It's About Time...

Did I actually hear this last night from Obama?

In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework after dinner, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, and read to their child. I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father when I say that responsibility for our children's education must begin at home.

I only wish we had been hearing this for the last 30 years. Now if we can just do something about the abysmal divorce rate that is dividing and diminishing our families.

Nicer but Dumber

Every year friends will ask me at the start of a new school year, how are the new students? At first it was a joke I would answer with-- nicer but dumber, but you know, it's really true. And what can account for this observation or phenomena if indeed it is true?

I think there are many reasons to account for this and one of the suspects is the internet and the vast entertainment media that kids are continually plugged in to. They are socialized early, with media images encouraging them to grow up, as many of us lament, far too fast.

Now kids have always been social, playing with toys or making up games ever since time began. Today though with reality tv, kids are use to being on display; they can't wait to see their picture on a digital camera and are confused when grandma takes a picture with a camera where you have to develop the film first (what's that?). Shoot video, watch yourself on You Tube minutes later.

I think on the positive side, due to more working parents, more kids are in day care and in pre-school and that this early socialization by all kinds of caregivers results in children learning early how to play-talk-communicate with others, young and old.

Also, as everyone has noticed, children today-- as young as 3 or 4, call you by your first name - a change that took only a generation or two to occur. This use of first names of adults by children breeds familiarity and (possibly) a blurring of authority. My older son is 6 now but at age 4 you could see him at the playground ignoring kids his own age to talk to the teenagers he didn't know or even adults. Today, while the neighbors 3 year old calls me "Paul", I still call my parents friends Mrs. Engstrand, or Mr. Fjelde though I am almost 50.

Dumber? Overall...probably. They come to my 9th grade class with maybe 3000+ text messages written and received in the past year and during that same time, maybe 6-8 badly written essays. However, the ones not carrying around too much baggage or attitude, are really nice, fun students. If I could only give passing grades for personality.

Watering Down the Requirements

Sometimes LESS is MORE but in this case, LESS is LESS. Santa Ana, a community about 10 minutes NE of Disneyland, is planning to do something about their lackluster high school gradutation rates. Instead of requiring 240 credits to graduate, they are proposing eliminating 4 classes and make them electives rather than requirements. The four classes are Health, College and Career Planning (Life Skills), World Geography and Earth Science (I teach the first two on this list). Now the burden to graduate is about 10% less.

Hum... Let's say you are manufacturing engine parts for Boeing and the widgets you produce are allowed a .05% failure rate. But would it be okay to increase that failure rate to .15%? What about the doctor who is about to do life saving surgery on your child, or sister/brother/parent. Is it okay that the medical school where she graduated relaxed it's standards by 10% and now allow students to take 10% fewer classes or pass with a 2.6 GPA rather than a 2.8 GPA?

Now those are dramatic, life and death situations but what about for the rest of us where life is not on the line at our workplace. What about me as a teacher? Is it okay for me to start making 10% more mistakes in entering grades in my computerized gradebook? Is it okay to have 200 mistakes in grading out of the 2000+ grades I have to enter every semester?

Santa Ana Unified School District, if they go through with the relaxed standards, will be sending a message, one that most of their graduates will remember for a lifetime. Can't quite cut it, just change the rules. Is that the message we want to give to 18 year olds as they enter college, work, marriage,and life?

And once you begin to make excuses for certain classes, can it's cousin cheating be far behind? Dumbing down the standards is bascially institutionalized cheating. We need to keep standards high and think of new ways to can help students succeed.

LA Times Santa Ana Unified School District article: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-graduation8-2009feb08,0,7528768.story

Back to the Basics

Give a Person a Fish...

...FEED them for a day, TEACH a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.

Something I learned when student teaching in Spring of '96, is not to (just) give them students information. Make them find it themselves. A class discussion or lecture is okay for adults, but for students-- not so good. Even though they may be staring right at you, their attention is elsewhere.

• what was the name of that website I was at last night?


• I wonder if I clean my room this weekend if my mom will buy me that new cellphone?


• I am soooo hungry, I wonder if he'll let me go to the bathroom and then I can buy chips?


• Should I ditch 5th period? I don't want him (the teacher) to give me attitude about not having my homework done again...

Project based learning is the Cadillac of assignments. You give the kids choices of topics, a grading rubric that tells them explicitly how it will be graded, and then give them a block of time and resources in which to create a project. Another term for this is Constructivism, where they are actively constructing meaning out of material. Projects can be done alone or done with others. The best ones are also tied to solving or investigating real world problems.

There are major caveats to this kind of learning however. Many 14-15 year olds think that if they cut and paste well enough you won't be able to tell that they copied the whole thing. You tell me, can you tell which was written by a 9th grader and which was written by a college educated adult-- examples

a) Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class -- and many teachers can't even hear the ring. Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing. As people age, many develop what's known as aging ear -- a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds. The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers -- not help them.

b) There is this really cool ring tone that you can get now that is to high-pitched for teachers too hear and this way you can text you're friends and your teachers aren't going to know. We can hear it because we aren't old yet, but old people can't, hear it.

Tough call huh? Catching plagaiarized work is like identifying the John 3:16 guy in a rainbow wig at a convention of morticians.

Other problems with projects is that while many will shine and do a great job, some are so daunted by the magnitude of a project that they turn in nothing. They may have worked on it in class, have rough drafts, but at home they are either paralyzed by fear, or just default to their usual M.O., "no mom, I finished my homework at school." Finally, you get some students that fixate on one part of the project (the cover, a chart, etc.) and forget the bigger picture, to make meaning of all the parts and come up with some new insight.

Of course I could do something clever and ask to see their work 3 days before it's due but then it's a chorus of "I left it at home mister", some actually did and others left nothing at home. What's the solution? For me it's vary the types of assignments -- essays, posters, presentations, quizzes, questions from the book, and more.