geek.teacher

Teaching Special Education in the Philadelphia suburbs gets you used to the idea that only one thing must suck more than urban education these days: urban special education.  Out of all of the horror stories I have seen or dealt with, the best must be the student that was held back in third grade three years in a row.  He was never tested for special education services.  Even after the parent specifically requested testing.  They signed a permission to evaluate, and still no testing.  This child was going to be 12 years old in a class with children 9 years old, and nobody thought that was something to be looked into.  When he came to our district, he was tested immediately and, unsurprisingly, he had a learning disability.  The only thing that makes the story more sad is that within a year they moved back into the city, where I would imagine he continued to receive the same standard of service.

I’m in my first ever Carnival of Education this week for this post over at What It’s Like on the Inside.  the most interesting post (and there are many!) to me was this one about starting a charter school based on a law firm model.

The method by which this could be accomplished is by using a state’s charter law. A group of teachers could apply for a charter with a school along a law firm model. In the model, there would be senior teachers on a managing committee, say 8-12 in total. Each of these senior teachers would have three roles, not unlike senior partners. First would be management of the school. Whether this is delegated to a staff person or handled by committee, they would be ultimately responsible for the schools bottom line–fiscally and educationally. While there may be other senior teachers at the school, this small committee is responsible, just like the management committee of a law firm, for the overall success of the school.

What happens when two teachers are both exactly qualified according to preset guidelines and a school district is doing layoffs?  Coin toss!

When the Gilroy Unified School District deemed a South Valley Middle School English teacher and an Eliot Elementary School second grade teacher identical in every way in terms of their qualifications, a judge flipped a coin to break the tie and determine which teacher was more senior, a decision that will affect the order in which teachers who received layoff notices will be hired back if the district has the resources to do so. When the coin fell, Jessica Chessani of Eliot won the prize. At this point, she still doesn’t have a job next year. But when and if the district can, it will hire the teachers back in reverse order, based on their ranking.

Even though the story does not back this up, I’d like to picture in my head that it’s like the coin toss at the Super Bowl, complete with roaring fans and a collectible coin.  Oh, and Ms. Chessani doing a victory dance afterwards.

I went into this post expecting yet another old fart post, but was delighted to find some delightful sarcasm arguing something new to me: letting kids have cell phones in schools.

Is tech good for kids?

Answer: maybe?

Seriously?  The more I pay attention to the news, I swear, the more frustrated it makes me.  People are having a hard time deciding when to let their kids have stuff.  Welcome to having children, where you have to make decisions on your own about what is best for your individual child without some experts telling you exactly what to do.  Don’t worry, though, to make sure the story is balanced, they show the pro-tech side:

“It’s myopic not to get kids into (technology) as soon as they are interested in it,” said James Daly, editorial director of Edutopia, a Web site and magazine run by the George Lucas Education Foundation. “Those gadgets are the tools of their age.”

The anti-tech side:

Kids can use Internet-ready devices - which are becoming increasingly common - to access material parents may not want them to have, such as music with foul words, movies with racy scenes or even pornography. Kids who use them also run the risk of encountering cyberbullies or other online pests and predators.

And the side that has realized that, apparently, the relentless rotation of our planet over a 24-hour period of time limits the number of hours in a day, and people have to choose how they spend their time:

“Technology can take up an extraordinary amount of time,” said Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico. “You get kids that are texting an hour a day, plugged into their iPods an hour a day, watching YouTube. How much time does that leave for the family, for parents, to walk the dog?”

That last one, of course, I favor the most simply because of the sheer obviousness of it all.  You could place any number of activities in that first half of that sentence to make them sound terrible.  Let’s try!

“You get kids that are reading an hour a day, studying an hour a day, playing musical instruments.  How much time does that leave for the family, for parents, to walk the dog?”

Parents, if for some reason you read this blog post, know this: No easy answers exist.  technology is neither good nor bad, it just is.  Technology has made it possible for me to have friends all around the country and the world.  It has also made it easy for me to waste time and be completely unproductive.  It has opened up whole new avenues of learning for me, and it has introduced me to banal tripe like the article in discussion.  Think for yourself, know your kids, and do what’s best for them.

For the record, I’m pretty sure the majority of the sixth graders at my school have cell phones.  Just this morning I was listening to a group in homeroom debate the differences between providers and discussing which phones they have and want.

Coming from the “nobody should be surprised about this” file, apparently 20-something teachers are just like every other 20-something out there.  I’ve seen stories like this before, about how young people just out of college have to realize that their public information means that anybody can see it, but this story takes a turn for the sinister because these people teach your children.  My favorite parts are where the reporter calls out some teachers that leave Facebook profiles open, only to have them close later.  No need to just get a point across that people have done this, but let’s name these scourges so their names will pop up in google searches for all time, ruining future employment chances!

In some cases, teachers apparently didn’t mind that their Web sites were raunchy and public — at least until a reporter called. Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”

Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Minutes later, access to her site was restricted.

As somebody just getting into the whole blog thing, I do have to say that I took some of this stuff into consideration, considering a recent debate about anonymity in edublogging.  Now, I don’t have any wild pictures or anything out there since I am a terrible introvert, but there’s still the possibility that I could say something which might annoy others or that might embarrass me later.  But when it came right down to it, I decided that I need to stand behind my words, no matter how bone-headed they might be.

