Maybe tween-agers don’t want parents to listen to their problems, suggests Ann Hulbert in Slate, reviewing the movie Thirteen and a book, Not Much Just Chillin’ : The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers.
Empathetic listening and therapeutic understanding, the kids suggest, can be overrated: What they really need are adults who can help them look and think beyond the often narcissistic travails of middle school, not prod them to obsess more explicitly about every personal problem.
In both the movie and the book, writes Hulbert, “the problem isn’t so much that grown-ups won’t or can’t begin to imagine teenage turmoil; it’s that more than a few of their elders are parasitically invested in adolescent identity confusion themselves.”
My solution is quite simple: Put all children in one of those sci-fi comas at the age of 12. Revive girls at 18, boys at 21.
New Orleans schools are so bad that parents who want their children to be educated must pay for private school. So assert Gregory and Maria Guth, parents who are suing the school district, demanding reimbursement of their son’s private school tuition if he’s unable to continue at his magnet school.
Franklin is among the city’s few “citywide access” schools, often called “magnet schools.” They are among the state’s best, but the schools have a limited number of slots for students and those slots are highly sought after.
Most other schools are far inferior, judging from the state’s 2002 accountability rankings. Of 119 New Orleans schools listed, 105 are ranked below the state average. Of those, 50 are considered “academically unacceptable.”
Guth wants to make the suit a class action.
Some Florida students will take home report cards on their fruit and vegetable consumption as part of a state program to combat obesity. And help Florida farmers sell those mangoes. I’m not clear if it’s just promotional literature exhorting kids to eat more healthy food, or an actual attempt to report on whether little Juan ate his carrot sticks and orange slices at lunch.
The Palm Beach Post observes:
Only 8 percent of the school district’s elementary schools have daily recess. About 20 percent offer the recommended 150 minutes of exercise weekly.
In elementary school, students don’t get recess? Or, apparently, phys ed. It would be easy to schedule a half-hour recess every day. It will be hard for teachers to change their students’ eating habits.
Boys are on the wrong side of the gender gap in schools, reports USA Today.
In classrooms nationwide, girls are pulling ahead of boys academically. Recent federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In 12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math and science exams, their advantage is slipping.
The story blames the heavy reliance on verbal skills, even in math, for boys’ slipping status. It’s also clear that boys are far more likely to be dosed with Ritalin when they act up, but I don’t think today’s teaching requires more docility than in the past. Most teachers are female, but that’s always been true. Perhaps the classroom chaos caused by today’s teaching methods — all those multiple intelligences going strong — is too much for easily distracted boys to handle.
The U.S. Department of Education concedes that no serious research is available comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender differences in learning.
After all, boys are junior patriarchs, right?
Via Sarcastic Southerner, a former teacher.
Update: Here’s a look at the gender gap on college campuses, where it’s increasingly easy for a guy to get a date. Even at MIT, women are catching up; 41 percent of undergrads are now female.
Invisible Adjunct hosts an excellent debate in the comments section on a post by Laura of Apartment 11D, who predicts that mid-level universities will become obsolete.
I’m going to make a Jules Verne prediction for the future. In the next 10 to 15 years, many of the mid-level colleges are going close and reopen as cyber schools. The University of Phoenix has been very successful at it. The technical colleges have already started shifted their courses from the classroom to the monitor. It’s much more profitable. No campus upkeep. Less faculty. Large classes. Students also like it, because they can fit their courses into their work schedule.
In twenty years, a traditional college education with dorm rooms and intramural sports will only be for the very rich. Harvard will always be Harvard. Yale will always be Yale. But Fairleigh Dickinson University in Paramus, New Jersey is going to shut their doors and put in some high speed internet cables. The rich will have their schools, but everyone else will telecommute.
A cybercollege isn’t going to have much of a football team. Many 18-year-olds looking for a place to grow up will want to go to a brick-mortar-and-ivy college; they probably lack the self-discipline for an all-cyber set-up. However, many older students will prefer the convenience and affordability of telecommuting for credit.
On the flip side, the Wall Street Journal has a story about universities bringing back Friday classes to make better use of classroom space. Professors are told to schedule quizzes on Fridays, so students have to show up. Students complain it’s cutting into their party time.
Atlantic Online interviews Virginia Postrel about her new book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. I want to get my book published and get that kind of publicity for it. And win the lottery, of course.
I wonder if the popularity of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” will help book sales.
A Mexican-American group says Arnold Schwarzenegger is anti-immigrant and maybe racist, because he believes immigrants should learn English. Even if they never lose that accent.
LULAC’s (Gabriela) Lemus said Schwarzenegger’s membership on the board of U.S. English “does not bode well for Hispanics.”
“So many of us support bilingualism and bilingual education and maintaining our culture, and he’s essentially saying it’s not valid by being part of this board that has got this whole anti-immigrant, underlying racist mentality,” Lemus said.
Politically, Arnie’s not vulnerable on the immigrant question. Among voters who actually turn out to vote, bilingualism is not popular.
