Because we should - Happy Halloween

Bobby "Boris" Pickett - Monster Mash (rare color clip)

Why Students aren't running things.

Micheal Wesch is the professor whose students made what many consider a seminal video on education. I include it here because I figure that it's a pretty good example of why the adults in the educational system shouldn't really listen to the opinions of students.

When you do, you run the risk of justifying that senioritis is legitimate, that students really are different today, that technology is necessary, that teachers are solely responsible when their students tune out, that cheating is a natural response to teacher pressure, that students can't memorize but should learn information retrieval instead, that blah, blah, blah ....

Wesch - In spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. The result was the disheartening portrayal of disengagement you see below. The video was viewed over one million times in its first month and was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere for several weeks, eliciting thousands of comments. With rare exception, educators around the world expressed the sad sense of profound identification with the scene, sparking a wide-ranging debate about the roles and responsibilities of teachers, students, and technology in the classroom.

Students are forever whining about their work.

Why do we have to learn this stuff?
Because you can. Because you’re here and you signed up for it.

When am I ever going to need this?
I don’t know. What I’m teaching you isn’t directly applicable, but it does train your mind in a way of thinking that you haven’t been able to use before.

Why do I have to take this class?
Beats me, kiddo. You’re the one paying money for this. If this is your way of wasting Daddy’s money, then have at it. If it is pointless, then wander over to Admin and drop out. Why spend months in a class you can’t learn in, that you disparage constantly and that you don’t like? How dumb are you to put yourself through months of something you consider a boring hell?

These students all think they’re clever because they can make a YouTube video disparaging education. They think that because they can stick an iPod bud in their ear and watch a movie on the laptop while browsing Facebook and texting the kid next to them that they’ve made a statement.

It’s pretty amazing if you think about how shallow and silly they really are.

Doesn’t bother me but I want to challenge them all - “If it’s so pointless, wean yourselves from the parental feeding tube and fend for yourselves. Drop out, get a job, change the world. Put that infinite information retrieval ability to the test. Show the world what special people you are. You’re the digital natives, the 21st century students. Show us your magnificence.”

Or at least shut up. I'd be grateful.

Sometimes the story seems fake.

I ran across this "case study" example for how the increase in minimum wage can negatively impact a business. These numbers just don't seem to add up. See what you think.

Here’s a personal case study in how that works to squeeze workers out of the minimum wage job market:

My parents own an ice cream shop, and rely heavily in its operation on eight 16-20 year olds working part-time schedules of 16-24 hours a week, along with one full-time manager who is assisted by my parents in their free time. Over the course of a 7 day work week, they typically employ the part-time workers for a total of about 340 hours a week.

Raising the minimum wage by .70 increased their straight wage expense by $240 a week, or about $1000 a month. But it had collateral consequences as well, as their worker’s comp. and unemployment insurance costs rose in relation to their payroll, as did their payroll tax contributions. The combination of wage increase and the various increases that spin off that wage increase was about $1500 a month. This is against a total wage expense for the part-timers of about $8000 a month.

Now, the ice cream parlor business is somewhat inelastic from a price stand point — people won’t continue to pay higher and higher prices for an ice cream cone when the alternative is simply to do without. So, that increase in operating expense could not, in total, be passed on to the customers. Instead, my parents worked a few more hours themselves and trimmed back on the hours they had the part-timers working. When one of the part-timers quit, they didn’t hire a replacement for her.

Now, the same thing is going to happen next month — another increase of .70 per hour, totaling about $1500 a month in additional operating expenses is going to kick in. This will come on top of significant increases over the past year in product costs — multiply the increased cost of milk you are paying at the supermarket several times over and you get a feel for the increased cost of buying ice cream on a large scale for a business establishment.

Politics and the American Teenager.

Central Florida 7th grader called racist for wearing Palin t-shirt.


I've got to give her credit for having the guts to wear that shirt. I know how students can behave. It isn't pretty sometimes.

My own students were needling another for supporting Palin/McCain. They took the tack that her religious beliefs were non-mainstream. That's not appropriate in an argument and I said so, but I have to wonder what drives my students to automatically jump on the obamabandwagon. After I told them that attacking a candidate based solely on a vague notion of her religion is wrong - argue her positions on policy, track record, and governing style instead - none of them seemed to have any idea of what policies Palin stood for that they disagreed with.

Failure is an option

What is wrong with Education in America is embodied in this one sentence:

For the first time in seven years, Seattle public high-school students who do poorly can receive a failing grade on their report cards.

More Testing Blahs.

As some of you know, I'm not a great fan of the NLCB testing. I should be more clear here - I don't mind the tests themselves - they're fine tests.

What I dislike is the uses that the results are put to and the interpretations and decision based on the results.

