Teaching Grammar

I was wasting time the other day, reading an article that my browser labeled "5 Administrative Tasks that Waste Teachers' Time" even though the actual title at the top of the article itself was "5 Things Teachers Do Every Day That Are a Complete Waste of Time."

Irony? I think that qualifies as irony. But, I digress.

The article listed the following:

1. Write the standard on the board. 
2. Teach grammar. 
3. Grade daily work. 
4. Collect data. 
5. Enforce the dress code. 

Wait, what?  One item at a time, shall we?

Enforce the dress code - that's a tough one. Dress codes are usually so one-sidedly sexist that I want to reject them outright and as a man (he/him/Mr.), I will always be over-cautious when it comes to enforcing dress code violations. Yeah, this can an administrator's job. I've got better things to worry about.

Collect data - data is good, as long as it is collected without extra effort on anyone's part. I see no reason to fill out paper forms, hand out paper exit tickets, or collect paper that only services data collection. If you tell me I have time to transcribe data, then I would have far more time if you understood that I can distill that raw data into more meaningful information.

I can ask for a show of hands. Clicker cards. Exit tickets and homework checks with Google Forms. That raw data is useless to anyone but me and instantly obsolete. My interpretation of that data is useful - we call that interpretation "Grades". That's what you pay me for. If you demand the detail, then I'll send you a blizzard of it and then pester you often for your interpretation of it, until you admit that it's not working for you.

I read further; that isn't what they meant:

It seems there’s always some kid who desperately needs an IEP but doesn’t have one, which means we have to go through the process to get the kid services. Yes, it’s incredibly important to provide kids with the accommodations they need. But spending 20 minutes twice a week using some “intervention” one-on-one just to prove that it doesn’t work, then giving a “probe” that’s completely unrelated to my curriculum or the skills the kid needs? That’s meaningless paperwork, and it takes away from my students’ learning.

The author is an ass.

The IEP has the power of a legal contract. It says what the school agrees to do, and by extension, me. They're important. If it says "20 minutes, twice a week" then it has to happen. To be fair, the author (Captain Awesome, apparently) teaches in the UK, so maybe things are different. In my school, the teacher is part of the team that decides what the school can guarantee to do, and we are expected to object if an intervention is truly impossible to fulfill; a school resource professional takes up the slack.

Grade Daily Work - no argument there. If we're using a normal 100-pt scale, tests are 100-150pts.  That means homework or classwork is 0pts or 5pts, depending on "an honest attempt". In the current SBG, this stuff is "formative" and carries no value to the grade. Either way, I'll tell you how you are doing, but I won't grade it.

Write the Standard on the Board. Yep, waste of time. Especially for us. Our administration has declared that each course has one "Power Standard" each term (8 terms). The same words are posted for a month; it's not particularly useful. If you mean "Daily Learning Target" should be posted, then that's different. I doubt that posting it has much purpose or improves the teaching in any way, but I'll do it if my paycheck depends on it.

Teach Grammar. WTF? Grammar is vital. (I'm assuming that Captain Awesome is an English teacher). Grammar to an English teacher is analogous to arithmetic and mental mathematics to a math teacher - it's basic, vital, and perilous if overlooked.

Take the line: y = (3/7)x + 2

What numbers would you substitute for x to get three points that you can graph? Why? If they aren't saying "-7, 0, and 7 because fractions", then you have a problem. You really shouldn't be moving on without this conversation because they can save so much pointless mental anguish trying to graph (3, 12/7) or (3,1&5/7) -- this takes up all their abilities and they miss this new idea of a linear function.  A slope of 100/250 can be reduced to 2/5 or 0.2, but can also be thought of as 100 up and 250 over, or 100 hits in 250 at-bats.

Grammar is similar. If it's understood, then your students can use it and communicate clearly and easily. If they don't "get" it, then you need to stop what you're doing and dive in.

I teach SAT prep. Most of the math I do is review. Let's look at this again, now that you basically know what to do but perhaps have forgotten "why?". Show me you can write the equations that model "$500 pays for 14 bags and 200 pounds overweight, or "kilometers are roughly five-eighths of a mile, so 55mph is equal to how many kph?".

Funny enough, I also have to review for the Verbal Test.

"The students' knowledge of grammar (is/are) laughable."
They can't identify the subject, so how are they supposed to know subject-verb agreement? "Clause" only has meaning at Christmas and adverbs are much the same as proverbs, apparently. "Past tense" is an easy concept as long as you know the meaning of "tense" in this context, and most students don't.

In fact, the only kids who understand English grammar are the ones who are in at least their second year of a foreign language.

Bah, Humbug.