What interests me is that LULAC places bilingual education in the context of “maintaining our culture.” These days, that justification is out of fashion. Educators claim the goal is to help students build a foundation in their first language so they can learn English better.
By the way, I don’t think Cruz Bustamante is a racist because he belonged to MEChA, a Mexican-American student group, in the ’70s. Yes, they spouted a lot of radical rhetoric then. But so did everybody. And la raza means “the people,” not really “the race.” Cruz wants to be governor of California — not Aztlan.
Update: OK, Cruz needs to disavow his youthful politics, just as Arnold disavowed his youthful sexual practices. It will be tougher for Cruz, because he needs to play the ethnic identity card, while not losing all those white voters. His ability to finesse this will be a good test of his political acumen. Or his ability to hire good advisors.
Since giving admissions points on the basis of race was ruled unconstitutional, the University of Michigan has announced a new system that will take race into account as a “plus factor,” but won’t give points. Admissions officers will consider a variety of non-academic factors, including family poverty, leadership potential and alumni connections, but academic factors will be most important, says the university.
The creepy part is the new essay:
The change most critics focused on yesterday is introduction of a mandatory “short essay” that examines attitudes on racial and ethnic diversity.
Applicants must choose whether to describe how their admission would contribute to “an academically superb and widely diverse educational community” or tell how a personal experience involving “cultural diversity Ñ or a lack thereof” changed their lives.
I wonder what will happen if some ornery straight-A student diverges from abject devotion to racial diversity. Will critics of “critical mass” be admitted?
Chuck Tryon, an English prof at Georgia Tech, has assigned students to read and analyze a blog: This one, Rachel Lucas or Tom Daschle. That’s what we call a gamut. They’re supposed to discuss how one of the blogs makes its arguments.
. . . you’ll want to focus on (1) locating a central argument; (2) analyzing the language and style of the argument; and (3) determining how the author establishes ethos, pathos, and logos.
Rachel has a handy summary for students with her philosophy of everything:
How do I make my arguments? Why, by calling people “asshats,” of course. Actually, I have no idea how I make my arguments except that I try to stick to the facts and I always admit when I’m wrong, which fosters credibility in all future arguments. I think.
Then she urges them to read me because I’m smart and will not bring “asshat” into their vocabulary. Smart? I don’t know what ethos, pathos and logos mean — not in this context. I sure hope I have some.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got more than Daschle. Sample:
Tomorrow, I am going to take a break from my vacation to meet with Dale Bosworth – the Chief of the United States Forest Service – to talk about forest management. Chief Bosworth and I will also have the opportunity to tour the Beaver Park area of the Black Hills National Forest to see how the thinning of pine beetle-infested trees is going.
The students’ personal blogs are on Tryon’s page. Like Rachel, I’ll be checking up to see what the students write.
I think there’s a lot of potential for using the Internet, and blogging in particular, to increase conversation between students and teachers, get students to write more and generally make the world a better place. John Lovas, who teaches English at DeAnza College, has a blog, and tells me he’s experimented with teaching writing online.
When I was advising La Voz, the student newspaper at De Anza, I developed a Newswriting telecourse with all the writing on listserv or e-mail. But I found the total on-line format a problem. Too many students couldn’t adapt and disappeared, though the ones who stayed did well.
He now combines the telecourse with some class meetings.
My argument is that every professional today needs to know how to navigate a range of print and on-line writing environments, so a college writing course should incorporate them all. The regular class meetings seem to really help students connect to the course.
Good luck locating a central argument in this post, students. Oh, scroll down. I’m sure I’ve got one somewhere.
On the National Association of Scholars forum, Thomas Reeves complains about the burdens of teaching unprepared, unmotivated, anti-intellectual students dressed like clowns, prostitutes or members of barbaric tribes. (The individual links don’t work, so be prepared to scroll.)
The great majority of high schools continue to require little in exchange for their diplomas. Hundreds of thousands enter the campus gates without a clue about the intellectual challenges that are, or at least should be, awaiting them.
The impact on college and university campuses of legions of unprepared freshmen is never positive. Millions of dollars must be spent annually in remedial education. And the rate of failure is still extraordinarily high. The ACT estimates that one in four fail or drop out after one year. A third of the freshmen at the relatively select University of Wisconsin-Madison do not return for a second year. I toiled for decades on a Wisconsin campus on which a mere 18 percent of the entering freshmen ever graduate. The financial costs, let alone the emotional toll on the young people involved, is scandalous.
Inevitably, standards are lowered so that students can move through the system without having to read or think too much.
On Critical Mass, Erin O’Connor is featuring the travails of Frederick Lang, a Brooklyn college professor who got in trouble for flunking too many students in basic composition class. Lang writes:
When I joined the English department and taught both literature and freshman composition, I tried to give my students a college education. I found that most of them were unprepared for one, but had been deluded into thinking they were doing just fine because they had been receiving passing grades. At arbitration, Tremper and Matthews admitted that most Brooklyn College students were unprepared, but insisted that I should have awarded my students only As, Bs, and the occasional C, so as not to “hamper their progress.”
Lang has been reassigned to non-teaching duties.
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