If Yale Can’t Do It….
By audhill | March 9, 2008
A charter school opening in 2009 in Washington Heights has got the solution … just pay teachers more. The school is the brainchild of Yale graduate and former Teach for America middle school teacher, Zeke M. Vanderhoek.
His idea is that if teachers were paid real money (in this case $125,000 a year plus bonuses for better performance), schools would be successful. His plan (as per the NYT) is to attract the best and brightest by spending more money on them, and to make up the shortfall by taking only a $90,000 salary himself and having no assistant principals, no disciplinary deans, no attendance secretary, and only one or two social workers. He’ll have a longer school day and a longer school year. The teachers will do all the admin work themselves, and they’ll teach low performing and area students with 30 kids in a class.
Basically, his idea is that if all the teachers were as bright and ambitious as he is, schools wouldn’t need all those frills… like low class size, time to create curriculum, disciplinary deans and social workers to handle the raging, hormonal distractions that threaten to interrupt every day.
Good luck with that.
Topics: education | 4 Comments »
By audhill | March 6, 2008
Topics: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Hey Kids, there’s code behind that curtain!
By audhill | February 20, 2008
I’ve I just got the okay to explore wikis with my kids. Wikispaces is the one that was first suggested, but I’m also looking at ones with more utility.. I’m looking at editwiki, pbwiki… any other suggestions?
We need a wiki that gives us control, security, flexibility, and options for designing pages and text. It has to haveaccess to the code view. Students in my classes will work in the wysiwyg editor, but I want them to also learn to use rudimentary html code. It makes sense for them to learn how to retrieve the hex for a color that isn’t available, manipulate text when an option isn’t available, add a link to a comment, resize a picture, or clean up all that overcoded microsoft word. Most importantly, I want them to begin to think about what goes on BEHIND the scenes in a wiki, blog, webpage, word document…
Topics: education | 2 Comments »
looking in the mirror
By audhill | February 20, 2008
Topics: for fun, personal | No Comments »
Brave New World Order
By audhill | February 10, 2008
There is so much spin on how innovative and transcending the new world is. How much is going to change for nearly everyone. I’m not so sure. For one, I’m not so sure how new any of this is… it seems to be that new technologies are layered onto universal ideas and repackaged as a totally new world. Most of the markers you list here are the same markers that have always measured the successful.
Great Collaborators and Orchestrators who are able to communicate a global business opportunities to a local market and implement the company’s goals.
Great Synthesizers who are able to take new discoveries and make products from them.
Great Explainers who are able to teach or explain complex ideas in simple terms.
Great Leveragers who are able to identify problems and solve them quickly and permanently.
Great Adapters who have the deep, versatile knowledge and attitude to be able to adapt to new opportunities quickly when they become available.
Green People who will work in research and development of environmentally friendly and/or renewable energies.
Passionate Personalizers put a personal touch on mundane jobs that make them marketable.
Math Lovers are people that are able to create mathematic algorhythms that organize and manipulate the digital data that people will need to use.
The Great Localizers can translate the global economy into local opportunities.
Secondly, not everything is wonderful. I do not believe, for instance, that constant self marketing for your survival is accomplishment. A chronic state of insecurity marketed as the new expectation is less about a brave new informational age then it is just a modern twist on the devaluing of workers I reject it as a good, even if there are true elements for some.
Of course, a curious, adaptable and constant learner with a positive attitude will always rise in nearly any environment. My husband calls this making your own luck. But, they aren’t the only ones to rise. In the political world it’s not always what you know and I don’t see that the political world is so very changed. Personality, position and type go a long way. If people like you… you go far (even if you’re none too bright) If you’re what is expected for the job (race, gender, interests, age, looks, credentials, connections etc) you have an edge. The brave new world has yet to surplant human nature or bias.
Finally, I think that the local phenomenon is underplayed. A lot of what is referred to here will not affect most people all that much. I could be wrong, but I think it’s pretty likely that most jobs are going to remain localized for most people. More people will be nurses, doctors, teachers, police, medtechs, child care workers, store managers, contractors, firemen, hairdressers… etc. etc. then will be live in some rarefied flat world of growth and innovation without end. For most of us, the local world is the world.
Topics: Uncategorized, education | 3 Comments »
The only way out is through
By audhill | February 10, 2008
I opened on Scott McLeod’s post about a technology facilitator named Pam who felt misused by the response she got from teachers and administrators to her presentation on web 2.0 tools. My thought is that the best use of a bad experience is self reflection. When people don’t respond the way we want them to.. when their views are different from ours.. when we feel misused or underappreciated, whatever else is going on, it’s always ALSO an opportunity for us to look at ourselves . It’s particularly important for creating bridges… it’s useful when we need to move on… it helps us to keep the focus on the things we can control. This was my comment.
Topics: education | 1 Comment »
politically correct
By audhill | January 21, 2008
To honor MLK’s birthday, I’d like to take a little stab at political correctness.
