Monday, July 11, 2011

End of an Era

The photo caption for the STS-135 Image Gallery shot at right was unusually brief:

Atlantis' Final Flight

Space shuttle Atlantis is seen as it lifts off from NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A at 11:29 a.m. EDT. [July 8, 2011]

The launch of Atlantis on the STS-135 mission, is the final flight of the Shuttle Program.

The same President who has allowed his Secretary of Education to encourage the vilification of teachers and our profession has now also turned over manned space flight launches to private industry. Glens Falls Post-Star editor, Ken Tingley, writes in We're all grounded by the end of space shuttle program, "The best and the brightest went to work for banks and on Wall Street, and we stopped dreaming about the stars to get rich." Tingley gives a long list of products and accomplishments that made the space program a good investment.

CNET's William Harwood adds a bit of background about how the end of our our ability to launch manned space vehicles came about in Atlantis launch a bittersweet end for space shuttle.

The Bush administration's plan was to eliminate the costly shuttle program--and the thousands of contractor jobs that made it so expensive--and use the savings to help pay for a new program, building safer, lower-cost rockets needed to support the establishment of Antarctica-style bases on the moon by around 2020.

But Bush never fully funded his Constellation moon program--he barely mentioned it after the initial 2004 announcement at NASA headquarters--and the Obama administration decided in 2009 that it was simply too expensive.

Writing off nearly $10 billion spent on initial design and development of the Constellation moon program rockets and infrastructure, President Obama settled on a controversial new plan that marked a drastic change of course for NASA.

The so-called "flexible path" approach calls for the near-term development of private-sector spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the space station on a for-profit basis while NASA focuses on designing new, more affordable rockets and spacecraft for eventual voyages to nearby asteroids, the moons of Mars, or even the red planet itself.

Harwood goes on to quote former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin as saying:

We are going to miss it. I was, as administrator, supportive of and willing to retire the shuttle in favor of a new and better system that would take us back to the moon and even beyond, but I'm not willing to retire the shuttle in favor of nothing. That, to me, doesn't seem like good national policy.

It's All About the Money

Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett showed his true colors in speaking about Wayne Township's new all-online public high school, hailing it "as a 'revenue generator' and a model for how cash-strapped school districts can save money," according to Alex Campbell's Education chief a fan of virtual school. He went on to speak of the Achieve Education Virtual Academy allowing the school corporation and its teachers to be "entrepreneurial." Campbell adds, "It's also assumed -- though not certain -- that an online structure would have a higher student-to-teacher ratio, which could also save money."

Sue Loughlin's Skinner turns full focus to legislature: Longtime educator retires from teaching gives a good appraisal of just how bad Tony Bennett has been for Indiana education.

Odds 'n' Ends

• The Washington Post: DCPS 2011 scores mostly flat by Bill Turque
• The Washington Post: D.C.’s masterpiece of obfuscation by Valerie Strauss
• AP: US Education Dept. joins probe of DC test scores by Brett Zongker
• Chicago News Cooperative via The New York Times: Laid-Off Art Teachers Turn to Their Craft to Express Themselves by Jessica Reaves

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

SpongeBob SquarePants Rerun

When I saw the RSS posting for Valerie Strauss's rerun of her SpongeBob SquarePants interview from last January, I knew we were in a really slow news cycle. That's not to take anything away from the humorous story, however. If you missed it in January, be sure to take a peek at it.

Odds 'n' Ends

Even in slow news cycles, there's usually something of value out there for teachers. Here are some possibilities:

• Library of Congress: Science in Popular Culture: Let’s Do the Radium Dance by Stephen Wesson
• Library of Congress: Selecting Primary Sources, Part I: Knowing your Students by Sara Suiter
• Science@NASA: Dark Fireworks on the Sun by Dr. Tony Phillips
• Science@NASA: Does Asteroid Vesta Have a Moon? by Dauna Coulter
• Science Nation: Geo-Immersion Makes Maps Come Alive by Miles O'Brien and Jon Baime

Friday, July 15, 2011

SOS Film Festival

In the runup to the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, the organization is holding the Save Our Schools Film Festival, July 25-29, 2011 in Washington, D.C. The rally and march will be held on Saturday, July 30, 2011, with a number of events and workshops scheduled in the days before the march.

