Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Grading exams: The staircase method

Published on December 31, 2009 in Testing. 5 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

Daniel Solove, a law professor, offers A Guide to Grading Exams on Concurring Opinions. It starts with a stack of exam papers. Then comes the toss down the stairs, which provides a spread for the grading curve.

This is an example of a toss of considerable skill — obviously the result of years of practice.

Exam-Grade-2a.jpg

Solove believes the papers that travel the farthest deserve the highest grades because they obviously have more heft. But an outlier that requires the professor to walk too far should be downgraded to a B.

Is he joking? Yes, he is. Or so he writes.

Via Instapundit, who also is a law professor.

Schools can use social networking

Published on December 31, 2009 in technology. 14 Comments Tags: . By Joanne

Schools should bring social networking into the classroom, argues Nicholas Bramble in Slate Magazine. Afraid of cyber-stalking, harassment and online pedophiles, many schools are trying to ban social media. That’s short-sighted, writes Bramble.

Social networks can also pull in students who are otherwise disengaged, because they draw on kids’ often intense interest in finding new ways to communicate with one another.

He suggests “students could talk about what they’re doing on Facebook and company, map out the ways they’re making connections with one another, and share videos and software they’ve created.”

Teachers can manage the project by selecting the best content and conversations, and incorporating it into other parts of the curriculum. If a student created an entry on Wikipedia for a local band or sports team, other students could work on revising the entry and building it into a larger local history project. The audience for school projects need no longer be one hurried teacher.

“Slamming the classroom door on social media just makes the virtual world more of a waste land,” Bramble writes.

Too blue sky?

Teaching’s rusty gate

Published on December 31, 2009 in Education. 21 Comments Tags: . By Joanne

Teachers should be gatekeepers for admission into the profession, writes Nancy Flanagan of Teacher in a Strange Land in The Rusty Gate. In addition to raising the bar for entrance and “investing more time, resources and research on effective teacher development,” the teachers we’ve already got need more support, she writes.

Struggling teachers come in two basic flavors: #1) teachers who haven’t had sufficient experience or training to do the job well and #2) teachers who once had the disposition and tools to be good teachers, but have checked out due to cynicism, fatigue, bitterness and unforgiving working conditions.

Novice teachers often fear evaluation and try “to keep a low profile,” she writes.

One thing that can be done by accomplished veterans: asking newer teachers for their ideas, and approaching them as full colleagues, rather than those who need help. . . . Novice teachers ought to be considered for leadership roles, such as curriculum writing or the school improvement team, rather than dumping unwanted, time-sucking class advisories or club sponsor roles on them.

Some burned-out veterans “were once enthusiastic and creative, but had had their mojo squashed by a culture of anger and perceived betrayal,” Flanagan writes.

. . . a significant group of teachers who retain the potential to be very effective in the classroom have found the only “leadership” role open to them is fighting back against systemic change through their unions. They need to have their professional experience validated and acknowledged; they’re not going accept either praise or criticism from someone they don’t respect, but they have not stopped caring about their students’ learning.

There’s a chance to learn from veteran teachers, even those who seem to have “dried up,” she writes.

District pays for black-on-black bullies

Published on December 30, 2009 in Culture, Education and Violence. 11 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

Two black students bullied for “acting white” by other blacks won a settlement from their South Carolina school district after they charged the school allowed a racially hostile educational environment. Because the abuse was motivated by their race, the claimants argued they were victims of discrimination, even though the bullies were also black. The district paid $50,000 apiece to the two students, who live in the same household, and $25,000 apiece to two family members for a $150,000 total, reports South Carolina Lawyers Weekly.

The elementary student claimed school officials ignored her complaints of  “racial and sexual slurs” that escalated to physical threats and assaults. After several months, she left school and was homeschooled for the rest of the year.

The suit also claimed that a school official and a district official, either individually or together, “retaliated” against the student by causing the state Department of Social Services to launch an abuse-and-neglect investigation of the plaintiffs and their household. The complaint said DSS determined the investigation, which included a strip search of the student, was unfounded.

The girl’s uncle, a high school student, testified that he didn’t fit in because his family was seen as “churchy,” “upright” and eager for education. In rural Williamson County, that’s not OK for blacks, he said.

“You see, it’s a crime to act white, or it’s a crime to be white,” the uncle testified.

It’s not new for school districts to be sued for tolerating bullying, but this may be the first successful claim of racial discrimination when only one race is involved, reports the Lawyers Weekly.

Via Volokh Conspiracy.

All who taught before

Published on December 30, 2009 in Education. 34 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

Reading a Slate interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on how success builds on the past, Miss Eyre opines that merit pay for teachers can’t be fair because “our success with our students is always cumulative.”

