A once-valued skill has fallen by the wayside -- but our kids will need it even more than we do.
You probably have a pretty good idea how well your teenager can write, how good her reading comprehension is, and how easily she solves math problems. But here's a question to consider: Can your high-school student extract the meaning from a chart or graph?
Okay, let's stipulate that your kid probably can. What do you think about your neighbor's kid? Do you think he knows how to read a visual display of quantitative information? There's a very good chance he can't. And that's a problem.
The education world seems always aflutter with controversies over how best to teach students to write or what's the most effective way to teach mathematics. While these are important matters, involving real problems, there are other gaps and failings that also deserve attention.
I taught for the past 10 years in an independent high school for girls. Not long after starting there, I discovered that many of my students had limited ability to derive and summarize the main message from fairly straightforward charts and graphs like this one, comparing the crime rate to unemployment in the US over a twenty-year period:
A Collaboration Between Good and Part & Parcel
When I raised the subject at a faculty meeting one day, my comment elicited wide agreement. The ensuing discussion revealed that kids handled these kinds of tasks well in science and math classes, but the skills didn't seem to transfer over to other subject areas such as the social sciences and history.