Monday, February 8, 2010

Shuttle Launch

The space shuttle Endeavour set off early this morning on mission STS-130 to the International Space Station. The launch had been delayed one day due to heavy cloud cover over the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From the NASA Image of the Day page:

The primary payload for the STS-130 mission to the International Space Station is the Tranquility node, a pressurized module that will provide additional room for crew members and many of the station's life support and environmental control systems. Attached to one end of Tranquility is a cupola, a unique work area with six windows on its sides and one on top. The cupola resembles a circular bay window and will provide a vastly improved view of the station's exterior. The multi-directional view will allow the crew to monitor spacewalks and docking operations, as well as provide a spectacular view of Earth and other celestial objects.

• NASA press release: Launch of NASA's Shuttle Endeavour Sparks Early Monday Sunrise
• NASA Image of the Day: Endeavour Lifts Off
• Space Shuttle Home Page
• STS-130 Educator Resources
• STS-130 Image Gallery
  

Snow Days and More Snow Days

With the mid-Atlantic still digging out from last week's snowstorm, the midwest is bracing for another wintry blast tonight and tomorrow. The Washington Post's Michael Birnbaum takes a look at some of the effects of school closings in Come summer, D.C. area students may pay the price for snow days. He writes:

The snow days have a cascade of repercussions. Students who qualify for free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria can't get those meals if they're not at school. Parents have to scramble for sitters. Summer plans might have to be modified. And in a high-stakes testing culture where every hour of preparation for state assessments can have deep consequences, days tacked onto the end of the school year don't pack the same payoff.

Reader Ed Harris sent along the photos at right and was kind enough to allow me to use them to illustrate the volume of snow along the Atlantic seaboard. Ed wrote:

Snow like this is rare in the Washington, D.C. area. One shot is my car, and the other is a little playhouse that we use as a shed. The first snow was very heavy (great for snowballs). Then it turned over to the lighter stuff.

The last time we received as much snow was back in January, 1996. At that time, schools were closed for a week. Then we had two hour delays the week after. All the snow was washed away when another nor 'easter rolled through. The temperatures were warm so it came as rain. (And then we had a problem with flooding along the Potomac River, and they had worries up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Susquehanna River.)

Volunteers Making a Difference

Robert King's IPS' School 14 is a beacon of hope is a good story about a school with tough "demographics - homeless kids, high-poverty homes, fractured families always in transit" making a difference in kids' lives. He writes that School 14 "is amazingly adept at tapping the city's wealth of resources for the sake of its children" and proceeds to give a number of examples of the difference a motivated volunteer corp can make. His story is a follow-up to the Indianapolis Star's volunteer and mentoring initiative described here last Monday.

Junk Food, Field Trips, and Farms

Gardiner Harris's A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools tells of a drive by the Obama Administration "to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years." The AP's Lisa Rathke has a related story in Farm to School program changes kids' views on food. She tells of third and fourth graders at Sharon Elementary (VT) visiting nearby farms and growing vegetables in raised beds at their school. Sharon Elementary is "part of the National Farm to School Network, aimed at getting healthier meals into school cafeterias, teaching kids about agriculture and nutrition and supporting local farmers."

In this time of high-stakes testing, it's good to see that some schools are still getting out on relevant field trips. My view is obviously influenced, as our two oldest children were raised on a farm and our last four in the country. And of course, we're avid gardeners still, even after our farming years.

Odds 'n' Ends

Sam Dillon writes in With Federal Stimulus Money Gone, Many Schools Face Budget Gaps in the New York Times that "with the federal money running out, many of the nation’s schools are approaching what officials are calling a 'funding cliff.'" Michele McNeil covers some of the same ground and more in Dueling Objectives Mark Stimulus at Halfway Point for Education Week.

Sandy Banks looks at When middle school is too late for sex ed in the Los Angeles Times. She shares some of her personal reactions to information released in a recent UCLA Civil Rights Project study:

What shocked me most was not that abstinence classes helped delay the start of sex -- but that it was too late for so many of these middle-school students.

Still, I was shaken to discover that among the study's 12-year-old subjects, 1 in 4 were already sexually active before the abstinence classes even started.

And I'm having a hard time counting as a victory getting a 12-year-old to put off sex until ninth grade.

