Monday, April 7, 2008

Education Blogs

Columnist Jay Mathews and classroom teacher Ken Bernstein share some of their Favorite Education Blogs of 2008 in the Washington Post today. Ken regularly posts on the well known Daily Kos blog.

Send Feedback to

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Dyslexia Study

A study released yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that "Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese." One expert not involved in the study noted that the study suggests that "we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention."

• Study: Dyslexia differs by language (alternate link)
• PNAS Abstract

Crescent Moon with Earthshine Tonight

I got to look at the crescent moon with earthshine last evening as described in a recent Science@NASA posting, Crescent Moon Alert. NASA's Dr. Tony Phillips describes the phenomena as "a pale impression of the full Moon inside the vivid crescent. Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was first to explain this phenomenon: it is Earthshine, the light of our own planet Earth illuminating the Moon's dark terrain. A crescent moon with Earthshine is widely regarded as one of the prettiest sights in the heavens."

The crescent moon with earthshine should be visible again this evening if you don't have a heavy cloud cover, as we are predicted to have :-( . And, I'd have a great shot of last night's crescent, but...between my faulty focus, a wobbly 35 year old tripod, and three dogs helping me focus, I blew the shot. But it's certainly worth taking a look just after sunset in the west.

New Greenhouse Emissions Maps

ScienceDaily today has an article about Project Vulcan and some new maps on greenhouse emissions that might be useful in the classroom. Revolutionary Carbon Dioxide Maps Zoom In On Greenhouse Gas Sources tells of the Purdue led project that has produced "a new, high- resolution, interactive map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels has found that the emissions aren't all where we thought." There's also an excellent YouTube video available that summarizes the findings.

Obama for President

Four weeks from today Indiana voters will go to the polls for the first presidential primary in my memory that actually may have some effect upon which candidate represents the Democratic party in a general election. After eight years of hearing the phrase "failing schools" hammered into the public's consciousness so thoroughly that many people truly believe the majority of our public schools are failing, after five years of a needless war initiated to fulfill the ego dreams of a lackluster president, and in the depths of a national recession, Indiana voters may actually shed their traditional conservative bent and vote for change.

Both my wife, Annie, and I have found that we believe Senator Barack Obama is the candidate that can effect the positive change so necessary in America today. I like the candidate's views on education, but even more, think he has the ability to bring the nation together and heal some of the divisiveness that has stymied progress for everyday folks.

Eight years ago I was aghast as George W. Bush injected the phrase "failing schools" into our culture. We then faced massive challenges in our nation's schools, but after eight years of his presidency, it appears things have only gotten worse. We now have his "signature legislation" that will make all schools "failing schools" by 2014 with its 100% formula and the lack of supporting funding. I always felt that the Bush administration had ulterior motives in their push for school legislation. It appeared to me (and still does), that his purpose was more in politically weakening the NEA and AFT and pushing for vouchers than in improving our public schools.

Teachers in America now take a daily browbeating in the news as more and more negative numbers and reports are published. I'm not for sticking our heads in the sand on the problems of education, but we're not going to get where we want to go with W's punitive system for schools. And, it's going to take some real money and real vision to improve our schools.

Having started my teaching career in what the Indianapolis News once described as "the golden ghetto," I felt the hope of students and parents generated by leaders such as Jessie Jackson and Robert and John Kennedy. We were making progress at that time, but we lost it somewhere along the line. I think we may have lost it when we lost that 60's spirit of hope and the idealism of that time. Maybe we all just got too greedy and self-absorbed.

I believe Barack Obama can restore that hope and idealism to this troubled nation.

On a Lighter Note

Wow! That was pretty heavy!

On a lighter note, I continue to scan slides and negatives from "my dinosaur age" with my new HP ScanJet G3010. The HP Scan software provided is incredibly slow at the resolutions I want, but trials of other scanning software haven't been satisfactory either. So, I'm having to just be patient as I stroll down memory lane via some old pictures I hadn't looked at in years.

Long after we went out of the hog business on our farm, we raised a pig to slaughter for a family barbecue. Here, my oldest son, Scott, and I work skinning the pig in the barn.	Of course, skinning a pig takes some very sharp knives. Scott sliced his thumb, but hung in there on the pig.	Neighbors are incredibly important on small farms. Labor, equipment, and expertise are often shared. Our neighbors had a Perdue turkey farm. Scott and I took care of the turkeys when our neighbors went on vacation. We used their manure spreader and turkey droppings to fertilize our fields.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Paying for Public School

Steve Lopez, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, recently attended a parent meeting at his daughter's elementary school devoted to making up the funding shortfalls created by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's gutting of public education in the new California budget. In Ponying up for a public education, Lopez writes:

For several reasons, I find this all rather extraordinary. I feel more than a little lucky to live in a good neighborhood with a great public school that parents are passionate about. At the same time, I can't help but think about the impact of budget cuts at schools where there's not a chance of parents raising anywhere near $180,000...

And the cuts were initiated, as you know, by a man who has tried to pass himself off as the education governor -- a man who doesn't have to worry about the impact of budget cuts on his own children. They go to private school.

Elsewhere in California, the Orange County Register reports in Saddleback education rally draws 4,000 that "More than 4,000 teachers, parents and students packed the stands of Mission Viejo High School's outdoor stadium Tuesday night to rally against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed $4 billion cut to K-12 public education."

New York Test Score/Tenure Proposal Fails

State lawmakers in New York "have decided to bar student test scores from being considered when teacher tenure determinations are made." Legislators Balk at Tying Teacher Tenure to Student Tests tells of the failure of a proposed measure backed by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer "to hold teachers accountable by using student performance data." Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers, commented, "Student assessments are designed to assess students, not teachers.”

