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Online ed works—for sex, alcohol, and health

April 12, 2013 by

All-online courses have low success rates, note the Hechinger Report. But computer-based instruction can be more effective than classroom teaching for sex, drugs, and health issues, “subjects in which privacy, personal comfort and customized information are especially important, and embarrassment or cultural taboos can get in the way of classroom teaching.”

Simple video- and animation-based interactive courses in these disciplines turn out to be good ways of teaching subjects you may have giggled through in health class.

. . . “We’re seeing significant and large effects on attitudes, knowledge, and also behaviors” from online courses in nontraditional subjects, says Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who coauthored one study of the subject.

Colombian students who took an 11-week online course in safer sex knew more about safer sex — and practiced what they knew — compared to students who took a conventional health class.

For every 68 students who took the online course instead of the traditional course, researchers estimated by reviewing students’ medical records and comparing them to those of peers who didn’t take the course, up to two sexually transmitted infections were prevented.

Students — and teachers — often feel embarrassed to talk about sex in conventional classrooms, the researchers found.

Years ago, I looked into how contraception was taught in San Jose high schools. One teacher told me sex ed was lumped in with drivers’ ed, anti-drug ed, career awareness, etc. He left sex ed till the end of the school year in hopes he’d run out of time and not have to teach it.

Filed Under: Health, Online Learning Tagged With: , , ,

Pushing drugs in school

April 3, 2013 by

Diagnosed as hyperactive in first grade, Ted Gup’s son was prescribed Ritalin and Adderall, Gup writes in the New York Times.

In another age, David might have been called “rambunctious.” His battery was a little too large for his body. And so he would leap over the couch, spring to reach the ceiling and show an exuberance for life that came in brilliant microbursts.

When he was older, he sold his Adderall to classmates, who saw it as a performance-enhancing drug.

As a 21-year-old college senior, he was found on the floor of his room, dead from a fatal mix of alcohol and drugs.

“I had unknowingly colluded with a system that devalues talking therapy and rushes to medicate, inadvertently sending a message that self-medication, too, is perfectly acceptable,” writes the grieving father.

Now psychiatrists have defined grief as depression, which “runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another.”  Gup does not plan to take a pill to dull his grief for his son.

Filed Under: Children, Education, Health Tagged With: , , , ,

Huck Finn, 2013

April 2, 2013 by


– Signe Wilkinson

Filed Under: Children, Disability, Education, Health Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Union blocks bill on firing ‘predator’ teachers

August 25, 2012 by

Awaiting trial for sexual abusing fifth-grade students, a Los Angeles teacher was paid $40,000 to take early retirement. A bill to make it easier and faster to fire teachers for crimes involving sex, drugs or violence stalled after the teachers’ union came out against it. Assembly Democrats receiving heavy teachers’ union contributions abstained in a committee vote, the equivalent of  ”no” without the accountability, reports Anderson Cooper.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times on teachers’ union clout in California.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Vee must haff your peppers

May 24, 2012 by

Via Instapundit, we have a chronicle of the absurd: a student is denied access to a prescription inhaler during an asthma attack because his parents didn’t sign a form.

School leaders called Sue Rudi when her son started having trouble breathing. She rushed to the office and was taken back to the nurse’s office by school administrators and they discovered the teen on the floor.

“As soon as we opened up the door, we saw my son collapsing against the wall on the floor of the nurse’s office while she was standing in the window of the locked door looking down at my son, who was in full-blown asthma attack,” Rudi said.

Michael Rudi said when he started to pass out from his attack, the nurse locked the door.

The Blogfather quips, “I’m beginning to think that sending your kids to public schools is starting to look like parental malpractice.”

Apparently no one even bothered to call 911.

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Health, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , ,

A teacher reviews her performance review

February 1, 2012 by

An English and journalism teacher for six years, Coleen Bondy ranked as low average in her effect on students’ test scores this year. The value-added scores — based only on her least-motivated students — are “practically useless in evaluating teacher performance,” she writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

It’s hard for those who finished high school 20 or 30 years ago, as I did, to fathom the conditions in a typical L.A. Unified high school classroom these days. Classes are huge. Students face overwhelming family and social issues. Drugs are rampant. Students are incredibly disrespectful, testing authority constantly at the beginning of the year. Teachers must be able to get a strong grip on their classes all by themselves because consequences for bad behavior in class are often nonexistent outside it.