A Few Words About Linda and Preparing Ones Classroom

In the middle of summer, few folks outside of the teaching profession are aware of what some teachers are doing. Non-educator husbands, wives, kids, and significant others of teachers know. But the general public thinks teachers walk out the last day of school in May or June and come back a day or so before school begins in the late summer. They assume, sometimes accurately, that the Fourth of July is the middle of a long vacation for teachers.

The last eight years of my teaching career, I was privileged to teach across the hall from one of the most talented, caring, and effective teachers I've known. I always played a little game with myself, trying to beat Linda in during the summer to get my classroom set up. I usually went in two to three weeks before the first day of school, often working half days or more getting things ready. Over all those years, I never beat Linda in. She always started mid-July or so and had her classroom completely set up a week before the first day of school.

Linda often remarked that she liked to take a vacation the week before school. I really think she wanted to avoid all the negativism that sometimes permeated the halls the week before school. She didn't want her positive attitude damaged.

While lots of education "reformers" regularly denigrate teachers as part of their game plan to remake education into something run like a business, they often miss the many, many Linda's who start going the extra mile shortly after the Fourth of July and continue to do so all school year long.

Sure, there are teachers who cut it as close as possible, often starting the school year not fully ready for their students. Sometimes summer jobs make that a necessity for them. I remember one teacher who one year made a big deal of not doing any classroom prep before the first day of school. It turned out she had spent many hours at home preparing a thematic unit of reading and math on setting up and decorating a classroom that she and her students did the first week of school. While I always preferred to have my little corner of the world set up as a warm, welcoming environment for student (and parent) first impressions, the teacher who turned setting up a classroom into a lesson had an ingenious idea and was an excellent teacher.

So in this era of teacher bashing and union busting, I just thought I'd write a few words to remind the reformers that some of us, union teachers and union officers at that, often contribute many, many hours and days because it's the right thing to do. Yes, I usually was the second teacher to come in each summer to get started on setup, but many more followed, beginning their year-long practice of giving extra to their students, days and weeks before those students arrived for their first day of school.

Odds 'n' Ends

I added a new page to the mathdittos2.com site last week, Desktop Photos: The Cutting Room Floor. When I started working on the page several weeks ago, I thought it could hold the shots that got bumped off our main Desktop Photos page. I later realized that I could move some of my personal desktop photos that wouldn't have general appeal onto the page. The first such shot to go up is a picture shot out the window of a Boeing 707 in 1975 as it flew over the Mississippi River. The original slide is in terrible shape, so cleaning up the cracked emulsion and lint marks took some time. But it's an interesting shot.

I took the photo with my Canon AE-1 which is still in good working order. That camera had a lot to do with my going back to Canon for a digital SLR after having two point and shoot Nikons fail prematurely.

I was on the plane because my school system sent several of us to Denver for an Individually Guided Education (IGE) conference. I obviously was teaching in 1975 at an IGE school. It was an interesting concept that worked well for many, but certainly not all, learners. See: The Rise and Fall of Individually Guided Education (596K PDF document) (abstract).

Getting back to current education issues, Barnett Berry's Moving past excuses from the no-excuse reform crowd on The Answer Sheet blog is a very good read. Other items that might prove interesting include:

• NASA Image of the Day: The Shuttle Era's Final Spacewalk
• The Washington Post: Schools Chancellor Henderson relaxes evaluation rules for some veteran teachers by Bill Turque
• The Los Angeles Times: L.A. officials unexpectedly move to shut down charters implicated in cheating by Howard Blume
• Ed.gov: U.S. Education Department Joins U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to Announce New Investment in School-Based Health Centers
• Library of Congress: Primary Sources by State: Making Local Connections by Sara Suiter
• Reality Check: Alternative to Traditional School Funding by Walt Gardner

My wife is always reading me something funny she's found on the Borowitz Report, so I thought I'd share the site with you. Some recent titles include:

• Disgusted, Satan Returns Murdoch’s Soul: Media Titan Loses Closest Ally
• Republicans: Trillions Could Be Cut from Budget if We Eliminate Empathy
• Obama Says US Not Deserting Afghanistan: "We Will Continue to Follow You on Twitter"
• Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate
• Greece Offers to Repay Loans with Giant Horse

Publication Note

A roofing project on the porch where our satellite internet dish is mounted moved me to switch from satellite internet to DSL (which is finally available in our area). The dish will probably come off the roof this afternoon, but our DSL installation won't occur until Monday. While I could fall back to dialup for Monday's posting, I'll probably just blow it off and enjoy our internet blackout until we get the new setup working.

Have a great weekend!

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