the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Schools are finally realizing if you don’t have standards-based grading you really do not have a standards-based education.
No More A’s for Good Behavior – NYTimes.comÂ
This seems like something that should have been figured out some time ago, that grading and assessing mastery is more important that deportment and compliance. Maybe this is the first step to identifying kids whose lack of compliance — missed homework, inattention — is due to their not being challenged.Â
Link: That this question needs to be asked says a lot.
Was any school ever improved by closing it? Did students get better education or learn English because their school was closed?
Link: What Makes a Great Teacher?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/
Just as soldiers know best what works on the ground, perhaps our educational system will re-focus on tactics instead of strategy. The top-down approach doesn’t work, given the sheer number of entities — school boards, citizens groups, unions, legislative committees, PACs, thinktanks, textbook publishers, test administrators — who have an axe to grind. As the old saying goes, everything works in Theory, but we don’t live there.Â
Roger Ebert reports on the human condition.
The bottom line is that so many of you were betrayed by life before you really even got started. How must it feel to be told by a parent that you are stupid, ugly, worthless? To be struck by such a parent? To be hated by the supreme authority in your young life? And then often begged to forgive and understand them? What’s that about? The cruelty is clear cut. But the pleas for remorse must inspire pity and contempt. The lesson is that people can be shabby and mean, and not to be trusted. People can be evil. No wonder you live in a shell. I still remember hurts and wounds from my early years, and know they were trivial. How must it feel to be struck by a parent? How can a parent be so cruel?
I could write a bunch on this, but I think his questions are better than my answers could ever be. You can imagine how it feels “to be told by a parent that you are stupid, ugly, worthless.” But I don’t have to imagine it.
I know the answer to his penultimate question (“How must it feel to be struck by a parent?”) but not the last one. Better to ask how people like that willingly become parents and don’t see the things they do and what they mean.
Link: Who thought it was a good idea to make things worse for generations yet to come?
We’re doing to higher education what we already did to secondary education; private schools, and public schools barely scraping by with lower standards, with smart people knowing that that’s not where you send your kids if you value education, except that we’ll want those public university students to take out lots of loans.
From an Anne Geddes book in a waiting room.
Think about that. These people
And the hours? Not much different from regular office workers: 7 or 8 to 5, some more, some less. It’s not 9-3 unless you think the classrooms clean themselves, that materials are made and distributed by fairies, that curriculum planning is easy, and that managing kids, their learning styles and needs, is trivial. Add to this the bureaucratic overhead and the constant attacks by people who haven’t been inside a school since their own unsuccessful school days and it’s a wonder anyone bothers with it as a profession.Â
Most days the kids make it worthwhile, bless ‘em.Â
Thinking more on the idea of readiness for school.Â
How do we make the change from five years old as the ideal time to enter school to either making as assessment of each child (complicated) or making more pre-K opportunities available for all young students?Â
Assessing each child is too risky: those who are found wanting are starting out behind and they or their families may be the least able to cope with that. I’m sure in many cases, getting a child off to school is considered liberating. Maybe not ideal but it is what it is. So making sure they’re ready makes more sense.Â
So what does an incoming kindergartener need to know?Â
Doing some some interviews with K/1s today, I was glad to see so many enjoyed math games and simple math work. The challenge is to keep that going: mathematics is a language and the only way to master a language is to use it. Written and oral language will come, unless there is some profound learning disorder or impairment but math can easily be neglected. And with math comes science, another subject that got a lot of interest.Â
Do they need to know how to read? No, though some can. But a mastery of the fundamentals, of letters and sounds, and the idea that those arcane squiggles make up words and sentences and books is important.Â
So what’s magical about the age of five for children to enter school? And what should they be expected to do and know at that age? Are there any entry requirements for entering school? We have a lot of assessments of kids at various levels, both formal and informal, from daily/weekly checkins to report cards and standardized tests. And of course we have graduation requirements. But do we ever assess a child’s readiness for school before they arrive?Â
Why not?Â
We do require an assessment if a child wants to be admitted before their fifth birthday. But what’s so magical about being five? It seems to be an open question.Â
Or we could learn this example, formerly used in New Zealand:
Children entered school on their fifth birthday, whenever that fell in the year. They were then moved along to the “primary” grades when they were considered ready, whether that was the June after they entered or at the end of the next year. That seemed to allow for those students who were developmentally ready to begin earlier and those who were not to have more time without any attached stigma.
