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What To Do With "Failing" Schools Nanette Asimov has another good article this week in the San Francisco Chronicle, Schools fail to meet No Child Left Behind goals. In it, Asimov tells of the recently released report from The Center for Education Policy, A Call to Restructure Restructuring: Lessons from the No Child Left Behind Act in Five States. The article and report relate the findings from five states studied on "whether school-restructuring programs required by the federal No Child Left Behind education act are actually working." And not surprisingly, the report found that the required school-restructuring for "failing schools" didn't help in most cases. Jack O'Connell, California's elected schools chief is quoted as saying, "You have to question your entire accountability program when you're setting all your schools up for failure." Sites to Remember PBS Teachers has added a free members area that includes forums and the ability to store links to resources. The CEC Blog is also up and running again this year for teachers of students with special needs. And the NASA Image of the Day below of a "wispy star-forming region called W5" is breathtaking. It's an infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
More on Eighth Grade Algebra Jay Mathews has some pertinent comments in his Recalculating The 8th-Grade Algebra Rush in The Washington Post.
It's nice to hear a voice of reason returning to the eighth-grade algebra for all debate. Send Feedback to
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Sleepy in the Classroom An article in Teacher Magazine by Anthony Rebora, Getting Sleepy, led me to study conducted at Ball State University about teachers not getting enough sleep. The study reports that "nearly a fourth of teachers say their teaching skills are significantly diminished and half admit to missing work or making errors due to a serious lack of sleep." The study involved just 109 teachers in one school corporation, but...zzzzz. Dyscalculia ScienceDaily reports in Unraveling 'Math Dyslexia' that researchers using brain imaging have found "that children with developmental dyscalculia show atypical activation patterns in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex." While not currently an answer to math instructional difficulties, the research "holds tremendous promise for people who, in the past, had simply accepted that they are 'not good at math.' Understanding the causes and brain correlates of dyscalculia may help to design remediation tools to improve the lives of children and adults with the syndrome." Stellarium Updated I wrote on Educators' News last July about using the excellent, open source application, Stellarium, to time my viewing of the alignment of Mars, Saturn, Regulus, and the Moon (pictured below). I wrote again in August about using it to help identify items in the night sky for classroom use (What's that bright star in the sky?).
I noticed today that Stellarium had been updated this week. When I tried the new version, it crashed on launch. I finally did find a download link to a corrected version for Macintosh. The application has some major changes in the labeling and configuration tools. Once I find where everything was moved, I think it will be an improvement!
Above is the sky for around midnight tonight from Stellarium. While poking around the education section of MacUpdate, I noticed a listing for iReadFast. It's a free, Mac-only application that displays text pasted into it one word at a time at user selected speeds. It seems as if it should have a positive educational application, although I wonder if seeing phrases, lines, or even multiple lines simultaneously isn't more of what speedreading is all about. It appears that it might be useful as a type of tachistiscope.
When I start having to pick up enough apples to fill a five gallon bucket each day, I know it's probably time to make applesauce. I've been writing today's posting in bits and pieces as I run downstairs to wash more apples for the pot, take warm apples out of the pot and into the Squeezo Strainer The squeezo will take whole apples, although I remove the blossom end and split each apple before throwing them into the pot of apple juice to warm and soften. Splitting them is necessary for me, as these are all groundfall apples. Almost all of them have a small bruise from where they hit the ground that needs to be cut out. Recipes for applesauce are really unnecessary if all you want is just straight applesauce. Both the Squeezo cookbook and the Ball Blue Book Since apples are an acid fruit, you can safely water bath can them for 20 minutes. This batch from ten gallons of apples won't last long enough to make it worth getting the water bath canner out and cleaning it. (I think I used it last to sterilize some potting soil!) Our crew of kids (grown) and grandkids will make quick work of it. One note I might add that I noticed in one of the cookbooks is that using several varieties of apples improves the taste of the sauce. Since our Granny Smith tree died last year, I'm making our applesauce this year just from apples from our Stayman Winesap tree. I have already noticed that the applesauce, while good, isn't as good as it has been in past years when we've had more than one apple variety to sauce.
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for "grinding" into applesauce.
have excellent directions. You just wash your apples, warm them (core them if you don't have a Squeezo), put them through a strainer, and add sugar to taste.
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©2008 Steven L. Wood