Monday, November 28, 2011

Looking Ahead

For many teachers and schools, December brings around the end of the first semester. So along with all the hoopla leading up to the holidays, one has to catch up on grading and posting scores. Holidays to remember, as if you might forget, include Hanukkah (begins at sunset, 20), Christmas (25), and New Year's Eve (31). Other dates of importance include Pearl Harbor remembrance (7) and the winter solstice (first day of winter, 22).

Besides the Teacher's Corner December Calendar pictured at right, the Scholastic Planning Calendar and the Crayola Calendar may provide folks looking for something unusual to observe this month just what they need (Eat a Red Apple Day?).

Privatization

Walt Gardner's The Stealth Campaign to Privatize Education from last Friday is definitely a good read. He discusses private entities pushing unproven technology as school "reform," writing:

I have no objection to innovation, provided it is not innovation for its own sake. But what is happening under the guise of putting children first is a thinly veiled attempt to privatize all public schools. Florida is not alone. Pennsylvania and Indiana are also in the vanguard, even though the evidence is far from convincing.

Scott Elliott has a related article in the Indianapolis Star, Parents can't get information on what takeover schools will offer, which highlights some of the coming problems in dealing with privatization.

Curiosity Launched

On Friday, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which carries a car-sized rover named Curiosity. From the press release, NASA Launches Most Capable and Robust Rover to Explore Mars, Curiosity should touchdown on Mars "near the foot of a mountain inside Gale Crater on August 6, 2012." It's two-year mission will be to investigate "whether the region has ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life."

Distinguishing it from the earlier Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity "will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover." Included in its package of 10 scientific instruments are "a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance, and an X-ray diffraction instrument for definitive identification of minerals in powdered samples."

NPR has a good story about the launch and rover in New Roving Science Lab Charts A Course For Mars.

Odds 'n' Ends

If it weren't for Walt Gardner and the folks at NASA, I'd have nothing to post today other than Andy Borowitz's FDA Declares Rick Perry a Vegetable and The Onion's timely Family Upgrades To Shells & Cheese. Things do tend to slow down a bit over a long holiday weekend.

Due to blended family schedules, we had Thanksgiving twice over the weekend! Burp! One of our daughters hosted a feast on Thursday, while we were the hosts on Saturday for a late Thanksgiving and early Christmas celebration with six of our eight grandchildren present. It was quite a day.

For several years I've tried to grow fall lettuce in our garden for Thanksgiving dinner. With the help of the floating row covers I wrote about several weeks ago, we had fresh lettuce for our Thanksgiving meals that was picked last Wednesday! The image at right shows the lettuce drying. We had both red and green romaine, iceberg and butterhead lettuce in the mix. There are still a few more lettuce plants out in the garden under the row covers, although we have what I think may be a season ending frost coming up later this week.

Getting back to something at least semi-educational, gardening far into November is one of the changes I've noticed in our weather over the last few years. Less desirable effects of what may be climate change include summer droughts and much higher winds than when we moved to this location almost eighteen years ago.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Online Learning and For-profit Cyber Charters

Diane Ravitch's Should Schools Be Run for Profit should be a must read for anyone concerned about where "education reform" is going in our country. Diane writes about the growth and potential dangers of online instruction and cyber charters. She isn't against technology in the classroom, but has some real concerns. "I confess that it troubles me to think of children sitting at home, day after day, with no opportunity for discussion and debate, no interaction with their peers, no face-to-face encounters with a real teacher."

Be sure to look at the lively discussion by readers that follows the column.

On the Blogs

NYC Teacher's Was There Clarity Now cracked me up. He writes in part:

We will do this, of course, via differentiated instruction. Over decades of facilitating standards-based rigorous curriculum and instructing pedagogues how to integrate rubric-centered learning styles, I've concluded definitively the most desirable mode of achieving differentiated instruction is via the quality review rubric, because it's uniform, and thus there is no room whatsoever for variation.

A comment by NYC Educator led me to Teachable Moments: A Comic Journal by Chris Pearce. Chris's work might bring a grin to your face.

Source: lifehacker.com via Mary on Pinterest

Mrs. Chili reposted a graphic she'd run before on her A Teacher's Education blog. "An Apostrophe Is The Difference Between" is her Grammar Wednesday posting for today. Since the graphic came from Pinterest, I can embed it here for you.

Mrs. Bluebird's Thanksgiving Break is a quick, good read.

Mr. Teachbad's Top 10 Reasons You May NOT Want to be a Teacher is all too accurate.

Paul Hamilton's Free Resources from the Net for Every Learner blog has a couple of recent postings that may be of interest:

• Android 4.0 Will Make Phones and Tablets More Accessible for Blind & Low Vision Users
• Readability Redux for Chrome — Browser Extension that Makes Web Pages Easier to Read

Snow Delays, Already

We had some really heavy snow yesterday, but only for an hour or so. It was warm enough that the snow melted off quickly, but northern Indiana wasn't so fortunate. Snow delays schools in northern, central Indiana tells of the results of up to ten inches of snow that came early in the season.

I was out running errands when the snow started. As I drove home, giant snowflakes struck the windshield of my truck. I ran upstairs when I got home and grabbed the camera to document the early snow. For balance, I grabbed a shot out the same window this morning.

And yes, we still have lettuce growing under floating row covers in our garden!

Odds 'n' Ends

Several other articles that have showed up online yesterday and today may be of interest to readers:

• ScienceDaily: Abstinence-Only Education Does Not Lead to Abstinent Behavior, Researchers Find
• Reuters via YahooNews: Poverty dominates many school districts: Census by Lisa Lambert
• Reality Check blog on Education Week: Skilled Workers Beat Out Degree Holders for Jobs by Walt Gardner
• Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet blog on the Washington Post: "Broader, bolder" strategy to ending poverty’s influence on education by Pedro Nogura
• Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet blog on the Washington Post: Gingrich on school and work: More than a bad idea by Mike Rose
• The New York Times: Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. Schools by Sam Dillon

Friday, December 2, 2011

It's not much of a posting today. But let me share a few lines from Deborah Meier's blog posting linked below:

The hope that there is a fast route to solving big problems is alluring...

But in the 50 years I spent fiddling with school-based problems I knew there probably was no grand solution that could occur in my lifetime until we tackled inequality head on. So, I'd have to be satisfied with "solving" the daily "little" dilemmas and puzzles about Child X or Y.

And I think that's what most of us do in the classroom.

• eSchool News: Big expansion, big questions for Teach for America
• The New York Times: Districts Pay Less in Poor Schools, Report Says by Sam Dillon
• The Los Angeles Times: Individual Los Angeles schools gain new autonomy by Howard Blume
• NPR: Tainted Nectar? Consumer Group Warns Of Arsenic In Fruit Juice by Kristofor Husted
• Reality Check blog on Education Week: Drawing the Line on Parental Involvement by Walt Gardner
• Bridging Differences blog on Education Week: Getting From Here to There by Deborah Meier

Have a great weekend!

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