Idiot Of The Week Award

It's early in the week, but I'm already polishing the trophy and preparing to give it to Senator Jim DeMint, R-SC, for this doozy:

DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.

I agree with Rhymes With Right on this one:

Senator, we on the right are fighting for freedom against sharia law. I certainly do hope that one day you will quit espousing it and join us on the side of liberty.

I had an interesting lunchtime conversation with a social conservative today. I may share some of their values, but for the most part I certainly don't advocate using the power of government to enforce those values on others.

Update, 10/6/10: Did DeMint actually make this statement 6 years ago? If so, why is this just being reported now? I may have to retract the award....

Lowering Standards

When you give predominantly A's anyway, and you reduce the general education curriculum to mere pablum (or worse, indoctrination) as opposed to actually teaching something, it's no surprise that the idea of giving a final exam would go the way of the dodo:

Across the country, there is growing evidence that final exams — once considered so important that universities named a week after them — are being abandoned or diminished, replaced by take-home tests, papers, projects, or group presentations. Anecdotally, longtime professors say they have been noticing the trend for years. And now, thanks to a recent discussion at Harvard University, there are statistics that make clear just how much the landscape has changed.

Tuesday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Maxwell Smart, Agent 86.

Today's question is:
Who is on the US coin that is also the moniker of rapper Curtis James Jackson III?

Power Corrupts.

And PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Never heard that before reading it here.

Monday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
A1ANA2.

Today's question is:
What sitcom character's signature line was, “Sorry about that, Chief”?

Sunday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Mary Celeste.

Today's question is:
What was Lawrence Welk's California car license plate?

Oh, The Bills He'll Veto!

Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed a bill that would have allowed students to opt out of art and/or foreign languages and take voc ed classes for graduation requirements, has vetoed a bill that would have created "green tech" academies in schools with funding coming from an electricity "surcharge" (tax), and has signed a bill that requires kindergartners to be 5 years old by September 1st.

Joanne has more details and direct links.

From One Fad To Another

I'm not sure whether it's endearing or frustrating to learn that my own school district is right in the pack with the latest education fads:

Of course, Differentiated Instruction is only one among many prominent detours American education has taken, none more pernicious than the chop-logic and excesses of what is now being advocated in the name of "21st-century education" or the simplistic requirement for teachers to mindlessly "incorporate technology" into their lessons-as though that will rescue poor instructional plans from failure.

Sweden Moving Away From Socialism?

Maybe.

America, even with Republicans in the House and possibly Senate, runs the risk of becoming the model sclerotic empire, wasting away while other states move toward more freedom. Canada and Sweden, nations we conservatives and libertarians used to scoff at as silly, are starting to beat the US on measures of freedom and competitiveness.
Sweden is one country to watch. First, it does socialism about as well as any state could. (of course, this is easier when your nation is small, homogeneous, and free of the burdens of world leadership). Next, unlike the US, Sweden is moving in the right direction, toward that conservative (in the true meaning of the word) ideal of a 3rd way, where the welfare state, to the extent it exists, is individualized.

The article then quotes National Review Online:

In fact, contemporary Sweden is much less socialist than many Americans realize. Since the early 1990s, when it suffered a painful financial crisis, the Scandinavian country has deregulated key industries (such as airlines, telecommunications, and electricity), lowered its overall tax burden, established universal school vouchers, partially privatized its pension system, abolished certain government monopolies, sold a number of state-owned enterprises (including the parent company of Absolut vodka), and trimmed public spending. Several years ago, it eliminated gift and inheritance taxes. The World Economic Forum now ranks Sweden as the second-most competitive economy on earth, behind only Switzerland. According to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom (compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation), Sweden offers greater business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, freedom from corruption, and property-rights protection than does the United States.

Is this hyperbole? How do their tax rates compare to those in the US? I find this difficult to believe; perhaps I'm stuck in an "old paradigm" regarding Sweden. Or perhaps it's just less socialist than it used to be....

Singapore Math

From people who've actually used Singapore Math, I've never heard a single complaint. Seems to be catching on in some US schools, too (thankfully):

For decades, efforts to improve math skills have driven schools to embrace one math program after another, abandoning a program when it does not work and moving on to something purportedly better. In the 1960s there was the “new math,” whose focus on abstract theories spurred a back-to-basics movement, emphasizing rote learning and drills. After that came “reform math,” whose focus on problem solving and conceptual understanding has been derided by critics as the “new new math.”

Singapore math may well be a fad, too, but supporters say it seems to address one of the difficulties in teaching math: all children learn differently. In contrast to the most common math programs in the United States, Singapore math devotes more time to fewer topics, to ensure that children master the material through detailed instruction, questions, problem solving, and visual and hands-on aids like blocks, cards and bar charts. Ideally, they do not move on until they have thoroughly learned a topic...

Singapore math was developed by the country’s Ministry of Education nearly 30 years ago, and the textbooks have been imported for more than a decade. The earliest adopters in the United States were home-school parents and a small number of schools that had heard about it through word of mouth.

Today it can be found in neighborhood schools like P.S. 132, which serves mostly poor students, as well as elite schools, including Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for gifted children in Manhattan, and the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, a private school attended by President Obama’s daughters.

SingaporeMath.com, a company that has distributed the “Primary Mathematics” books in the United States since 1998, reports that it now has sales to more than 1,500 schools, about twice as many as in 2008. And Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Math in Focus, the United States edition of a popular Singapore math series, is now used in 120 school districts and 60 charter schools and private schools, the publisher says.

