October 2010
36 posts
“Kindergartners at 18 public schools in San Francisco are getting a gift from the...”
– Ehh…. Well good luck with that.
Georgetown isn't first college to find drug lab →
When I worked as a reporter in the Midwest, there was routine news about methamphetamine lab busts — usually in isolated rural areas lacking neighbors who might smell or suspect something.
Uhh… Awesome.
Boston Law Student Wants A Tuition Refund →
AMAZING:
The student added that his wife is expecting a baby, and he goes to bed every night “terrified of the thought of trying to provide for my child AND paying off my J.D., and resentful at the thought that I was convinced to go to a law school by empty promises of a fulfilling and remunerative career.”
College tuition hikes up to 25 percent proposed →
“Is his goal to drive tuition higher? If it is, we’re going to fight with him. He’s saying he wants us to submit a plan that would raise tuition more than 9 percent,” Foster said.
Because petty, fake-naive rhetoric is what helps the freaking students themselves! I am SO SICK of political crap taking precedence over students and education.
“Lawson Sakai modestly recounts his life’s accomplishments: He was awarded...”
– This is the lede in the LA Times story about Compton Community College awarding honorary degrees to interned Japanese-Americans. It’s just about the most underwhelming thing I can imagine reading. I understand it takes a huge amount of magnanimity to get over something like the injustice...
"Nearly 70% of degree-seeking students who... →
UGH. And I know the solution isn’t to lower the bar. It’s more likely to raise the ground.
More lessons taught with technology →
In a report to the committee on how technology is being used, David Theriault, who is in charge of technology at Lewiston High School, said three years ago about 5 percent of teachers routinely used technology as part of their lessons.
“Now it’s 50 percent,” he said. “Technology has become an embedded tool at Lewiston High School. You see it every day.” (Via world-shaker)
Wow, that is really...
Online Colleges and States Are at Odds Over... →
Responding to what they call unfair scrutiny from state and federal regulators, representatives from online colleges discussed a self-imposed quality-assurance framework at today’s Presidents’ Forum in Washington, convened by Excelsior College.
But state officials said they are still concerned that self-imposed standards are not good enough and that online programs are not consistent in...
7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers →
This link offers descriptions & videos about various social media tools for teachers. Thanks Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this Mashable link. (Via thingsforteachers)
This is a neat article. It goes to show, you needn’t attend an online university, necessarily, to gain some of the benefits of online/distance education.
Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber →
In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments — experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of...
Learn To Change/Changing To Learn →
A really good blog post about higher education. (Via adventuresinlearning)
“Continental philosophy is philosophy which takes things that “stand out” in...”
– Second Balcony: My Old Definition of the Analytic-Continental Divide is Still the Best One
Oooh, this is a great way of looking at philosophy.
How I Snuck Into The Ivy League. And You Can Too. →
This is just a ridiculously fascinating read, although I’m not sure what the ending is supposed to mean, literally. Still, it doesn’t surprise me. There’re are always off-menu items, right?
The Economy and College Admissions →
According to a new report from the US-based National Association of College Admission Counseling, despite the peak number of 3.33 million high school graduates during the 2009 admissions cycle, 29% of institutions cited a drop in the number of applications they received, the highest proportion reporting a decline since 1996. This finding may be the result of changed student behaviour due to the...
There is No New Media: It’s All New Consumption →
For the media industry (which is video, music and print), there has been one more, and perhaps the farthest-reaching, failure: the inability of the folks to grok that today’s audience is not tomorrow’s audience. It goes without saying there’s a whole generation of folk that has either grown up, or are growing up, on the Internet. Their consumption and online behavior is going to be predicated...
“As community colleges take center stage today at a White House summit, a group...”
– Oh snap?
“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
– Saint Augustine (via azspot)
Without context, you could say Augustine is saying that where you should want to offer charity, you would be better to withhold justice. As in, it would be just for sufferers to suffer. I kind of think Augustine was an asshole a lot of the time, though.
“thebronzemedal: Today a patron called and asked if she was speaking to a “real...”
–
Librarianista
Hey, I know that’s a big part of the result of earning my masters. And if you think you need to call someone up in order to use Google, then you probably lack a bit of education.
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010 →
Thanks Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this link. (Via thingsforteachers)
It’s kind of funny that the top two are likely blocked at most high schools, and thought of as frivolous at most colleges.
1 tag
“Admitting when life is complicated or things aren’t shiny and happy all the time...”
– This piece by Merlin Mann is one of the most labyrinthian pieces I’ve read in quite some time. It’s worth a browse.
Va. spends $178M on college dropouts over 5 years →
That headline is meant to, I suppose, shock and awe you. Or at least get you mad at those damn college dropouts. (The ones who, upon graduating, are carrying an average of $22,000 in student loan debt and have an 85% chance of moving back in with their parents.)
But I ran the numbers according to their article:
21,170 dropped out of state school;
14,044 dropped out of private school;
247...
A Chilled Pairing
As I was reading this story about the average college graduate now having $24,000 in debt, there was a contextual headline on CNN that said 85% of college graduates move home. I can see why a lot of people don’t even finish school. Not graduating could actually be a pragmatic move.
“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a...”
– Jeanette Winterson via thechocolatebrigade (via ifiwereahoarder)
Study: Most Americans want wealth distribution... →
92 percent prefer Swedish model to US model when given a choice
Americans generally underestimate the degree of income inequality in the United States, and if given a choice, would distribute wealth in a similar way to the social democracies of Scandinavia, a new study finds.
For decades, polls have shown that a plurality of Americans — around 40 percent — consider themselves conservative,...
