some extent who even applies to Harvard and then who gets in. Because they don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the IT… “garbage in garbage out”.

Standardized Tests Don’t Matter

The evidence that all of us know standardized tests don’t measure what they claim they measure is that nobody, I mean nobody, that you encounter on the upper reaches of society would dream of hiring somebody on the basis of those tests or grade point averages. You’d be playing Russian roulette because they measure nothing. The grades largely measure that you memorize what you are told to memorize. I mean, there are a few other things but that’s the heart of it. So now you know you have somebody who’s obedient, and probably for a clerk that is a good measure. Not for someone who has to adapt to changing circumstances, you know, by the natural selection process of reality.

Schooled to the Point of Extinction

It’s fairly easy without being a wise guy or very learned as long as you retained the ability to think independently from the data in front of you, to penetrate the masks, the contentions that don’t conform to everyday reality. So no one will hire you as a CEO and ask you what your… but if you examine the data that’s available about big-time politicians. Now we have, and I don’t think it would surprise anybody, that George Bush, the most recent one was a C average high school/prep school and a C average at Yale. What does surprise people is that the candidate he ran against was a C average in prep school, in the C average at Yale, and the lower C average than George Bush. Kerry of Massachusetts. The best evidence that the nation has been schooled to the point of extinction is that they were fraternity brothers at Yale and I’ll skip its interesting reputation; it only has 15 members. And they were fraternity brothers at Yale. There’s 308 million of us! I mean, mathematically I wouldn’t know how to set the odds but they would be stupendous. No one mentioned it, or if they did it was to quickly get over that. That should have been headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Fraternity Brothers at Yale Run for President!”

Amish

What “Educated” Means to the Amish

By Terence Gillespie March 2, 2018

That the Amish have done so well puts a realistic base of possibility under the ideal of an independent citizenry as the proper goal of schooling. — John Taylor Gatto

This article is a summary of the Amish part of J.T. Gatto’s speech: “What Does ‘Educated’ Mean?” If you’ve got 90-minutes to spare, I highly recommend downloading the transcript and listening to the entire speech.

(Note: Rather than put everything in quotes, I’d prefer to make this article more readable by keeping John’s words in standard text. I have shortened and condensed John’s speech for quick reading but these are his ideas and words. I’m the beneficiary of John’s wisdom and experience while making them more accessible to other homeschooling parents who may be on the same path.)

The Lancaster Amish

The old order Amish are a group of 320,000+ well-mannered, prosperous, law-abiding people who came to America in the early 18th century with little more than the clothes on their back. Everybody’s heard about the Amish, but very few people know the astonishing details, and here they are.

Virtually every adult Amisher has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.
There’s almost no crime in the community, no violence in the community, no alcoholism in the community, no divorce in the community, no drug taking. There’s a little bit of each of those things, but it’s so microscopic that when it happens, it makes the front page of newspapers because it just doesn’t happen.
They accept no government help with health care, with old-age assistance, or with schooling after the eighth grade, and for most of the century not even that. They were compelled by the government to accept 1 through 8 schooling.
The success rate of Amish in small business is 95% (the rate for non-Amish business is 15%.)
All Amish children have a chance to take an expense-paid sabbatical year away from Amish life when they arrive at the verge of adulthood. The Amish don’t want someone in the community who doesn’t want to be there… and that is a principal reason that this group has grown 3,000 percent in the 20th century.
Almost every group member, when interviewed by outside investigators, reports total satisfaction with their lives, whether they’re children or adults.

They don’t have high school educations, they don’t have specialized training, they don’t use computers, they don’t use electricity, they don’t use automobiles, and they don’t have training in how to create a marketing plan.

And yet, the resources that have transferred over from the farm are these: an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to take risks, innovativeness, a strong work ethic, a cheap family labor pool, and high standards of craftsmanship.

The Amish Fought the Law and the Amish Won

You can figure out a lot of what an Amish believes in education is from the things they fought the government about and won.

When the Supreme Court ruled they had to go to school from 1st to 8th grade, they were prepared, in mass, to go to prison unless concessions were made, and they won these concessions.

They demanded that any school be within walking distance of home, they would not allow their children to be carried on buses.
They refused large schools where pupils are sorted into different compartments and assigned different teachers every year.
They demanded that all school decisions had to be signed off by the parents.
They demanded a maximum eight-month school year.
They demanded the teachers who taught their children to be knowledgeable in, and sympathetic to, Amish values in rural ways. They refused to hand their children over to professional educators.
They insisted their children be taught that wisdom and academic knowledge are two different things.
They insisted that their kids have practical internships and apprenticeships supervised by the parents. They were prepared to go to jail and lose everything before they would surrender their children to any form of state indoctrination, called schooling, which would break up their families, their traditions, and their communities, and leave their children restless, trained to leap and jump but without purpose or direction not knowing where they would land.

An education to an Amish-er is being independent, living in a closed community, as a valuable neighbor, and living a godly life.

On the cusp of the 21st century where you and I are perched, it hardly seems possible for a definition of education like this to have survived and even thrived. Yet how can we explain the baffling Amish who do it their own way, in spite of expert advice, and have abundant prosperity and abundant happiness?

That the Amish have done so well puts a realistic base of possibility under the ideal of an independent citizenry as the proper goal of schooling. It’s something I hope you’ll think about.

Children

Transcript: What Does ‘Educated’ Mean? — John Taylor Gatto

By Terence Gillespie February 21, 2018

This transcript is of an outstanding speech given by John Taylor Gatto on what it means to be truly educated.

John gives his ideas on how education should be framed and what he thinks makes for an educated person. He also details the characteristics of both an Amish education and that of the best boarding schools in the country.

