Monday, July 25, 2011

It Rained Yesterday...in Our Kitchen!

My three-year-old grandson, Brady, exclaimed yesterday, "It rained in the kitchen." And it did. It also rained in our dining room.

While we were almost desperate for rain in our area, the rain came the day after my son-in-law had torn the shingles off our back porch and hadn't gotten the tarpaper on to protect the roof...and the dining room and kitchen it has leaked into intermittently for years. Both my son-in-law and I were certain we wouldn't get caught with our roof off after weeks and weeks without any rain. I was raking hay and my son-in-law was working on patching the problem area on the roof where it meets the side of our house when a hot, muggy Sunday afternoon turned into a very rainy one.

So after emptying gallons and gallons of water from pots, pans, kettles, buckets, and trash cans, I'm having a little trouble focusing on education today. I still have lots of cleanup to do today, along with a load of roofing shingles to take to the dump.

We now, of course, have a good coating of tarpaper to protect the decking (and the kitchen and dining room) of the roof. It probably won't rain a drop for weeks.

Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action!

The Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action is scheduled for this weekend in our nation's capital. I'll be there in spirit only, as I hope to be hammering shingles on our back porch next weekend. But I think this may prove to be an important event in challenging those who are promoting business oriented "reforms" in our schools. It should at least have some effect on our President who received massive teacher support in the 2008 election, only to turn his back on teachers when changes for schools were considered and proposed.

From the SOS about page:

The Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action is a grassroots movement dedicated to restoring educator, parent, student, and community influence over education policy and practice. We are a varied group of people with different perspectives, experiences, and views on education. But we agree that those who know the most about education, our schools, and our communities—the educators, students, families and communities in and around them—should be the ones to have the most influence over education policy and practice. Our goal is to put public school stakeholders back at the center of all education policy conversations, and to refocus national, state, and local efforts on providing the resources and support schools need in order to provide a high-quality education for each and every student.

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Follow the Money

A couple of good articles about philanthropic funding in education appeared online this week. Valerie Strauss tracks the biggest contributors and recipients in Where private foundations award education cash. Walt Gardner analyzes the "success" of Bill Gates' contributions to education in Bill Gates Reflects on His Philanthropy.

Odds 'n' Ends

I found it interesting that the story appearing on eSchool News, Teachers will not join Walker in education effort, hasn't attracted more national attention. And the Library of Congress's Selecting Primary Sources, Part II: Considering Historical Context by Stephen Wesson is an excellent posting. Of course, my original teaching endorsements were in U.S. and World History.

No Lions or Snow Leopards

While I really like the photography for Apple's Mac OS X Lion (10.7) upgrade, you won't find any lions, or for that matter, snow leopards (10.6), running around my office. Both Educators' News and Senior Gardening are written on machines far too old to support Apple's latest and greatest operating systems. So while I'm carrying a ad today for OS X Lion, I can offer no review.

Our newest equipment is a bit newer than our old Mac IIfx (pictured at right just for the fun of it...and it still runs). Our G5 Power Mac and G4 Powerbook both run Mac OS X, versions 10.4.11 and 10.5.8 (Tiger and Leopard), but their PowerPC chips were left behind when Apple released its Snow Leopard upgrade.

Once Apple dropped support for PowerPC chips, it was only a matter of time before software writers no longer included code in their programs for the older machines. As long as the old versions of software do the job, I'm in good shape with my older hardware, but I'm finding increasingly more applications I'd like to try, possibly review on this site, and sometimes use that won't run on my equipment. Even my iPhone 3G won't run a lot of the new apps available from the App Store. But then, I still look at my 2000 GMC pickup truck like it was new, ignoring the creeping rust on the bumpers, quarter panels, and wheel wells. And of course, I still see my sweetie as the young woman I met in 1992.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action

The Save Our Schools March on the White House is set for tomorrow afternoon under "mostly sunny" skies and temperatures in the mid-90s. In the runup to the protest march, both the Department of Education and the White House have reached out to organizers of the march. Nirvi Shad reports in Teachers Converging on Washington for 4-Day Schools Rally that "three organizers of the SOS March met Wednesday for an hour with senior-level Education Department officials," with Arne Duncan making a ten minute cameo appearance at the meeting.

Valerie Strauss reports in Obama administration reaches out to education activists before march on The Answer Sheet blog that leaders of the march have been invited to a White House meeting scheduled for this afternoon. Straus cynically and sagely writes of the overtures from the Administration:

Is this a repeat of the administration’s efforts last summer to blunt criticism by a coalition of civil rights groups who released a framework for education reform that was critical of administration policies? Just before it was released, administration officials met with some of the leaders of the group in the coalition, and some backed off their criticism.

Or is this a legitimate effort to allow administration officials to hear teachers complaints (even though they’ve had many months to invite them to the White House, and even though officials have some other pressing business — like the debt limit crisis — to deal with)?

