In a speech on Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Wisconsin high school student ripped pages from a Bible. He was suspended and told he can’t return to class without being cleared by a psychologist.
(Classmate Elle Jacobson said:) “He said he was going to do something that our little stupid minds wouldn’t be able to comprehend. He took the Bible and pulled it out in front of the class and first he started ripping out pages, and then he started ripping out sections. Everybody looked stunned. I was stunned. I was shocked.”
Parker Principal Dale Carlson says the boy was suspended for “other behaviors” in addition to ripping up the Bible.
The boy may have intended to illustrate Emerson’s condemnation of conformity, points out Liz Ditz at I Speak of Dreams. Perhaps he knew that his home town, Janesville, Wisconsin, is the home of the Bible-distributing Gideon Society.
Just the other day, I was thinking about listening to Peter and the Wolf when I was a kid. Now, thanks to Ben Cunningham, I’ve discovered it’s possible to download classic children’s records from the ’40s and ’50s — including the same version of Peter we used to own — on Kiddie Records Weekly. They’ve got Uncle Remus too. Check it out!
Playing with toy guns helps boys develop and learn, say the British government’s child development experts. The Department for Children, Schools and Families has advised staffers at preschools and play groups to “resist their ‘natural instinct’ to stop boys using pretend weapons such as guns or light sabres in games with other toddlers,” reports the Daily Mail.
Fantasy play involving weapons and superheroes allows healthy and safe risk-taking and can also make learning more appealing, says the guidance.
Some teachers “find the chosen play of boys more difficult to understand and value than that of girls,” the guidance said. It praised a North London children’s center which helped boys print Spiderman photos from the Internet to create a “Spiderman House.”
This led to improvements in their communication, ability to develop storylines in their play and skills in drawing, reading and writing.
It’s a return to common sense, writes Betsy.
Dr. Helen, the InstaWife, agrees that aggressive play lets children learn to deal with their feelings.
Home for a Jewish-Italian Hannakristmas, Dan Greene of Exponential Curve discovered his half-brother, a fourth-grader, understands fractions better than his ninth-grade Numeracy students at Downtown College Prep, a San Jose charter high school that recruits Mexican-American underachievers.
I struggle daily to get them to pay attention, to care, to think, to not give up when a problem is hard, and their mathematical progress is painfully slow.
But they’re catching up.
I just gave our grade-level equivalency test before break, and the median score has improved by 1.1 grade levels (from 5.9 to 7.0) and the average by 1.65 grade levels (from 5.76 to 7.42) since the summer. If I can squeeze that kind of growth or better out of them during the second semester, most will be in pretty good shape for next year.
Dan Greene is one of the math teachers in my book, Our School, which I’ve failed to promote sufficiently. Consider it a good post-Christmas gift.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reviews the free-speech battles of 2007 on college campuses including University of Delaware, Michigan State, Brown, University of Rhode Island, Colorado State, Gettysburg College, Temple, Occidental and San Francisco State.
Teacher Magazine features Donalyn Miller, a a sixth-grade teacher and “book whisperer,” who requires students to read 40 books of their own choice “in a variety of genres such as realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction.”
If I teach a lesson on conflict, eventually students will be asked to identify the conflict in their own book and provide evidence to support their observations.
I do not “teach books”; I use the students’ independent reading to reinforce the skills and concepts that I am teaching.
Many children read 50 or 60 books; the lowest number finished is 22.
When my daughter was in school, they read very few books in class but read them intensively. It seemed to me they beat each poor book to death. Of course, Allison read voraciously on her own, as I did (and still do).
In part two, Miller writes about getting boys to read by catering to their interests, even if that’s vulgar humor or video-game strategy guides.
The subject matter that draws high school boys to certain movies and video games can be found in trade books, but rarely the assigned books. I had a whole group of boys one year that passed around and read The Chocolate War because they heard the book contained off-color language, when, in fact, there were just a few inappropriate words.
Part 3 discusses in-class reading time.
Angered by thefts from backpacks at school, an 11-year-old Australian boy set a mouse trap for the sneak thieves.
Harry drew on know-how acquired from hours spent glued to the History Channel, his favourite program being a documentary about Vietcong-made traps in the Vietnam War.
On the fourth day, he placed a mouse trap with a $5 note attached in his school bag during recess.
He had squirted the device’s main bar and metal fittings with green food colouring, cutting a small hole in the note and securing it on the bait hook with sticky tape, so that the thief would have to wrestle with it, thereby setting off the spring and getting hit with the coloured bar.
One of the thieves was caught trying to wash off the green; he implicated an accomplice.
The vice principal said the use of a mouse trap couldn’t be condoned, said Harry’s mother, “but privately teachers were, like, ‘Good on you, mate’.”
Betsy suggests the school hire Harry as security chief.
Over at the Carnival of Education, hosted by History is Elementary, Diana writes in praise of failure.
Po Moyemu is hosting 2007’s final Carnival of Homeschooling.
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