"Among 30 developed countries, we rank 25th in math and 21st in science. In almost every category, we've fallen behind. Except one.... Kids from the u.s.a, rank #1 in confidence"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg
The ranking of our kids in their colonial language (English) is probably even lower.
This is where we can learn some things concerning the real life example of Malcolm X.
One of the main struggles I have at work teaching and tutoring students is their lack of study skills. Language Arts students have an adversion to using a dictionary and thesaurus. Math students in geometry will ask "Why?" if I ask them to use a compass or protractor in drawing and/or measuring angles. Students refuse to use an atlas in social studies and world geography.
Brother Malcolm explains part of his transition process:
“Every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might have been in Chinese”.
He skipped the words he didn’t know and so had little idea of what the books said.
He got himself a dictionary and began painstakingly copying every entry. It took him a day to do the first page. He would copy it all out and then read back aloud what he had written. He began to remember the words and what they meant. He was fascinated with the knowledge that he was gaining. He finished the A’s and went on to the B’s. Over a period of time he finished copying out the whole dictionary. Malcolm regarded the dictionary as a miniature encyclopedia. He learned about people and animals, about places and history, philosophy and science.
As his word base broadened, he found that he could pick up a book “and now begin to understand what the book was saying”. He says that “from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of a book with a wedge”.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/malcolm.htm
At work I typically keep two things with me at all times. A college dictionary and a graphing calculator.
If parents invested in these two items alone their kids academic performance would improve exponentially, provided they used them with regularity.