Monday, February 22, 2010

Night Landing

The space shuttle Endeavour returned to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida last night. From the NASA press release:

The STS-130 mission to the International Space Station included three spacewalks and the installation of the Tranquility node, a module that provides additional room for crew members and many of the space station's life support and environmental control systems. Attached to Tranquility is a cupola with seven windows that offers a panoramic view of Earth, celestial objects and visiting spacecraft. Tranquility and its cupola are the final major U.S. portions of the station. The orbiting laboratory now is approximately 90 percent complete in terms of mass.

Just four shuttle flights remain, with the space shuttle Discovery scheduled to lift off on mission STS-131 on April 5.

Oh, my!

A Diploma in 10th Grade on the New York Times illustrates the things that can happen when non-teachers start meddling in education. First, a Utah state senator proposed eliminating twelfth grade as a cost cutting measure. Then word came of an eight state plan to allow at-risk tenth graders to move on to community colleges. The folks the Times assembled to write about the proposal fortunately included two (out of ten commenters) classroom teachers. Vern Williams of Longfellow Middle School (VA) best summed up my thoughts: "What high-quality research (or logic) supports the conclusion that students who are not prepared for junior college after their senior year of high school will somehow be prepared after their freshman year?"

On the Blogs

With all the pressures and demands of teaching, John P. Wood's This Week's Education Humor can often provide a little relief. John's tongue-in-cheek Professional Development Journaling is a dandy.

The latest entry on Walt Gardner's Reality Check, The Beatings Will Continue Until Teacher Morale Improves, talks about why high performing charter schools can't replace traditional public schools. He writes:

Teachers in these high-flying schools work schedules that set the stage for eventual exhaustion. While they may be able to maintain the pace in the short run, the odds are against their being able to do so in the long run. If this observation is accurate, then trying to apply the same model to the 15,000 schools in dire need is unrealistic. In other words, the high flying model is neither scalable nor sustainable.

Everything Techy in Kindergarten has a couple of interesting suggestions for the younger set, Switcheroo Zoo and An iPad For the Kindergarten Crowd. The first tells of the free Switcheroo Zoo web site where kids can switch different heads, legs, and tails on animals to create their own new animals, feed animals, and watch videos about different animals. It's an interesting site, but pretty cluttered with advertising.

The Fisher-Price iXL won't be available until October, but appears to be a product parents and teachers might want to consider purchasing. The device targeted for 4-6 year olds allows them to "read interactively, draw, look at pictures and play games." Fisher-Price iXL is a tweener that no kid needs convincing of and Fisher-Price Takes (On) a Leap give a few more details.

Malcolm Bellamy's Learning Blog suggests that using the Facebook-like Edmodo site might encourage students to write and communicate a bit more in a familiar interface.

Fury & Logical Consequences on Organized Chaos tells of what can happen when one's significant other spends too much time at happy hour, leaving the teacher-spouse at home too much "time to pour over the governor's budget proposal. Time to read, research, take notes, and become more and more furious."

Craig A. Cunningham's How Should School Principals Be Selected in Chicago on the Education Policy Blog is an interesting read about Chicago's current practice of the Local School Council (LSC), an elected body of parents, community members, and teachers, selecting principals. He explores the pros and cons of a proposed bill in Illinois that "would shift the principal-selection power away from the LSC, returning it to the central office (and thus, the ultimate control of the mayor)."

Scott Guggenheimer's posting on The Other 17 Hours, Snow storms in DC shut down everything and left the entire district immobilized. And the Green Club grew lettuce, has a great photo of organic lettuce students are growing in cold frames, but surrounded by heavy snow in front of Thurgood Marshall Academy.

One More Plant Project Idea

I've frequently offered suggestions here for classroom plant projects, but I think I've never mentioned growing cactus. I'd actually forgotten that we grew them a couple of times until I ran across a scan of a pot I'd made up of leftover cacti. Our kids usually took home one or two small cacti in individual thumbnail clay pots we bought from the Clay City Pottery just a few miles north of our school.