To wit, we gave the writing test today and one of the better students academically was talking about her essay. The topic was something by Gandhi - be mellow and don't stress out - and she wrote a polemic on the testing of students and the idiocy of the state's analysis of results. Completely off topic, no?

So, a fairly decent essay that is completely off-topic will be considered a 0. Our principal will discuss the results later in the year and say things like "We should put in our action plans to align our curriculum better to the GLEs / state standards / Frameworks. We must motivate our students to do better."

Welllll. No.

Our curriculum might need adjusting, but this is not a good reason why. These kids don't care about the test and their results will be meaningless.

Testing, testing ...

So the principal doesn't apparently trust the faculty to proctor the state NCLB testing. So we're dutifully teaching our classes and Principal PJs takes them kids off to be tested. We find out later that he packed them too many to a table unnecessarily (there was plenty of room but the kids crowded together - no surprise), left the room unattended while he chatted on a cell phone and wandered to a bathroom, and the students had a food fight with the motivational bagels and juice!

So today an English teacher was designated at the last minute to help him stand watch. (Tomorrow, it's a math teacher.) Apparently today was much calmer.

Any bets on how long this goes until TSHTF**? Until someone reports to the Supt? Oops, too late. Superintendent already knows. State will be notified. It's flying.



** "The solidified fecal material makes contact with the gaseous propulsion device."

3 days for un-tucked shirt?

From KPHO in Phoenix, AZ comes this heartwarming tale of no-nonsense school administrators living up to their stereotypes:

A 12-year-old girl who didn't tuck in her shirt was suspended from an Albuquerque middle school, KOAT-TV reported. Judy Benavidez said her daughter, Natalia, is a good student and not a troublemaker. But Natalia is on a three-day suspension from Harrison Middle School because her shirt was untucked.

A school district spokesman said a special announcement was made this year that students could be suspended for dress code violations.

Hey, they made an announcement. They warned the kids. What did the kids expect? This is willful disrespect for the rules.

Of course, a 3-day suspension is a stupid administrative over-reaction, but I'm being redundant.

English Immersion Example

IN a New York Times "Education Watch" article:

The Bilingual Debate: English Immersion
By Lance T. Izumi

Take, for example, Sixth Street Prep, a charter elementary school in eastern Los Angeles County. The school’s students are overwhelmingly Hispanic and low income. More than a third of the students, many of whom are recent arrivals, are learning English. Yet, among fourth graders, an astounding 100 percent of the students tested at the proficient level on the 2008 state math exam. A nearly equally amazing 93 percent of fourth graders tested proficient on the state English-language-arts exam. This incredible success was achieved using a different ingredient than the one favored by Mr. Obama.

Sixth Street emphasizes review and practice, constant assessment of skills and a no-excuses attitude. Furthermore, and here’s where Mr. Obama should take note, according to Linda Mikels, Sixth Street’s principal, the school’s instructional approach for English learners is “full immersion.” English immersion emphasizes the near-exclusive use of English in content instruction. Ms. Mikels, who opposes bilingual education, told me, “we’ve had tremendous success with having a student who is brand new from Mexico and you would walk into a classroom 12 months later and you wouldn’t be able to pick out which one he was.” “It’s working,” she observed, “it’s working for us.”

I wonder why that seems to be the exception rather than the rule? I can't see bi-lingual education being as effective - it certainly never was in my experience.

Let's define effective while we're at it. The students should walk in knowing only their own language and walk out speaking fluent, if accented, English. To put it another way, in two years or less an immigrant student should be able to function in an exclusively English setting whether it be a community college or trade school or sales position at a car dealership in Iowa.

How do you pack twelve years of English education into two? By doing it 6x as often per day, i.e., immersion.

Seems simple to me.

Sick.

BLEAH.

Feel like dirt on a taco. I figured that I'd made it through the first month with only my own allergies to complain about. Cruising along, wasn't I? and then -- WHAM -- hits me like a truck. Slept for 24 hours, nearly straight through. Still not good, coughing and just plain grouchy.

As for that "feel like dirt on a taco" thing? I just made it up. I thought it was clever until I realized that I'm somewhat delirious and that I made no sense.

Fits, somehow.

Drinking age discussion

I found this in the local paper and thought I'd bring up the topic.

Prohibition, then and now
September 25, 2008
By John M. McCardell Jr.

As a former college president who is all too familiar with the damage alcohol can inflict on the health and safety of young adults, I was intrigued to run across the observations of noted psychologist A.A. Brill as reported in The New York Times. Dr. Brill noted "that more people are drinking who never used to drink, that moderate drinkers have become heavy ones, that former drinkers of beer and light wine are drinking whiskey, brandy, gin, raw alcohol and other concentrated spirits."

