Educators' News - October 3-7, 2011

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Monday, October 3, 2011

The Man I Voted For

A couple of weeks ago, I resolved to start every Monday posting with an inspiring human interest story about students, teachers, and/or schools. After just two weeks of such stuff, my plan crashed and burned today. I couldn't find a single warm, fuzzy story about great teaching or student victories online this weekend.

While searching for a story, I sought out Stephanie Salter's column on the Terre Haute Tribune-Star. She's almost always good for a quote in a pinch. It turned out that Where have all the protest songs gone did have a paragraph about teachers in it.

Among public-sector unions, more than 37 percent of members are teachers, trainers and library workers. While merit pay, charter schools and lawmakers’ obsession with test scores can make a teacher’s life miserable, such demons don’t lend themselves to searing song lyrics.

If I could have beer with the President,
I'd choose a Guinness Stout.

And wouldn't you like to hear me tell
of the things we'd talk about?

I'd say, "Barack, can you tell me, please,
just one thing I do implore,

"Who are you, and what did you do
with the man I voted for?"

Frustrated in my search for a great education human interest story, I took a break and began chasing down Stephanie's reference to the Anne Feeney song, The Man I Voted For, just for the fun of it.

Paydirt!

It turned out that the song was written by Pat Lamanna as If I Could Have a Beer with the President, but got renamed, slightly adapted, and covered by Feeney. The lyrics are incredible and are as applicable to what the President and Secretary Duncan have done to education in this country as they are to ending war. I've included just a few lines at left from the original Lamanna version.

And thanks, Steph, for the "story starter."

Odds 'n' Ends

Having pretty well used up my writing time, let me offer some links to some non-warm and fuzzy education stories:

eSchool News: Hispanic students vanish from Alabama schools
AP: Massachusetts considers tests to assess kindergarten kids
ScienceDaily: New Software Brings Science to Life for Young People

Clara Moskowitz's Are Aliens Part of God's Plan, Too? Finding E.T. Could Change Religion Forever on Space.com certainly isn't educationally related, but it was an interesting read.

And possibly for a bit of balance, here are a couple of pieces that may get under your skin a bit.

The Washington Post: A federal takeover of education by George F. Will
Time: Coming Together to Kill Education Reform by Andy Rotherham

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

NASA Contest

NASA announced a contest yesterday for K-12 students to "help the agency give the twin spacecraft headed to orbit around the moon new names." Currently known as GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory), the spacecraft will begin creating a gravity map of the moon when they reach it in late December and early January. "The mission also will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, including the size of a possible inner core, and it should provide scientists with a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed."

Teachers may submit an entry in the contest for an individual student or for a group of students, but only one entry for each class or group of students. Teachers with multiple class periods (different groups of students) may submit one entry for each class. The deadline for entries is November 11, 2011.

When I read the contest announcement yesterday, I was immediately puzzled by a line that said the "spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. on Sept. 10 to begin a three-and-a-half-month journey to the moon." Being part of the Apollo moon mission generation, I wondered why the Grail spacecraft would take so long to reach the moon when the Apollo spacecraft did it in about three days or so. A posting by collectSPACE editor Robert Pearlman led me to the answer on the Grail Launch Blog:

The GRAIL spacecraft will not go directly to the moon, but instead are taking a circuitous route that calls for them to loop out deep into space on a journey that will cover about 2.6 million miles and take three-and-a-half months. By taking the longer path, the spacecraft don't have to use much fuel to slow down and go into lunar orbit. Apollo capsules carrying astronauts took three days to reach the moon, but they had to fire their braking rocket to go into lunar orbit.

On the Blogs

One Sunflower relates in Apple Pie A B C, why she is so excited about a new alphabet book:

I love it when an alphabet book is more than just an list of things that begin with the letters in the alphabet.

What I love about this book is that there is a story. My preschoolers barely understand the concept of the alphabet but they can certainly understand the storyline about a girl who has made an apple pie and her dog who desperately wants to eat it.

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day may have a good one for history and geography teachers in The Best Historical Photo + Video Map-Based Sites.

Deven Black writes in The Education Story the Media is Missing on his Education on the Plate blog:

Teachers are lazy,
Teachers don’t care.
Teachers lose interest.
Teachers are complacent.
Teachers teach because they aren’t smart enough to do anything else.

He then proceeds to tell about the EdCamp movement with the tongue-in-cheek descriptor of "complacent teachers who gathered together and learned from each other" on their own time.

