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Education

The surveillance of our youth

By Guest Post January 23, 2019

Like many school districts, the Southeast Polk School District in Pleasant Hill, Iowa monitors the Web usage of its students on district-provided computers for inappropriate activity. And like some school districts, Southeast Polk also uses a monitoring service that sends weekly emails to parents summarizing their students’ Internet search history. This raises some difficult issues because we know that young people need space away from the heavy thumb of adults for healthy identity formation and the development of self.

Why do teenagers go to the mall, or congregate at the park, or cruise the strip, or gravitate toward the online spaces where adults aren’t? Because they need spaces that are separate from us. Should we monitor every single book or online resource that our children read? Should we use biometric school lunch checkout systems so that we can see exactly what our children eat for lunch each day? Should we dig through our children’s belongings and rooms every morning after they leave for school to see if they’re doing something that they shouldn’t? Should we install RFID and GPS tags into our children’s clothing and backpacks so that we can track them in real time? Should we slap lifelogging cameras on our kids and review them every evening? Should we install keystroke logging software or monitor everything that youth search for on the Internet? Which of these makes you uncomfortable and which doesn’t?

Read the Full Article

Children

The Consequences of 200 Years of Unthoughtful Consumption

By Guest Post January 22, 2019

I’ve just discovered Dangerously Irrelevant and was impressed to read Scott Mcleod ask: When will we take seriously the challenge of preparing our graduates for our new information landscape? And what are we going to do about all of our graduates?

Our new information landscape is digital bits in the ether instead of ink dots on paper. There is no foreseeable future in which we go back to analog. One of schools’ primary tasks is to help students master the dominant information landscape of their time. Schools are knowledge institutions preparing students to do knowledge work. So let’s be clear about what our new information landscape looks like:

In a followup article, Scott comments:

We spent the last 200+ years (at least) pushing consumption models of learning on most of our students. We asked them to be passive recipients of whatever information came from the teacher or textbook. We gave them few opportunities to question the reliability or validity of the information that we spoon-fed them. We trusted that someone else did the filtering for us and them beforehand. And in many cases, we actually punished kids who dared to ask questions or present alternative viewpoints.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that we now have an information / media literacy problem with our adults. We shouldn’t be surprised that most of our citizens have trouble determining the validity and reliability of digital and online information sources. We shouldn’t be surprised that we are easy prey for those who spread misinformation, deception, and outright lies.

Read the whole article, “Unthoughtful Consumption” on Dangerously Irrelevant.

Children

Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late

By Terence Gillespie January 11, 2019

Why don’t all parents send their kids to a private school?

Money.

“You know those two Mercedes we have parked in the driveway?”, I say to parents at church (a rhetorical question since we have no luxury cars.)

“Right, that’s because we send our kids to private school.”

The cost of the monthly lease payments for two luxury cars is about the same as sending our two boys to private school. Of course, we also pay for the public school they’re not attending in the form of property taxes.

What Should Be an Easy Decision for Christian Parents

For Christian parents, public school is now a dire compromise for which there’s no spiritual or philosophical defense. Anyone can understand not having enough money. What’s less understandable, or even comprehensible, is the extent to which parents will compromise out of fear or ignorance of homeschooling.

… and for Teachers

As for teachers, I’ve talked with three who recently fled public school teaching positions due to classroom turmoil (that school policies left them powerless to prevent), physical endangerment, and the frustrations of having no control over what or how they teach ( a defining feature of common core rebranded as “Next Step”).

But Really, How Bad is it ‘Out There?’

The question has now been meticulously answered by Mary Rice Hasson, J.D. and Theresa Farnan, Ph.D.:

Should we stay or should we go? Millions of parents with children in public schools can’t believe they’re asking this question. But they are. And you should be asking it too. Almost overnight, America’s public schools have become morally toxic. And they are especially poisonous for the hearts and minds of children from religious families of every faith—ordinary families who value traditional morality and plain old common sense. Parents’ first duty is to their children—to their intellect, their character, their souls. The facts on the ground point to one conclusion: Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late.

The negative consequences of sending your children to public school need no longer remain in doubt. The final section of “Get Out Now” ends with 100 pages of endnotes and hard documentation supporting author accounts and claims.

Education

8 Digital Literacies Required to Thrive in a Digital World

By Terence Gillespie January 1, 2019

Understanding Digital Literacies by Rodney H. Jones by Christoph A. Hafner

Assuming no knowledge of linguistics, Understanding Digital Literacies provides an accessible and timely introduction to new media literacies. It supplies readers with the theoretical and analytical tools with which to explore the linguistic and social impact of a host of new digital literacy practices. Each chapter in the volume covers a different topic, presenting an overview of the major concepts, issues, problems and debates surrounding the topic, while also encouraging students to reflect on and critically evaluate their own language and communication practices.

8 Digital Literacies Required to Thrive in a Digital World

The ability to quickly search through and evaluate great masses of information.
The ability to create coherent reading pathways through complex collections of linked texts.
The ability to quickly make connections between widely disparate ideas and domains of experience.
The ability to shoot and edit digital photos and video.
The ability to create multimodal documents that combine words, graphics, video, and audio.
The ability to create and maintain dynamic online profiles and manage large and complex online social networks.
The ability to explore and navigate online worlds and to interact in virtual environments.
The ability to protect one’s personal data from being misused by others.

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.