From MUSE: National Day of Action for Public Education

This post was also published on MUSE '13

From MUSE: Occupy the Capitol for Public Education: March 5!

This post was also published on MUSE '13

From MUSE: Fictional Truth

Facts are Stupid, Slate

In which a writer discusses two writers and a fact checker and their varying ideas about changing the facts to get at the truth.

I may use this article with my 11th Graders as a bridge between The Things They Carried(especially our discussion of "How to Tell a True War Story") and an autobiographical writing project with 826 Valencia.

Should a writer who claims to be writing nonfiction always stick to the facts and just the facts, ma'am? Or can liberties be taken?  


This post was also published on MUSE '13

From MUSE: The Presidency

Wikipedia Sortable List of Presidential Rankings And this, from Lawyers, Guns, and Money This is an Easy One [ 150 ] February 18, 2012 | Scott Lemieux Ta-Nehisi Coates points us to this President’s Day question, and also gives us the right answer. I’ve discussed this before, but Grant is extremely underrated. Teaching the Presidency this semester, I spent some time with my students going over this handy sortable list of presidential rankings by historians. Grant’s reputation is improving. But it’s hard to get a better example of the pernicious influence of the Dunning School than the fact that in the first Schlesinger poll in 1948, Grant ranked 28th out of 29 — below Buchanan, below Pierce — with Andrew Goddamned Johnson, the man who tried to govern as a Confederate after the Civil War despite not being elected, ranking 19th. …Good point in comments about LBJ; I suppose it depends on the audience, but my sense (generally confirmed by the polls) is that LBJ is getting more of his due from historians. Incidentally, in the informal poll of my students, LBJ was only mentioned a couple times out of 15. JFK ranked 4th, behind Lincoln, FDR, and Washington. This post was also published on MUSE '13

Prior Knowledge and Field Trips

I emailed this article but wanted a permanent place for it: The importance of prior knowledge to reading comprehension.  I also like the short statement of how the teacher uses field trips and field trip follow ups.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/nyregion/for-poorer-students-an-attempt-to-let-new-experiences-guide-learning.html


This post was also published on MUSE '13

You guys! T-Rex Teaches Poetry

You should really go to the real page so you can see the mouseover text and all (click on the comic images).  But I wanted them here too. So you can see them both together.  You're welcome.

Oh wait! I just learned to do mouseover text in html, because I am the goddess of the internets (or at least the goddess of those who are married to former software engineers and have taught themselves a little bit of html because its really not that hard, but whatever). 

Oh, hah.  They're already attached to the images.  Well, that was easy goddessing.

Oh, but they have to be small, so go to the real site anyway.  I mean, you should always go there, and now you have another reason.

  


True, I could have edited out the stream of consciousness as my understanding changed, but where is the fun in that?

English Teacher SLAMS Student in Rap Battle

From MUSE: Woo Paolo!

"Teacher preparation should never be reduced to a form of training.  Rather, teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history. . . . I am speaking of a universal human ethic, an ethic that is not afraid to condemn . . . the exploitation of labor and the manipulation that makes a rumor into truth and truth into a mere rumor.  To condemn the fabrication of illusions, in which the unprepared become hopelessly trapped and the weak and defenseless are destroyed.  To condemn making promises when one has no intention of keeping one's word, which causes lying to become an almost necessary way of life.  To condemn the calumny of character assassination simply for the joy of it and the fragmentation of the utopia of human solidarity.  The ethic of which I speak is that which feels itself betrayed and neglected by the hypocritical perversion of an elitist purity, an ethic affronted by racial, sexual, and class discrimination.  For the sake of this ethic, which is inseparable from educative practice, we should struggle, whether our work is with children, youth, or adults."  Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (pp. 23-24) This post was also published on MUSE '13

More about the Finnish model

From The New Republic:

While nations around the world introduced heavy standardized testing regimes in the 1990s, the Finnish National Board of Education concluded that such tests would consume too much instructional time, cost too much to construct, proctor, and grade, and generate undue stress. The Finnish answer to standardized tests has been to give exams to small but statistically significant samples of students and to trust teachers—so much so that the National Board of Education closed its inspectorate in 1991. Teachers in Finland design their own courses, using a national curriculum as a guide, not a blueprint, and spend about 80 percent as much time leading classes as their U.S. counterparts do, so that they have sufficient opportunity to plan lessons and collaborate with colleagues. The only point at which all Finnish students take standardized exams is as high school seniors if they wish to go to university.

...

The reflexive critique of comparing the Finnish and U.S. educational systems is to say that Finland’s PISA results are consequences of the country being a much smaller, more homogeneous nation (5.3 million people, only 4 percent of whom are foreign-born). How could it possibly offer lessons to a country the size of the United States? The answer is next door. Norway is also small (4.8 million people) and nearly as homogeneous (10 percent foreign-born), but it is more akin to the United States than to Finland in its approach to education: Teachers don’t need master’s degrees; high school teachers with 15 years of experience earn only 70 percent of what fellow university graduates make; and in 2004,* authorities implemented a national system of standardized testing. The need for talent in the classroom is now so great that the Norwegian government is spending $3.3 million on an ad campaign to attract people to teaching and, last year, launched its own version of Teach for America in collaboration with Statoil—called Teach First Norway—to recruit teachers of math and science.

Moreover, much as in the United States, classes in Norway are typically too large and equipment too scarce to run science labs. A science teacher at a middle school in Oslo told me that labs are unfortunately the exception, not the rule, and that she couldn’t recall doing any labs as a student a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, much as in 2000, 2003, and 2006, Norway in 2009 posted mediocre PISA scores, indicating that it is not necessarily size and homogeneity but, rather, policy choices that lead to a country’s educational success.

The Finns have made clear that, in any country, no matter its size or composition, there is much wisdom to minimizing testing and instead investing in broader curricula, smaller classes, and better training, pay, and treatment of teachers. The United States should take heed.

Focusing on Equity in Education

This is a really fantastic article. 

It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.