Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
Fred Strine, the veteran Seattle teacher whose Seattle Post-Intelligencer column calling on teachers to, well, teach, set tongues wagging here and over at Joanne Jacobs. He honors us with a visit in the comments section and a correction: He’s not retired, he’s just fed up.
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Having children is supposed to make you happy. So how can it be that several studies show that couples without children are happier than those with children? One study finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless, Newsweek reports.
Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”
Can you name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? The Speaker of the House? How much of the oil consumed in the U.S. is imported from other countries? What’s the total U.S. national debt? Which country emits the most carbon dioxide? What’s the minimum amount of exercise a person needs each day?
These and other questions are part of a Newsweek poll as the magazine looks at “Global Literacy 2008.” It’s easy to deride some of the questions (What’s the tallest building in the U.S.) as mere trivia. On the other hand, content knowledge will remain stubbornly useful when engaging in critical thinking and problem solving in the realm of politics, the economy, health care, the environment, et al.
Newsweek’s quiz is here.
Fascinating idea from Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk today, who blogs about creating a mechanism to open schools to part-time teachers, especially retired teachers:
There are some national service ideas floating around on this but they tend to focus on full time teaching. Another way to approach it would be to create more adjunct teachers, especially at the high school level. While teaching full-time may be more intense and more of a time commitment than some people want as a post-retirement option, capturing some of their time is one way to help address the various human capital challenges education faces….There are other part-timers out there, too, for instance mothers with young children, who could be tapped.
I’d add corporations in science and technology to the list of talent sources. If turning out qualified students is their concern, might as well help out. “Facilitating all this would be an attractive niche for a non-profit, too,” Andy notes.
As a parent and as someone who cares deeply about elevating the state of our civilization, I rebel against the idea of letting children decide whether they feel like learning today or any day. I believe that adults must take responsibility for children’s well-being, for their physical and intellectual growth, and that involves setting goals as well as limits, in other words, acting as the grown-up.
That’s CK board member Diane Ravitch, at Bridging Differences. Well said.
The United States Tennis Association is expanding its efforts to encourage high school coaches to adopt “no cut” policies. “The idea is that students benefit from participating, even if they aren’t top players, and that they will become lifelong players and fans of the sport, EdWeek reports.
Coaches who take part in the program receive gifts, such as caps and a sports-magazine subscription, as well as professional recognition, such as a letter of commendation to their school principals praising them for maintaining a large team. Perhaps most important, they receive access to features such as a new Web site created this year, which allows them to share information through a coach-to-coach online forum and gives them tips on how to run a no-cut team effectively.
Not being cut and playing, of course, are different matters. Having ridden the pine on a couple of baseball teams as a kid, I’d prefer to have been cut rather than to endure the humiliation of playing only in blowouts.
A dictionary, a high school English teacher used to remind me, is not a rule book but a history book. It provides a record of how the language changes and grows. The editors of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary have added 100 new words to their latest edition that have found their way into general usage, including edamame, wing nut, dirty bomb and pescatarian — a vegetarian who eats fish.
“As soon as we see the word used without explanation or translation or gloss, we consider it a naturalized citizen of the English language,” Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, tells the AP. “If somebody is using it to convey a specific idea and that idea is successfully conveyed in that word, it’s ready to go in the dictionary.”
The most interesting neologism: “mondegreen.” It describes “words mistaken for other words.” A mondegreen most often comes from misunderstood phrases or lyrics, such as “Jose, can you see” for the opening line of the Star Spangled Banner. Mondegreen was coined by a writer for The Atlantic over 50 years ago, who confused the lyric of a Scottish ballad with the lyric “laid him on the green” with “Lady Mondegreen.”
Among the best-known modern examples: “There’s a bathroom on the right” in place of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “There’s a bad moon on the rise” and “‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy” in place of “kiss the sky” in the 1967 Jimi Hendrix classic “Purple Haze.”
Merriam-Webster is inviting people to post their favorite mondegreens on their web site
NYC’s best education reporter, Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun, has a big piece this morning about anonymous blogger Eduwonkette, whose blog has become “a thorn in the side” of the New York City Department of Education.
DOE communications chief David Cantor and Eduwonk Andy Rotherham are among those who take shots at EW, alleging that her anonymity keeps readers from evaluating her bias. Having spent decades in the news business before becoming a teacher, I should be predisposed to agree. So why doesn’t her anonymity bug me? Perhaps it’s the nature of her blog. By focusing on research, EW on her best days functions as a first-rate BS detector, saying in essence “here’s the data. You decide.” The fact that she’s got deep pocketed institutions and major players in the edusphere taking shots at her is a testament to her impact. Indeed, you can probably divide edubloggers into two camps: those who admit they are envious of EW’s impact…and liars.
But that’s her second most significant accomplishment. Her first is that she makes education research entertaining. Her anonymity may be frustrating to her critics, but her blog is indispensible.
Elementary school students will be exposed to the work of Shakespeare starting at five years old under a new government education initiative in the U.K., the BBC reports.
Ian McNeilly from Britain’s National Association for the Teaching of English said: “Some of the language in the plays would be beyond pupils under a certain age, but the earlier children are introduced to Shakespeare the better.”
“It’s all down to the approach,” says McNeilly. “You can bore people of any age with the wrong approach and you can enthuse people of any age with the correct one.”
That’s true of teaching any subject.
Enhanced school safety? Or just plain creepy? That’s the question school officials and parents in Rhode Island are grappling as they weigh the efficacy of a pilot program that equipped elementary school students’ backpacks with radio frequency locator tags in the name of improved safety for children in transit to and from school on buses.
House and Senate lawmakers, worried about privacy violations, passed legislation prohibiting the use of such tags to track students. But Rhode Island’s governor has vetoed the bill noting that “in certain circumstances, it may be helpful for schools to have the ability to quickly identify where each of their students is located.”
A Middletown school official said the tracking devices were not meant to infringe upon students’ rights. The tags were placed on backpacks of children who rode buses and were used to track them in real time as they boarded and left the vehicles. The Providence Journal says the idea was “to help notify parents when a bus is running late, or has encountered trouble, as was the case during the December snowstorm that saw more than 50 Providence buses stranded for hours, said school facilities director Edward Collins, a program supporter. In more serious circumstances, the chips could alert school officials if a child was lost or abducted.”
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