Parents are buying the Time Tracker to prepare their children for standardized tests, the New York Times says. But is that the motivation?

Shaped like a colorful peppermill, with a digital readout panel, lights that suggest a traffic intersection and an electronic male voice that booms “Begin” and “Time’s up,” the Time Tracker, which sells for a list price of $34.95, has turned into a surprise hit of the holiday season, according to some toy sellers. By using the tracker during playtime, homework or any other activity, children are supposed to develop a sense of passing time – 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour – that translates into better management during tests. Siren sounds indicate when a certain period has gone by, and the lights switch from green to yellow to red to demonstrate how close the child is to the end of the allotted time.

Contrary to what the story implies, children don’t take “make or break” tests in elementary school, except for a few states that test for basic reading and math skills before promoting children to the next grade. Students who fail lack more than time management techniques. They lack basic reading and math skills.

The Time Tracker has become the top-selling toy for Learning Resources, which bills it as a way to keep kids on track, not necessarily as an SAT prep tool.

Perfect for: Study sessions, Projects, Tests, Experiments, Practice sessions, Classroom Assignments, Cooking, Hearing impaired and hundreds more uses.

I suspect most parents who buy Time Tracker want their kids to limit video game playing time or practice piano for a full 30 minutes. I can’t believe they’re worried about time management for test taking; it’s just too bizarre.

An election post-mortem in the January 2005 NEA Today declared, “The good news: A golden opportunity to reshape the Republican Party.” Education Intelligence Agency, laughs at NEA’s positive attitude.

What’s missing from this fantasy is what benefit the GOP is supposed to reap in exchange. What is the NEA sales pitch? “Let us do for you what we’ve done for the Democrats?”

You broke it. You bought it.

Professionals follow protocols or scripts, writes Jenny D. But when teachers are asked to follow a script, they’re offended.

A professional cellist needs to know how to read the music (the protocol). In addition, he needs to know how to play the cello (the skills). Or a doctor. She needs to know how the procedure for doing an appendectomy (the protocol) and also needs to know how to use a scalpel, how to tie off bleeding arteries, how to clamp the appendix, etc. (the skills). All of these professions have protocols, which are replicable, to some extent measurable, and repeatable procedures for doing the work of the profession. Protocols allow for professional standards to be developed, for specialized knowledge of the profession to grow, and for professionals to be more powerful by having and using that specialized knowledge. Without protocols, it’s barely a profession because there’s really no way to distinguish the work of the professional from similar work by anyone else.

Several have argued that teaching is so individualized between teacher and student that it can’t be routinized, or that it shouldn’t be because it would be demeaning. On the contrary, I think some standardized, scientifically based protocols would actual improve the standing of teachers.

Psychologists, pressured by managed care plans to show results, have moved to short-term standardized therapies designed to produce specific outcomes, she writes. Studies show the protocols produced the desird results.

These protocols were not entirely scripts; they could be tailored to fit the individual patient’s needs. But they provided a fairly tight framework that kept the therapy on track, and prevented the process from drifting into inertia.

The psychologists I spoke to said this new way of viewing therapy (which was loathed by most shrinks when first introduced) has actually shed new light on their work. It has allowed them to see results, and to build on the results by doing more research and measurement of their professional efforts.

Many teachers think of teaching as an art. But not all teachers are great artists.

Jenny D’s also looking for links to stories on parents complaining about Christmas celebrations in schools: Either too much Christmas or too little will work for her, as long as people are complaining. Which they usually are.

The education establishment in Niagara County, New York is fighting ugly to block a black pastor’s plan for a new charter school, writes Ryan Sager.

Board members of the proposed charter school have been intimidated into resigning, parents have been intimidated into not signing petitions in favor of the school and the Assembly has tried to intimidate the head of the state’s Board of Regents (whose term as a Regent is up in 2005 — it’s the Assembly that would reappoint him).

An ugly story all around as the teachers union and the local school superintendant tries to stop poor and minority kids from getting a shot at a decent education.

Sager’s New York Post columns one and two observe that 70 percent of minority students in Niagara Falls are failing to meet standards.

Michael Meckler’s Red State features a bizarre story about a promotion for Doane College, a small college in Crete, Nebraska founded by Congregationalists. Trying to recruit out of state, Doane sent postcards to California students with cartoons showing fictional students.

The text box in the upper right corner reads, “Finally, a place where he could work toward the career of his choice.” Tim imagines himself as quarterback of the football team, and the small box below him reads, “…and also play the field…” What caused the controversy was the text box in the lower part of this split image, which depicts Tim imagining himself the center of attention for three co-eds: “…and play the field some more….”

