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Neither security scares, folders, nor anything else has convinced me to stay with any of the Internet Explorer alternatives in the past. But, this morning as I was trying to read an article with tiny (8 pt? maybe 10) type, I was once again frustrated by IE's inability to adjust type size on many sites. So, a quick download of Firefox and, voila!, I can see! Come on, Microsoft, get on the ball.
Part of the reason public schools, and high school in particular, get trashed is that many people who write well and public were smart and went on to far more interesting experiences. This column by Paul Graham is an example. A PhD in computer science from Harvard, author of books, program language designer, and painter gives some pretty good thoughts to high school students, but includes these comments:
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it.
and
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.
In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.
Pretty harsh. But not undeserved. We don't ask most kids in high school to do much that's hard. We let them not even try, then give them opportunities to avoid real consequences. (They didn't do home work during the year and failed? Let's make summer school so easy they can't fail. After all, we wouldn't want them to drop out. Think I'm making this up? Nope. Happened while I was on the MNPS school board. When I suggested to the academic council that we not make summer school available to students unless they had at least done their home work, one teacher looked at me and said, "None of them would fail if they did that.")
Hat tip to Alex Halavais. Visual Settlements are a cool way of viewing blogs developed by Anjo Anjewierden. The image is his blog analyzed against a defined community of blogs focused on knowledge management. Here's his explanation:
This article in the NY Times is worth reading. I'm only pulling the baseball quotes, for reasons regular readers (thanks, Dad!) of this blog know and others can find here.
This may sound like a touchy-feely progressive prescription. But a good example of such teaching in our culture is the stern but beloved baseball coach. How many school teachers are as good at essay writing, science or mathematics as the average coach is at baseball? And even when teachers are expert, how many children ever get to watch them work through writing an essay or designing a scientific experiment or solving an unfamiliar math problem?
Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
A good coach may well make his players throw the ball to first base 50 times or swing again and again in the batting cage. That will help, but by itself it won't make a strong player. The game itself -- reacting to different pitches, strategizing about base running -- requires thought, flexibility and inventiveness.
Children would never tolerate baseball if all they did was practice. No coach would evaluate a child, and no society would evaluate a coach, based on performance in the batting cage. What makes for learning is the right balance of both learning processes, allowing children to retain their native brilliance as they grow up.
The article is by Alison Gopnik, co-author of ''The Scientist in the Crib'' and professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.
As I've written about often, rolling out programs from the top is bad policy for school systems, even when the programs are good educationally. When the program promotes lousy education approaches, the result is disastrous. And I thought I had a great post about this using a story about "anti-racist math" from Michael_the_Archangel installed by the superintendent of Newton, MA, schools between 1999 and 2001.
Between 1999 and 2001 the district superintendent 'redesigned' the math cirriculum to an "anti-racist multicultural math". What does that exactly mean? Well, it means that division, multiplication, fractions and decimals is no longer the first priority in math class. No, to quote from the article, the new priority in a math class is "...Respect for Human Differences - students will live out the system wide core of 'Respect for Human Differences' by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias behaviors." It continues, "Students will: Consistently analyze their experiences and the curriculum for bias and discrimination; Take effective anti-bias action when bias or discrimination is identified; Work with people of different backgrounds and tell how the experience affected them; Demonstrate how their membership in different groups has advantages and disadvantages that affect how they see the world and the way they are perceived by others..." It goes on and on."
However, this particular story has gotten extensive coverage in the blogosphere. Tangoman at GeneExpression has hit it twice, here and here. (The latter includes a 3,119-word riff on political correctness in pedagogy, complete with extensive quotes, AFTER he finishes with the Newton story!) Chris Correa responded to Tangoman's first post and has visited the subject again here. Not only the posts, but the comments are good.
What to make of all this? I've run into Connected Math before. My best guess is that this is a case of a teaching approach that, done well creates excellent learning gains, but, done poorly, falls much below other approaches that have less top-end potential. That's been my overall conclusion on a lot of the "constructivist" pedagogy argument. This could raise a question about the approach of getting poorer performing teachers to emulate their higher-performing peers. It could well be that "almost" teaching like a top-tier teacher will get far worse learning gains from students than teaching in a safer, if ultimately lower-potential manner.
Betsy is writing about the demand for magnet schools in LA. When Nashville was under a desegregation order, we had three magnet schools for higher achieving students, one 5-8, one 7-12, and one 9-12. The 5-8 didn't feed into the 9-12; you had to go into the lottery again. Still, the demand for the 5-8 school was so high that we turned down five "white or other" students for every one we accepted.
