The answer is: games, dogs, animals, civil war and George Washington
What are the top in-school search terms entered into Google, Yahoo and other search engines by kids?
Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs.
Archive for May, 2008
““England has two books; the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.” — Victor Hugo
A bill sitting on Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen’s desk would allow the state to develop a curriculum for the academic–nonsectarian, nonreligious–study of the Bible. Tennessee students could be studying the influence of the Bible on literature, art, music, culture and politics.
It’s hard to argue against the measure on curricular grounds. Our public discourse is full of literary allusions to the Bible, and it informs our history and politics. A pair of Tennessee state lawmakers argue for the bill here. Others inevitably worry it’s an invitation to proselytizing. This writer calls the bill a ticking time bomb.
It’s described as the largest immigration raid in U.S. history Monday at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa–nearly 400 people arrested. EdWeek’s Mary Ann Zehr files a strong piece on the raid’s impact on the local school.
“All of the Latinos [from the school district] were impacted,” said David Strudthoff, the superintendent of the 600-student Postville Community School District. “About 220 students in the Postville school system are from immigrant families, he said, and many children were separated from parents or siblings employed at the plant.
“Mr. Strudthoff is also pondering the fact that more than a month ago, his district was served with a subpoena from the Iowa Division of Labor Services to provide detailed personal information about Postville students and some school employees,” EdWeek reports.
Zehr notes undocumented students have the right to a free public education, and school employees aren’t permitted to ask students about their immigration status.
Nothing like a little blog-on-blog violence to liven things up. Over at Flypaper the other day, Mike Petrilli advised the Association Council of the American Educational Research Association to dump Bill Ayers, who was elected as AERA’s Vice President-Elect of Curriculum Studies in March.
“The Council might consider whether it’s prudent to allow a former terrorist to join its ranks—particularly a man who said as late as 2001 that ‘I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough,’ wrote Petrilli, who noted the Council has the authority to strip anyone’s association membership, and suggested AERA do so to Ayers.
Eduwonkette, while not defending Ayers per se, isn’t exactly throwing him under a bus. “Bill Ayers was democratically elected, and the right of professional associations to self-govern should be respected,” she writes. “Mike believes that Ayers’ presence reflects badly on the whole association, but guilt by association is a shaky principle.”
I’d gladly take a bullet for the talented Ms. Kette, but I’m with Petrilli on this one. It’s not a question of guilt by association but poor judgement. A vote for Ayers may not be a vote for terrorism, but apparently it’s not a disqualifying factor, which reflects badly on the profession, to say the least. A commenter in Eduwonkette’s thread offers that Ayers was never convicted of terrorism, which is true. But having pronounced himself “guilty as hell and free as a bird,” the issue of his guilt or innocence is not in dispute. Ayers, having acted in his Weathermen days as judge, jury and (at the very least attempted) executioner also makes his legal standing a curious standard by which to judge him.
The mildest thing one can say is that the AERA, in overlooking the unrepentant Mr. Ayers past, is not exactly crowning itself in glory. Like Petrilli, I’m not an AERA member either. But I am an educator, and have a hard time rationalizing my profession’s warm association with Mr. Ayers.
What’s worse than low standards? Standards that are confusing, misleading, or get in the way of understanding. A Michigan math standard, courtesy of The Elementary Educator:
“N.FL.05.14 Add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators through 12 and/or 100, using the common denominator that is the product of the denominators of the 2 fractions, e.g., 3/8 + 7/10: use 80 as the common denominator.“
So in Michigan, 3/4 + 1/8 = 28/32. Reducing fractions is a 6th grade standard. No kidding.
Applications to Teach for America from graduating college seniors continues to surge —up more than a third this year from about 18,000 to nearly 25,000, reports BusinessWeek. “Of those, about 3,700 are expected to step up to the blackboard as new teachers this fall. That’s up more than 25 percent from the 2,900 who did so last year.” The New York Times also weighs in on TFA.
Most of us in education probably think of marketing, brand building and customer relations as beneath our dignity. We’re educators, after all. We’re not selling soap or soft drinks. Food for thought then, courtesy of Scott McLeod at the Techlearning blog, who notes that every interaction is at heart a marketing transaction representing “an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.”
“What’s this mean for schools? Well, it means that every time a parent walks away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a teacher has yet another boring lesson, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a school board member puts her personal agenda ahead of what’s best for students, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a member of the community walks through an uninviting building, that’s a marketing interaction. And every time an administrator squanders an opportunity to be a leader rather than a manager, that’s a marketing interaction.”
Schools do a host of wonderful things,” McLeod concludes. “But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities.”
Smart stuff. And worth reflecting on, as McLeod notes, next time someone complains about problems with student engagement, parental support and community involvement.
In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. A teacher’s turns to leaving. TMAO, the earnest if occasionally sanctimonious blogger behind Teaching in the 408 files a first-rate post with the best kicker ending since The Sixth Sense (HT: Alexander Russo). Over at Eduwonkette, the link between NCLB and leaving the classroom is discussed. Yours truly posted at length in the comment section there; I’ll spare you the cross-post here.
Readers of certain age probably remember with fondness The Electric Company on PBS. At the very least, it was acceptable “educational” TV for 6 to 9-year olds who had outgrown Sesame Street. The New York Times reports PBS is reviving the show, although it will have to work harder to find an audience in the increasingly crowded, (if content-free) kids media arena:
“Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).”
Now if someone would only revive Schoolhouse Rock, which probably did more to get me interested in social studies than any of my teachers. More than 30 years later, I still know all the words to those songs.
“Concern is spreading among parents and mental-health professionals that the exploding popularity of computer and video games has a deeper dark side than simple couch-potatohood,” reports U.S. News [Hat tip Joanne Jacobs]. “According to the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University, about 8.5 percent of 8-to-18-year-old gamers can be considered pathologically addicted, and nearly one quarter of young people—more males than females—admit they’ve felt addicted.”
A more nuanced take on video games is offered by Cheryl Olson, a psychiatry lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and the author of “Grand Theft Childhood.” Olson, who has conducted research on video games and their impact on children, says in an interview with the Australian website The Age, “that games can be both healthy and problematic, but in ways that are hard to convey in a few sound bites on the news.”
“For most young teens, video and computer games are a routine part of life, like TV, recorded music and books,” Olson says. “The average teen boy routinely plays video games with violent content; a not inconsiderable number of girls do, too. Teens often play violent games to cope with feelings such as stress and anger; they also play for creative reasons and to learn new things. It’s not normal for teens (especially boys) to play video games alone all the time.”
Her research notes that young teens who play any Mature-rated (age 17+) game on a routine basis are at higher risk than teens who play other types of games for behaving aggressively (for example, beating up someone, damaging property for fun) or having school problems (for example, poor grades, getting in trouble with a teacher) at least once over the course of a year. They are also more likely to report being threatened by someone with a weapon. The risk of problems increases if young teens play mostly mature-rated or violent games. “These relationships between violent game play and behavior/school problems are statistically significant correlations, very unlikely to occur by chance,” Olson observes. “But correlations don’t tell us about cause and effect. For example, children with aggressive personalities may play more violent games, or children who get poor grades may express their frustration by playing violent games.”
Recent Comments