Category: Education

With son number three due this spring, Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, and Byron, official husband of Jill, are calculating costs. According to their financial advisor, here are some estimates for the cost of four years of college when the boys reach that age:

University of Virginia………………$486,715
College of William and Mary……$512,956
University of Notre Dame……$1,454,963
Stanford University………………$1,599,440

NewMexiKen, official grandpa of Jill’s three sons, can only offer these four words of wisdom:

Linebacker
Quarterback
Point Guard

“[W]hich was a great help when I was teaching college coarses…”

Found among comments on a website.

From a report in The Washington Post:

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.'”

But that conversation turned out to be a big problem for the staff at the Endeavor Alternative School, a small public high school in an ethnically mixed blue-collar neighborhood. A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school.

Watts, whom students describe as a disciplinarian, said she can’t discuss the case. But in a written “discipline referral” explaining her decision to suspend Zach for 1 1/2 days, she noted: “This is not the first time we have [asked] Zach and others to not speak Spanish at school.”

Es un problema grande. The school district has rescinded the suspension. The parents have hired an attorney.

What kind of small-mindedness causes people to think that being bi-lingual isn’t a good thing? Don’t they teach languages in school anymore? When I learned languages (NewMexiKen has studied four other than English), it was always considered a good thing to practice. Children in many other countries routinely learn a second language (or more). Here we punish it.

At Slate, “The Rules of Distraction – Hey, you—with the laptop! Ignore your professor and read this instead” by Avi Zenilman:

The Internet is, of course, a distraction. There are some ground rules: I always try to position myself so my screen isn’t in the line of sight of the professor or one of the teaching assistants. And after a bad pop-up ad experience, I always press the mute button. Still, even when a lecture engages me, it can be hard to pay attention when the little AIM man starts bobbing up and down at the bottom of my screen.

But are these distractions worse than the old-fashioned ones—doodling, dozing, reading, playing footsie, passing notes?

Key point: “Perhaps the real problem with laptops in lectures isn’t the laptops, but professors’ over-reliance on the lecture as a learning tool.”

Interesting.

A Wired News interview with Nicholas Negroponte. A couple of points:

… Wired News: The machine is expected to start mass production late next year, and the governments of Thailand and Brazil have already said they’re serious about placing $1 million orders for their school kids. Others are close to lining up.

… Negroponte: Clearly (though) in some countries even $100 spread over five years is too expensive. So in those countries we have to find other means to pay for it than the normal education budget. But at least half of the developing world — certainly half the population, probably half the countries — could afford the $20 per year.

I think that the presidents of MIT, Cal Tech, the University of Chicago, and all the other major universities with high-priced investments in the physical sciences should call a press conference and announce, much to their regret, that they no longer will consider any application they receive from any high school student in the state of Kansas. Sadly, they should say, due to the state’s publicly expressed preference for mythology over science, they no longer can be confident that students from Kansas are sufficiently grounded in the basics for those students to succeed at these extremely competitive universities. Disappointed? Tough. Go to Bob Jones University.

Comment at Altercation

Bob Somerby has some provocative thoughts on education and Jonathan Kozol’s new book, The Shame of the Nation. Must reading (skip down to “Still Asking”).

The 49-year-old teacher, Rafe Esquith, is a genius and saint. The American education system would do well to imitate him. These children’s lives have been changed by their year with this man. And it is not all about Elizabethan drama.

Mr. Esquith’s pupils play guitar. They name the six states that border Idaho. They discuss whether Huckleberry Finn would be doing the right thing to turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave. They visit the Lincoln Memorial on a class trip.

— From an article in The New York Times

Mr. Esquith and his students are the subject of a PBS program: The Hobart Shakespeareans, which aired Tuesday evening. NewMexiKen did not see the program, but did see an item about the class previously. The fifth-grade teacher is remarkable. Though from a “poor and dangerous part of Los Angeles,” he gives his students gift certificates to Barnes & Noble for Christmas and takes them to UCLA to show them “This is the life you’re working for.”

But it’s the students who are truly remarkable.

VAIL, Arizona — Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks — but it wasn’t because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks — laptop computers by Apple Computer — to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks.

School officials believe the electronic materials will get students more engaged in learning. Empire High, which opened for the first time this year, was designed specifically to have a textbook-free environment.

From the AP via Wired News. Vail is a suburb of Tucson.

If you graduated from high school–no matter the year!–you should know these 10 words, according to the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries. Actually you should 90 more, too. And they’re all in “100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know.” But let’s start with these 10.

A history professor laments too much technology in the classroom: Professors, Stop Your Microchips.

Throughout the class the students took notes on the computers, creating a ceaseless keyboard clatter and making it difficult for anyone to hear the teacher’s voice. Worse, as they faced their screens they looked away from the professor and away from one another. The class had no sense of communal purpose, and some students scarcely gave the professor a glance.