Teacher Retention

Celine Coggins has a good editorial in Education Week, The Post-Boomer Teacher Crunch, about teacher retention. She says in part:

Students suffer because we have low expectations for retaining talented teachers. It is time to find a way for teaching to live up to its potential as a learning profession that challenges and rewards practitioners. If we do not, it is certain that our best teachers will find the growth they seek outside the classroom.

I rarely link to content in Education Week, as much of it requires a paid subscription to the weekly. The editorial above requires free registration, but even that is somewhat intrusive, as most major news publications have given up on their registration, subscription, and premium plans.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Astronomy Picture of the Day and More

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is one I just couldn't pass up posting to add a little color to this page. Stickney Crater is a great shot of a giant crater on the martian moon Phobos. As noted in the APOD text, "Over 9 kilometers across, Stickney is nearly half the diameter of Phobos itself, so large that the impact that blasted out the crater likely came close to shattering the tiny moon." Besides adding some much needed color to Educators' News, various "pictures of the day" can serve as great classroom illustrations, class web page widgets, and discussion starters.

While talking NASA, a press release just came in saying that "NASA's Science Mission Directorate has launched a new Web site that provides enhanced and engaging information about NASA's vast scope of scientific endeavors and achievements."

At first glance, the site certainly looks interesting, although I sometimes get a bit weary sorting out all of the various NASA sites online. This one may, however, try to tie together all the excellent information NASA provides to we educators and the public at large.

The Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) site was updated yesterday to include the Nanotechnology - The Power of Small site. It is a companion website for the PBS series that includes video clips of experts as they discuss "the promise, the consequences, and potential risks of nanotechnology enhanced medicine, solar cells, and security systems."

Take Another Look at that Science Textbook

The Dot Earth blog in the New York Times has an interesting posting in A Textbook Case of Downplaying Global Warming? A high school student challenged lines such as "Science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all," in a popular college and advanced-placement high school textbook written by two prominent conservatives. Grist also has a good piece on the story. "Publisher Houghton Mifflin says it will review the text and points out that it has, um, improved things in the latest version, in which the above sentence was changed to, 'Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is.'"

Distance Ed

eSchool News has a couple of interesting articles this week about distance learning. Schools mull needs of adult distance learners and Hybrid courses show promise both address how schools are contemplating and in some cases already using the internet to augment or supplant regular classes. "Colleges and universities are examining the needs of adult distance learners as they develop online courses that meet the needs of not only 18-to-22-year-olds, but also those students who might have full-time jobs and family responsibilities." Hybrid classes capitalize "on the benefits that both face-to-face and online learning can provide—and now, there is some evidence to suggest that hybrid courses can help students learn more effectively." I just come off a job stint that included designing and teaching a distance education course for Indiana teachers on using the Moodle course management system. I have to agree that there are some real possibilities for enhancing instruction by adding online instruction. In the course I taught, however, there were some times when I really wished we had a face-to-face meeting or two where I could interact directly and personally with the learners.

Your Daily Kick in the Teeth

I got off on a bit of a rant earlier this week with the daily browbeating teachers take in the news, so I'll just post the following two pieces:

• High school seniors' financial know-how goes from bad to worse (alternate link)
• Report tells how to improve college educations

Legos and Autism

A good feature article by Marie McCullough in the Philadelphia Inquirer slipped by me last month, but fortunately, a CEC Smartbrief carried a link to the reposting on Ohio.com, Legos can be building block to teach children with autism. McCullough tells how Daniel Legoff's ''Dr. Dan's Lego-based Social Development Therapy'' helps teach social skills to children with autism.

Awareness Months

I got a late start updating Educators' News today, as I'd hustled outside to topdress and hoe in some peat moss into a section of the garden before it rained (again). After feeding the indoor cats and our parrot and starting a load of laundry, I caught a quick shower and shave and glanced at the morning paper. At the bottom of section D in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star was the banner, "Honor the little piggies in April during Foot Awareness Month." Today was April 10, and I'd already missed nine whole days of being aware of my feet!

I think maybe the Legos and Autism posting above and Autism Awareness Month may have gotten me started, but somehow it all morphed into an Awareness Overload.

Friday, April 11, 2008 - TGIF

Clinton and Obama on Education

In yesterday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Eleanor Chute talks about the many similarities and few differences of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's proposals on education. Both Clinton and Obama attack No Child Left Behind Act is an accurate title, but the column really is an excellent summary of the candidates' views.

Autism Diagnosis Study

Science Daily has and article about the the rise in the number of students diagnosed with autism being somewhat related to changes in the way the disorder is now diagnosed. Rise In Autism Is Related To Changes In Diagnosis, New Study Suggests tells that many students now diagnosed as being autistic might have previously been undiagnosed or diagnosed as having developmental language disorders.

Birmingham Approves 1:1 Laptop Pilot

The Birmingham schools will pilot a program using 1,000 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computers, according to an article in eSchool News. Birmingham approves low-cost laptop project tells that the plan calls for the eventual deployment of 15,000 of the laptops to all Birmingham students.

The Raw Material Makes a Big Difference

Teacher Kim McClung talks about how the "lean manufacturing" concept has been erroneously applied to education in Lean Education. She writes with passion in Teacher Magazine about the vast differences among her students in terms of homes, language, financial status, and more.

Forgetting More?

While probably totally unrelated to education news, New York Times columnist David Brooks has really funny story today in The Great Forgetting. For those of us aging gracefully or otherwise, realizing your memory isn't as sharp as it once was is a blow to the ego. Brooks eases that feeling a bit with funny lines such as, "It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most."

Ads shown on this site do not represent an endorsement or warranty of any kind of products or companies shown. Ads shown on archive pages may not represent the ads displayed in the original posting on Educators' News.