March 2009 Archives

Mei Flower recommends the "The Class," about a junior high in inner-city Paris. Be warned, however, that it doesn't sound like escapist fare. MF loved it, she writes, because it is realistic in a way that American teacher movies seldom are:

The movie deals with one class of freshman-aged students in their grammar/literature class. The teacher is stressed and overworked, he worries about his performance, about his ability, about what he's really teaching, and about his kids--not just as students, but as PEOPLE. ...

Many times, as I was watching the film, I found myself slouching down in my seat, or cringing, or covering my eyes, or shaking my head. Many times, I recognized myself in that teacher, and my mistakes in his mistakes. Oooh. It was rough, let me tell you. But ... totally, totally worth it.

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NYC Educator is often outspoken with his opinions, particularly when it comes to issues of teachers’ unions and their detractors. He doesn’t like education outsiders like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Waltons (of Walmart fame) who, in NYC Educator’s words, “toss money about to make sure unionized employees are marginalized.” He found it especially disappointing when Bill Maher, a man also known for his controversial opinions, recently joined the ranks of teachers’ union bashers.

Maher thinks unions need to be broken, but it's pretty clear what can happen to teachers without unions. It's also clear that folks like Joel Klein and Al Sharpton are fine with working people being treated like that, but I'd think Maher would question the privatization of education, particularly given what he said about the Bushies for eight years.

NYC Educator points out that breaking up unions isn’t going to fix education or make bad teachers disappear. It’s the districts, in fact, that provide them with job security.

Personally, I'm not much enamored of bad teachers, and I'm afraid I have little sympathy for them. On the other hand, teacher unions neither hired them nor granted them tenure. What does Maher have to say about the administrations who did? What does Maher think about Chancellor Klein going to Albany to plead for the right to retain 14,000 teachers who couldn't pass a basic competency test, some of whom had failed it dozens of times?

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From Michele McNeil at edweek.org's Politics K-12 blog: The National Rifle Association's monthly magazine has named U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan the "most anti-gun" member of President Obama's cabinet. Apparently, Duncan has had a history of, um, discouraging gun violence in schools. We're guessing, as Michele notes, that most educators won't exactly be incensed over this ...

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Ariel Sacks of On the Shoulders of Giants is having trouble with the “digital divide” between students who have internet at home and those who don’t. She and the special ed teacher in her classroom took a lot of time to record themselves reading Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm to help students struggling with the reading. Then they posted the MP3 of themselves on Multiply.com, a social networking site. The problem was many students couldn’t participate because 1) they don’t have internet access at home and 2) the site was inaccessible from the school due to filtering.

Sacks doesn’t see this as a huge impediment just yet. Her kids will just have to read their assignments the old fashioned way. But she thinks the problem will grow as time goes on.

This divide is going to become more and more painful. I'd like to see the government step in and make internet free for parents who send their children to public schools, and provide a laptop—or an easy, affordable pathway to getting one—for all public school students. Once this is the case, schools need to get with the times and create safe and attractive networking programs for teachers and classes to use.

Posted by Josh Cohen at 2:37 PM | Permalink | 9 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Mei Flower notes that it is during times like these that teaching can seem like a fortuitous career choice:

One perk of being paid so poorly is that I haven't really lost money in our dying economy. One advantage of having a job that comes with so little status is that I get to keep it, since no one else wants it. And one benefit of working my tail off for eleven months out of the year is that I get one full month in which I don't have to work.

I certainly haven't heard anyone else talking about planning a two-week trip to Italy this summer.

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A high school senior who won an essay contest has donated the award money back to the financially-strapped enterprise that gave it to her. Here's an excerpt from her letter:

As you well know, for high school-aged scholars, a forum of this caliber and the incentives it creates for academic excellence are rare. I also know that keeping The Concord Review active requires resources. So, please allow me to put my Emerson award money to the best possible use I can imagine by donating it to The Concord Review so that another young scholar can experience the thrill of seeing his or her work published.

Hat Tip: Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

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Renee Moore of TeachMoore was disappointed that President Obama chose to use the children of Mississippi as evidence that we need nationalized standards. A teacher in Mississippi, Moore says that while the problems are very serious, the causes of one state’s educational problems aren’t necessarily the same as another’s.

The comparison of the performance of fourth graders in Mississippi to those in Wyoming focuses attention on the symptoms, not the causes of educational inequity. The problem is NOT that the two states have differently written standards …

Average pay for teachers in Wyoming (5th in the nation) in 2006-07 was $50,771, while Mississippi teachers only averaged $40,182 (47th in nation). All of these disparities have their roots in Mississippi's sad history of racial discrimination and its sibling: opposition to progress.

Moore says that, as a result, the solutions that will work for one state won’t necessarily help another.

Improving the quality of education for all our children is a national priority, but a localized task. It requires the knowledgeable contributions of many parties, most notably the parents and teachers of a given state or community.

Posted by Josh Cohen at 12:15 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

One sign that that you're pretty much test-prepped out: When you can no longer even understand a student's request to go to the bathroom.

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School technologist Doug Johnson is skeptical about the educational usefulness of Facebook, but thinks teachers should use it just to get a sense of the medium. As to the ongoing question of whether teachers should "friend" their students, he says, in essence, you gotta be kidding me. ...

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Bill Ferriter jumps into a debate over whether cell phones might be effective instructional tools. To the common complaint that students would just use them to text their friends during class, he has a bold response:

I may be naive, but aren't distracted students texting from the back of the classroom pretty convincing evidence of poor teaching?

He admits that it's hard work to create lessons that captivate today's students.

But that's our job, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to be able to put together learning experiences that matter? And if we can't shouldn't we be ready for distracted students?

Posted by Teachermagazine.org at 4:15 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Fourteen-year-old video blogger and Ruby Payne detractor John Wittle is making a splash in the edublogosphere with his YouTube appearance. Thumbing through Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Wittle questions the educator-slash-consultant’s research methodology:

She hasn't collected any data.

And he questions his district for crowing her the poverty pundit:

...[T]he place where I live, Wake County School System...is being run by people who think Ruby Payne is the only authority on how to interact with poor people.

Schools Matter has seen Wittle's video and agrees with him:

[Payne] is a marketing enterprise who has probably done more to advance real ignorance about poverty than anyone else in America. The way 14-year old, John Wittle calls her out, is a thing of beauty.

Dangerously Irrelevant offers a long list of criticisms by academics (and others, including Wittle) and asks:

First, should districts be spending their monies on a consultant whose work has been accused of being riddled with hundreds of unproven assertions? Whose emphasis on students’ need to change is allegedly so reductionist that it basically ignores the school, neighborhood, societal, political, and other contextual factors that influence the life success of students in poverty?

For more commentary on Wittle and Payne, go here and here.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 2:35 PM | Permalink | 5 Comments | TrackBacks (0)