Cacti take a long time to grow into a substantial plant, but actually reach just the right size for sending home in small pots in a few months. They're certainly not as dependable as a classroom plant project as some other plants. Some seeds will germinate in just a few days, while others take weeks to germinate. But for a change of pace for the very patient, growing cactus from seed can be a rewarding classroom project.

I usually purchased seed for our cactus projects (both for school and at home) from Stokes Seeds. Their Super Greenhouse Mix of cactus seed runs $2.15 for 20 seeds (larger packets also available). Thompson & Morgan Seeds offers their Special Cacti Mix for $4.25 (80 seeds). Both are reliable seed houses.

While catalog photos for Thompson & Morgan (right) and Stokes (not pictured) look pretty exotic, our results produced more prosaic cacti, but still good enough to send home with the kids. A sunny windowsill will do for cacti, although one year I had to take the flat of cacti home and put them under our plant lights for a few weeks. (I'd been moved to a classroom without a sunny window!)

Over the years I was in the classroom, we grew lots of other plants from seed, including asters, begonias, browallia, geraniums, gloxinias, marigolds, petunias, sensitive plants (mimosa pudica), and once, various vegetable plants. If you're looking for a fairly quick flowering plant, asters, browallia (very tiny blooms), or marigolds would be a good choice, with marigolds being almost foolproof. While the idea of growing vegetable transplants for the kids to take home for a home garden sounded cool, it turned out to be a disappointment.

A Word of Caution

One of the saddest things that can happen in a classroom plant project is to find that most to all of your young seedlings have been cut down at the root or lower stem from damping-off fungus. To avoid this disaster, use only sterilized planting medium. I actually bake my potting soil in the oven for an hour at around 400^o F to kill off any of the fungus which is often present in commercial soil mix. Commercial soilless seed starting mixes are also available, but raise the cost of the project. Providing good air circulation around the young plants (Don't crowd them.) discourages damping off. Watering early in the day and not too frequently also helps prevent damping off. Various chemical seed and soil treatments also help slow the fungus, but they're nasty stuff to use.

Something Different

If you're not into the seed starting bit, but would still like an impressive plant project for your classroom, AeroGarden offers complete planting kits that look interesting. The aeroponic kits are available from the manufacturer or from Amazon and run from $60 up to around $200.

Advertising Note: We've themed our ad column this week with garden related advertisers. At this writing, we still have a spotty cover of snow on the ground. But it's late February and gardening season isn't far off. Getting stuff started now under grow lights or on a sunny windowsill fights off the winter blues and also cuts costs for transplants in the spring.

Odds 'n' Ends

While critics might justifiably view most of what appears on Educators' News as odds 'n' ends, this section does allow me to throw in some interesting links (and comments) that wouldn't otherwise appear here.

Peter Baker and Sam Dillon write in Obama Pitches Education Proposal to Governors that the President favors requiring states to adopt "college- and career-ready standards" in reading and math to qualify for Title I funding in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Peter Wilson's A Midstream Switch to Teaching is his story of switching from a career in public relations to education. After three years in the classroom, he doesn't intend to go back to PR.

Andy Gammill's Reading opens his world at first glance appears to be a human interest story about a student with dyslexia rescued by a caring, dedicated teacher. Unfortunately, Andy slips into some teacher and school bashing along the way that may or may not be well deserved by the Indianapolis Public Schools. The scary thing about Andy's column is that it may just the opening round of teacher bashing in the always conservative Star's recently announced mentoring and volunteering campaign. IPS doesn't deserve any passes for its many faults, but the Star and Gammill need to better substantiate their accusations and also explore the dynamics of how a student can get into high school with few reading skills. There is a story there, but I think the Star's bias against teachers won't let it be told.

And Layoffs loom for teachers: education secretary is just a public acknowledgment by the Secretary of Education of what nearly everyone else around the country already knows. But since Secretary Duncan said it to a meeting of the National Governors Association on Sunday, it's news.