I've got to get back to work.

You'd think SOMEONE would notice.

It is the education department, after all.

Sometimes taste should decide fashion.

§176. Respect for flag No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America;
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.

I know Americans are more aware than citizens of most other countries of improper handling or display of the flag, but I still feel this is inappropriate. Certainly, someone should have pointed out that Perry was going to be a huge part of the show, broadcast nationwide and the performer's ego might take a backseat just once to taste.

This isn't a call for a Congressional over-reaction by anti-desecration amendment to the Constitution but rather a request to the broadcast networks to remain aware that tolerance may be a US virtue but that flouting that tolerance shouldn't be quite so obnoxiously visible.

Oh well, I guess this makes it okay. Or not.

I'd be interested to know if gunny "spoke" to him before his commander or after, and if the "conversation" was pleasant.

Located the Problem - a missing piece

See, if you look hard enough, you'll eventually find the problem. (Man at lower right, for scale.)

It holds true in education, too.

Don't text and walk.

5 minutes of my life - gone. But it was funny.

She was texting and walking, then tripped into a fountain. Splash. (You can see her there in the still, just about to fall in the water.) She instantly gets up and climbs out of the fountain, nothing hurt but her pride. "I fell in the fountain. I was so drenched."

Mall security didn't rush out to help her. She called them the next day "I'm a mall employee. I don't want my employer to know."

The story would have ended there but the surveillance video, as all video eventually does if it's embarassing or funny somehow, wound up on YouTube. (There's a lesson there, kiddies.) "I admit. It was funny, but (whiny sniffle) nobody took my feelings into consideration. Nobody called. Nobody went to my aid. It could have been anyone's mother." .... yeah, but it wasn't and she got up so fast that I'm not sure how anyone COULD have gotten to her before she took off. Naturally, she feels wronged and the lawyer smells deep pockets. A lawsuit is born.


Lawyer wants to hold all responsible parties accountable, demand an apology, hold persons responsible for making the video public, blah, blah, blah. Aaaaaah, who gives a damn .... she walked into the fountain!

But there is a message here. Swimmer girl's lesson: "Do not text and walk. Especially to the younger generation. The fountain could have been empty. I could have been hit by a bus. I could have been hit by a car. (sniffle)"

Ain't that freakin' awesome? "I coulda been hit by a bus."  How? YOU WERE IN THE FREAKIN' MALL!

Let me think how this could have been avoided.

Duh. Comment.

Some clown at Dissertation Help really needs to improve his "robot commenter."

Dissertation help said... This is a sort of blog we can have loads of information i would like to appreciate the intelligence of this blog's owner

If this is their idea of intelligent comment and correct grammar, who in their right mind would ever go to that website for help with a dissertation?

Okay, I'll bite.  Let's go look.

Nope, they suck.  Let the students go there, spend their money, pretend they actually wrote a paper.  Thank you for your time and we'll see you in this class again next year.

The Single Funniest Lede in History

Right from the front page of the Rutland Herald (VT) ...

When David Belock's car went missing, he told state police he suspected the men who delivered cocaine to his house on a weekly basis may have been responsible.

But wait, it gets better. How? Well, a man was found driving it. (There was also a passenger from Brooklyn) The driver claimed he didn't know the man in the other seat nor where the car had come from, but

When he arrived at his home, he found the man from Brooklyn in his house and the car parked in his driveway. He decided to go to the store and noticed the keys were in the ignition so he decided to take the car to the Grand Union supermarket.

And, all this time, I thought the New York Post made this kind of stuff up.
(story by Brent Curtis, Rutland Herald)

Welfare Queens are Back

Facebook people have been commenting on this doctor's posting. He apparently sent a letter to The Clarion Ledger of Missippi (according to Snopes) explaining why healthcare is in trouble. This one seems to have been embellished, but only a tiny bit.

As well as being an arrogant bastard, he makes some invalid points and some amazingly judgmental comments about one of his patients. She is, according to him, making bad life decisions and that is why the country's going to hell.  Get rid of her and others like her and "all our health care difficulties will disappear."

Dear Mr. President:
During my shift in the Emergency Room last night, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient whose smile revealed an expensive shiny gold tooth, whose body was adorned with a wide assortment of elaborate and costly tattoos, who wore a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and who chatted on a new cellular telephone equipped with a popular R&B ringtone.

