Monthly Archive for November, 2007

‘Mohammed’ Bear = 15 days in jail in Sudan

Published on November 30, 2007 in Culture. 15 Comments By Joanne Jacobs

The British teacher who let her class of Sudanese seven-year-olds name a teddy bear “Mohammed” has been sentenced to 15 days in jail followed by deportation from Sudan for insulting Islam. Gillian Gibbons had faced a maximum sentence of a year in jail and 40 lashes if convicted of all charges. A crowd that gathered outside the jail called for the teacher’s death.

Gibbons’ 25-year-old son, John, fears her treatment will lead to a backlash.

“I don’t want the verdict to lead to any anti feeling towards Muslims. Everyone has been very nice, but one of my fears, and I imagine my mother’s also, will be that this results in any sort of resentment towards Muslim people.”

It might not be Mum’s number one concern just now.

Teachers from Western countries should be very wary about taking jobs in Sudan or similar countries.

Update: On The View, co-hosts Sherri Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg think the teacher should have learned local customs on stuffed-animal naming so as to avoid being an “ugly American.” From Liverpool.

Update II: Scrappleface reports that plans for a “Tickle Me Muhammad” doll have been put on hold.

Best high schools

Published on November 30, 2007 in Education. 8 Comments By Joanne Jacobs

U.S. News’ list of best high schools analyzes reading and math scores, including a look at how low-income students are doing, and challenges, such as how many students take and pass AP exams.

The story on Massachusetts, the “first-class state,” includes MATCH, a “gold medal” Boston charter school that recruits low-income minority students. Hidalgo High, a high-poverty school on the Texas-Mexico border, shines among the top open-enrollment schools.

Eduwonk’s Andrew Rotherham helped develop the U.S. News alternative to Newsweek’s list of America’s Best High Schools, which honors schools that offer challenging courses but doesn’t look at equity. In the U.S. News list, “charter schools are over-represented . . . indicative of the number that are focusing on college prep for urban kids,” writes Eduwonk. Four out of five high schools on the list are open to all students.

Learners try harder

Published on November 30, 2007 in Parenting. 14 Comments By Joanne Jacobs

Effort, not superior intelligence, is the key to success, writes psychologist Carol Dweck in Scientific American. Telling children their success is a result of their ability leaves them “vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn,” she writes.

  • Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
  • Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

Dweck and colleagues followed junior high students for two years. “Growth” believers said learning was more important than getting good grades and believed that hard work would pay off.

Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.

Students in the two groups started with similar test scores, but the students who believed in effort were more persistent when the work got harder. They soon forged ahead in achievement.

You can’t win if you don’t play

Published on November 29, 2007 in Education. 6 Comments By Joanne

Academic contests are good for students, writes Betsy, who coaches her charter high school’s quiz bowl team. She links to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Rebecca Wallace-Segall, who helps students prepare for writing contests. Progressive private school administrators “will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions,” Wallace-Segall writes. Competition creates winners and losers. Someone’s self-esteem might be dented.

But it’s OK for students to compete in sports, as long as they’re playing in teams and not as individuals.

“Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition,” says one mother, “he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn’t allowed to win the same honors for his gifts.” Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.

“We don’t want kids to compete individually, put themselves in vulnerable positions as individuals,” explains a leading administrator. “They can compete within teams,” explains another. “So the focus is on community building rather than on personal value.”

Once a middle-school spelling bee coach, Betsy saw this mindset lead to the cancellation of elementary and then middle-school bees.

Then the same geniuses tried to end another lovely competition, Battle of the Books, for which teams of students read books from a list for their grade level and then compete to answer questions from those books. I used to coach that competition when I was a middle school teacher and I just loved to see all these kids reading and discussing the books. . . . A few weeks after the competition, I would come up to those students who had been so upset and ask them if they’d come to grips with their defeat. Invariably, they would say that they had. And then I would tell them to remember that moment the next time that they faced a disappointment. Remember how they enjoyed preparing and competing, how upset they’d been, and, how they had learned that life goes on after a defeat and that they could learn to cope. That is an important lesson for all young people — to realize that life goes on after disappointment and not to become so focused on a defeat that they can’t get past it.

Most kids can handle failure without falling apart — unless they’re raised to be wimps.

If math were a color

Published on November 29, 2007 in Education. 15 Comments By Joanne

Texas’s state school board has rejected Everyday Math texts, writes Michelle Malkin in a column excoriating “fuzzy math.”