One of the most difficult things for a school under No Child Left Behind can be the subgroup scores.  I should know, since my school for the past few years has failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress based on our disaggregated groups.  Last year, we made progress in all areas except for special ed students in math.  In previous years, we also had difficulties with the African-American and low income students’ scores, but that has improved over time.  Thanks to missing out on progress with these subgroups, even if our overall scores improved, we have been placed into the ominous-sounding Corrective Action.  Fortunately, so far we’ve avoided the worst of what that could mean: replacement of adminstration and possibly staff.

Having experienced that, I find it unsurprising that schools in California are recategorizing students to lower their numbers in the disaggregated groups.  According to NCLB, you only have to report the scores for groups that are above a certain threshhold of student numbers, which, at least in California, would apear to be 100 students.  What if you’re on the borderline of that threshhold and that group is failing you, though? Here’s how one principal handled that problem:

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn’t count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong said. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”

Over the past two years, 80 California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.

Given NCLB’s penchant for punishment over assistance in cases of falling behind in AYP, this kind of gamesmanship is the only way some schools can survive for now.  It’s not something I can approve of, but I can understand why an adminstrator would look to go this route when it means the difference between NCLB’s definitions of success and failure.

In the last week, here’s what I’ve been reading/watching/playing:

Books:

• Our Dumb World by The Onion - This has been bedtime reading for a while now.  It’s great parody of an atlas, as it’s very dense but often hilarious.  For example, this bit on Hong Kong:

An exotic seaport off the coast of China, the Hong Kong province is plagued by massive, well-choreographed brawls that break out almost daily on every street corner.  The dazzling, high-speed, and acrobatic violence puts every citizen at constant risk of being thrown off a two-story balcony onto a pile of cardboard boxes.

• The Incredible Indoor Games Book by Bob Gregson - I haven’t looked at this book in years, and it reminded me of some fun games that I was able to play with my students for PAT on Friday.

Comics - I read almost everything, so some highlights and low points:

• Countdown #1 -  I already trashed this.
• Fables #72 - Cinderella is awesome.
• Mighty Avengers #12 - If you’re reading Secret Invasion and not reading everything else Bendis is writing at the moment, you’re nuts.
• New Exiles #5 - I already trashed this one, too.
• Ultimate Spider-Man #121 - The only Bendis book you don’t need to read if you want to keep up with Secret Invasion, and it, too, is great.  This is a nice done in one story that wraps up the typical high school baby project for health class.

TV:

• How I Met Your Mother - More Robin Sparkles?  Thank you!  Bonus for The Dawson balding.
• 30 Rock - Some delightful continuity this week that’s going to lead to interesting places, and, even better, more Will Arnett on my TV.  It also had my favorite line of the week.
• Lost - Poor Sayid.

Games:

• Just Cause - While it’s certainly not a great game, it was worth the $15 I spent on it.  It’s a fairly simple open world game overall, but I just find the concept of freeing tiny villages from tyrannical rule very appealing for some reason and always want to do just one more.  A grappling hook and a parachute both go a long way to making the typical open world experience more fun.
• Crackdown - This was another $15 game, and it was way more enjoyable than I thought it would be.  I finished up the co-op campaign with Brian, and it was pretty fun.  Again, having a fun way to move through the open world with awesome jumping abilities definitely improved the open world gaming experience for me.

The New York Times reports on an interesting study that says all the real world examples that pop up in Math programs may just be a gigantic waste of time:

“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”

They talk further about how the use of real world examples obscures the math concepts that need to be learned.

One of the things that is simultaneously hilarious and frustrating about having nerdy pastimes is dealing with nerd anger.  Sometimes it makes you want to laugh, and sometimes it makes you want to punch someone in the face.  Worry not, I do not fail to see the irony in that statement.  The funny thing about it, of course, is that nerds are always sitting, waiting for mainstream acceptance of their hobbies, but the nerd anger makes it that much harder for people to accept them.

I would posit this comes from some compulsive beast inside the nerd.  It’s that which takes ownership of the hobby, compelling us to read and interact with everything related to our chosen hobbies.  I know that I am not immune.  I’m proud of myself when I choose not to read one or two comics a week because I dislike them, but at the same time, if I am in some way convinced that it might be important to know about later, I will continue to read things that I actively loathe.  Case in point number one, right now, would of course be Countdown.  Why did I read every issue of a shamefully bad series?  I was promised importance, so I was compelled to read it for myself instead of just getting spoilers somewhere.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there, I’m also compelled to read series that I’ve followed for ages, even if they have devolved into mediocrity.  Just this week, for example, Countdown wasn’t even the worst book released.  That would have to be this week’s issue of New Exiles.  I haven’t loved Exiles since Judd Winick left, and that was almost five years ago.  and now the series is downright terrible, but I still read it.  Self-loathing is one of the clear characteristics of the nerd hobbyist.

Anyway, I started off on this rant on nerd anger because Tom Brevoort shared his own dark past as an angry nerd, complete with savaging the motivations of the creators.  It’s a fun look at how the arguments kind of stay the same even as the specifics change.