California 12th graders can’t graduate unless they can pass the exit exam. But many seniors who haven’t passed yet aren’t working very hard to learn the skills they need, reports the Sacramento Bee.
Juan, 18, has passed the English part of the test but not the math. You wouldn’t know it by looking at his class schedule. He’s taking English 12 – like most seniors – but is not enrolled in math.
Juan has all the math credits he needs for graduation and said he didn’t want the stress of taking it again. It’s the only subject in which Juan has been placed in special education.
“I don’t know how I passed geometry and Algebra 1,” he said. “I don’t feel I learned enough to pass the California High School Exit Exam.”
Many of Hiram Johnson’s struggling seniors have never done well in school but always have been promoted. They’ve gotten by with C’s and D’s. They don’t always attend class.
They’ve been pushed through before without learning skills and many think they’ll get by somehow this time.
Students get six tries to pass the test before graduation, starting as sophomores. Multiple-choice questions cover “reading and writing at a ninth-and 10th-grade level and math skills typically taught in sixth, seventh and eighth grade.” Students must get 55 percent on the math and 60 percent on the reading and writing test to pass. Blind guessing would generate a 25 percent. This generation of students has made it to 12th grade without basic skills essential to just about anything they might want to do as adults.
In a final English exam, Australian students were “asked to compare an SMS message, ‘how r u pls 4giv me I luv u xoxoxo O:-),’ with a famous Keats love letter, ‘You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish’,” reports The Australian.
And the 46,000 Victorian students who sat the three-hour VCE exam were also asked to analyse a Dilbert cartoon on the modern dilemma of email and write a letter to the editor of Woolworths magazine Australian Good Taste.
The test of English skills also included analysing more traditional texts from Shakespeare and Henry Lawson to Graham Greene.
But it also quizzed students on popular films such as sci-fi flick Gattaca, Australian drama Lantana and classic Breaker Morant.
Students sat the paper, set by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, six weeks after the same body was accused of trying to “dumb down” Year 12 English.
hevvin 4fend.
In the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Kyle Zirpolo, who testified as a nine-year-old in the McMartin Pre-school case, confesses he lied about being molested to please his parents, who fed him rumors about the allegations, and his interrogators, who wouldn’t take “nothing happened” for an answer.
I remember them asking extremely uncomfortable questions about whether Ray (Buckey) touched me and about all the teachers and what they did — and I remember telling them nothing happened to me. I remember them almost giggling and laughing, saying, “Oh, we know these things happened to you. Why don’t you just go ahead and tell us? Use these dolls if you’re scared.”
Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.
Zirpolo has happy memories of his time at McMartin, and wants to make amends for his lies. His mother still doesn’t believe him.
Because of the heavy pressure on children to make up stories — such as Zirpolo’s tale of being taken on a plane ride — the McMartin defendants were acquitted. The surviving defendants say they don’t need apologies from the children but they wouldn’t mind apologies from the adults involved.
Students learn math and science better when taught with abstract rather than “visually engaging” 3-D objects that “moved dynamically on a computer screen,” reports Science Daily.
The students were also more successful in applying what they learned to new situations when they were taught with abstract symbols rather than concrete objects, said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University.
. . . “Many teachers believe that concrete materials make learning more fun for students, and that will increase their motivation and help them understand the concepts,” (Sloutsky) said. “While this may be true, in many cases, the concrete materials also interfere with what they are trying to learn.”
Dancing, talking, humanized letters and numbers may confuse young children, Sloutsky said. Children see humanized letters and numbers as individuals, not as “symbols that can be used in many different ways.”
There are many reasons why concrete may not be better for learning, according to Sloutsky. For one, concrete objects have more “perceptual richness,” meaning there is more for students to look at and process. That means there is more to distract students from what is important.
Also, concrete symbols are less “portable.” For example, a child can use a stick – a relatively abstract item – and imagine it is a car, or a space ship or a flower. However, it is more difficult for a child to take a toy train and pretend that it is a flower.