Consider that a 5 year old has 20% more life experience than a 4 year old, that much more time observing, absorbing, questioning, and just being. A lot happens in those years, lots of teeth coming and going, more language skills, more activities (learning to ride a bike and swim, first exposure to organized team sports). Could those used as part of the assessment for readiness? Could a child’s ability to manage their behavior on a sports field or control their body enough to swim or bike be used to gauge their readiness for the classroom?Â
Even at the purely academic level, what skills should they have? Their letters and numbers (how far? to 100?), their colors and shapes? Should they understand that letters make sounds as a foundation for phonics and learning to read? Or is just knowing the 26 symbols enough? Is knowing 1-10 enough? Or should they know that some numbers are bigger: if you give a child 10 pieces of candy and ask for three 3, will they count three out or just push the pile across to you?Â
For all the talk about graduation requirements and declining performance of college freshmen, maybe it’s time we looked at how prepared kids are to enter school as a way of ensuring they have what they need for a fulfilling life when they leave school. Â
Some people swore that the house was haunted.
Haunted? Like, by ghosts? No, it wasn’t like that. But “having or showing signs of mental anguish or torment” as the definition reads? That’s more accurate.
But how does that work for an inanimate object, like a house? Well, if you consider that a house is made of wood and wood comes from trees and trees are living things, can’t living things be unhappy, maybe even very unhappy? If a house was made of wood from trees that were unhappy in life, does the wood remember? Can you expect those warped gnarled timbers to hold their shape, bear that load, to shed weather any better after being harvested than it did before?
This house was built from wood that should have been plowed into a slash pile and burned before anyone relied on it for anything but heat. The trees were bent and twisted from weather and wind over many years and had been left standing when others around them had been harvested.
After years of standing as a windbreak and being used as a living fenceline, having gradually engulfed wires and staples, the land was cleared and no one related their story to the new owner. New to the territory, they pulled the trees down and piled them up for burning. But before the wood was dry enough, someone took the bigger pieces and built the house — the one we’re talking about — from the lumber they trimmed from them. No one knew who took the wood or who built the house. We don’t know how they milled it, as crooked and dangerous as it was. No one ever saw it in its intended location. We never saw it til it got here, where you see it now.
It moved itself here, where the trees came from. We never figured out how. It left some marks behind, of course. Nothing that big moves without leaving some trace. That gate you came through? Demolished. Knocked flat with 20 feet of hedge on either side of it. Some gouges in the lawn there, too. But we never found where it started from. And no one claimed it. Can you imagine a “Lost: house” posted on a telephone pole? See a milk carton with “Have you seen my house?” printed on it?
Next morning, the coast watchers came out to check the beach and do their usual weather observations and look for any problems. And there it sat. Right on that cliff as if it had been built there. The old fellow who was first to see it, well, he didn’t know any better, so he went up to it and tried to open the door. It was locked or somehow held shut. He kept on pulling and knocking and for some reason it finally opened (according to the fellow with him that morning). He went in and the door slammed so hard, the house jumped off the ground. And out through the front door, on the opposite side, he came flying out and ended up out in the channel, about where you see those gulls. Fully 20 yards.
His partner rescued him, as they had a boat and life-rings right there, but he quit that day and never came back. Haven’t had a coast watcher here since. No one will take the job.
Time was, we had a swimming beach and a boat launch here and some picnic tables and fire rings for families to enjoy. But then that house arrived.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.