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Daniels for President

Indiana's Mitch Daniels 'open' to a White House run relates that the Indiana governor "has become a favorite of fiscal hawks for the way he has run his state." Educators: Only cuts left are ones that will hurt kids relates what Daniels's property tax cap program has done for the state's schools.

Take it from a Hoosier educator. If you see this guy's name on a primary ballot, find another choice!

Odds 'n' Ends

Michelle Rhee continues to try to explain and justify her statement last month to Fast Company magazine that an unspecified number of the 266 teachers laid off in October had physically or sexually abused students in a report (48K PDF document) sent on February 12 to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray. Bill Turque's Rhee reports to D.C. Council on teacher misconduct tells that Rhee sent " a letter to teachers late Friday, after school officials learned that The Post had obtained the report." In the letter, "Rhee expressed regret about the magazine item, saying it was out of context and that it painted D.C. teachers with an unjustly broad brush." Turque states that "the report...does not include names and offers only fragmentary descriptions of the incidents."

Obama urges states to raise academic standards is a review on eSchool News of the President's remarks to a meeting of the nation’s governors at the White House.

In Special-education pass rates higher on VGLA, Amy Jeter writes that "State leaders are worried that elementary and middle schools across Virginia are increasingly turning to an alternative - some say easier to pass - measure of student competency to help earn accreditation."

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Stellarium

The open source planetarium software, Stellarium, was updated to version 0.10.4 yesterday. Stellarium is a great tool for those times when you need to illustrate how the sky will look at a certain time for your students.

I grabbed a screenshot using the new version of last night's sky around 8:30 pm looking almost due south. Then I put on my coat and ran outside to look at one of the few clear night skies we've had in a while. Orion was, of course, right where Stellarium predicted it would be.

Stellarium has controls that allow the user to show star names by brightness (magnitude), add constellation lines, show nebulae names, etc.

Setup involves putting in the current time and date if the application doesn't automatically pick it up from your computer (it should). The application offers an extensive list of locations so that you can localize the display to accurately display your area's night sky. If you're like me and want to set the locale by latitude and longitude, Stellarium also supports that function. (You can easily find your geographic coordinates in Google Earth.)

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Fired!

Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo carried through her plan to fire all the administrators, teachers, and staff at Central Falls High School (RI) this week. Gallo hoped to receive additional federal funding for school improvement and adopted a state school reform plan "that would have lengthened the school day and required teachers to get additional training and offer more after-school tutoring." When the teachers' union wanted to negotiate more pay for the additional hours, Gallo invoked part of the state plan that could include mass firings.

The AP's Ray Henry describes the problems at the school in Plan to fire all its teachers roils poor RI city:

Central Falls High has long been one of the worst-performing [schools] in Rhode Island. Just 7 percent of 11th graders tested in the fall were proficient in math. Only 33 percent were proficient in writing, and just 55 percent were proficient in reading. In 2008, just 52 percent of students graduated within four years and 30 percent dropped out.

A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High School in the New York Times adds a few details.

Valerie Strauss looks at the craziness of this situation on her The Answer Sheet blog in Why not fire all the teachers? She notes "that Education Secretary Arne Duncan applauded the move, saying the committee members were 'showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.'" Strauss writes:

Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security.

L.A. Teachers To Take Over 22 Schools

Howard Blume reports in L.A. teachers gain control of 22 campuses in reform effort that "groups of teachers, rather than outside operators, will run the vast majority of 30 campuses under a controversial school reform effort, the Los Angeles Board of Education decided Tuesday." Blume writes that the "strategy that was designed to allow outsiders to manage new or troubled campuses" ended up leaving out three of "the most politically potent" charter school organizations: Green Dot Public Schools, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, and ICEF Public Schools.

The L.A. school board primarily followed recommendations from L.A. Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines in choosing the groups to take over the schools. Facing criticism from charters and other groups that lost out in the reform plan, Cortines stated, "There are those who feel my recommendations are not bold enough. They are looking for something that might be sexy. Let me tell you, I am not interested in fads. I am interested in transforming the lives of our students."

Odds 'n' Ends

I've always liked photos of structures with lots of detail. So today's NASA Image of the Day, Preparing for the Next Mission, is a delight to me.