While Annie and I didn't much enjoy the outcome of Super Bowl XLIV, we both roared at the Snickers commercial that showed Betty White and Abe Vigoda getting creamed in a football game. My second choice turned out to be one I missed until I saw it online this morning, a CBS Late Night Promo that featured Dave Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, and Jay Leno! USA Today's The story behind that Leno-Letterman-Oprah Super Bowl promo tells how that one came about. And while I thought the pre-game feature on the Lingerie Bowl Beauties was funny, Annie didn't see any humor in it whatsoever.

eSchool News Editor Dennis Pierce relates Four things every student should learn … but not every school is teaching he learned from a speech by education technology consultant Alan November at the recent Florida Education Technology Conference in Orlando. He writes that "November...revealed several topics that he said every member of the Net Generation should learn:"

1. Global empathy.
2. Social and ethical responsibility on the web.
3. The permanence of information posted online.
4. Critical thinking about the information found online.

Sarah Fine touts the promise of community schools on Education Week in Community Schools: Reform's Lesser-Known Frontier. (Be sure to check out the comments at the bottom of the article.)

And if you've been putting off getting those Valentine's flowers, candies, diamonds, etc., ordered, now's the time to get on it. (That's a note to myself as much as it is an advertising plug!)

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Periodic Tables

Sandra McCarron published an incredible list of periodic tables Sunday on her Reflections of a Science Teacher blog. A Dozen or so Charts of the Elements is a chemistry geek's Christmas. There are links to standard, online periodic tables, interactive ones, printables, periodic tables augmented with videos "demonstrating properties of the elements and describing them," an interactive periodic table game...

Sandra also includes links to some charts of non-chemistry elements that take the form of the periodic table of chemical elements

Gosh, I wish there were blogs back when I was teaching. Heck, I wish these resources existed when I was struggling through chemistry class!

While we're talking about education blogs, don't miss John Spencer's Bloggers Block on his Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher. It's actually pretty good advice for all writers, although it's targeted at bloggers.

iPad Pushback

You can't even order Apple's new iPad as yet, but the recently announced tablet device is already getting some strong pushback from technology writers. eWeek's 10 Things Apple Doesn't Want You to Know About the iPad gives some reasons why you might not want to jump for the iPad when it becomes available. Larry Magid suggested on Mercury News that "Had Apple called this device the 'iPod touch 2,' I would have praised it as a really good follow-up to an excellent product." David Coursey reported on PCWorld that a survey by "Retrevo, an online marketplace for consumer electronics...found that the iPad's Jan. 27 announcement did more to snuff out customer interest than to spark it."

The tech web went nuts yesterday after Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope shared some insights picked up after meeting with Apple executives. Shope wrote, "“While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated).”

• WSJ blogs: Apple Management: iPad Prices Could Change by Matt Phillips
• PCWorld: Apple iPad Price Cut: Blunder or Brilliance? by David Coursey

For educators, the pricing for the upcoming iPad, often described as "aggressive," hasn't seemed to resonate well at $499 to $829. Maybe something good will shake out on pricing, especially educational pricing, on the iPad before it becomes available next month.

Coyote

As I was refilling my coffee cup on a break from writing today's Educators' News, I glanced out our kitchen window. A single coyote was wandering across the field next to our house. I immediately shot him/her nine times...with my Canon Digital Rebel XSi! Even with my long lens, it was a tough shot.

And yes, in the days when we kept hens for eggs, I would have had the shotgun out. Maybe I don't miss farming that much, after all.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Interesting Video

Kevin Honeycutt, a technology integration specialist at ESSDACK (Educational Services and Staff Development Association of Central Kansas), wrote the song I Need My Teachers To Learn for staff development sessions. The little song that could... tells the story of Kevin writing the song and how the video came about. It has become a favorite on YouTube with over 9,000 views (combined views from several versions).

Since I was fighting rain fade (snow fade) yesterday while trying to watch the video, I finally resorted to downloading the QuickTime version of it and playing it from my hard drive.

Thanks to Jim Hunt and Tom Rademaker for their postings on the HECC (Hoosier Educational Computer Coordinators) listserv that led me to this one.

