Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Half of under-30s think they’re “weird,” reports YouGov. Sixty-three percent say weird is good.
Older Americans are much less likely to see themselves as “weird” or value weirdness. However, 78 percents of Americans of all ages think it’s better to be “a distinctive individual.” Only 11 percent believe it’s better to “fit in with the crowd.”
When I was in high school, Mr. G, the head of the English department, popped in to class one day to tell us not to use “interesting” in our writing. It’s too vague, he said. Use “specific” language to show the reader why something is interesting.
He also said to use “said” in quotations rather than distracting synonyms. Someone asked about variety. He said readers should pay attention to what’s said, not how it was said.
On my own, I read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. “Avoid fancy words,” it advises. “Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.”
Now, in hopes of encouraging livelier writing, English teachers are banning words such as “good,” “bad,” “fun” and “said,” reports James Hagerty in the Wall Street Journal.
“We call them dead words,” said (or declared) Leilen Shelton, a middle school teacher in Costa Mesa, Calif. She and many others strive to purge pupils’ compositions of words deemed vague or dull.
. . . Her pupils know better than to use a boring word like “said.” As Ms. Shelton put it, ” ‘Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list.”
The Powell River Board of Education in British Columbia lists 397 alternatives to “said” on its site, writes Hagerty. They include “emitted,” “beseeched,” “continued,” “sniveled,” and “spewed.”
One student, banned from using “big,” substituted “anti-microscopic,” reports the Journal.
Asked to edit famous authors, sixth-grader Josie Dougherty modified the famous closing words of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “….yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Josie suggested: “…yes I hollered yes I will Definitely.”
Josie and brother Josh, a ninth grader, tackled Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway refers to cars “going very fast.”
Josie wrote “going at a superior speed,” while Josh chose “lightning speeds.”
The kids told the reporter they were miffed that writers get to violate the “dead words” rules, just because they’re dead themselves.
Are Some English Teachers Encouraging Bad Writing? asks Anthony Rebora on Ed Week‘s Teaching Now.
Affirmative!
Riverside County (California) schools aren’t responsible for a drug sting that targeted special ed students, a Superior Court judge has ruled. Judge Raquel A. Marquez dismissed a 2013 suit brought by Jesse Snodgrass, reports Jane Meredith Adams in EdSource.
After his expulsion was reversed, Jesse Snodgrass completed high school.
Snodgrass was a 17-year-old with autism and bipolar disorder when he was befriended and manipulated by an undercover sheriff’s deputy, the suit alleged. “Dan” sent 60 text messages asking him to buy marijuana.
He was arrested on felony drug charges and expelled. Later, citing extenuating circumstances, a judge gave Snodgrass six months of probation. An administrative law judge overturned the expulsion, saying that Snodgrass “has overwhelmingly demonstrated that his actions were a manifestation of his disability.”
A 2014 Rolling Stone story, The Entrapment of Jesse Snodgrass, and a Vice Media video, The War on Kids, “launched a barrage of negative publicity” that persuaded local school districts to stop authorizing drug stings, writes Adams.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan mentored Lawanda Crayton 25 years ago.
Twenty-five years ago, Arne Duncan was an “I Have a Dream” Foundation mentor at a Chicago elementary school. The outgoing education secretary reunited with Lawanda Crayton, when she was interviewed for NPR’s StoryCorps interview project.
The foundation helps low-income children with “tutoring in early elementary school all the way through help with college tuition,” reports NPR.
Crayton’s mother was “an abusive alcoholic,” she told Duncan in the intrerview. “I remember being put in the hospital, I had a broken bone in my leg, had cuts on my face — all from my mother.”
I was a very angry young woman . . . But you and I had a very dynamic relationship, because I spent a number of days being tutored by you in math, and it became one of my favorite subjects.
Crayton was motivated by the program’s rewards. “And for us it was like, hey, if we do well on this test we can go on a trip … anything that was going to get us out of the war zone that we were in. I wanted as much homework as I could get in order not to go home.”
Every year I embraced everybody a little bit more and I accepted that they wanted to be a part of my life. They knew I had a future, I had a life, and I had a purpose, because I never thought that I had that, and it took these blessings to put that in my life. If I didn’t have that support, I wouldn’t be here.
The foundation paid for Crayton to attend a Catholic school, then go on to college.
She had no family at her college graduation. But she’d called Duncan. “You were there. You came. You were just as proud of me as I was of myself.”
Crayton now works in information technology as a project manager and mentors children.
Career readiness is an afterthought for most U.S. high schools, concludes Jobs for the Future in a new report. However, High Tech High Schools, Cristo Rey schools, Big Picture Schools, P-TECH models, and early college schools provide “applied learning related to the labor market.”