While glancing over her patient chart, I happened to notice that her payer status was listed as "Medicaid"! During my examination of her, the patient informed me that she smokes more than one pack of cigarettes every day, eats only at fast-food take-outs, and somehow still has money to buy pretzels and beer. And, you and our Congress expect me to pay for this woman's health care? I contend that our nation's "health care crisis" is not the result of a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. Rather, it is the result of a "crisis of culture" a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on luxuries and vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. It is a culture based in the irresponsible credo that "I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me". Once you fix this "culture crisis" that rewards irresponsibility and dependency, you'll be amazed at how quickly our nation's health care difficulties will disappear.
Respectfully,

ROGER STARNER JONES, MD

He "happened to notice her payer status was listed as Medicaid." Okay, a doctor "happened" to notice? Bull. Doctors are all about the money. Try going to one without it. Don't act all innocent, Roger.

The patient had lifestyle choices that disapproved of. His obvious feeling is that she should be thrown off Medicaid because she can afford to have a gold tooth, tattoos, sneakers and a cellphone. She also smokes and eats fast food. "What a welfare queen," you can almost hear him saying. "Damn nigger" also comes through clearly -- though he never quite said that word -- but he made sure to mention the gold tooth, R&B ringtone.

Apparently gold teeth are bad - news to me. I have a gold tooth as well. It was cheaper and better than composite and my dentist recommended it. Should I be denied health care if my financial situation takes a turn for the worse?

Tattoos are stupid, in my opinion, but that's only my take on it. I really couldn't care less if your 18th birthday present to yourself is a tramp stamp. It lowers my opinion of you, but that's all. Likewise the pair of sneakers - yes, a TI-84 costs as much as AirJordans, but AirJordans are better for people on their feet all day than a calculator. The shoes could also have been one of Marbury's $25 shoes; I doubt this guy would know the difference. He also points out a new cellphone - as opposed to what in this day and age? If it was a replacement for a landline, it's actually cheaper and far more convenient. Lot's of people are doing that, including a $1 ringtone.

Then, in a veritable tsunami of evilness, she smokes and eats fast food. Like THAT is a reason to drop her from health care through Medicaid - she's in the category that MOST needs a doctor to counsel her instead of judging her. You would also need to make smoking and fast food illegal across the board for all poor people. All Jewish deli sandwiches, Polish kielbases and "Italian" pizza joints, McDonalds and Burger King, and Subway, and the sidewalk pretzel carts.  How does this smarmy little twerp care to judge the relative worth of all that?  I'm not so sure that we should be dictating personal dietary choices - isn't Bloomberg enough of a cautionary tale?

Finally, I think of all of my lower-income FRL students.  Do they deserve to be left without health care because some doctor disapproves of the choices their mother made?  The life of a single mother is difficult enough these days.  Grow up, Doc.

Wait, how much?

I was struck by this when I first saw it.  Cool use of distortion effects and all that, laudable goal of getting people to slow down near schools, too. The post points out the "sweet spot" and mentions some of the unintended consequences. I get it.

But then, these two sentences jumped out at me:

The $15,000 decal was paid for by Preventable.ca ...
the decal was removed after one week. It was an experiment, a stunt,

Didn't they have a better use for $15,000 dollars that a stunt that lasted a week? And why $15,000? The local screen printer could have banged that out for a couple hundred at most. The anti-danger people can spend the money like water.

It's not an agrarian thing, okay?

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school — and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past. He continued by explaining that the American school calendar is antiquated and must be modified so that American students can compete at the highest levels internationally.

“Most people realize that our current day is based on the agrarian economy, and we don’t have too many kids working out in the fields nowadays,” Duncan said. “Schools in countries that are beating us are going to school 25-30 days more than us. If you practice basketball five times a week, you’re gonna be better than the people who practice three times a week.”

Most people realize, huh? Then most people would be wrong. And so is our benighted Education Secretary.

First, the summer months are hot. When the yearly schedules were decided upon, it was easier to heat buildings in the winter than to cool them in the summer because, you know, duh, there wasn't any air conditioning. Factories closed. Schools closed. Everything closed. People with the wherewithal escaped the cities and went to the Adirondacks or the Catskills.  People who didn't have money went to Coney Island.

"Why does everyone traditionally get two weeks in August?" and "Why are they called the Dog Days?"  - because it's hot, humid and no one wants to be in a schoolroom, factory, office, etc.


Second, if the whole thing was done for farmers benefit, wouldn't it make more sense to have the time off when the real heavy work was done on a farm? Like planting and harvest? You don't see vacations in October, do you? About the only farm work done around here in the summer is haying and watching the corn grow.