Snowmageddon

Many mid-Atlantic schools are giving up on trying to open this week and have cancelled classes until next week. Valerie Strauss tells of the closures in MoCo schools hope to open next Tuesday. And Whiteout Conditions in Beleaguered Washington (D.C.) tells just how bad things are. New York City missed most of the first storm, but today schools and a good bit of the city are closing down as another snowstorm is predicted to deliver up to 15" of snow on the Big Apple.

While things really looked bleak outside for a good bit of the day yesterday, the worst of the snowstorm missed our area. It actually rained a bit before changing back to snow. The strong winds (20-30 MPH) sweeping across the fields east of us have created some dandy snowdrifts, almost always in inconvenient places. Some schools in our area remained closed today, but others opened with 2 hour delays.

I took my camera with me yesterday afternoon when I walked to the barn to feed a couple of our cats that have chosen to live there. Despite wearing a heavy coat with a hoodie underneath, my face began to sting almost immediately from the wind. But when I got back to the barn, the tree cover there broke the wind enough that it was really rather pleasant. The view below of the pond behind the barn caught my eye for some reason.

I liked the shot well enough that I added it to my rotation of desktop photos. I also uploaded it to our free Desktop Photos page.

Odds 'n' Ends

L.A. Unified plans to fire more non-tenured teachers than usual probably is the outcome of a savaging inflicted upon the LAUSD by Los Angeles Times' writers last year. The article quotes Ted Mitchell, president of the State Board of Education and chairman of a task force on teacher evaluation, as saying, "The effectiveness won't be determined by the amount of blood spilled but by the quality of the decisions being made. This is the first step in the process, not the last. Members of our task force are looking forward to working with the district to refine the evaluation system over time."

Debra Viadero writes in Algebra-for-All Push Found to Yield Poor Results that the "algebra for all" policy that pushed all students to take the subject by 9th grade or earlier may not be working out so well. She writes that "A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek." I can hardly wait until the non-teacher policy wonks who advocated this change to begin blaming "bad" math teachers for the failed initiative. Early algebra isn't a bad idea for kids who are ready for it, but we all know there are kids who just aren't ready for algebra in eighth grade (or even 9th grade) and still need to be working on basic operations in math.

Dr. Laura Berman offers her common sense read on the recent abstinence-only sex ed study in Abstinence should be first - but not only - sex education option on the Chicago Sun-Times. Dr. Berman notes that the findings of the UCLA Civil Rights Project study "do not mean that we should throw out all other sex education classes; especially when there are numerous studies supporting their success. The fact that the 2006 teenage pregnancy rate increased for the first time in years is proof enough that the Bush administration's support of abstinence-only curriculum was ineffective. Add to that the statistic that shows that one in four teenage girls has an STD and we can all agree that our sex education programs need work." She also found a gem about the study that everyone else seemed to miss: "All studies have potential flaws and biases and, in particular, this one paid students $20 for each abstinence-only class they attended. This might have caused students to feel obligated to misrepresent their sexual activity."

Tree Kits

On one of my online garden seed orders, I happened upon some tree kits that looked interesting. Since we need to replace some trees we've lost over the years, I decided to try the Red Maple Arbor Day Tree Kit and the Colorado Blue Spruce Tree Kit from GenericSeeds.com. My wife always comments positively when she sees and attractive red maple, and we lost one of our blue spruce trees a few years ago. While these kits may not produce anything big enough for our needs this year (probably will have to buy seedlings), the kits look like something that might be useful in the classroom.

When the order arrived, I was fairly pleased with the contents of each container. Included were a small, plastic mini greenhouse, "growing medium" (which I assume to be a sterile, soilless mix), some perlite to cover the seed, an ample quantity of seeds to allow for non-germinating seeds, and instructions that include a pretty good explanation of seed stratification.

While GenericSeeds.com doesn't offer classroom sets of the tree kits, the manufacturer listed on the tree kit containers, The Jonsteen Company, does. Their Life Cycle of a Tree 24-pack might be a nice alternative to the traditional bean seed in milk carton activity so often used in classrooms. The cost runs about $3.00 per student.

Full disclosure: GenericSeeds.com is an Educators' News affiliated advertiser. The Jonsteen Company is not.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

On the Blogs

Diane Ravitch took a look this week at Two Types of Superintendent(s) on the Bridging Differences blog. She relates her description of the traditional superintendent and the new breed of reform superintendent to the Race to the Top program noting, "You can see why the reform superintendent would love the Race to the Top." And, "...the problem with the reform superintendent is that he usually knows very little about schooling and education. He focuses on organization and strategic planning and so on, but is in the dark about what happens in the classroom." She concludes, "Anyone who thinks that these methods will produce first-class education for our nation's children is either a fool or is fooling himself."