Cristo Rey students share a single full-time job (in a law firm, bank, hospital, or other setting), with each student working one day a week to pay school tuition.
At Worcester Tech in Massachusetts, students work in a veterinary clinic in partnership with Tufts.
Big Picture students make personalized learning plans that take them out to work several days a week with mentors, and a goal of defining their passions and finding work that is satisfying.
Massachusetts vocational schools typically host companies on site and provide the clinical training required for industry certifications. Worcester Tech, for example, hosts Tufts at Tech, a veterinary clinic serving the community.
The Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) in Clovis, California, provides half-day programs for 11th and 12 graders in four career clusters: professional sciences, engineering, advanced communications, and global economics.
. . . students complete industry-based projects and receive academic credit for advanced English, science, math, and technology. Students do everything from testing water in the High Sierra, to making industry-standard films, to trying out aviation careers by actually flying planes. Teaching teams include business and science partners, and many teachers have extensive professional experience.
Only 24 percent of U.S. teens have jobs, down from 44 percent in 2000. Teens from well-to-do families are the most likely to have jobs, while few lower-income teens are in the workforce.
In Switzerland, students apply for internships at the end of ninth grade.
For the next three or four years, your week consists of three days at work, two days at school, and an occasional stint in an intercompany training organization (like the Centre for Young Professionals, in Zurich, Switzerland). Your company pays you between $600 and $800 a month to start, moving up to $1,000 or $1,200 or more by the end of your third year.
Seventy percent of young people use this system, completing “the equivalent of high school (and a year or so of community college).” Swiss youth unemployment is 3 percent.
Linked Learning integrates career tech education with academics.
Earning a technical certificate or associate degree at a community college significantly boosts earnings. However, most community college students — including those who place into remedial classes — are trying to earn academic credentials.
Employers are doing more to train workers for skilled blue-collar jobs, reports U.S. News.
In response to a Yik Yak post that read “#blackwomenmatter,” a Colorado College student wrote, “They matter, they’re just not hot.” Thaddeus Pryor, a junior, was “suspended for two years” for “abusive behavior” and “disruption of college activities,” reports The Catalyst.
His house mate, Lou Henriques was expelled for posting a screenshot from a South Park episode showing a character on Wheel of Fortune incorrectly answering a “People Who Annoy You” question with the letters N_GGERS displayed. (The correct answer was NAGGERS.) Another Henriques’ post referred to a South Park character running down the hall yelling “RACE WAR.”
Yik Yak is anonymous, but someone tipped off the administration that Pryor and Henriques were responsible. Within 24 hours, they were kicked out of school. Two deans made the decision.
Both students have appealed.
“I apologized” for the six-word comment, Pryor told the Colorado Gazette. However, the deans accused him of writing earlier Yik Yak posts that he agreed were “racist and hateful.” Pryor said he didn’t write the earlier posts or know who did.
“There have been shorter suspensions and lesser punishments for things related to sexual assault and physical violence,” he said.
In a campuswide assembly to discuss the Yik Yak posts, some students said they were offended. OK, maybe they were.
If making a lame joke and quoting South Park are grounds for suspension and expulsion . . . How can any college educate children so frail?
FIRE reminds Colorado College about free speech in this letter.
Erika Christakis, who set off a flap over racism by suggesting that Yale students could pick their own Halloween costumes, will no longer teach child development at Yale.
“I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems,” she said in an email to The Washington Post.
Why so many helicopter parents? asks Megan McArdle on Bloomberg View.
The world isn’t more dangerous than it used to be), she writes. “I grew up in a New York City where kids had a lot more freedom — and a lot more crime to contend with, a lot more pollution, and a lot less safety gear.”
What’s different is that “we got richer, and richer people can expend more effort protecting their kids,” writes McArdle. But does this explain the “radical transformation” in parenting?
Parents are spending more time with their children — and working longer hours — than in the recent past. “Intensive parenting” is most common” among those who could afford to hire others to supervise their kids.
What matters is the way we got richer, she argues. Fewer well-to-do- people have family businesses to pass on. Instead, the upper middle class is made up primarily of the “extensively educated.”
An MBA . . . is not heritable. Neither is a law degree, a medical degree, or any of the other educational credentials that form the barriers to entry into today’s upper middle class. Those have to be earned by the child, from strangers — and with inequality rising, the competition for those credentials just keeps getting fiercer.
Professional-class parents can pass down their “ability to navigate the educational system that produces the credentials,” she writes. So they hover.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan celebrated the birth of their daughter by pledging to give 99 percent of their wealth — $45 billion or so — to worthy causes, such as “advancing human potential and promoting equality.” They’ll make do with the remaining $450 million.