Finally, schools in countries that are "beating us" are different:

1. They give a damn about the PISA testing and their students give a damn. The American schools who participate ... not so much. When was the last time any of our elite schools took that test? Right, they don't.
2. The other countries are remarkably monocultural. Surprising, but the American melting pot isn't the easiest group to get motivated and educated.
3. The other countries have single nationwide set of common standards and fewer choices for books and curricula. Again, it matters because you can tailor you curriculum to your culture.
4.  Those longer days in Japan or England do not bother with sports.  We have chosen this aspect of our kids lives to focus a large part of our schools' attention on.  Again, it matters.  Other countries, if they have sports at all, have morning calisthenics but not school sports.  Sports teams are done as a town, not as a school.  Those who excel are not part of those in school - they're taken out.  

If you did these things with the American schools who took PISA or TIMSS, we'd blow the world away.  How do I know? I've taught these kids, both the top-of-the-line American students (the kind who get 5s on every AP test they take and win academic scholarships from Middlebury) and the top-of-the-line foreign students (from Japan, Korea, China, South America, Middle East Europe -- lots of them from all around the world.)  Look where the world want s to go college.  The US.  Who does well in US colleges. Americans and those foreigners who pick up the Calvinistic, work hard - be nice attitudes.

Oh well, Arne.  Sucks to be stupid.

Racist in Vermont

I really like this state. The environment, communities, the people. And then you get the whack-jobs crawling out of the woodwork and it just stuns you. Take this article in the Rutland Herald (south-west part of the state):

Police: Day care also home to coke dealer
A day care inside a home in a well-to-do neighborhood of Rutland City served as the base of operations for a prolific cocaine and marijuana distribution operation, according to police assigned to the state's Southern Vermont Drug Task Force. (continues for many paragraphs ...)

You think, "Oh brother, nasty crime. Glad they caught them. Good job police." and then the lunatic shows up, in the comments section:

Better get use to this because the blacks have taken over Rutland with drugs and have the low life junkies deal for them, only way to get rid of this is to run the blacks out along with their welfare ma ma's and the slum lords that rent to these poeple, sorry bleeding hearts but we treated them as a equal and this is what they do, time for the working class whites to get back our city.
-- Posted by None None

What the hell?

Yearbooks in the News.

Tom, at Stop Trying to Inspire Me picked up on the article in The Free-Lance Star that Massaponax High School's yearbook is being recalled for a "True Confessions" page, among other things.

Lots of truth, anonymously told. Students are dismayed when the book gets pulled.

First, where the hell was the advisor and the administration? The yearbook is all online these days, even down to the image editing. The advisor has passwords for each kid and has a higher level password for herself. Nothing gets published without her knowledge. She could have reviewed the material and locked the pages. She did not. The administration also has high-level passwords and could have reviewed the material as well, but did not.

"Rodkey said the yearbook is a student publication, overseen by an advisor. He said he did not want to cast the staff or advisor in a negative light."

Bull. Not making a decision is equivalent to approval. The joke that seems funny now is crude in a few years, stupid in a few more, and just plain mean-spirited after that. The mis-attributed "Quotable Quote" would be a lawsuit in any other publication. The previous yearbook was called "Scandalous" and many parents agreed. It does give one something to think about.

I've found that the biggest student misconception is "It's OUR yearbook and we can write anything we want."

Um, no, it's not. And you've got Facebook for that.

The yearbook may be ABOUT the students but it doesn't belong to them.

It has to be about the football kids and soccer kids, the goths and the jocks, the drama club and the drama queens, those who did nothing for four years and those on the Ivy track. It should have the loners and the clubbies, winners and losers (pictured that one time when they looked good). No one should ever have to hide a picture. Every senior should have a formal and at least one candid. Every picture and every comment must meet the "parent shows to grandparent and both smile" test.

It's the kids' yearbook,
and the parents',
and grandparents',
and the community's,
and the library's,
and the faculty's,
and the friends and fans of the sports teams,
and for the kids twenty years hence to show their children.

Everything in it must be something to make all those people look back fondly. Publishing things like "I have sex with people just to feel wanted." "I worry all the time my ex-boyfriend will use the naked picture I sent him to ruin my life."
"I had an abortion and my mom doesn't know." "I once did so much pot that I woke up high." "I'm pregnant with my best friend's boyfriend's kid."

What in hell were the adults thinking?

Dance of the Lemons begins anon.

I went visiting some old friends from another school the other day. These guys had been through a lot with bad principals in the last few years - a wimp then a loser, followed by touchy-feely throw around a ball of yarn dude, replaced by borderline psychotic paranoid woman. So they breathed a pretty big sigh of relief when the down-to-earth guy arrived.

Who has been seen recently with the science teacher's hot wife ... in a setting and with behavior that didn't suggest routine "networking". Yup, the married with kids Principal canoodling with the married-with-baby, science teacher's wife. Quiet so far, but sooner or later, scandal will out.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.