How To Control Textbook Costs

To me, the easiest way would be for individual schools and university systems to forbid the practice of allowing a professor to make money off of textbooks used in their classes. Others have different ideas:

When Dennis Passovoy, a lecturer at University of Texas' McCombs School of Business, selected a new textbook for his Organizational Behavior class last year, his students didn't even have to buy it. They could read the book online for free, or purchase it in several formats, including as an audio book, PDF, or $30 paperback version ordered online that would be printed and then shipped to their doors. "It was equally as good as this $160 textbook, but what really got my attention was if the students adopted the book online, it was free," says Passovoy, who got the new textbook from startup publisher Flat World Knowledge.

Flat World was launched in 2007 by two textbook industry veterans to provide an alternative to expensive course books, such as Organizational Behavior, a standard text from Prentice Hall that lists for $180. "It was so obvious to anybody in the industry that students are running as fast as they can to avoid buying a new book," says Jeff Shelstad, Flat World's 46-year-old chief executive officer. CourseSmart, a joint venture by major textbook publishers including Pearson and McGraw-Hill, distributes digital versions of textbooks for a fee. Six months of digital access to Organizational Behavior, for example, costs $98, according to the venture's website.

I guess it's a start. Still, $98 seems egregiously expensive to me.

Worse Than Illegal Fees?

How about extortion?

Investigators say a former vice president and dean at a New York university forced students to cook, clean, wash clothes and chauffeur her family -- and threatened that their scholarships would be revoked if they refused.

An arrest affidavit unsealed by federal prosecutors this week alleges that Cecilia Chang required scholarship students at St. John's University to take out the garbage, shovel snow and cook food at her home in Queens, New York.

"Chang threatened the students and placed them in fear that if they refused to perform these personal services, they would lose their scholarships and be unable to attend St. John's," FBI Special Agent Kenneth F. Hosey said in the affidavit.

At the time, she was a vice president and dean with the authority to award scholarships, the affidavit said.

Saint of a lady, that Cecilia Chang.

What A Teacher Likes To Hear

We don't have AP Statistics at my school, just a non-AP course, because our students who want AP will take Calculus (so say our calculus teachers!). As a result, most of my stats students will be "poets and journalists" in college, not mathematicians and scientists. Teaching to my audience, I've decided to de-emphasize graphing calculator usage in the course and to emphasize the use of spreadsheets, something these students will more than likely have and be able to use in college.

Last week our first Excel project was due. As I expected, I had about a half-dozen students in each class who had never before used a spreadsheet at all, so I made this project the world's simplest introduction to spreadsheets and their ability to generate graphs for us. Most students who have already turned it in have scored A's on it. It's due no later than close of business on Monday, the day after tomorrow.

Two days after we went into the computer lab to get started on it, one girl said to me, "Look, Mr. RotLC, I'm using a spreadsheet to organize tasks for the next dance!" She was one who had never used a spreadsheet before.

Music to my ears....

Saturday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Alcyone, Sterope, Celeno, Electra, Maia, Taygeta, and Merope.

Today's question is:
What “ghost ship” left Boston for Genoa in 1872 and was found abandoned in the Atlantic four weeks later will all sails still set?

Friday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Piltdown Man.

Today's question is:
Identify any of the 7 Sisters, stars in the constellation Pleiades.

Thursday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
CSS Virginia.

Today's question is:
What was the name of the “missing link” skeleton discovered in England in 1911, and exposed as a hoax in 1953?

Education Buzz

This week's is here and includes my post about Back To School Night.

Wednesday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Clampett.

Today's question is:
When the Merrimack was raised and made into an ironclad, what was she renamed?

The Unintended Consequences of "We've Got To Do Something!"

Laws banning texting while driving actually may prompt a slight increase in road crashes, research out today shows...

Researchers at the Highway Loss Data Institute compared rates of collision insurance claims in four states — California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Washington — before and after they enacted texting bans. Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted.

The Highway Loss group theorizes that drivers try to evade police by lowering their phones when texting, increasing the risk by taking their eyes even further from the road and for a longer time. link

It's plausible.

On the other hand, there's this:

Sending text messages while driving was the culprit in the deaths of an estimated 16,000 people from 2001 to 2007. Even more sobering, researchers warn that fatalities have shot up significantly since 2005.

An analysis of federal data on road fatalities, published this week in the American Journal of Public Health, concluded that deaths due to "distracted driving" surged from 4,572 in 2005 to 5,870 in 2008. That's a 28 percent increase in three years.

Many of the deaths involved collisions with roadside objects, as drivers typing on their cell phones veer off-track and into poles, traffic lights or other items.

Whom to believe....

There Was A Time I Wasn't "Highly Qualified"

Teaching interns can no longer be counted as "highly qualified" teachers under the No Child Left Behind law, a federal court ruled today.

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals comes in response to a 2007 lawsuit filed by Public Advocates, a San Francisco-based public interest law firm. The suit alleges that a loophole in No Child Left Behind allowed the government to misrepresent how prepared teachers are for their jobs, perpetuating a pattern of clustering inexperienced teachers in the neediest schools.


Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/09/27/3060617/judges-say-interns-arent-highly.html#ixzz10sCsyK1I

When I started teaching I had a bachelor's degree and a pulse--heck, I hadn't even taken the CBEST yet, and that's a requirement for teachers and substitutes in California. The district HR folks told me, "Just sign up for the October test. By the time anyone at the county or state figures out you haven't taken the test, you'll already have passed it." I appreciated their confidence in me.

I had an intern credential for my 2nd and 3rd years of teaching, while I earned my real credential.