Pissed Off Teacher can’t teach calculus to students who haven’t mastered basic algebra; NYC Educator can’t teach newcomers to the United States how to speak English unless they can already communicate in some language. And when my students showed great improvement on the state ELA exam last year, I knew most of the credit had to go to their elementary and earlier middle school teachers. How could I have taught advanced essay writing skills to students who couldn’t read or write a simple sentence?

This is why merit pay, as most “reformers” imagine it, won’t work.

Believing that one teacher can make students do anything feeds the myth of the hero (or martyr) teacher, she writes.

PE is not job one for schools

Published on December 30, 2009 in Education. 5 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

Requiring more P.E. time for D.C. students is a bad idea from good people, writes Jay Mathews on Class Struggle.

D.C. council member Mary M. Cheh and Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray worry that “18 percent of D.C. high school students are obese, 70 percent fail to meet the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommended levels of physical activity and 84 percent do not attend physical education classes daily.” Their Healthy Schools Act would require schools to buy “fresh produce from local growners,” which is bound to raise costs, and require 150 minutes of PE per week for K-5 students and 225 minutes for middle schoolers.

. . . the D.C. schools need to do a better job using the limited time they have, about six and a half hours a day, to address students’ weaknesses in reading, writing, math, science and social studies.

If Cheh were saying we should add an hour to the school day of every child, and use half of that new time for more exercise, I would cheer. Many of the city’s most successful public schools are charters that have used their independence from district rules to give children eight or nine hours of learning each day.

The proposed law requires all schools, including charters, to devote more time to P.E. (and more money to lunch), regardless of whether the principal thinks that’s the best use of time and money.

When I was a high school student in Illinois, daily P.E. was required for all four years. The P.E. teachers had lobbied the state Legislature for the mandate. Only three years of English was required for graduation. I won state honors in the National Council of Teachers of English contest for a personal essay, “Confessions of a Physically Educated Woman,” on my loathing for field hockey. Which was required.

Sissies

Published on December 29, 2009 in College. 8 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

Yale is too “sissy” to accept a Harvard-mocking T-shirt that quotes  F. Scott Fitzgerald, writes Robert Sibley of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) on Pajamas Media.

In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald (Princeton ‘17) creates a scene:

“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

The T-shirt’s front said: “I think of all Harvard men as sissies” with “WE AGREE” on the back with “The Game 2009”  in script underneath it.

The Freshman Class Council changed the design, which had been chosen by the freshman class, in response to “outcry from members within the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community,” reported the Yale Daily News. If the council hadn’t acted, the dean was prepared to ban the design.

The  “right not to be offended” doesn’t exist, Sibley writes. Expression can’t be “conditioned on the feelings of the most sensitive member of the audience.”

Carnival of Homeschooling

Published on December 29, 2009 in Blogging. Closed Tags: . By Joanne

The winter in Idaho edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Life Nurturing Education.

Don’t know much about history

Published on December 29, 2009 in Education. 13 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

American students don’t know much about history, writes Robert Holland for the Lexington Institute.

In the most recent round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one fourth of American schoolchildren tested as proficient in their knowledge of U.S. history.

Only a small minority of history teachers have majored in history, Holland writes.

. . . history is often tucked under the umbrella of social studies – a mishmash of everything from global studies to sociology, in which critical figures and lessons from American history are often overlooked. Indeed, in some cases, it is possible to gain certification as a social studies teacher without having studied any history.

However, Holland praises the Teaching American History Grant Program, adopted in 2001, which has enabled schools “to partner with colleges, libraries, museums, and nonprofit history and humanities organizations to enhance history teachers’ knowledge and appreciation of American history.”

Berkeley High: To close racial gap, cut science labs

Published on December 28, 2009 in Education. 33 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

To close the racial achievement gap, Berkeley High School’s Governance Council, made up of teachers, students and parents, has a modest proposal: Cut science labs and five science teachers to “free up more resources to help struggling students.”

Science labs mostly benefit higher-achieving white and Asian-American students, the council believes. The school’s enrollment is 33 percent white and 7 percent Asian; blacks make up 28 percent and Hispanics 13 percent.

Via Discriminations.

Berkeleyside has more on the debate, including a link to a letter by the high school’s science teachers. They say dropping the labs, which are scheduled before and after the regular class schedule, would cut science instruction time by 21 percent in most science classes, 30 percent in AP classes. It’s not clear how the savings would be spent, but commenters believe the plan is to create small “learning communities,” an innovation that’s failed to show results so far.

Update: A special bond issue funds music, art and an extra lab period once a week for regular science classes and twice a week for honors and AP classes. All labs meet in period 0 (before school) or period 7 (after school).  Because AP classes have time to cover more ground, high-achieving students may skip Biology I to go directly to AP Biology, skip Chemistry I for AP Chemistry and so on. A new “Science and Equity” group argues that good science teaching benefits all students and that extra lab time is most important for struggling students.