Web Watch

Teacher Joseph Lekuton has high standards for his middle school social studies students. His "infamous test on the whole world," as one student puts it, requires that the teenagers locate and identify nearly every country and capital on the globe. That knowledge should come in handy for them now that Lekuton will be living on the other side of the world: He recently won a seat in the parliament of his native Kenya. After a decade at the McLean, Virginia, Langley School, Lekuton declared his candidacy last April in a special election to replace several members of the Kenyan parliament who died in a plane crash. His platform focused on educational and economic development. In July, voters in central Kenya chose him as their representative. The burgeoning political career was a natural step for Lekuton, who had spent his summers facilitating exchange trips and fundraising efforts that connected families in Virginia and Kenya. He was born into the nomadic Masai tribe and came to the United States on a college scholarship—but not without help from his countrymen, who sold livestock to pay for his plane ticket. At a final visit with his former students this week, Lekuton reminded them to keep a global mindset: "It's never about yourself. It has to be 'What can you do for someone else?' That is how you keep your dream alive."

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It may not be immediately obvious, but some chronically and terminally ill children need school. It’s a routine that returns them to normality (a time when they weren’t confined to a hospital bed), and implicit in the education process is the idea that, yes, one day I will get better and use what I’m learning. That’s what the New York City Department of Education is banking on by employing 87 licensed teachers who serve 550 students in 42 city hospitals. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, for example, has been the site of state exams, graduation ceremonies, and even proms. One of its teachers, Anne Marie Cicciu, had a rough time when she first taught in the cancer ward, not knowing how to read the signs, in chemotherapy patients, of nausea and fatigue. Cicciu is Catholic, but she’s since clung to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. She also revels in the good days with her students, including Jessica Kuebler, a 7-year-old from St. Louis who’s had cancer since she was two months old and must return intermittently to Sloan-Kettering for treatment and tests. During a recent lesson, Jessica finished a book about a lost baby bird that eventually finds its way home. “Look at how well you read that,” Cicciu told her student. “I know you’ll make it home, too, Jessie.”

Posted by Rich Shea, Teacher Magazine at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an effort to improve student decorum and reduce distractions, school districts in the Northeast and elsewhere are increasingly turning to uniform or dress code policies. While the established research has concluded that such polices make little discernable difference in student performance or behavior, a new, small-scale study of schools in Ohio has found that schools requiring uniforms have higher graduation rates and fewer disciplinary problems. The author of that study, Virginia B. Draa of Youngstown State University, says uniforms help blur class lines between students and reduce peer-pressure issues. They may even heighten teachers’ expectations of students, she speculates. Still, some families see uniform policies as repressive, expensive, and no fun. “You live in America, where you’re supposed to have freedom of choice,” complains a uniform-resistant father of five in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Meanwhile, many young teachers are finding that they, too, have less than absolute freedom in what they can wear to school. In response to gradually blurring standards of professional dress, school districts in Northern Texas, to take one example, have implemented new guidelines on teacher attire. Such policies range from general discussions at new-teacher orientations to, in the Mesquite district, a 27-slide PowerPoint presentation detailing appropriate dress. Citing items such as body piercings, flip-flops, and revealing t-shirts, school leaders in the region say it was getting difficult to distinguish some teachers from students. And while some parents and teachers contend that educators can teach just as effectively in flip-flops and jeans, others suggest there are also important issues of perception involved. “While Americans are notoriously informal in their dress, … I think teachers should be perceived as professionals and dress professionally,” said Bob Davis, a teacher at Berkner High in Richardson, Texas.

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Just in time for the new school year, the great homework debate is boiling over again. Harris Cooper, a noted education researcher at Duke University, has co-authored a new study finding that elementary school students gain little from most homework assignments, and that excessive amounts of homework might even be bad for middle and high school students. In his new book, The Homework Myth, education gadfly Alfie Kohn is even more strident. He calls for the complete elimination of homework, which he blames for stress, family conflict, and slackened student motivation. Other education experts believe that the problem isn’t homework per se, but the types of assignments teachers give—or are forced to give—and a general lack of clarity about the purpose of homework. “What should homework be?” ponders Dororthy Rich, founder of the Home and School Institute. “In the biggest parameter, it ought to be help kids make better sense of the world. Too often, it doesn’t.”

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While schools across the country take time this week to commemorate the 5th anniversary of September, 11, 2001, Madeleine V. Leckie Elementary in Washington, D.C., has special reason to remember that day: It lost a teacher, a student, and two parents when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. Hilda Taylor, a teacher from Sierre Leonne devoted to boosting geographical knowledge, was on board the flight with her 6th grade student Bernard Brown II, as part of a multi-school field trip to the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary off the coast of California. Leckie parents Johnnie Doctor and Marsha Ratchford, both Navy employees, were working inside the Pentagon when the plane was brought down. Most of the students now enrolled at Leckie are too young to remember that day, but, with help from the Washington Architectural Foundation and some donors, the school built a now-cherished memorial garden. It features a walkway lined with student handprints as well as wooden benches dedicated to those lost. “Every time you go here, it reminds you that they were nice people and they didn’t do anything wrong,” said 5th grader Arika Muse, who was in kindergarten in 2001. Now living in Florida, Bernard Brown’s mother, Senita, didn’t plan to attend the 5th anniversary ceremony at the school, but said the families of the victims remained closely connected to Leckie Elementary. “There’s nothing but love up in that school,” she said. “Genuine love.”

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As the technology becomes more widespread, teachers are increasingly turning to blogs as a natural classroom tool. According to Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, tens of thousands of teachers across the country are now actively blogging. While many teachers maintain blogs to offer personal reflections—or just plain vent—on the teaching life, others are using them as a way to build greater classroom community and keep busy parents informed about what their children are doing in school. “The more [parents] know, the more they understand where you’re coming from and what you’re trying to accomplish in your room, the less they get upset,” reasons a teacher-blogger in Massachusetts. For his part, Richardson would like to see more teachers use blogs to tap new sources for learning. “You can bring authors. You can bring scientists,” he says. “This really opens up a way to make distance irrelevant and to bring people who know more than we do about the topics in our classroom. You’d be surprised by how willing people are to do that.”

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Here’s a back-to-school idea to think about: A new study published in the journal Science found that black students who wrote a short essay on their values at the start of the school year got a lasting boost in academic performance. The study, conducted over the course two years at a suburban middle school, asked randomly selected students to write a brief explanation of the values that are most important to them. A control group was instructed to write about values that they rated the least important. Each year, the black students who wrote about positive values scored about one-third of a letter grade better than black students in the second group. Perhaps more significantly, they also closed the achievement gap with white students by 40 percent. The researchers believe the assignment helped the students affirm their self-worth and negate the negative stereotypes that many black students feel in school. “Our performance is really affected by what other people think of us,” said Geoffrey Cohen, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, who coauthored the study.

Posted by at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)