Whither Libraries?
Doug Johnson says "library people" need to be able to answer the question of why schools even need libraries in the age of the Internet. And he gets a ton of responses.
Hat tip: Teacher Ninja.
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Doug Johnson says "library people" need to be able to answer the question of why schools even need libraries in the age of the Internet. And he gets a ton of responses.
Hat tip: Teacher Ninja.
Group blog boingboing recently featured a story about a decidedly atypical high-school rebel. A teenager in a private school is using the unoccupied locker next to her own to run a lending library of banned books. The list includes: The Canterbury Tales, Candide, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Animal Farm, the Holy Qu'ran, and more. The library’s popularity grew—as did her peers’ interest in reading—through word of mouth and the library now contains 62 banned books. The story surfaced when the girl posted a question about the ethics of her underground library on Yahoo! Answers. She asked:
Before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I'm doing a good thing, right?
Not only is she lending out books, she’s guided by a sense of appropriateness and quality.
I limit my 'library' to only the sophmores [sic], juniors and seniors just in case so you can't say I'm exposing young people to materiel [sic] they're not mature enough for … I am starting [an] appreciation of the classics and truly good novels (Not just fad novels like Twilight) in my generation.
More than 50 percent of the students speak Spanish in the district where The Daily Grind’s Mr. McNamar teaches. In light of that, he thinks it would make perfect sense for the district to provide Spanish-language classes to all teachers as a form of professional development. Mr. McNamar himself can speak elementary-level Spanish thanks to years of working in a restaurant where all the line cooks spoke it, and he has decided to use those basic skills to try and communicate with his Spanish-speaking students in their native language. He thinks it’ll help the students be more comfortable with him and, from the looks of it, he might be right.
I've made it my mission from now on to not be afraid to attempt communicating with our Spanish speaking students. If our many bilingual students who feel insecure about their English proficiency (often hiding behind the language barrier), observe me trying, and often failing, to communicate with them, perhaps they will begin to feel more confident that we don't judge them because of their inability to speak English perfectly.
A group of ELL students have recently decided I'm acceptable to talk with. This group, who are in my study hall, would often ignore me or yell at me in Spanish if I tried to get them to sit down or quiet down. But once I started communicating in Spanish, they've begun to ask me questions and even say hello in the hallway.
Mrs. Bluebird and her colleagues have discovered that, with the school year winding down, a number of students with ADHD have gone off their meds. There's a logical explanation, it seems:
We are suspecting that many of our parents will attempt to save some money this summer by not renewing their child's medications (they are, after all, fairly pricey from what I've been told). In addition, I've discovered many parents take these kids off their meds during the summer anyway as it's a good time to make adjustments, see how they react without it, and deal with some of the negative side affects. So, since we're nearing the end of the school year, why bother refilling the prescriptions once they run out?
It doesn't make the last days of schools particularly easy on teachers, though.
Could "No Excuses" schools—schools for low-income children that "create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values,"—be the solution to the achievement gap, as New York Times columnist David Brooks recently suggested? Teachers Nancy Flanagan and Doug Noon have some serious qualms:
Noon:
[Teachers and parents] understand that, while a “disciplined, orderly and demanding” school environment can promote middle-class values, these efforts, alone, will not sustain long-term changes for underprivileged students. Education reform must be accompanied by low-cost health care, decent housing, public and domestic safety, employment opportunities, job security, and affordable higher education.
The next step in this line of thinking [toward no-excuses schools for poor children] is “paternalism”–a chilling and arrogant word that has recently been promoted as a positive quality in school reform. We choose what we want for our own children, and we know what's best for children in poverty. Work hard, be nice. No second chances, no excuses.
One of Hobo Teacher's students seems not to understand how it would be earthly possible for a teacher to communicate with an absent student without the help of texting.
A D.C. teacher-blogger, who calls himself Harry Potter because he bears a "shocking resemblance" to the wizard, recounts a conversation he had with his wife (pseudonym: Ginny) about Chancellor Rhee’s teacher-improvement plans.
Ginny:
I hear so much from the WTU, the AFT, and Randi Weingarten about how Rhee's proposal and the 90 day plans are bad because they mean teachers will be fired arbitrarily. But certainly not all firings can be arbitrary. Some must be legitimate. So isn't the union there to protect good teachers from being fired arbitrarily? . . . Why would you be concerned about being fired arbitrarily if you've got a union to protect you? Unless you don't think the union is competent enough to actually help you.
Potter is pretty sure it’s not just the teachers who lack faith in union leadership:
If the leaders felt they were themselves competent, wouldn't they just be against arbitrary firings instead of against all firings?
Robert Pondiscio comments on the significance of a new study providing evidence that a single disruptive student can decrease the achievement levels of an entire class:
I have long believed that the time on-task lost to disruption and behavior problems is almost certainly one of the under-discussed root causes of the achievement gap. This study does a great service by confirming what many teachers and parents have intuited for years: disruption matters and has a negative effect on all students.
Clay Burrell draws attention to the policy implications:
The study seems to seriously undermine the validity of any attempt to evaluate (and pay, retain, and promote) teachers based on their class performance on standardized tests.
Angela Powell of the Cornerstone posts her recommendations for the best teacher discussion boards. A helpful roundup—but try ours, too.
Hat tip: Teacherninja
One of NYC Educator’s students recently announced to the whole class that his science teacher is racist. NYC Educator admonished the student telling him not to talk about other teachers in the classroom and offered to talk to the student privately. The student continued, saying that his science teacher was racist because he yells at everyone. NYC Educator explained that that doesn’t make the teacher racist and got him to sit down and do his work. But it left NYC Educator with some concerns about the implications of students making unfounded claims.
I could imagine a circumstance under which that science teacher gets sent to the rubber room, or is suspended without pay or medical benefits for 90 days or more for pretty much no reason at all. When you're a city teacher, especially after that 05 contract, you aren't necessarily innocent until proven guilty.
Scott McLeod's blogtweetcook.org—an unlikely digital cookbook for edubloggers and tweeters—now has 22 recipes, including one for Roasted Halibut with Banana-Orange Relish. Well, well, well ...
Renee Moore: a research project at a Mississippi community college finds that implementation of the state's high school exit exam in English seems to correlate with poorer student writing skills.
Eight grade teacher Ariel Sacks fears that she has failed, due partly to the day-to-day pressures of teaching, to cultivate a genuinely responsive learning community in her classroom:
I succumbed to many of the ills of the factory model system of schooling over the last few months. Even though I design my curriculum to bring out the voices of my students, I've failed to address things they've said or done to one another that jeopardize our community. On the surface, I always respond to inappropriate behavior, but on the deeper level I've failed.
I've committed a great sin of teaching--being more committed to "the curriculum" than to the students. I've gotten caught up with doling out consequences--and sometimes neglecting to dole out consequences--for students who break basic rules of conduct. For minor misbehaviors that happen on a regular basis, consequences are and were never the answer.
She may have failed by her own standards, but it's hard not to think that her students haven't benefited greatly from her self-awareness and reflectiveness.
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