Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Small colleges are paying recruiters to bring in foreign students who’ll pay full tuition. It’s illegal to pay U.S. recruiters, but not those based overseas.
Houston Community College has opened an overseas campus that some call Crazy College of Qatar.
Shop is Not a Four-Letter Word, writes Jim Berman on Edutopia. ”Technical education is the foundation that can work for many of our students.” Berman started his teaching career at a technical high school.
On my very first day, my supervisor, Mr. Wells, walked me through the halls. He introduced me to Mr. Davis, Automotive Technology instructor. Davis explained that his students are almost always in demand, often securing good employment before making the big walk in June.
I saw students working beneath the undercarriage of cars, suspended with myriad of diagnostic cables, wires and hoses that made a surgical suite look plebian.
I saw the Carpentry classroom, complete with a house being built from the foundation, wired by the Electrical Trades students and run with pipe by the Plumbing crew. Mr. Wells hustled me off to Medical Assisting where a patient was splayed out on gurney with all the requisite needles and beeping monitors you would see at Cedars-Sinai or the Mayo Clinic. The Welding room was glowing with the azure, electric-white glow from plasma torches ripping through metal. The din from the Automotive Body Repair garage was deafening. Mr. Wells explained that we were witnessing a team on a hard deadline to finish the repair and paint work on a ’77 Corvette that was heading to a car show the following week.
Berman plans a three-part series.
College students need practical skills as well as liberal arts, writes Scott Carlson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Students learn about “sustainability” in class, but don’t know how to cook their own food, much less grow it, he writes. They can’t install a thermostat that conserves electricity.
Even science and engineering students lack “a serious enough regard for the way things get made and the way that things arrive on our kitchen table to eat in the morning,” says Robert Forrant, a professor of labor and industrial history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a former factory-floor machinist.
Instead his students see themselves as designers, divorced from the dirty work of making. “Somehow we have this notion that we are going to be this country that has all the idea people—that all the Steve Jobses of the world will live in the United States,” Forrant says. “To somehow think that you can dream something up without really understanding what it takes to make it flies in the face of reality.”
My husband, who grew up tinkering in the basement workshop, understands how things work. As an electrical engineer, he holds 30-odd patents.
Everybody’s connected all the time, “sharing” every 140-character observation, updating each other on their latest cup of coffee, tweeting and texting. But there’s less time to think, writes Diana Senechal in her new book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture.
An English teacher quotes Senechal’s critique of the stress on group work and collaboration.
“Our public schools, which should encourage students to see beyond the claims of the movement, have instead caved in to the immediate demands of the larger culture and economy. Convinced that the outside world calls for collaboration, school leaders and policymakers expect teachers to incorporate group work in their lessons, the more of it the better. They do not pay enough attention to the ingredients of good collaboration: independent thought, careful pondering of a topic, knowledge of the subject, and attentive listening.
“One oft-touted practice in elementary school is the ‘turn and talk’ activity, where a teacher pauses in a story she is reading aloud, asks a question, and has the students talk to their partners about it. When they are done, they join hands and raise them in the air. Instead of losing themselves in the story, they must immediately contend with the reactions of their peers. Many districts require small-group activities, throughout the grades, because such activities presumably allow all student to talk in a given lesson. Those who set and enforce such policies do not consider the drawbacks of so much talk. Talk needs a counterbalance of thought; without thought, it turns into chatter.”
I memorized a sonnet by Wordsworth in the 10th grade. Forty-odd years later, it stills comes to mind: “The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . . “
Compulsive tweeting and checking of e-mail is harder to resist than alcohol or cigarettes, according to a new study.
Providing college classes at high school campuses present a series of challenges, writes a community college dean. Principals want to maintain their traditional schedule and authority structure.
Community colleges have created “corporate colleges” that customize learn-while-you-earn training for apprentices in local industries.
China has banned schools from reading kindergarteners’ palms — at parents’ expense — to predict academic potential.
Although many parents in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province, eagerly brought their children to be tested, some later complained about the high cost and raised questions about the testing method, which test-givers said could reveal the children’s aptitude in music, mathematics and languages.
Three kindergartens in the province charged 1,200 yuan ($190) per person for the tests. That’s a lot of money for the average Chinese family. That palm reading could be a viable racket says something about parents’ anxiety for their children and willingness to invest in them. The one-child policy must ramp up the usual parental angst. If my kid has dull palms, should I defy the authorities and go for two?
Lunch Scholars, a video by two Olympia High (Washington) journalism students spotlights ignorance. Asked the state capital, students guess Seattle, even though they live in the capital city, Olympia. What countries border the U.S.? ”Canada?” says a girl. “That’s a state. Never mind.” In what war did the U.S. gain its independence? “That war,” the Civil War and the Korean War get as many votes as the Revolutionary War. Who’s the vice president? George Bush, Bill Clinton or “someone named Bin Laden.”
In a statement on Olympia High’s student newspaper site, filmmaker Evan Ricks admits the editing included the “funniest responses.”
“Though there were many correct answers to these pop questions, the comments in national forums concentrate on the negative, and, as usual, do not take into consideration the amount of editing it took to get these funny, incorrect answers. So, we are taking down our video.”
Taken down on Vimeo, the video was reposted on YouTube.
“Olympia High ranks as one of the best in the state in graduation rates, AP test results and SAT scores,” reports KXLY. The high school is the defending state champion in the Knowledge Bowl.
Teachers aren’t prepared to teach the new Common Core Standards, writes Stephanie Hirsch of Leaning Forward in Ed Week.
Because the common core focuses on the application of knowledge in authentic situations, teachers will need to employ instructional strategies that integrate critical and creative thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, research and inquiry, and presentation and demonstration skills. They will need subject-area expertise well beyond basic content knowledge and pedagogy to create dynamic, engaging, high-level learning experiences for students. They will need greater data literacy as we shift from current accountability systems to more granular ways of assessing student learning. And, their leaders will need to champion professional learning in their buildings and back the teachers who coach and support each other.
The traditional “spray and pray” method of professional development doesn’t work, Hirsch writes. What would?
Why not let teachers teach teachers?, asks Nancy Flanagan of Teacher in a Strange Land. “Professional Development assumes that someone knows better than a teacher” what teachers need to know.
. . . teachers aren’t considered true professionals–and policy is leading us further away from a professional work model. We’re still talking about “training” teachers, rather than drawing on their wisdom.
Finally–probably the most significant reason–professional development is an education market. What would happen if teacher development happened internally, entirely site-based and tailored to particular schools and populations? It would require demonstrated, deep teacher expertise in instruction and curricular issues. Which could shift the balance of power. And it would cost very little.
The GE Foundation is giving $18 million to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit which is working with teachers to develop an online library of resources for teaching the new standards at achievethecore.org.
The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Cajun Joie de Vivre.
Under pressure from an online petition, Sallie Mae will stop charging a forbearance fee – $50 every three months per loan — to unemployed borrowers. Instead, what the private lender calls a “good faith deposit” will be applied to the balance of the loan.
Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America s Schools, edited by Rick Hess and Andrew P. Kelly, looks at what Uncle Sam does and doesn’t do well. Contributors include Ron Ferguson, Mike Smith, Larry Berger, Charlie Barone, Maris Vinovskis, Mike Casserly, Checker Finn, Mark Schneider, Liz DeBray, Pat McGuinn, Jennifer Wallner, Paul Manna, Josh Dunn and Jane Hannaway.
Hess has more in Ed Week on the book and on an American Enterprise Institute discussion on Education 2012: What the Election Year Will Mean for Education Policy.
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