. . . Today’s teacher must be highly skilled in her subject matter just to make it into the classroom, more so than at any other time in the history of education. She also must play the role of parent, custodian, psychologist, drug and alcohol interventionist and parole officer, to name a few.

“Society has decided to blame many of its failings on teachers,” Bondy writes.

If teachers can’t be evaluated fairly based on their students’ progress (compared to their previous progress’ rates) and they can’t be evaluated based on classroom observations, how can they be evaluated?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Teen sex is dreary on MTV’s ‘Skins’

February 11, 2011 by

MTV’s Skins, which features “lurid and explicit” teenage sex, teaches teens some valuable lessons, writes Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post. Other teens-gone-wild shows make adolescent sex and drug use “seem glamorous and exciting,” she writes.

CW’s “Gossip Girl” . . .  portrays the “scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite,” as the anonymous narrator says at the start of every episode.

By contrast, the kids on “Skins” seem sad, lonely and disturbed, each in his or her own distinctively troubled way. Cadie is a strung-out pill-popper with a stable of inept, pill-dispensing shrinks and parents who are too self-absorbed to pay her much attention beyond suggesting that she take her meds. Chris is a strung-out pill-popper – he’s taken an excess of Erectagra – whose mother abandons him with a scrawled note and $1,000 in cash in an envelope.

They manage to make sex seem like a dreary, transactional chore – a sex-for-pills exchange is arranged to engineer a loss of virginity – and drugs and alcohol seem like, well, drugs and alcohol, unpleasantly disorienting and prone to induce vomiting.

Marcus thinks teens will appreciate their own nagging parents after watching the checked-out, boozed-up parents on Skins.

Will teens watch Skins as a cautionary tale of the downside of sex, drugs and lax parenting? Or will they take the show as a sign that promiscuity and drug abuse are normal?

Filed Under: Children, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bullying worries

April 29, 2010 by

Bullying and harassment are a serious problem in local schools, say 74 percent of respondents to a Public Agenda survey. However, illegal drugs and lack of respect for teachers raised even more concerns.

Parents were slightly less worried about bullying, drugs and respect.

Physical fighting and cheating in schools are lesser concerns for both the total public (59 percent and 55 percent, respectively) and parents (55 percent for fighting, 48 percent for cheating).

More than a third of Americans say they were bullied in school, but only 8 percent say they were bullied “a lot.”

Filed Under: Education, Violence Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Advil strip violated girl's rights

June 25, 2009 by

Strip searching a 13-year-old girl suspected of carrying ibuprofen (the drug in Advil)  violated her privacy rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1. However, the majority shielded school officials from personal liability.

The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.

Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.

“In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” the court said. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

No pills were found on the girl, then an eighth-grade honor student. She transferred to another school and then dropped out of high school, but is now attending college.

During oral arguments, the male justices seemed to think it was no big deal to force a girl to expose her breasts and pelvic area to a school nurse. However only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

If a strip search is necessary — let’s say it’s heroin rather than Advil — then call the police, writes Volokh’s David Bernstein. They know how to do these things.

Filed Under: Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , , ,

Better brains through chemistry

April 25, 2009 by

Neuroenhancing drugs, such as Adderall and Ritalin, are  popular with college students who want to study and party, but not necessarily sleep or eat, writes Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker. Research in 2005 estimated 4.1 percent of undergrads “had taken prescription stimulants for off-label use; at one school, the figure was twenty-five per cent. ”

 . . . white male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuroenhancers. Users are also more likely to belong to a fraternity or a sorority, and to have a G.P.A. of 3.0 or lower. . . .  they are decent students at schools where, to be a great student, you have to give up a lot more partying than they’re willing to give up.

 Most students who use stimulants get them from an acquaintance diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder who has prescription. Since students have grown up with classmates on ADHD meds, they assume they’re safe.

For us elders, “smart pills” may prevent cognitive decline — or make it possible to work harder for longer. The undrugged may not be able to compete.

Via This Week in Education.

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