Arne Duncan has announced some new wrinkles and contests for rating and "improving" colleges of education in A New Approach to Teacher Education Reform and Improvement. Zachary Chase pretty well takes apart Duncan's new program in The DoE is circumventing democracy on Autodizactic. He begins:

In the latest round of circumventing the United States Congress, the U.S. Department of Education rolled out a new competition Friday that mirrors the cock fight tactics of Race to the Top.

In competing for a portion of $185 million in funding, states will have to show their colleges’ teacher preparation programs graduate teachers whose students score well on state testing. They’ll also need to tighten up teacher licensing requirements and kill off poor performing teacher preparation programs.

Correction

Yom Kippur was left off our Looking Ahead section last Friday. The holiday begins at sundown Friday, October 7. My sincere apologies for the oversight.

Odds 'n' Ends

I have just a few goodies to add here before winding up with some site news.

Bridging Differences blog on Education Week: The Trouble With the Parent Trigger by Diane Ravitch
NPR: USDA Wants To Limit Potatoes In School Lunches by Josie Huang

There probably should be some mystery about how a web site operates just to heighten interest, but I already gave away my new and possibly failed plan to open each Monday's posting with a warm, fuzzy, human interest story. Our On the Blogs feature has now seemed to settle in as a regular Wednesday event, although I'm still looking for great teacher blogs to add to my new list for this year ( ).

Regular readers may have already picked up on another new wrinkle for this site. Our Wednesday banner advertising for the last few weeks has featured various charities. The eye-catching and somehow humorously annoying cow from Heifer International at the top of this posting is one the ex-farmer in me couldn't resist. The change in banner advertising is still an experiment. It's a bit harder than one might think to find useable banners for responsible charities to use on this site!

I added a short column today that tells how this change came about, A Charity Phone Solicitation.

We'll see how it goes.

Late Update

CNN: Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies by Brandon Griggs
The Wall Street Journal: The Steve Jobs I Knew by Walter S. Mossberg

Friday, October 7, 2011

October Night Sky - Moons, Jupiter, and Meteor Showers

A page on Space.com features the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Jane Houston Jones telling about the highlights of skywatching for October. She relates that Jupiter will make its closest approach to Earth on October 28. It's four Galilean moons can be easily viewed this month with a set of binoculars or an inexpensive telescope.

While the moon will somewhat diminish the Draconid meteor shower on October 8, EarthSky's Deborah Byrd writes in A boom year for the legendary Draconid meteors in 2011 that "some astronomers are calling for a Draconid meteor shower to burst into storm in 2011, with rates of 1,000 meteors per hour."

Jones also relates that moonlight will interfere not only with the Draconid meteor shower tomorrow night, but also with the Orionids that usually occur October 17-25, and should peak this year on the night of October 21-22.

I haven't had my telescope out in a while, but I think I'll dust it off for that closest approach of Jupiter...for me and grandkids who may be visiting this month.

But knowing ahead of time what that streak in the sky was can be pretty cool, and it can really impress students who might ask about it.

$35 Tablet Computer for India's Rural Poor

Over a year ago, the Indian government announced its intention to provide tablet computers costing US $35 to its poorest students. On Wednesday, India introduced the Aakash, or “sky” in English, tablet computer that with a $10/unit subsidy from the government will cost $35 for students and teachers! India's Minister of Human Resources Development, Kapil Sibal, "called the announcement a message to all children of the world." "This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are disempowered. This is for all those who live on the fringes of society."

eSchool News notes in India announces $35 tablet computer for rural poor that the tablet's developer, Datawind, "says it can make about 100,000 units a month at the moment, not nearly enough to meet India’s hope of getting its 220 million children online."

Lunchroom Wars

The school lunch rules proposed in January by the USDA are stirring some backlash over their suggested limitation of starchy veggies such as peas and corn. The real target of the rules seems to be french fries, tater tots, and the like. "Peas kind of got dragged along with their fellow starchy vegetables in this," notes Margo Wootan, a nutrition specialist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a supporter of the new rules, in Peas, corn and other starchy veggies at center of furor over USDA school lunch guidelines. Maine Senator Susan Collins, usually a fairly cool head in most things, took up for her state's potato industry, saying, "I certainly agree that french fries is not the healthiest choice, but a baked potato can be a good source of potassium for our children." Collins "is trying to block the funding needed to implement the guidelines."