Organized Chaos avoids cabin fever during the current school shutdown with Snow Day Love. Paul L. Martin relates a trip to his tax preparer to applications for a job opening at his school in Buried in the Avalanche. He leads with the greeting from the cover letter of one of the applicants, "Dear Sir or Madman." And Jay Mathews suggests that for him, this may have been Washington's best winter ever.

Norm Scott got my chuckle of the day with his description of Andy Rotherham in Oh What a Tangled Web: Millot, Russo and Rotherham Battle As Millot Charges Arne with Conflict of Interest. He also gets today's award for the longest title of a blog posting!

Scott's posting and Kenneth Libby's Millot: Sound Decision or Censorship at TWIE? (I) both shed some light on the pulling of Marc Dean Millot's Three Data Points. Unconnected Dots or a Warning posting last Friday on This Week in Education (TWIE). Millot was subsequently fired from his guest blogging job at TWIE.

Millot created a furor by suggesting that "the fix is in on the U.S. Department of Education's competitive grants" (Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation) and that the "Department's senior officials know exactly who they want to get RTTT and I3 money - in brief, the new philanthropies' grantees and the jurisdictions where they work."

TFA Funding

Nick Anderson found a new wrinkle in the proposed education budget, Teach for America's federal funds threatened by plan for grant contest. He writes that Teach for America "would lose its uncontested claim on $18 million in federal funding under an Obama administration proposal to launch a grant competition for teacher training programs." The TFA program "which enlists recent college graduates for two-year stints in some of the nation's most challenging public schools" would have to compete with other organizations for a portion of $235 million "for initiatives to recruit and prepare teachers for high-need schools" in the proposed budget.

Late Valentine's Orders

If you haven't yet ordered those Valentine's Day flowers, candies, etc., you still have time to do so. The Popcorn Factory guarantees free Saturday delivery on orders placed by 1 P.M. (EST) tomorrow. Use promo code VSAT.

1-800-Flowers has a 24 HOUR SALE going through tomorrow night, although you'll probably have to pay extra for Saturday delivery. (Annie got her Valentine's roses yesterday at work via a local florist and 1-800-Flowers.)

Friday, February 12, 2010

A Year Ago

It's hard to believe that a year ago this week I was writing about a House-Senate committee agreeing on the stimulus package. On Monday, I ran a link to an article about what may happen when the education stimulus funds run out this year.

Getting back to a year ago today, I ran the shot below of a tobacco hornworm from our 2006 garden.

I ran the shot as an example of the royalty-free images educators can find and use from the Pics4Learning site. You may browse the site by subject, search for images by name, and even find collections of images from the same photographer such as my page shown at right. Many of my shots that are on Pics4Learning are also available on our mathdittos2.com Desktop Photos page for free download and use as computer desktops or wallpapers. Do note that all images appearing on my sites are copyrighted. The desktop photos may be used as such without permission or payment. All other use requires prior consent, massive royalty payments, your left pinkie finger... (Actually, I'm a pretty soft touch on teachers using my photos. Just , please.)

And of course, the week last year wound up with Valentine's Day on Saturday. Since we were a bit tight at this time last year, Annie and I agreed to just exchange Valentine cards. I did cheat and picked up a nice pot of forced tulips I found on the markdown rack at a discount store!

We also announced for the first time on Educators' News our "new" site, Senior Gardening. The site had been going since July, 2008, but was authored anonymously under the pseudonym of the Old Guy at Senior Gardening. Currently, that site awakes a few times a month from its winter slumber for a posting, but is just about ready to take off as we get our transplants for this spring started.

If you're wondering where I'm going with this ramble down memory lane, the answer is nowhere! (Remember, I'm old and retired. Geezers should be allowed to ramble.) After a week of snow keeping a lot of the education world cooped up inside, there's not much to report on. I did find an interesting Associated Press story, Frisbee inventor dies at 90. It relates that "Walter Fredrick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died. He was 90." I've had a photo of a sensitivity plant (mimosa pudica) sitting in an inverted BookIt! frisbee on my bio page for years, but I'm not sure a dirty frisbee being used as a pot bottom qualifies as education news. I do hope Walter got his royalties for it. Growing sensitivity plants is another good classroom plant project, but I already used up that kind of "throwaway" story on Wednesday when I wrote about tree kits.

