Sunday, December 25, 2011 - Merry Christmas

And the angel said unto them, Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.

Luke 2:10-11 (ASV)

The image above is a "scene from a life size nativity at the Luxembourg Christmas market." It was taken in 2006 by graphic artist Debbie Schiel who lives in Far North Queensland, Australia, and shared on the royalty-free stock.xchng site. The scripture was copied from my installation of the free, Macintosh Online Bible. There's also a free version for Windows users. On my iPhone, I currently use the ESV Bible app.

Best wishes from Annie and I to you for a joyous and fulfilling holiday season.

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Monday, December 26, 2011

Slow News Monday

If it weren't a slow news Monday after a holiday, I'd have probably missed Christopher Magan's tale, School bus driver in West St. Paul district honored for trivia game he plays with students. While I hope West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan school district bus driver Dennis Stricker keeps his mind on the road, trivia questions such as, Which state has no natural lakes, keep his riders on the right track. If the kids don't know the answers, they research them at home or school. Winners get to get off the bus first.

Had I not found Magan's article, I would have lead today with an Astronomy Picture of the Day rerun of the Crap Nebulae or a great shot of the storm that has engulfed most of Saturn's northern hemisphere for the last year. APOD featured them as their Picture of the Day yesterday and today. As I read the description of the storm on Saturn, I found myself following a link to more information about the storm. Possibly your students might also find it as interesting as I did. (Check out the Captain's Log entry for November 17, 2011, on the Ciclops page for more information.)

Chris Dawson has an interesting article about "a few things that a lot of us in the field [of technology] expected would be revolutionary in education that just sort of fizzled." And recently announced increased testing in New York moved Walt Gardner to write about it and overtesting in general in Testing Gone Wild.

Beyond that, Andrew Hartman's Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda, Michael Alison Chandler's Outside firm will check for cheating on District’s standardized test, and Charles Haynes's The truth about school prayer were about all I could come up with for today.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

I called Monday a slow news day, and today is more of the same. I'm not complaining, as I'm busy working on a big piece for our Senior Gardening web site this week, so the dearth of major education news may be a good thing. As a bit of a promo/preview, I put together a bunch of stills I took out our sunroom window of our main garden plot over the last twelve months.

Update (12/29/2011): With another holiday approaching and family coming in, I'm not sure if I'll be getting back to the keyboard for a Friday posting or not this week. So let me insert a great great story by Robert King that appeared in the Thursday Indianapolis Star, Mr. Sam cares for kids. King tells about the care and support Sam Davis, custodian and coach at Emma Donnan Middle School in Indianapolis, gives to the students there who know him as "Mr. Sam."

Getting to what is out there of possible interest:

• The Indianapolis Star: The mad scientist of middle school by Carrie Ritchie
• The Los Angeles Times: Two fourth-graders find a way to share school's food by Matt Stevens
• The Los Angeles Times: Sandra Day O'Connor promotes civics education by Howard Blume
• The Los Angeles Times: Governor Jerry Brown says he will increase education funding by Anthony York
• Reality Check blog on Education Week: Private Funding of Public Schools by Walt Gardner
• The Huffington Post: Arizona Schools' Ethnic Studies Program Ruled Illegal by Jacques Billeaud

Friday, December 30, 2011

If you have seasonal affective disorder, or just crave seeing something green or in bloom during the winter, take a peek at our Flowers in the Senior Garden feature. There's lots of pictures of flowers and of flowers peeking out behind lush, green growth of vegetable plants. The pink snapdragons shown in the image at right just blew me away last summer. I hadn't done any really special care for them, just transplanting them in at the end of our pea trellis. For my minor effort, they rewarded us with a summer of dazzling blooms.

Just a few articles of interest to wind up the week (and year):

• The Answer Sheet blog on The Washington Post: 10 education predictions for 2012 by Larry Ferlazzo
• The Los Angeles Times: Mandarin immersion program flourishes at L.A. school by Matt Stevens
• Reality Check blog on Education Week: The Intrusion of Religion in Schools by Walt Gardner

Thank You

Let me offer here my sincere thanks to our small, but apparently loyal group of readers of Educators' News. Your comments, suggestions, tips, criticisms, and encouragement throughout the year have been greatly appreciated.

Have a great weekend and new year!

Saturday, December 31, 2011 - Sunday, January 1, 2012

If you're an online writer or columnist, it's sort of expected that you'll do some kind of end of the year roundup article. I actually did two this year, but they were both for our Senior Gardening site. Instead of a new column here, I decided to wind up 2011 and begin 2012 with a look at the few columns I managed to post last year from both of my web sites. Eleven columns certainly isn't a lot, but taken in context with hundreds of daily posts to both sites, it's about all I could manage.

Good Grief!

The Saturday Terre Haute Tribune-Star certainly wasn't a bundle of joy for area residents. The headline proclaimed that Governor Mitch Daniels, acting in concert with the Indiana State Police, had conspired to limit crowd size inside the state capitol "for safety reasons." Daniels' staff sprung the new rule that goes into effect on January 1 at a quickie press conference on Friday. Reporters quickly saw through the 3,000 person limit, which included 1,700 state employees on most days, as a way to quiet protests over Daniels' and the Republican majority's plans to ram through their right-to-work legislation. Having successfully attacked the state's public schools and teachers' unions in the last session, Daniels & Company now move on to attack the power of working people's unions.

In the unbelievable realm, State Senator Vaneta Becker has proposed a bill to require "the state Department of Education to set standards for singing and playing the national anthem at public schools and universities." Oh, say, she can see only the "Normal" way to sing anthem relates that the bill "would require performers - whether amateur or professional - to sign a contract agreeing to follow the guidelines and would set a possible $25 fine for violators." Becker would further burden Indiana schools with a requirement theybecome the national anthem police and "maintain audio recordings of all performances for two years and develop a procedure for dealing with complaints about someone straying from the approved lyrical or musical guidelines."

Obviously, Big Brother is watching us and doesn't like the discontent he sees.

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