Faculty and students complained the message was sexist and inappropriate. Red State explains:

A Doane college football player was arrested in May for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Does “play the field” signify “engage in orgies” in Nebraska?

A new teacher tries to motivate Los Angeles high school students in the first part of an LA Times series. (Go to BugMeNot for sign-in info.)

One slept. Others stared, bored.

He had planned today’s class carefully: His students would relate to him. They would ask his advice about college. Then he would divide them into teams and lead them in a tic-tac-toe spelling game.

They would compete fiercely. Excitedly.

A girl in the front row studied herself in the mirror of her compact. She ignored him.

This was Ricardo Acuña’s third week as a teacher. Day after day, it was growing more difficult. He gave the girl a tense look. Then he wrote her name in red on the board: detention.

“Mister! I wasn’t putting on makeup.” She slammed her books on her desk. Then she crossed her arms and slumped in her seat.

“If you have an education,” Ricardo told them all, “you can make a difference in your lives and your families’ lives.”

The hour passed without any sign that he was making much difference himself.

Acuna, the son of a migrant laborer, got a boarding school scholarship and went on to earn Stanford and Columbia degrees. After working as communications director for the United Farmworkers, he’s now a teaching intern. The mentorship program that was supposed to help career-switchers learn to teach has lost its funding, but he can turn to his wife, an experienced teacher, for help.

All Michigan high school students are expected to learn algebra, even if they enter ninth grade without basic math skills. The remedial track is being eliminated, reports the Detroit Free Press.

But many educators now say that in the changing economy, where low-skills jobs are disappearing, schools don’t have the luxury of going slow. All students, they say, must take rigorous classes in high school to prepare them for postsecondary work, whether it be a one-year certificate program, a two-year community college or a four-year university.

“If you’re putting them into a course that goes a little slower and easier and where the expectations are a little less, obviously every year they fall a little bit behind,” said Mike Yocum, director of learning services at Oakland Schools, the county’s intermediate school district.

Struggling students need extra help.

“The fact is that many of those kids don’t know their multiplication tables, don’t know their basic mathematical operations. Unless you make some provision for them to cross the bridge between what they know and what they’re supposed to know, it’s not going to work,” said David Plank, codirector of the Education Policy Institute at Michigan State University.

“Unless you’re willing to invest the time in catching them up, then this is just a recipe for further failure,” Plank said.

At Downtown College Prep, the charter school my book is about, all ninth graders take college-prep English and algebra; many also take Verbal Reasoning (remedial reading) and Numeracy. And most Numeracy students don’t pass algebra till their second (summer school), third (10th grade) or fourth (summer school) try.

In a satirical, humorous, not-actually-real article, Watley Review profiles a teacher who specializes in applied physics, John Gaston.

A typical Gaston exam question involves asking students to choose between catching a small metal box filled with 20 pounds of lead dropped from a height of 1 foot, or the same metal box stuffed with 20 pounds of feathers dropped from the roof of an 8-story building. Each year, about five students try to catch the feather-filled box and end up in the emergency room with concussions.

“I still think it was a trick,” glowered Marvin Stoddmeyer, a student who chose the feathers and failed the final exam, breaking his collarbone in the process. “Gaston said something about momentum and kinetic versus potential energy or something during the year – yadda yadda yadda. But at no point did he specifically warn us not to try to catch a 20 pound object dropped from an 8-story building. That’s deception, man.”

Students are guaranteed an A, without having to attend classes or take exams, if they create a perpetual motion device by the last day of the school year.

Overprotective parents are raising a “nation of wimps,” a Psychology Today article warns.

Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.

. . . With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they’re robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we’re on our way to creating a nation of wimps.

When overprotected kids get to college, they often fall apart.

College, it seems, is where the fragility factor is now making its greatest mark. It’s where intellectual and developmental tracks converge as the emotional training wheels come off. By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. It takes a variety of forms, including anxiety and depression — which are increasingly regarded as two faces of the same coin — binge drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation and other forms of disconnection.

. . . The severity of student mental health problems has been rising since 1988, according to an annual survey of counseling center directors.

Via Education Gadfly

Convicted of painting her own car with racial slurs, a former visiting psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College has been sentenced to a year in prison.

Kerri Dunn, 40, was convicted in August of filing a false police report and attempted insurance fraud, and had faced up to three years.

Dunn allegedly wanted to mobilize students to fight hate crimes. She reported her car vandalized after she spoke at a campus forum on tolerance.