They’ve come in for a lot of criticism and kibbitzing.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan with their new born daughter, Max.
Some want to tell them how to spend the money: Don’t try to change things like Bill Gates!
Anil Dash advises funding “people and institutions that are already doing this work (including, yes, public institutions funded by tax dollars) and trust that they know their domains better than someone who’s already got a pretty demanding day job.”
Others accuse the couple of trying to dodge taxes. (Giving away 99 percent of your money is not a great way to save money.)
In response, Zuckerberg explained why they set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, as an LLC rather than a traditional foundation. They want flexibility.
“This enables us to pursue our mission by funding non-profit organizations, making private investments and participating in policy debates.”
. . . “If we transferred our shares to a traditional foundation, then we would have received an immediate tax benefit, but by using an LLC we do not. And just like everyone else, we will pay capital gains taxes when our shares are sold by the LLC.”
The Initiative will focus on “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities,” he wrote.
“Our education work has been funded through a non-profit organization, Startup: Education, the recently announced Breakthrough Energy Coalition will make private investments in clean energy, and we also fund public government efforts, like the CDC Ebola response and San Francisco General Hospital.”
The money will be wasted, predicts Gawker’s Sam Biddle. He sneers at Facebook’s support for Summit’s personalized learning platform — with no understanding of what it is.
The Washington Post describes the couple’s plans to provide private schooling and health care for low-income families in a heavily minority community, East Palo Alto.
At Chicago Vocational Career Academy, which is desperately trying to raise its test scores and graduation rate, nearly all students come from low-income black families. Most ninth graders are years behind in reading and math. Intensive tutoring provided by MATCH Education is helping students catch up, reports Maya Dukmasova in the University of Chicago Magazine.
On a day in early June, three girls sat face to face with tutors in the Math Lab, which they attend in addition to their normal math class.
They were working on division with unknown variables. “Number 23 is a little curveball but I bet you can do it,” Nichole Jannah, a recent college graduate, told her student.
Math tutor Amelia Hansen works with one student at a time. Credit: Maya Dukmasova
Veronica, a freshman, started the year with a D in math. With daily help from a tutor, she finished the year with a high B.
Sarah, also a freshman, raised her math grade from a C to an A with the help of her tutor. “When I go into math class, I fly through work,” she said, snapping her fingers.
“Everything in education policy right now is about getting teachers to do a better job teaching grade-level material,” says Jens Ludwig, who co-directs UC’s Education Lab. But good algebra teaching can’t help students who haven’t mastered third-grade arithmetic.
Being able to successfully teach in the classroom involves years of practice and training in pedagogy and classroom management. . . . To get results as a tutor, he says, requires only knowledge of the material, good rapport with people, and commitment.
MATCH recruits recent college graduates — and a few career switchers — who are willing to work full time for $17,000 a year plus benefits.
Before the school got MATCH tutors in fall 2013, the first-year on-track rate — the percentage of freshman passing all their classes — was in the low 70s. Now 86 percent are on track to graduate.
CVCA was able to cancel its summer credit-recovery classes for failing students, writes Dukmasova. “Instead the school focused on offering higher-level math and honors courses.”
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)– the long-awaited revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act aka No Child Left Behind — passed the House 359-64, and is expected to pass the Senate next week. Present Obama will sign it.
The compromise is endorsed by most major education groups, but it misses “the sweet spot of reason in evaluating schools and teachers,” editorializes the Los Angeles Times.
No Child Left Behind made the nation aware, as never before, of just how poorly students of color or with low incomes were faring.
The solution working its way through Congress, though more reasonable than No Child Left Behind, threatens to leave many poor and minority students in schools that middle-class parents would never accept for their children. At minimum, the bottom 20% of schools in California and other states with comparatively poor student achievement need to take concrete steps toward improvement; the looming federal compromise would require intervention only at the lowest-performing 5%. That’s unacceptable. And is this country honestly ready to allow high schools to continue graduating a mere 67% or 70% of their students, with no sense of public outrage?
California dropped its Academic Performance Index in hopes of creating a broader measurement of school effectiveness, notes the Times. “Early indications are that the state might end up dumping out a hodgepodge of data for each school, with no overall sense of student performance. How will the state help its neediest schools if it can’t even identify them?”
Conservatives should oppose ESSA, argues Lindsey Burke of Heritage. Although it eliminates average-yearly-progress mandates, the proposed ESSA would not make Title I funds portable or cut duplicative programs, she writes. The act “would maintain significant federal intervention in local school policy for years to come.”
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