A large majority of teachers believe children have trouble with abstraction and learn better when everything is as concrete as possible. I wonder if the study will change any minds.
The fight over evolution is making Americans hostile to science, some academics fear.
Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller believes the rhetoric of the anti-evolution movement has had the effect of driving a wedge between a large proportion of the population who follow fundamentalist Christianity and science.
“It is alienating young people from science. It basically tells them that the scientific community is not to be trusted and you would have to abandon your principles of faith to become a scientist, which is not at all true,” he said.
Most Americans don’t believe in evolution or the Big Bang; fewer than 20 percent are scientifically literate, scientists say.
The board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is working on a new science test for 2009 based on a draft science framework that’s not “up to the challenge,” says a Fordham report.
For a school principal in Newton, Massachusetts, the scariest Halloween specter was the possibility a few parents would boycott the traditional Halloween costume party. From the Boston Globe:
When students at Underwood Elementary School walk to their classrooms on Monday, there will be no witches, SpongeBob SquarePants, or Johnny Damons there to greet them.
No skeleton paintings or Frankenstein tattoos, either.
The school’s principal said yesterday he acceded to the complaints of a handful of parents who said that because the school’s traditional Halloween celebrations offended their religious beliefs, they would not send their children to school if the revelry continued this year.
Of course, the majority of parents are angry the school won’t celebrate Halloween. Some plan to protest on Monday by standing in front of the school — in costume.
The principal plans to hold a ”celebration of fall” and a costume event, perhaps with kids dressing as their favorite literary characters, later in the school year. Surely, parents who don’t like celebrations of the supernatural will be offended by all the Harry Potters.
Here’s a surprise: The federal program to connect all schools and libraries to the Internet is “extremely vulnerable to “waste, fraud and abuse.”
A federal program that has doled out more than $10 billion to help schools and libraries link to the Internet has wasted millions of dollars over its nine-year history, according to a congressional report.
A fee on phone service finances the program, which was created in 1996.
Jose is more popular than Michael for San Jose area toddlers, reports the Mercury News. Aditya, an Indian boy’s name that means “sun,” has outpaced Timothy and Paul.
Boys called Angel outnumber boys called John, a name that sailed over on the Mayflower.
Old-fashioned names — Hazel, Mathilda and Daisy — are coming back in style. Except for Maria at #3, Hispanic girls tend to have non-Spanish names like Jennifer, Samantha, Ashley, Emily and Jocelyn. Their brothers have Spanish names because they’re likely to be named after fathers or grandfathers.
Of course, this being California, the drive to be unique can be a challenge. Seven girls named Charlize will one day have the image of the South African movie star Charlize Theron to contend with. Five white girls named Piper can start their own girl band once they are out of diapers.
And four boys named Neo — the name of the character in the cult movie the Matrix popular among computer lovers — are doing their part to honor Silicon Valley’s geek roots.
Top boy’s names in 2003 were: Andrew (all ethnic groups); Ryan (whites); Jose (Hispanics); Anthony (blacks); Kevin (Vietnamese); Andrew (Chinese) and Aditya (Indo-American). Top girl’s names were: Emily (overall); Emma (whites); Jennifer (Hispanics); Emily (Vietnamese); Emily (Chinese) and Shreya (Indo-American). Of 271 black girls born in the county in 2003, no three had the same name.
Six percent to 14 percent of students suffer from a math learning disorder, according to a recently published Mayo Clinic study. Some also have trouble learning to read, but many have problems only with math.
With private funding, the University of Nevada will open a public school for “profoundly gifted” children testing in the 99.9th percentile.
I wasn’t that impressed by the 10-year-old girl in the story. She reads up to six books a month? I averaged six books a week at her age. Of course, I wasn’t in eighth grade when I was 10. I didn’t ask questions that annoyed the teacher. I read in class.
Obviously, it’s nice that super-smart Reno students will have a school tailored to their needs, but most smart kids will have to find their own way.
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