At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, work platforms are moved into position around space shuttle Endeavour in Orbiter Processing Facility-2, following its touchdown at the completion of the STS-130 mission to the International Space Station on Feb. 21.

Processing now begins for Endeavour's next flight, STS-134. The six-member STS-134 crew will deliver the Express Logistics Carrier 3 and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station, as well as a variety of spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank, additional spare parts for Dextre and micrometeoroid debris shields. STS-134 will be the 35th shuttle mission to the station and the 133rd flight in the shuttle program. Launch is targeted for July 29.

Friday, February 26, 2010

The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Education sites are abuzz this week about the upcoming release on Tuesday of Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Valerie Strauss sheds some light on all the coverage in Why you should read Diane Ravitch's new book, as the book reveals how terribly misguided the current Obama/Duncan business model for education "reform" is. She writes that "The U.S. public school system would not be as troubled as it is if most of the reformers of the past few decades really understood" that "charter schools aren’t a silver bullet. Nor are high-stakes standardized tests. Nor is shaming teachers or reducing them to robots who repeat nonsense from bad textbooks." She adds that Ravitch's "notions are not, of course, original...But she has put together a complete, compelling argument, and when she publicly advocates, her words carry far more weight than others."

The Post's Nick Anderson may have best framed the importance of Ravitch's new book when he wrote in Business principles won't work for school reform, former supporter Ravitch says, "For those who believe that performance pay and charter schools pose a threat to public education and that a cult of testing and accountability has hijacked school reform, an unlikely national spokeswoman has emerged."

Getting Rid of Bad Teachers

Yesterday's Getting Rid of Bad Teachers discussion on The New York Times is pretty predictable. The New Teacher Project person thinks more rigorous evaluations are necessary, but also thinks principals are good evaluators. The testing person thinks more tests (for teachers) are the answer. One of the think tank people railed against "rubber rooms." And the real teacher on the panel suggested nurturing new teachers to help them become truly effective educators for their students.

Odds 'n' End

Last Friday I wrote about Walt Gardner's new blog on Education Week, Walt Gardner's Reality Check. At that point, Walt just had his initial post up. But since that time, he has quickly added brief, informative postings about teaching and learning. As a teacher, Walt wisely cuts up his proffered wisdom into small, but important bites. If I had to pick the three people who are saying (writing) the most important things about education now, our President and Secretary of Education wouldn't make the top five, and most of the non-teacher think tank folks wouldn't even get a mention. Walt Gardner along with Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier should be daily reads for us all.

Walt's postings so far include:

• Teachers Are Potted Palms in School Reform
• The Hits Just Keep on Coming in Makeover of Schools
• The Beatings Will Continue Until Teacher Morale Improves
• Demoralized Teachers = Deprived Students
• Are Quality and Quantity Possible in Teacher Recruitment?

My posting today about Diane Ravitch's new book is a little thin. Early this month I'd written Diane an email of thanks and support for some of her comments about teacher bashing on she and Deborah Meier's Bridging Differences blog. I was a bit surprised when just eight minutes later I received a pleasant response to my email from Diane. She also supplied her publisher's contact info with the suggestion that I request a review copy of the upcoming book. I did so, but am still waiting...for the book or even a polite rejection of my request from the publisher. So today's posting about the new book is made up of third person raves about the book without any of my personal observations on its contents. I'll either use the Amazon link above or sign out the book from the library to get a peek at it.

BTW: Diane wrote and offered to buy and send me a copy! Gotta love her, but I'll buy my own.

Having had a bit of time to mellow out (and a stiff scotch), I hate to end the week on a negative note. So let me share the shot I grabbed this afternoon when a dozen deer raced across the field next to our house. I'd guess they were on the run because of the gunfire I'd heard earlier from behind our house (but way, way, too close). Poaching (out of season hunting) is pretty much accepted around here as a way of life. And if they're hunting to put food on their family's table, so be it. The deer, although nice to watch, present a constant hazard while driving, especially at night. But I still get a kick out watching them!

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