I’ve read most of John’s books and this speech is the best framing of what it means to be truly educated. For parents who want to get started homeschooling their children, this is the perfect place to start.

The transcript is ~11,000 words with the video running 1 hour, 17 minutes. The excerpts, below, are 1/10 of the whole transcript.

(Note: All text, below, is John Taylor Gatto speaking)

Challenge Assumptions

One of the universal marks of an educated man or woman is that they know how to challenge assumptions. They don’t believe everything strangers tell them.

10 Kinds of Awareness to Build On

In the beginning of planning a curriculum, I think you need to consider ten separate kinds of awareness around which self-knowledge and self-awareness are built. The first is a personal reality.

We all need to know as much as we can about our relatives and our ancestors. What were their cultures? What are their cultures? What’re their situations, their goals, their struggles? Then, you need to inventory, by carefully testing your own talents and weaknesses, your own limits that come from your biological and cultural heritage. You just need to get a kind of profile yourself. it doesn’t happen in a week or a month; it’s an ongoing thing. I probably spend a little bit of time every day, at an advanced age thinking, about every single one of my relatives and wondering what part of me I can feel in harmony with that particular person.

Then, you need to have an intimate knowledge of history. I think you need to know local history, regional history, national history, and global history. Starting about 1917, the teaching of history in the United States was systematically and deliberately destroyed so that you wouldn’t be able to step back from your own life and figure out what on earth is going on.

On the other hand, I have some good news for you. It’s a fairly easy and greatly satisfying thing to self-correct that. So, an intimate knowledge of history that would include political history, and cultural history, maybe the history of labor, the history of science and technology, and other relevant forms, that’s the second thing.

The Amish Example

The Amish are a group of 150,000 well-mannered, prosperous, law-abiding people who came to America with little more than the clothes on their back. So they didn’t have any contacts to make the way easy for them and they have been persecuted by the state of Pennsylvania, the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio for the whole century.

So everybody’s heard about the Amish, but very few people know the astonishing details, and here they are. Virtually every adult Amish-er has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.

The Amish realized that new government schools were social separators built on the principle of mechanical milk separators. They whirl a young mind about until both the social structure of the parents and their coherent consciousness are fragmented. Schools separate children from their personal past and from the past of the culture.

Education, as the government called it, separated people from the daily content of life dividing the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who remain strangers to their children in all but name. Even religion in a government school, if it was mentioned, would be studied analyzed and separated from the family and from daily life. It would become just another subject for critical analysis. Specialists armed with books, separated from the Amish and culture and training, would be entrusted with rearing their children and would encourage their children to liberate themselves from the shackles of home. For what purpose? To jump where? In what direction? of course the school, after it breaks your kids away from you, has no idea.

Boarding School Model

Now let’s take a look at what the parents of the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling.

I’ve been studying their expectations for 20 years, now, in order to compare them with my own goals. And I think you’ll find this interesting even if you don’t agree with all of it. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent. There are only 20 of them, and some of them say there aren’t 20, there are only 18.

But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or st. Paul’s could. And I’m going to give you these ideas in no particular order of importance. You decide which of these are important.

Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So their manners would be reflexive.

That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person. Now tell me, does it cost anything at all to teach people good manners? I run into ghetto kids who are as mannerly as anybody on earth.

Undiluted Hard Knowledge

The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down. I never taught any kids younger than 8th graders. But I will tell you that we started in eighth grade with Moby Dick, and as soon as I found out that the school edition had all the hard words and ideas taken out, I just threw it away and went out and bought enough copies for my kids and myself with a real thing. I mean Moby Dick’s is as hard a book to read as I think exists. This is your tough book to read. And what I found was after an initial struggle, maybe it lasted two weeks, the truth is that the dumbest kid and the brightest kid were thrilled with all these ideas interacting with each other and they could see the difference between the plotline of hunting a whale and all the ideas that spun out of the interaction of the crew and the officers and the captain with each other. I mean, it was a thrilling thing to do and I the truth is by that time I had lived in New York for a while, I was tremendously bored with what they handed me to teach.

If you pick up a bestseller from 1818, that would be James Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans, and you make sure that it’s unexpurgated, you will find yourself struggling to read a book that’s casting off political and scientific and philosophical ideas. I mean you got to read about three pages before the arrow gets out of the quiver. That was a best-seller in 1818. It sold the equivalent of five million copies a book today. It would be an outrageous best seller. It was bought by dirt farmers, and it was read by their kids.

Learn to Draw

Not one of my favorite human beings but the reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is. So, developing the powers of accurate observation, it’s not a natural thing to do. We don’t naturally see what’s in front of us or hear what other people say, either. So, some emphasis on that.

Learn How to Handle Pain

This one is a big one: practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England that it was translated over here it was done not to win a game but to get people familiar with the idea that pain isn’t very painful, unless you think it is. Otherwise, it just goes away.

What you learn from these things is that you do have, I’ll say the God-given internal resources, but these people knew that you had the internal resources to overcome these things, that it was only to the common people that they seemed impossible to do. Once you tried to do them, they were easy to do, or fairly easy as long as you were disciplined. As long as you understood there was danger, as long as you are confident in yourself. Well, you want those things for your children, anyway.

Homeschooling Hope

I’d say, just to swell your heads here, I think that the homeschoolers are the most exciting contradiction of the direction of the 20th century that I’ve ever heard, seen, or read about. That without the slightest bit of assistance you just grab your bootstraps and lifted yourself up and now that you’re you’re substantial enough all over that you can’t be pushed around so easily.