The PowerPoint remote control didn’t work quite right at first — tinkering with it caused a delay — and students periodically whispered to one another about technical problems when they should have been learning the day’s topic.

…

I talked with the professor afterward, and he acknowledged that technology could be a distraction as well as an aid. He added that, although his was a writing-intensive class, the students didn’t like to write, and that they wrote badly. Every college teacher knows it. The current generation of students has devoted thousands of hours to mastering computers but hasn’t learned how to maintain verb-tense consistency in a sentence, hasn’t learned not to follow a singular subject with a plural verb, knows almost none of the more-advanced rules of grammar, and uses apostrophes with chaotic caprice.

Teachers’ overuse of technology sends a baleful signal to students that the machines are necessary. At a medical-history conference last year, I was the only history professor in a group of doctors. Many of them were good amateur historians, but all of them were cursed with a dependency on PowerPoint, which seems to exercise an even stronger appeal among physicians and scientists than among professors of the humanities and social sciences. Every word the doctors spoke was duplicated on a screen above their heads. It was numbingly repetitive. One speaker even spoiled what would have been a pretty good joke, giving away the punch line by bringing up the crucial PowerPoint slide too soon.

Once again NewMexiKen is reminded of the PowerPoint Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication.

Emily, official younger daughter of NewMexiKen, and the mother of two of The Sweeties, shared in the Golden Lamp Award last evening with her company, Teacher Created Materials. According to the Association of Educational Publishers, which presented the award, “The Golden Lamp is the most prestigious award within the field of educational publishing. Publishing professionals, educators, and librarians recognize winners as providing the most outstanding materials for learning….The judges look for materials that surpass others in the areas of editorial, design, and content integration. In addition, they should clearly meet their mission statement’s objectives and goals.”

Emily was the project manager (developed the idea, selected authors, is overall series editor and even wrote two of the books herself) for the Primary Source Readers, the “Instructional Materials” award winner (“…designed for use in the classroom”). So far there are two kits — Primary Source Readers: Early America and Primary Source Readers: Expanding & Preserving the Union — each provides enriched content to complement social studies and language arts curricula in grades 4 through 8. Among the 32 titles in the two kits are “Causes of the Revolution,” Abigail Adams,” “Thomas Jefferson,” “Lewis & Clark,” “James Madison,” “Harriet Tubman,” “Pioneer Trails,” “Sitting Bull.”

 

This is a bit of a family affair — Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, authored eight of the 32 books and assisted on four others.

Two numbers begin and end this story.

• 5,633 — The number of students who began eighth grade in Denver Public Schools classrooms in the fall of 1999.

• 1,884 — The number of those students who graduated from a DPS high school five years later.

Read the story in the Rocky Mountain News.

It’s Reading Is Fun Week, May 15-21. NewMexiKen hopes you are making “each day a little wacky and a lot of fun!”

Today is Wacky Wednesday and tomorrow is Thrilling Thursday.

Children who are 3 and 4 years old weigh only 35 pounds or so, but when they are kicking, hitting, biting, running around or are in other ways a handful, they are more likely to get expelled from their state-funded preschool program than students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

More than three times as likely.

That’s the finding in the first study of expulsion rates of 3- and 4-year-olds, led by Yale University Child Study Center researcher Walter S. Gilliam.

Gilliam, assistant professor of child psychiatry and psychology, said that decades of research show that early childhood programs can significantly improve the chances of a student’s success in school.

“Unfortunately, there appears to be a back door through which some children — the ones who stand the most to gain from these programs — are sometimes pushed,” he said.

“These children are barely out of diapers. No one wants to think of children this young being kicked out of school.”

Pittsurgh Post-Gazette

Link via The Huffington Post

According to the most recent statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in U.S. history, only 17 percent of fourth-graders, 14 percent of eighth-graders, and 11 percent of 12th-graders scored proficient on the assessment; further, more than half of 12th graders did not reach the basic level.

No Child Left Behind — A Desktop Reference — Pg. 26

From Newsweek: The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. High Schools.

George Will writes about One Man’s Way to Better Schools:

The idea, which will face its first referendum in Arizona, is to require that 65 percent of every school district’s education operational budget be spent on classroom instruction. On, that is, teachers and pupils, not bureaucracy.

Nationally, 61.5 percent of education operational budgets reach the classrooms. Why make a fuss about 3.5 percent? Because it amounts to $13 billion. Only four states (Utah, Tennessee, New York, Maine) spend at least 65 percent of their budgets in classrooms. Fifteen states spend less than 60 percent. The worst jurisdiction — Washington, D.C., of course — spends less than 50 percent.

For generations of college-bound teenagers, nailing a 1600 on the SAT has been as good as it gets, equivalent in American popular culture to pitching a perfect game or bowling a 300.

But no longer. Starting Monday, the venerable college entrance exam will sport a new scoring format and frame of reference. With the recent addition to the SAT of a third section that includes a handwritten essay, 2400 is becoming the new 1600.

Los Angeles Times