Tragedy is a shortcut that sells, and the particular tragedy of being an Indian has an amazing ability to make readers lose their capacities to discern good writing from bad, interesting ideas from vapid ones.
The headline on CNN's website the past couple of days:
Bush: NCLB not meant to punish schools, but to help them
Er, I wonder. If punishment was not the intent, why is the law more punitive than supportive?
"It is important for all of us to make it clear that accountability is not a way to punish anybody," Bush told supporters of the law in a meeting at the White House. "It's an essential component to making sure that our system, our education system, frankly is not discriminatory."
NYC schools' cell phone ban earns parents' ire
NEW YORK (AP) -- Parents who oppose the cell phone ban in New York's public schools are ranting in e-mails to the city's government that the policy is unreasonable, irresponsible, and hints at "thoughtless fascism."
Here's a tricky issue, one that will have various strong but opposing arguments and no clearly satisfactory solution, I humbly predict. For cell phones ain't going away. They may change, but if anything they will only become smaller and more thoroughly integrated in the usual human accessories — there's been talk for years about "wearable" computers, for instance, so it's easy to imagine cell phone technology woven into fabrics, built into eyeglasses, attached to caps, maybe someday surgically imbricated into the human body.
It's as eternal as the first day of school. Every year some few teachers or pundits or politicians or some combination of them commences to provide a meal for their own voracious egos by trashing the intellectual capacities of "kids these days."
The latest installment appears on the Washington Post website today, "Writing Off Reading" by Michael Skube.
I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)
CNN.com has a story up now, Most states fall short on testing, government says about how a number of states still aren't toeing the NCLB line, failing to do some things that really ought to be done if you're going to fashion an education system around standardized testing, like making sure students are tested over what they've actually been given an opportunity to learn, etc.
But of course the means of bringing states up to standard is, er, problematic. They get docked pay. Fix your tests or lose part of your funding, is the message from feds to states.
Another "literacy crisis" story. I wonder why reporters, ostensibly inquisitive by nature, never think to ask the question of literacy crisis purveyors: If we're so woefully underprepared to survive in an info-rich world, how is it we keep surviving in an info-rich world? Each generation of students, horribly illiterate though they are, keep finding and succeeding at jobs in the modern work place. They get out of school unable to this or that or the other, but somehow they manage to do this, that, the other, and some new stuff besides.
Weird, huh?
Hey, I'm a liberal, and I am forthright in the classroom about my politics, but this guy's antics are not helpful:
Teacher accused of giving 'liberal' quiz
Friday, November 25, 2005; Posted: 1:38 p.m. EST (18:38 GMT)
BENNINGTON, Vermont (AP) -- A high school teacher is facing questions from administrators after giving a vocabulary quiz that included digs at President Bush and the extreme right.
Bret Chenkin, a social studies and English teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School, said he gave the quiz to his students several months ago. The quiz asked students to pick the proper words to complete sentences.
[This is the text of a brief speech I gave at the Talkies Roundtable, aka "Collaboration as Common Ground: Transforming Professional Growth Through Online Inquiry," at the NCTE Convention in Pittsburgh, 19 November 2005.]
My task: To provide some general context for the specific conversations at this session. I won't talk long. I was recently reminded while trying to introduce my rhetoric and composition students to logical fallacies, which I think are fascinating, that I'm not exactly an inspiring and riveting speaker. Did you know that if twenty-five pairs of eyelids close at the exact same time they actually make a sound? It's like this: WHUMP! There's a bit of breeze, too. In any case, it's early and sleep still beckons some of us. There are too many good conversations to be had with some very interesting folks, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for anyone sleeping through the event.
Design for learning:
Today's educational facilities -- not your parents' schools anymoreBy Lisa Porterfield
CNN
Friday, August 12, 2005; Posted: 4:15 p.m. EDT (20:15 GMT)story.workstations.jpg
Open-office "advisory" workstations at the Avalon School.Avalon Schools
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This is cool! I always thought Bush was a bit of a dogmatist (and one backing the wrong dog at that), but here he comes right out and says it's good to teach kids various alternative ideas:
EDUCATION -- BUSH HAS DESIGNS FOR AMERICA'S SCHOOLS: At a roundtable interview with five Texas reporters yesterday, President Bush threw his support behind teaching intelligent design, or ID, a controversial theory which maintains that life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and suggests that higher powers must have played a role.
