If you’re trying to persuade parents to pay private-school tuition, hire a proofreader, suggests Barb the Evil Genius. (Great name!)
To "rest upon" an opinion
January 27, 2010 By
I will be guest-blogging several times for Joanne Jacobs while she is away. I have had Marianne Moore’s poem “The Student” (1941) on my mind for a while; I keep returning to it and thinking about this “student” that she describes.
It is difficult to quote from the poem, because of the enjambment from stanza to stanza. Not one of the stanzas (except for the last) ends with the end of a sentence. Another difficulty is that Moore’s poetry has many quotes, each one worthy of explanation. So be it. What intrigues me is the ending, but it makes little sense without the rest of the poem.
It is written in syllabic verse–no set meter, but a set number of syllables for each line. In each stanza (with a few exceptions), the syllable count per line is as follows: 7, 10, 8, 10, 6, 5, 11. This gives the poem a visual structure that contrasts with the relative lack of sonic structure.
The poem seems at first to defend the American idea, criticized by a lecturer, that everyone should have a college degree.
“In America,” began
the lecturer, “everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don’t say everyone
must go to college.” We
incline to feel, here,
that although it may be unnecessaryto know fifteen languages,
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school—like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths that sang in concert—
is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty,–
seen in the unanimity of college
Now Moore has moved beyond the idea of the college degree. College is important not for the degree, which seems incidental, but for the thought that takes place within it. But Moore hints at a pitfall of such institutions of thought: perhaps Americans have opinions and not much more. [Read more...]
D.C. data
January 27, 2010 By
I like the way Focus D.C. shows the data on achievement in traditional and charter schools in Washington, D.C. This scatter graph shows proficiency and progress.
Carnival of Homeschooling
January 27, 2010 By
You’ll find the Carnival of Homeschooling at Corn and Oil.
Carnival of Educators
January 26, 2010 By
I Want To Teach Forever is hosting the Carnival of Educators.
Is RTTT a rip-off?
January 26, 2010 By
Race To The Top will cost only $13 per American, but add in the education stimulus and the extra federal spending will cost $366 a person, nearly $1,500 per person for a family of four, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.
“Chances are slim that winners of Race to the Top grants are going to actually use the money to drive reform,” Petrilli writes. After all, the $106 billion education stimulus did nothing for school reform.
Is it worth $1,500 to your family ”to see a handful of states lift their charter caps, a couple more promise to take teacher evaluations seriously, and lots of states to sign a letter saying they will do national standards—unless they later decide not to?”
He’s got a poll.
Update: Arne Duncan won’t release the names of the panel of reviewers who will decide which states get RTT money. Frederick Hess thinks the administration needs more than a “trust us” defense.
Students fight winter ball ban
January 26, 2010 By
At a Canadian elementary school, two fifth-graders are fighting a winter ban on balls in the schoolyard.
Dana Slater, the principal of D. Roy Kennedy Public School in Ottawa, said balls are banned during the winter for safety reasons.
“They’ve got snow stuck to them, they’re frozen, often there’s pebbles on them and they’re flying through the air,” Slater said. “One student fell backwards on their head and ended up with a concussion. We had a student with a ball in the eye area, which was very serious.”
Miles Lawlor and Owen Moore say recess is no fun without balls. “People are just standing around talking and not getting any exercise, and that’s the whole point of recess,” Owen Moore said.
Via Detention Slip.
At my Illinois elementary school, we had ice skating for P.E in the winter. I can’t remember if we had outdoors recess in the winter. It took so long to put on our winter clothes and then take them off.
Parents on homework
January 26, 2010 By
On a SurveyUSA News poll, most parents of school-aged children said their children spend 30 to 90 minutes a night on homework. Only 14 percent said homework takes less than 30 minutes and another 16 percent said it takes more than 90. Parents tended to think today’s kids gets more and harder homework than in the past. But 52 percent said the amount of homework is just right with 26 percent saying it’s too much and 21 percent wanting more.
On an Inside Schools poll, most teachers say they assign homework on holidays.
Fed Up with school lunch
January 25, 2010 By
Vowing to eat the school lunch her students get in 2010, Mrs. Q is lunch blogging as Fed Up.
Today’s menu: Pepperoni pizza, milk, baby carrots, multi-grain apple mini-crisps, fruit cup.
Our first repeat meal! I strongly dislike the pizza so for me this one was a rough. I got excited by the “mini-crisps” because I thought they might be dehydrated apple slices, but unfortunately they were bland, rice cake-like disks.
I liked the baby carrots, but I asked one of my students if he ate them and he told me, “No.”
The fruit cup was partially frozen AGAIN. I did attempt to eat it, but I didn’t even eat half of it.
On the other hand, the Rib-a-cue tastes a lot better than it looks, she reports.
Via Core Knowledge Blog.
In elementary school, we walked home for lunch. I ate the school lunch in junior high school. It was just as bad. I wondered why they had to serve a hot lunch since I usually ate a sandwich for lunch at home. In high school, the cafeteria was so noisy, crowded and dirty that I brought a bag lunch and ate it in a student lounge or (secretly) in the social studies library. When I was too lazy to make lunch, I ate two bags of M&M’s in the lounge, which inevitably led to a hunger headache. I’d make myself soup when I got home.
Update: When recess comes before lunch, students eat more and return to class calmer, some schools say.
Who writes the tests?
January 25, 2010 By
“Proponents of national benchmarks seem to think that they’ll be the ones writing them,” notes Marcus A. Winters in No State Left Behind in City Journal.
Bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education will have other ideas. So will congressmen from lower-achieving states, which won’t want to be embarrassed by a national proficiency standard that their students can’t reach. Since any system of setting a common standard—either by federal mandate or voluntary state agreement—depends on the cooperation of lousy performers like Georgia, it’s hard to see how a demanding national standard would survive the political process. Similarly, if the NAEP became an enforceable national benchmark, pressure would grow to make it easier.
Winters proposes amending No Child Left Behind to encourage states to set high standards backed by a challenging test.
Ed Week’s Stephen Sawchuk looks at teaching common s standards and writing and scoring the tests.
Most experts in the testing community have presumed that the $350 million promised by the U.S. Department of Education to support common assessments would promote those that made greater use of open-ended items capable of measuring higher-order critical-thinking skills.
. . . The issues now on the table include the added expense of those items, as well as sensitive questions about who should be charged with the task of scoring them and whether they will prove reliable enough for high-stakes decisions.
To save the cost of human scorers and speed turnaround time, testing companies are experimenting with software that scores open-ended responses. Are we going to let high-stakes tests be scored by robots?
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