You are here: Home / 2009 / Archives for December 2009

U-Minn backs down on teacher ed plan

December 23, 2009 By

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has promised not to enforce a “political litmus test for future teachers,” FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights) proclaims.

The College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) is redesigning admissions and the curriculum to focus on “cultural competence.”

. . . The proposal, initiated by the college’s Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, sought to require each future teacher to accept theories of “white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression”; “develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity”; and “recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism … but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation.” They were to be judged by their scores on the Intercultural Development Inventory, a test of “Intercultural Sensitivity.” In one assignment, they were to reveal a “pervasive stereotype” they personally held and then demonstrate how their experiences had “challenged” it. They also were to be assessed regarding “the extent to which they find intrinsic satisfaction” in being in “culturally diverse situations.”

In response to a letter from FIRE, General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg promised that “[n]o University policy or practice ever will mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with ‘wrong beliefs’ from the University.”

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , ,

The work-ethic and knowledge gap

December 23, 2009 By

Most American students are lazy and lack basic knowledge, writes Kara Miller, a Babson College professor of rhetoric and history, in the Boston Globe.

My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have – despite language barriers – generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.

One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar.

Undergrads from China have the strongest work ethic, Miller writes, but she’s also been impressed by students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. They struggle with English, but they’re carried forward by their respect for professors and for knowledge.

By contrast, many of her American students “appear tired and disengaged.”  While the best U.S. students are knowledgeable and innovative, too many lack the basics.   “We’ve got a knowledge gap, spurred by a work-ethic gap,” Miller writes.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , ,

Accountable for grade 13

December 23, 2009 By

High School’s Last Test is how well graduates do in college, write J.B. Schramm and E. Kinney Zalesne of College Summit in a New York Times op-ed.  Race To The Top guidelines tell high schools to “show how they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year of college.”

Most schools, districts and states are just starting to collect data on “grade 13,” they write. The Department of Education will require states to keep good records of graduates’ progress in college.

But what’s critical is that the Education Department also helps high school principals and teachers learn to use their data to improve student achievement — to find out which of their educational strategies actually result in student success after high school.

We are a long, long way from tracking high school graduates’ progress. In fact, we’re not good at tracking students through the K-12 system either.  But it sure would be nice to know how well high schools are preparing students for higher education — and employment.

Filed Under: College, Education Tagged With: , , ,

Taliban is too hot to debate

December 22, 2009 By

Virginia eighth-graders won’t argue the Taliban’s point of view in a mock UN debate, reports the Washington Post.  Swanson Middle School Principal Chrystal Forrester canceled the debate after some parents objected. (Among other things, parents feared kids searching for information would end up at extremist web sites.)

“Recognizing the pain that has touched many of our families and neighbors due to the terrorist attacks on the United States and acknowledging the sensitive nature of the conflict in Afghanistan involving many of our dedicated members of the U.S. armed forces, we have eliminated this topic as part of the U.N. unit of study effective immediately,” the e-mail said.

In addition to the Afghanistan conflict, students were asked to discuss:  China and Taiwan; India and Pakistan; North Korea vs. Western powers; Russia and Chechnya; and Colombia vs. the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In debate, students often are assigned to argue cases they don’t agree with. They have to work a bit harder.

At Core Knowledge Blog, Robert Pondiscio agrees with Post columnist Robert McCartney: The kids could have handled it.

In other news, a Pakistani comedy troupe has produced its version of a Taliban soap opera to “fight terrorism with humor.”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Carnival of Homeschooling

December 22, 2009 By

A Very Nearly Tea is hosting a hectic Carnival of Homeschooling.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With:

Brain power

December 22, 2009 By

Young children can learn more than people used to think, says a New York Times story on cognitive neuroscience.

The teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia.

And schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class.

The story looks at the Building Blocks program for preschoolers.

In a Building Blocks classroom, numbers are in artwork, on computer games and in lessons, sharing equal time with letters. . . . children play creative counting games; but it also focuses on other number skills, including cardinality (how many objects are in a set) and one-to-one correspondence (matching groups of objects, like cups and saucers). Teachers can tailor the Building Block lesson to a student’s individual ability.

Children who learn math basics early do better than those who aren’t taught the basics.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Build a library for $2

December 22, 2009 By

You can help the Book Wish Foundation build a library for refugees from Darfur. A $2 donation buys a brick. The library will require 5,000 bricks.

Filed Under: Giving Tagged With: , ,

The AP juggernaut

December 21, 2009 By

Advanced Placement enrollment is surging. The New York Time’ Room for Debate blog asks its panel:

Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?

In a recent survey, a majority of AP teachers said “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With:

Test smarter

December 21, 2009 By

Smart testing improves quality, writes Mark Kleiman of The Reality-Based Community. He cites W. Edwards Deming’s work on statistical quality assurance, which continuously “feeds back information about processes and their outcomes to operators so the processes can be changed in real time.” In education, this would mean:

- Selecting a sample of students for high-quality, expensive testing rather than settling for the level of observation we can afford to do on every student.

- Using information about the whole range of performance rather than fixating on an arbitrary cutoff.

- Taking measurements all through the school year, not just at the end, and getting the results back to the teachers promptly.

Via Megan McCardle.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With:

Bored of darkness

December 21, 2009 By

In Heart of Darkness on the NAS Blog, David Clemens, a literature professor, wonders why each year more students complain the same readings — Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Sophocles, Phillip Larkin, Tobias Wolff, and J.G. Ballard — are too dark.

. . . If such authors do anything, they force us to face existential questions. Once, students went to college to experience just this sort of perennial questioning. Today, questioning is a nonstarter having been replaced by what Phillip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic” and, as he predicted, by students preoccupied only with themselves and with attaining a “durable sense of well-being.” This ends any interest in reading about what Victor Davis Hanson calls “the tragic limitations of human existence and how to meet them and endure them with dignity.”

The “Facebook and Twitter crowd” think medicine will postpone their senescence indefinitely, Clemens writes. “With death no longer inevitable, they find that a literature based on the tragedy of mortality is both archaic and irrelevant.”

BTW: Library Examiner has literary vampire links.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »