Back in school, Bush touts signature education law
Submitted by eric on 9 January, 2006 - 20:48The softer side of his agenda? I guess it is, but I'm afraid that's only a testament to the harshness of the rest of his agenda.
Back in school, Bush touts signature education law
Monday, January 9, 2006; Posted: 4:03 p.m. EST (21:03 GMT)
GLEN BURNIE, Maryland (AP) -- Emphasizing the softer side of his agenda, President Bush went back to school Monday, touting rising test scores as proof that his education law is working.
Bush marked the fourth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act by visiting North Glen Elementary, a suburban Baltimore school that has made big gains in reading and math. It was a reminder of a major bipartisan success that Bush scored early in his White House tenure, far from the wrangling over war, domestic spying and other matters overshadowing his second term.
Stretching the Brain... Both Theirs & Mine!
Submitted by frstbrn24 on 8 January, 2006 - 20:35Started with livejournal on December 5th, 2005... just realized today that I still have nothing that I want to post there... well, nothing of consequence.
I put all of my teaching theories and notes here...so it seems pointlessly redundant to use that space for the same purpose... Really have nothing other than what I currently post on schoolnotes and homestead for my students (although I am beyond impressed with The Goddess of YA Literature's site @ http://www.livejournal.com/users/professornana/ !!!)
So that leaves me with my own personal interests of hybridizing daylilies and my art... but how and when to do it??? My life seems totally engaged with teaching at the moment. I spend at least 30 minutes to an hour running greenhouse chores (cannot very well use that time on the computer)... so the site simply sits there waiting at the moment...
SAT essay: a meaningless joke
Submitted by eric on 2 January, 2006 - 10:21Here we have a student complaining about grade inflation! Or rather, test-score inflation. Still, it's noteworthy if not unique. I have mixed feelings about his conclusion, which is that the SAT essay test is too easy and need not be taken seriously. For him, perhaps that's so. For many students, writing the kind of essay Shar scoffs at may be the best they can manage, and for them, following his advice would be unwise indeed. On the other hand, I'm NAIVEly skeptical that the SAT essay test is a very useful measure of student writing ability, so I'm kind of sympathetic to Shar's scoffing.
No advances made in adult literacy, study says
Submitted by eric on 31 December, 2005 - 06:37This is old news (from two weeks ago!) but I still think we ought to have reference to it since it's of a kind. A reminder that literacy crises are a matter to attend to, whether they are real (in which case our profession is part of the cure) or not (in which case our profession should be part of the cure). In either case, these stories help shape public perception about education, so they affect us.
Those Precious Moments...
Submitted by frstbrn24 on 18 December, 2005 - 00:24Have you noticed that when you are at your most stressed, most tired, something always happens that takes your breath away???
Just received an email from a mom who was sooo shocked that she had to contact me :) Turns out that one of my students who NEVER reads borrowed one of my books yesterday... her mom caught her reading at 9:30am... was shocked by it...but by 2:30pm... and her daughter was STILL reading... she felt compelled to capture the moment and send it to me!
God...that was better than any Christmas present I could have received!
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Spanish At School Translates to Suspension
Submitted by eric on 13 December, 2005 - 12:38I'm all for immigrants learning English. If I ever move to Italy I would gladly learn Italian. It would be in my best interest to do so, and it's in the interest of anyone who lives in the US to know English. Still, stories like this suggest the English-only project is getting a bit carried away, unnecessarily coercive, and verging on totalitarian in its methods. What, are we going to criminalize non-English language?
Spanish At School Translates to Suspension
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 9, 2005; Page A03KANSAS CITY, Kan., Dec. 8 -- Most of the time, 16-year-old Zach Rubio converses in clear, unaccented American teen-speak, a form of English in which the three most common words are "like," "whatever" and "totally." But Zach is also fluent in his dad's native language, Spanish -- and that's what got him suspended from school.
"It was, like, totally not in the classroom," the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. "We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he's like, 'Me prestas un dolar?' ['Will you lend me a dollar?'] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I'm like, 'No problema.'"
Big problema...
RTI... What does it really mean?
Submitted by frstbrn24 on 11 December, 2005 - 17:09RTI... What does it really mean?
RTI equals "Response to Intervention"... I only knew of it as a vague term... been fighting for it for almost four years without really knowing what it was called until last week when I attended the RITAP conference up in Providence. The past two years I have finally relaxed a bit... prior to that I felt like I was fighting a one-person war.
Now I am trying to think about why it is we go to conferences... what we can really accomplish as individual teachers. RTI is supposed to be a school-wide intervention for students who are failing to learn... While I love (absolutely LOVE) the concept... I fail to see how it could ever be implemented in my building. Out of four people from my building scheduled to attend, one didn't go... The next day one of the teachers that went was speaking in the hallway about this session... "it was a waste of time... same old stuff"
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Teens create Hamlet 'in the Hood'
Submitted by eric on 7 December, 2005 - 23:23Wednesday, December 7, 2005; Posted: 11:51 a.m. EST (16:51 GMT)
at CNN
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Hamlet's father runs a club -- not a kingdom -- and the "sweet prince" drunkenly raps a version of his "To be or not to be" soliloquy in an urban teenage take on the Shakespearean play.
Brainstorming ideas for a project promoting nonviolence, the students chose a work in which almost all the main characters are dead by the time the curtain falls. But in their version, Hamlet openly discusses his troubles with his mother and friends, and his murderous uncle ends up in jail instead of dead at Hamlet's hands in a second, "rewind" ending.
What happens when the really great lesson doesn't work?
Submitted by ofulmer on 28 November, 2005 - 21:58Another step in journey toward critical literacy in the classroom--a stumble.
Today, I taught an "inferring" lesson. I gave some statistics about spending on education: six times more money is spend on corrections than on higher education. Since 1980, the prison population has risen from 500,000 to over 2 million, with half of the prison populaton being African-American while African Americans account for 13% of the total US population. I asked students to tell me what it says (literal interpretations) and then to draw some inferences. They had trouble. Maybe I should have gone to Kylene Beers' "It Says-I Say" strategy to help students make connections between their background knowledge and the information in the text.
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Critical Literacy, more thoughts--scrambled though they may be
Submitted by ofulmer on 27 November, 2005 - 22:07I have been rereading Alfred Tatum's book Teaching Reading to Adolescent Black Males. I think my reading and research about critical literacy is shaping the way I'm reading Tatum this time. I see my students so clearly in his descriptions of urban black males. What made so much sense to me this time was the idea of young black males taking on a "cool pose" as a way of establishing an identity.
I'm into his chapters on the theoretical strand of instructional planning--that is, thinking about what goes into the curriculum, not so much about how to teach it (that comes in later chapters). Tatum emphasizes how important it is to provide students with texts that connect to their lives in meaningful ways. Janet Allen says the same thing; in fact, that very point guided her selection of core texts and text sets for Framing Best Practice English 1 and English 2 curricula.
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