‘Obviously, some parents do value education, but it’s not the norm’

The Santa Fe New Mexican reports on minority achievement levels in schools.

A new study of how Santa Fe students scored on a state standardized test confirms what local educators know and what national studies show.

Hispanic students score lower than Anglos at all grades and in all subjects. But what hasn’t been apparent until now is that the gap continues to show up when poverty and language are discounted….

Sandra Rodriguez, an education professor at the College of Santa Fe, drew similar conclusions in a published dissertation based on her study of eight students in Española Public Schools in the late 1990s.

“Damn it, it’s true. People say it’s poverty, but it’s not. People say it’s language, but it’s not,” she said.

Rodriguez has another idea. Native New Mexico Hispanics, she said, tend to distrust the education system because of bad experiences of their relatives, and that could explain the gap in motivation….

Gwen Perea, a bilingual teacher at Nava Elementary School, said that the most important factor in success of her students — more than money or divorce — is parental involvement. [emphasis added]

Well read, redux

Elsewhere Debby takes exception to some of the “well read” list posted below.

I think that a lot of the titles offered ought to be required (or perhaps suggested) college reading, but high school? In fact, I think to require high school students to read some of those titles would only turn them off to reading–perhaps permanently. It could even effect their self-concept (or GPA) in a negative fashion when they couldn’t muddle through the complexities of Karl Marx or the language of Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles. Of course they were polling a bunch of brainiacs and elitists (educators, businessman, politicians and journalists) and, in all fairness, not all of the titles got high marks.

One hundred years ago bright young people read Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles in Greek. Have we come so far that young people can’t even read them at all now for fear their GPA or self-image would be upset? Can’t education require effort on the part of the student?

NFL Divisional Playoffs

Panthers at Rams
Titans at Patriots
Colts at Chiefs
Packers at Eagles

Put your picks on the record in Comment(s).

Well read

Some years ago the National Endowment for the Humanities polled educators, businessman, politicians and journalists for the books they felt high school students should read (or should have read). The leading works are listed with the percentage of responses for each.

71 Macbeth, Hamlet — Shakespeare
50 Declaration, Constitution, Gettysburg Address
49 Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
48 Bible
28 Iliad, Odyssey — Homer
26 Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
21 The Republic — Plato
19 Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
17 Scarlet Letter — Hawthorne
17 Oedipus — Sophocles
13 Moby Dick — Herman Melville
13 1984 — George Orwell
13 Walden — Henry David Thoreau
12 Collected Poems — Robert Frost
11 Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman
9 Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
9 Canterbury Tales — Chaucer
9 Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx
9 Politics — Aristotle
7 Collected Poems — Emily Dickinson
7 Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky
7 Collected Works — William Faulkner
7 Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
7 Democracy in America — de Tocqueville
6 Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
6 Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 The Prince — Niccolo Michiavelli
6 Paradise Lost — John Milton
5 War and Peace — Tolstoy
5 Aeneid — Virgil

Zap!

NewMexiKen was pleased to see he’s not alone in finding the world too complex. In a Christmas letter a colleague wrote:

Sometimes the routine can be confusing. One morning last month, Lauren was juggling kids, the cordless portable phone, and her Starbucks coffee (carefully bought the day before and refrigerated). She punched 30 seconds into the microwave to warm the coffee, started to glance at the paper, saw her coffee on the counter, and became the first in our family to smell microwaved phone. Which leads to the question—what was more expensive, frying the portable phone, or the week’s previous purchases at Fourbucks?

Star Quarterback’s Daddy, but a Legend All His Own

The New York Times on Brett Favre’s Dad. That’s Brett and his daddy in the photo.

The Kill, as folks call this town of about 2,000, has been in mourning ever since. In a place where family means the extended kind and the good times are remembered more than the bad, grieving encompasses a fair bit of marvel and laughter.

By now, everyone knows how Brett Favre played the night after his father’s death and turned in a magical performance with 399 yards passing and 4 touchdowns in a 41-7 victory over Oakland. Most suspect, too, that it had to be Big Irv’s divine intervention that allowed Arizona Cardinals quarterback Josh McCown to throw a desperate 28-yard touchdown pass as time expired to defeat the Minnesota Vikings, 18-17, last Sunday and put the Packers in the playoffs.

The Simple Life

Affecting story in the Los Angeles Times about the Stoops brother who remained in Youngstown — The Simple Life.

Driving along gray streets at dusk, streets where he grew up, Ron Stoops Jr. says Youngstown has been down on its luck since the steel mills closed. He gives a wisp of a smile to the next question, the one people always ask.

Why does he stay? It makes no sense in a culture that prizes bigger and better, richer and glitzier.

People compare him to his younger brothers. They see Bob Stoops coaching Oklahoma, earning millions of dollars, guiding his team into the BCS national championship game against Louisiana State at the Sugar Bowl tonight. They see Mike taking over at Arizona and hiring Mark, the youngest, as his defensive coordinator.

That makes Ron Jr. the forgotten man in college football’s best-known brother act.

Not that he doesn’t love the game. Any male born into the Stoops family seems genetically coded to live and breathe football. They look like coaches, with close-cropped hair and a certain intensity around the eyes.

“When you think about it,” Ron Jr. says, “that’s what we were destined to do.”

Issac Newton…

was born on this date in 1643.

The NOVA website devoted to Einstein talks also of the genius of Newton.

There is a parlor game physics students play: Who was the greater genius? Galileo or Kepler? (Galileo) Maxwell or Bohr? (Maxwell, but it’s closer than you might think). Hawking or Heisenberg? (A no-brainer, whatever the best-seller lists might say. It’s Heisenberg). But there are two figures who are simply off the charts. Isaac Newton is one. The other is Albert Einstein. If pressed, physicists give Newton pride of place, but it is a photo finish — and no one else is in the race.

Newton’s claim is obvious. He created modern physics. His system described the behavior of the entire cosmos — and while others before him had invented grand schemes, Newton’s was different. His theories were mathematical, making specific predictions to be confirmed by experiments in the real world. Little wonder that those after Newton called him lucky — “for there is only one universe to discover, and he discovered it. “

Charles Sherwood Stratton…

was born on this date in 1838. Better known by the name given him by P.T. Barnum — Tom Thumb, Stratton’s height never exceeded 33 inches (84 cm). A popular entertainer received by Presidents and European royalty, Stratton was married in 1863. He retired in 1882 and died the next year at age 45.

Utah…

was admitted to the Union as the 45th state on this date in 1896.