So I find myself stuck, much as I was when I wrote This Week's "Non-Column" (October 15, 1999) for Dan Knight's Low End Mac site. (Note to Alexander Russo, Andy Rotherham, and the Washington Post editors: Dan never, ever pulled one of my columns, no matter how outrageous they were!)

Maybe I'd better quit while I'm ahead and end this posting with the line I used to wind up the 1999 column:

At any rate, Dan (Knight) has 1300 words of birdcage liner (if we were a print publication) and I'm going to take the cash and run.

Almost Made It

I almost made it out the office door, but I decided to check the WaPo education page to make sure I hadn't missed some earthshaking education news. While Bill Turque's DCPS may get new lunch service certainly isn't earthshaking, it does address a subject I've often written about here on Educators' News: Quality school lunches. Bill writes that "the District put out a 'Request for Information' (RFI), asking other food service firms for ideas on an 'operational model and supporting execution plan' that would break even and provide 'overall high quality nutritious and safe meal service.'" Apparently, DCPS Chief Operating Officer Anthony J. Tata is looking for an alternative to the current DCPS food service contractor, Chartwells-Thompson.

Bill links to a six-part series of articles, Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen by Ed Bruske, author of The Slow Cook blog. Bruske spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary recently and "didn't have many yummy things to say about Chartwells." Bruske writes:

What I quickly learned is that “fresh cooked” does not mean “from scratch” or “fresh ingredients.” Indeed, most meals at H.D. Cooke are constructed around foods that have been heavily processed and reconstituted in distant factories, then shipped pre-cooked and frozen.

Most of us, as teachers, already know that school cafeteria food in most cases is what can be conveniently warmed up and economically served, with negligible attention to taste, quality, or even nutrition beyond federal standards. Some of we older teachers can remember when school cafeteria staff were actually cooks, making each meal from scratch or close thereto. I probably still carry a few pounds acquired when the Coalmont Middle School cooks would make cinnamon rolls from leftover dough on light bread roll days. Their cinnamon rolls put the current, commercially available sticky buns to shame. And our kids, many on free and reduced lunch, had nutritious, home cooked meals each day.

The interest in better school meals in D.C. probably comes from D.C. Council member Mary Cheh introducing a bill "that would require sweeping improvements in student nutrition and health, including greater use of fresh, locally grown produce in school meals." But interest nationwide for using more locally grown ingredients and less processed foods has been growing in recent years.

I've recently linked to Daniel Weintraub's Making a Healthy Lunch, and Making It a Cause about Revolution Foods and Jenna Johnson's Thinking Outside The School Lunchbox about using food from local farmers and producers. And just last Monday, I linked to Gardiner Harris's A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools, Farm to School program changes kids' views on food, and the National Farm to School Network beside a photo of one of my sons skinning a pig (complete with bandage on his thumb from the skinning knife).

In a 2008 posting about school gardens, especially school vegetable gardens, we had Sowing the Seeds of Gardening in which Jacqueline Mroz tells about the successful Princeton School Gardens program. The Princeton Regional Schools have 15 garden plots that are "being used to teach subjects like math, science and language arts." One of the schools, Riverside Elementary, has a great page of photos and descriptions about their various garden plots. The Princeton School Garden Cooperative has "written a guide (3.1 MB PDF document) that contains the steps for composting, planning and planting your edible garden as well as lesson plans and curriculum links for math, social studies, language arts, science, visual arts and health."

Those thinking about a school garden of some type should find the guide linked above and some of the links below helpful.

• kidsgardening.org: Garden In Every School® Search
• Texas A&M: School Gardens
• The School Garden Wizard

Now, I'm really running late, and it's all Bill's fault. I still have to feed our animals and get supper going for my wife and a daughter who is driving down from Chicago for the weekend. While the baked cod for supper wasn't raised here, the baked potatoes and sweet peas are from our garden and are delicious. And I guess I'm still rambling down memory lane, but school meals and locally grown foods are something I believe are really important and deserve far more attention than they are getting.

Have a great weekend!

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