Free Tech for Teachers: 5 Alternatives to... →
I really, really like the ideas he talks about in this post. (thingsforteachers)
Me too!
4,100 Students Prove 'Small Is Better' Rule Wrong →
A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.
Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded...
“Education costs far less than incarceration … and gets better results.
Average...”
– What to do about schools? Readers share ideas - Education Nation - msnbc.com
I need to stop reading these responses, or else I’ll never get to bed.
(via girlwithalessonplan)
Aboriginal, education groups call for increased... →
Last Thursday, representatives from the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the CFS rallied on Parliament Hill to highlight the importance of First Nations education and fairness for First Nations students. The organizations called on the federal government to lift the 2% cap on funding increases to the Post-Secondary Student Support Program. The AFN estimates that over 15,000 Aboriginal...
Blogger sentenced in Iran to 19 years >> →
A Canadian-Iranian blogger has been sentenced in Tehran to 19 years in prison after being convicted of creating anti-government propaganda.
Hossein Derakhshan was arrested in Tehran on Nov. 1, 2008.
He was tried on charges of collaborating with enemy states, creating propaganda against the Islamic regime, insulting religious sanctity and creating propaganda for anti-revolutionary groups.
...
Books Aren't Crucial, but Long-Form Texts Are →
infoneer-pulse:
What we cannot survive without is ideas. Life on earth would be severely diminished without the well-thought-out, well-researched, written works that communicate expertise, insight, and creative ideas from one human being to another. That, historically, has been the role of books, and they have played it admirably, in works from the Bible to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Silent Spring...
“There is nothing more important than teaching, I genuinely believe this.”
– President Obama on NBC’s EducationNation, September 27, 2010
(via aprilgariepy)
Unfortunately, no one taught the transcriber what a comma splice is.
“The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the...”
– From “Goodbye, cruel words: English. It’s dead to me.” by Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post. (via karinanotcinerina)
Another offshoot of the Obama administration: The death of English.
September 2010
9 posts
Five lessons from the nation’s best online teacher →
Educators who teach in an online setting should foster strong relationships with their students’ parents and should offer plenty of positive feedback, says the nation’s first-ever K-12 Online Teacher of the Year.
Teacher Teresa Dove of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) last week was chosen as the first winner of this new award, which not only recognizes excellent teaching but also the...
It's Tuesday...
…so if you’re looking to recommend someone for the directory, I’d ask you to pass on me. Given the issues with the Queue, I’ve been lax over the past week and haven’t really earned it. Instead, please consider recommending some of these folks:
Positively Persistent Teach
The YUNiversity
Adventures in Learning
And of course, Things for Teachers
(Via world-shaker)
Seconded.
Does merit pay pay? →
This letter by Diane Ravitch wants to say that merit pay is a failure, but it seems only to be a failure under the terms she’s hell-bent on clinging to. You can say that this chocolate cake sucks at washing your car, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad chocolate cake.
She says merit pay is to encourage teachers to teach harder. She says that underlying the concept of merit pay is...
University loses its licence →
Accreditation for Lansbridge University, a Fredericton-based online university, has been revoked by the province. (Shawn Berry - The Daily Gleaner Via thebriefingroom)
The license revocation affects only 170 students. It would be interesting to see exactly how the school was found deficient.
“Destructive cultural trends lurk behind the decline of readerly ambition and...”
– Will the Book Survive Generation Text? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via infoneer-pulse) (via teachingliteracy)
I generally agree with Romano’s points, but his rhetoric (his “eristic moves”) is so overblown and atavistic that I’m afraid this...
Putting Teachers to the Test: The Debate Over... →
(via adventuresinlearning)
There’s a little like logic-defying chestnut in the piece:
Teachers have reason to fear they may be misidentified — roughly one in four would be even after three years of data have been collected, according to a report last month commissioned by the Department of Education. Hanley Chiang, a Mathematica Policy Research researcher who co-authored the report, said,...
The New and Old of Digital Learning : Education... →
(Via educationalrap: Re-posted from EducationNext.org.)
The ending of this piece is especially good/insightful.
“The increasing use of student surveillance and intrusion of school districts...”
– U.S. schools: grooming students for a surveillance state | Privacy News - PogoWasRight.org
Very, very glad my high school days are long behind me…
(via shorterexcerpts)
Indeed! It’s Foucaultian in discretely numerable ways! Beside the obvious, it’s as if they see more information as...
August 2010
44 posts
“There are test-taking strategies that help students score higher on tests, rote...”
– The one of the many real teachers being given a # as part of the “Value added” debate! This is important to read!
One teacher’s view of ‘value added’ evaluations - latimes.com
(via adventuresinlearning)
I’m afraid I haven’t clicked through yet, but I think there’s a little bit...
Thoughts on Upcoming Events and American Style and...
As more and more things are happening, I think it’s important to note that “fewer” has to do with numerable quantities and “less” has to do with amounts. I have fewer than five apples. Well, you’re less hungry. I understand Garner (whom I’ve cited before) and others advise using ‘less’ for time, I think number of weeks/days/hours just sounds...
The Christian Science Monitor weighs in on the...
“While the American public is totally right about respecting the teacher and improving the quality of teaching, I think the American public is wrong about the quality of their community’s schools,” [Jon Schnur, co-founder and CEO of New Leaders for New Schools] says. “This overestimate of the quality of local schools makes people less inclined to support dramatic interventions.” He sees a lack...
Mindblowing Point?
A total education spend of $4.07 billion will result in an increase of… $25 per child more than last year in the state of Massachusetts.