That Dr. Brill's thoughts were reported by the Times in 1926, and referred to the effects of Prohibition on otherwise sober citizens does nothing to lessen my impression that they constitute an apt summary of the kinds of adverse effects produced by the modern-day equivalent of Prohibition - the federal mandate that establishes the legal drinking age at 21.

On Sept. 26, it will have been 75 years since the citizens of Vermont voted overwhelmingly to repeal the 18th Amendment, which had supplied the constitutional authority for Prohibition - a bold and misguided experiment intended to end the consumption of alcohol in this country.

Vermont's shared border with Canada made the state popular with smugglers, who transported illegal alcohol in vehicles with secret storage compartments, using smoke screens to conceal their activities. On Lake Champlain, liquor-laden submarine barges were towed just below the water's surface from the Canadian border headed for secret destinations in Vermont and New York. A Washington Post story reported on a Vermont senator, who was accidentally shot by Prohibition agents in 1924 and subsequently suffered dizzy spells as a result of his wounds.

After more than a decade, even Prohibition's initial supporters had had enough. In 1933, lopsided votes in favor of repeal in state after state ultimately sounded Prohibition's death knell.

But 51 years later a self-appointed moral majority led by Mothers Against Drunk Driving persuaded Congress to enact the National Legal Drinking Age Act of 1984. Once again, the federal government effectively usurped the power of the states to regulate alcohol, stipulating that any state with a legal drinking age lower than 21 risked the loss of 10 percent of its federal highway funds.

And how has this modern reprise of Prohibition worked out? Badly.

In the same way that the speakeasies of the 1920s and '30s functioned as havens where alcohol could be consumed out of the sight of enforcement officials, today's young adults frequent fraternity house basements and other hideaways where they engage in furtive binge drinking. There, suspended above a keg, tap in mouth, feet in the air, young people chug beer to the chants and cheers of fellow partygoers, and engage in games of Beer Pong, Kings, Flip Cup, and Beirut, whose foremost purpose is to get contestants drunk as quickly as possible. Private homes and college dorm rooms serve as venues for "pre-gaming," in which young people under the legal drinking age consume large amounts of alcohol in a short period of time in order to become and remain sufficiently intoxicated to spend a night moving from party to party.

It is no surprise that substantial numbers of these young adults become victims of alcohol poisoning, serious bodily injury, sexual abuse and worse. As with Prohibition, legal age 21 has had the predictable effect of worsening the problem it was intended to solve. Trying to eliminate an ingrained social behavior by legislative fiat simply does not work, as we should have learned from Prohibition. Such ill-advised policies simply drive the consumption of alcohol from public view, significantly increasing the hazards that irresponsible drinking imposes on the health and safety of us all.

The repeal of Prohibition and the return of jurisdiction for the regulation of alcohol consumption to the states drastically reduced the incentive to participate in the dangerous behaviors that accompanied the furtive consumption of alcohol spawned by speakeasies. We could profit by following this path.

Young adults should be treated as such, even when it comes to alcohol. If we devise ways to educate them about alcohol consumption in a broad way that goes beyond temperance lectures and scary messages about brain damage, we can certify that they have reached a level of understanding that qualifies them to exercise adult judgment.

We should reconsider the bad law and poor social policy that allow these problems to fester in the shadows. We do ourselves no favors by relegating drinking by any age group to the dark corners of society where the effects of risky behaviors remain unobserved and unaddressed until it is too late to do much about them.

Science scores are back - we're #1

So the scores are back in for the NCLB science testing - we're in the top three in the state for one grade and #1 in another.

So what? Just as low scores are meaningless in the long run, so are these high scores. The students are the difference, not the teaching. Last year, these same teachers were "below average" because the students didn't do well and probably next year we'll be back down in the pack again. Does this mean that their skills as teachers have somehow improved for this cohort and then will have diminished next year? Pretty silly if you think about it that way, isn't it?

When are the bean counters going to figure out that the manufacturing model isn't an appropriate analogy for education. You have a group of students here. You can't reject any with flaws as you can with raw materials for the assembly line. You can attempt to standardize the process but without consistency in the construction material, you get variations in the final product. Those variations can neither be eliminated nor minimized.

You can improve the process but it'll only be incremental. The students are the key and they are not consistent. Sometimes you get lucky and the kids get it and sometimes you don't get lucky and the state puts you on the checklist.

MEAH.

I celebrate because they're my friends, not because they're superior to the rest of the state. When the 11th grade scores come back, let's hope the coins comes up heads again.

A Great Debate Tonight

Regardless of the side you're on, I think you'll have to agree that this evening's debate is one of the best in my memory. Kudos to those who set it up, kudos to the candidates for agreeing to the format, and kudos to Lehrer for bringing back the classic debate.

Both candidates are looking presidential and both sound very good. Classroom teachers should replay this one many times.