Citing “an Illinois mom,” Malking says the fifth-grade Everyday Math textbook asks:

A. If math were a color, it would be –, because –.

B. If it were a food, it would be –, because –.

C. If it were weather, it would be –, because –.

I’m thinking white cotton candy in a heavy rainstorm.

Dartmouth, dead or alive

Published on November 29, 2007 in College. 2 Comments By Joanne Jacobs

Getting buried in a Dartmouth coffin is taking college loyalty too far, writes Joie Jager-Hyman, who discovered that Collegiate Memorials carries a line of coffins and urns for people who want to die as they lived between the ages of 18 and 22.

Parents against inclusion

Published on November 28, 2007 in Education. 25 Comments By Joanne

Some parents of disabled students are fighting for separate classes for their children, reports the Wall Street Journal. Mainstreaming doesn’t work well for all kids, parents say.

A majority of special-education students spend 80% or more of the school day in mainstream classrooms, up from about a third in 1990. Federal rules have pushed schools to make mainstreaming the first choice; many special programs have been eliminated.

Mary Kaplowitz, a special-education teacher in Kingston, Pa., was a bigger supporter of mainstreaming before she had her son, Zachary, who has autism and is mildly retarded. She says his preschool classmates rarely played with him and he came home from summer camp asking why the nondisabled children laughed at him. On a visit, she saw them drawing away from her son.

“They shunned him and it broke my heart,” says Ms. Kaplowitz. Earlier this year, she and other parents fought successfully to preserve separate special-education classes in Kingston like the one Zachary, now 9 years old, attends at a local elementary school.

When disability rights groups fight for full inclusion, parents sometimes fight back, the Journal reports.

Mainstreaming is cheaper than creating a separate school for the disabled, though providing a district-run school is a lot cheaper than paying tuition for students to attend private schools for the disabled.

The (New Jersey) school funding hearings, held in various towns and cities last fall, were emotional. Ruth Lowenkron, a special-education attorney, testified that beyond being the right thing to do, mainstreaming would save money. “Repeat after me,” she told the legislators, “inclusion is cheaper than segregation.”

Anti-inclusion parents say their kids were isolated and miserable in mainstream classes.

Surely, mainstreaming works for some disabled students but not for others. Letting parents choose seems like the obvious answer.

Carnival of Education

Published on November 28, 2007 in Blogging. Closed By Joanne

Over at the Carnival of Education, Matt of Matt-a-Matical Thinking is giving out Noble Prizes.

Secret WinterPerson

Published on November 28, 2007 in Culture. 8 Comments By Joanne

When teachers at Darren’s school give each other gifts for the winter holiday, it’s called Secret Snowman because “Santa” is considered too sectarian.

Can anyone explain in which holy book a fat man with flying reindeer appears? And in which holy book we’re commanded by the deity to cut down trees — the givers of oxygen! — to decorate?

If Santa is a religious symbol, it’s shouldn’t be OK to give gifts, a tradition inspired by the Magi, Darren argues.

Soon Frosty will acquire a religious identity.

Baby steps to marriage

Published on November 28, 2007 in Family. Closed By Joanne

Delonte Mohamed, 21, and Satrina McDuffie, 22, are expecting a baby boy. She’s already got two toddlers. Should they get married?

In Couples take baby steps to ‘I Do’, the Baltimore Sun reports on a counseling program for young expectant couples. Many were raised by one parent or less and haven’t observed a stable two-parent family in real life. The idea is to help them learn relationship and life skills so they can build a lasting marriage.

Many programs target blacks, who have the lowest marriage rates. Though the teen pregnancy rate has dropped for blacks, nearly 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers.

“I got street family,” said Mohamed, who was raised by his grandmother, his mother addicted to drugs, his father absent. “And that’s about it.”

McDuffie, meanwhile, grew up in foster care. When she met Mohamed, she was living in a shelter with her sons, Daeshawn, 2, and Darius, 1.

“They are gonna need that male role model,” Mohamed said. “And I’m going to do that.”

Their biggest challenge is communication, said McDuffie. Mohamed shuts down when he’s angry; she prefers to talk it out. She’s becomes upset if he doesn’t call when promised. He grows frustrated when she calls him a liar.

. . . Mohamed’s goal: to create a family styled after the film Soul Food, where a family’s trials are overcome at the Sunday dinner table.

At least, he’s seen a functional family on screen, if not in real life.

I wish the story had mentioned the couple’s level of education and work experience. Does Mohamed have a job? Does McDuffie have job plans — or plans to start using birth control? Good intentions are great, but who’s going to put meat (or macaroni and cheese) on that Sunday dinner table?