Update: Valerie Strauss posted an update today in Save Our Schools March leaders answer White House invitation:

Organizers of Saturday’s Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C., have declined an invitation to meet today at the White House with education advisers to President Obama, saying they would instead be available after the march.

If you're new to the SOS campaign, here are their Guiding Principles from the organization's About page:

For the future of our children, we demand:

Equitable funding for all public school communities

• Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems
• Full public funding of family and community support services
• Full funding for 21st century school and neighborhood libraries
• An end to economically and racially re-segregated schools

An end to high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation

• The use of multiple and varied assessments to evaluate students, teachers, and schools
• An end to pay per test performance for teachers and administrators
• An end to public school closures based upon test performance

Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies

• Educator and civic community leadership in drafting new ESEA legislation
• Federal support for local school programs free of punitive and competitive funding
• An end to political and corporate control of curriculum, instruction and assessment decisions for teachers and administrators

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

• Support for teacher and student access to a wide-range of instructional programs and technologies
• Well-rounded education that develops every student’s intellectual, creative, and physical potential
• Opportunities for multicultural/multilingual curriculum for all students
• Small class sizes that foster caring, democratic learning communities

For those of us who support the ideas behind the Save Our Schools movement but cannot attend the march, messages to the White House and Congress can help add our voices to those protesting in our nation's capital.

Another Message to Send

The Education Votes site, part of the National Education Association, makes it easy to contact your representative and senators in Washington on specific issues such as the current debt limit crisis. You just go to the site and enter your zip code. A listing of your senators and representative should appear with a form for using NEA talking points in your letter or email. One can pick and choose which talking points to use, add ones own comments, and then edit and spell check the entire message.

Enter your sender information at the bottom of the compose form and the site presents you with a preview of each of the messages to be sent. With the debt limit talks being time sensitive, an email may be advisable to reach the recipients before any vote is taken. There is also the option to have the NEA send a printed version of your message. Sometimes a snail mail letter seems to get more attention than an email, but I 'd also want to send it myself on whatever letterhead I choose rather than having the NEA send it.

And if you need some comic relief on the debt ceiling issue, Andy Borowitz comes to the rescue on his Borowitz Report site:

    • Debt Ceiling Crisis: Like Y2K With Assholes Instead of Computers: Majority of Congressmen No Longer Remember Which Deal They Like

    • China Puts US on eBay: "Government Sold Separately," Sales Listing Says

On Education Week

Education Week has had several good articles this week, possibly highlighted by Alyson Klein's Harkin: No Specific Target Date Now for ESEA. Klein relates that Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, "declined in an interview today to be more specific about exactly when the Senate education committee would get around to marking up the very, very long-overdue ESEA reauthorization bill." Harkin is still seeking bipartisan cooperation in writing the bill.

Christina A. Samuels tells in Voucher Advocacy Shifting Focus, Report Says that voucher advocates have moved away from "extolling the academic achievement of voucher participants to focusing on the value of school choice as a virtue in itself."

Nirvi Shah adds some perspective to a continual problem in Report Finds Progress, Problems for Students With Learning Disabilities.

And Walt Gardner's For-Profit Charter Schools on his Reality Check blog is an excellent discussion about the track record of a couple well known charter school chains.

Another Astronomy Site

The eSchool News site of the week this week is Amazing Space. Classroom resources help students learn about space discoveries relates that the site "uses the Hubble Space Telescope’s discoveries to inspire and educate about the wonders of the universe. The site focuses on astronomy, math, and physics, and features lesson plans, printable images, and interactive online activities."

I found something I liked on the site with my first click to Hubble Reveals Orion in Picture-Perfect Glory. While I'm a sucker for almost anything dealing with the constellation Orion or the Orion Nebula, I liked that the Orion story was written at a reading level that intermediate students could handle. Their Zoomable Orion Nebula page was also cool, although I wish the authors had included a download link to the full size photo of the Orion Nebula and links to related sites such as the Astronomy Picture of the Day's Orion Nebula: The Hubble View.

While eSchool News chose to highlight the site this week, it appears that the site may have not been updated since last year. But there's still some good stuff there, especially for teachers of the intermediate grades.

Another Free HTML Editor (Yea!)

I added another free HTML editor to our Freebies page last night after reading Dan Knight's Death and Rebirth of a Power Mac G4. Dan gives BlueGriffon some high praise in his Low End Mac article. BlueGriffon is a WYSIWYG content editor powered by the Gecko rendering engine of Firefox 4. It's available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Unfortunately for me, the Mac version is for Intel chip machines only (See: No Lions or Snow Leopards), so I'm going on the strength of Dan's recommendation. (Note: I worked with Dan at the now defunct MacTimes News Network and began my View from the Classroom series on his Low End Mac site.)

Have a great weekend!

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