So, why didn't we start another magnet middle school. Well, clearly one reason was because we had virtually every black student who met the requirements in one of those three "academic" magnets -- and the requirements were a "B" average and an average of 7 stanines on reading and math achievement tests. So, we could not have racially balanced the school.
What about now, when we aren't under the order. Still no dice. Of course, increasing the number of racially out-of-balance schools is still an issue. But so is "hurting" the zoned schools. Yep, that's right worry about how the adults in the schools feel, not about whether students are getting offered the education they need.
OK, the fair question now is, "Are the magnet schools doing better than the zoned schools at meeting the needs of the higher achieving students? When I went on the Board in 1998, I analyzed this and prepared a paper called, "On Meeting the Needs of High Achieving Students and the Desires of Their Parents." As articles noted on that page, it has seemed that we were making progress. Recently, however, I had an opportunity to update that analysis. Here's what I concluded: (Hume Fogg and Martin Luther King are the academic magnets)
Overall, it doesn't look like the zoned schools are making as much improvement as has been represented. Of course, this data does not reflect students who are enrolled in "AP" classes but not taking the exams. WIthout taking the tests, we have to wonder whether those students are actually having the opportunity to face the academic challenge that should be inherent in AP classes. I understand that there is a great deal of resistance among zoned school principals to any focus on getting more students to take the tests, much less any requirement that they do so.
I did not have a basis for comparing the "Top 40%" data from 1998 with 2004. The 1998 data were derived from the results of the end-of-course geometry test. That data is no longer available, and I have not identified a comparable 2004 metric.
In my early days as a young lawyer, a respected senior partner in the firm gave me three pieces of advice:
1. When a potential client says it's not about the money, it's about the principle, it's about the money every time.
2. Go to the scene.
3. Know which business to turn down.
The Tennessean is covering a story of a father who has been sentenced to attend school 23 days with his son because his 10th-grade son missed six days in the fall without a doctor's excuse. Five is the limit for a year, and last year the young man missed 17 -- all with notes from parents saying he was sick, but not with a doctor's excuse. Apparently, the school system charged the father with responsibility for truancy violations. There's no mention at all of the young man doing poorly in school -- he's just not sitting there often enough.
It's about the money. Average daily attendance -- the way state funds get allocated to school systems. It's not about learning. It's not about whether this child (and others) have become so disengaged and bored that school holds no attration and maybe a genuine aversion to them. Those are important questions worth exploring, but they aren't being raised. All the system cares about is getting attendance up so they can keep the money. And we wonder why folks aren't more supportive of public shools.
The Wall Street Journal today had an article about Leapfrog announcing it's FLY computer in a pen that uses Anoto's digital pen and custom paper technology. The product, $99, is aimed at 8 - 13 year olds. Man, that's a great age group. I think the key is "plasticity". If they can make it do things the designers didn't anticipate, it will be a huge hit. If limited to the "activities" designed for it, I think it will fail. However, with comments in the articles about being able to draw a rectangle and divide it into eight parts to get a musical scale, or round circles to get a drum, or write a word and have it spoken in another language. I think there is hope. The whole Anoto concept is unusal and interesting. According to WSJ, Leapfrog VP who initiated the product was intrigued by a 2000 Wired article. I read that article, and it was intriguing. Wired articles mentioning Anoto are here.
"We need to develop a better compensation system that recognizes the awesome responsibilities we place in the hands of teachers every day," said Arlene Ackerman, Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District....
Wonder if she recognizes those responsibilities by (1) refraining from rolling out new programs that take up the time and attention of faculties and (2) making time and a structure for collaborative work on improved teaching and learning by teachers. Hope so, but I doubt it. Hat tip Eduwonk.
On the merit pay issue, I'm not a big fan. No proof it works and, despite what you'll read some education commentators saying, it is NOT the way the business world works. There are many very successful firms that eschew it on just the grounds teachers sometimes put forth, including its effect on culture and collaboration. And, many consultants to such firms, including David Maister, see it as a cop out for poor managers.
There's always something new to learn. I've never been a big PowerPoint kind of guy. I don't do that many presentations, and now days I'd likely use MindManager for that anyway. But, in working with system developers last Fall, I learned it is possible to use the drawing tools in PowerPoint for screen design. Not as sophisticated as Visio (which I don't have and don't use and wouldn't pay for given my needs), but plenty good enough to get the job done in many cases. Here's a screen shot I got from our MCLE System developers with my suggested alterations (in green) going back to them:
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