It is my view that promoting politically correct speech is a bad idea. Political correctness catches as many dolphins as it does tuna in it’s all encompassing net. It is the stuff of alienation and power playing, not community building. It should be eradicated as a good and replaced with a culture of personal reflection and self and other acceptance.
Certainly there are borders to everything and some speech is malicious and ill intended, however there is no community where there are guardians of the language. It may be temporarily satisfying for some, but it is ineffective in the long term. It does not produce sensitivity, unless by sensitivity we mean hyper awareness and piety… not awareness of one’s own prejudices so much as fear of labels and not internal goodness so much as self satisfaction. The impact of self or other imposed political correctness is not merely the eradication of malice in speech, but the eradication of ease and trust between people. Real interaction (and therefore potential for communion) is replaced with hyperconscious efforts to negotiate safe harbor.This may seem like a good enough result to those who put their trust in surfaces, but I put my trust in honest interplay (which is messy but more productive).
For that reason, I think that a better suggestion is this: Do not resign yourself to the unsightly demilitarized zones of polite political correctness. Rather, endeavor to be forthright and truthful instead of self protective. Make a point of surrounding yourself with people who say what they think and who expect and accept the same from you. Laugh at the dicey and offensive if it’s funny, but rely on and listen to your inner voice to determine when and where a line is crossed. Avoid the pious and rigorously politically correct, not just because they are the least interesting of people but because these are often the most insincere. Do not be confused by opportunists making use of surfaces to serve their ambitions.
Value honesty, humor, curiosity and openness in others. Never ask them to say the right thing, although be free and brave enough to challenge ideas that you disagree with. That being said, do not offend easily. Accept that sometimes you will be offended. When necessary be unwilling to be silent. With real people create real bridges.
Topics: reasoned, language | No Comments »
How?
By audhill | January 19, 2008
In my experience, classes that are heterogeneously grouped (or, in the case of an advanced group, include unable students) create slower moving classes that disadvantage better students and brings down the level of education overall. I know this is true in the middle grades, where most of the literature read is 3 or 4 years below grade level to support students that can’t read well. I know it’s true in math where students who need basic math computational skills are dragged through a curriculum they can’t understand in the hopes that they will catch up if they are exposed conceptually. I know it’s true in the content areas where we routinely choose text books that are below reading level so that students who have reading difficulties can read the texts.
Those who maintain that the research shows that heterogeneous grouping benefits children, rarely mention and often don’t even know that much of the research demonstrating the benefit of heterogeneity measures social benefits rather than academic ones and that significant research exists that documents the benefits across the board of homogeneous instruction . Because some value social benefits over academic ones, they ignore and obscure a documented decline at the top and no movement at the bottom (those scoring a 1 on the state tests) ( My district has 5 or 6 years of a decline in 4s and rises in 2s and 3s on the NCLB tests in language arts.) It benefits the 2s and some lower 3s, but it should suprise no one that students who are not working at the pace they are able to lose momentum and teachers who teach to the middle provide fewer challenge for the top and less remediation for the bottom.
It should suprise no one to know that differentiation is unequal to the task of consistently creating work that is appropriately challenging for students of widely differing ability or preparedness. It is not merely a matter of classroom management or creating more intricate instruction to meet all needs. Differentiation depends on the concept that every child’s needs can be served by a simple tweak up or down. With such wide disparities, a tweak is not nearly enough.When you have a student reading on the second grade level in the same class with a student at PHS (post high school) level, the entire body of work is nearly always inappropriate for one or another group. Our better students often spend large parts of their school careers in classes where they know everything that is being taught to them before they enter. Enrichment often takes the form of diy projects which usually means extra work and at your seat work that will free up the teacher to work with the bottom. Work that would actually challenge requires more teacher interaction than a system with a significant bottom percentile can afford.
Similarly, bottom students who need focused time on below grade level skill work, often spend their time drowning in teach to the middle assignments and texts that they simply can’t manage. Or patronized by happy work assignments that teach them nothing, but give them a sense of at least accomplishing something. And, then… since the test is always with us, loads of tax dollars are spent on homogeneously grouping those same kids after school and in summer academies in a misguided effort to try to shore up what we are unwilling to address during the school day: different levels of ability or readiness often need different content and differently structured classes. We give lip service to challenging them all equallybut we know it’s not happening. Advocates turn a blind eye (unless it’s their own children on the chopping block); Compliance and complicity allow it to go on.
It sounds equitable and compassionate to keep students of widely differing ability together all day, although it isn’t. But, we can’t simply afford to put children in homogeneous groups all day long, either. Children who are disadvantaged end up never catching up, reinforcing a class based system where some children are successful by birth and others are not. Also, when children who are behind only work in homogeneous groups, they get a skewed idea of what good work is and an even more skewed idea of their entitlements relative to other more able or prepared children. We must agree that every child has the right to see and participate in what’s possible.
If every child has the right to run the race they are ready for among other children who are equally capable and ready to run the same race AND every child has the right to participate in an enriched curriculum and be exposed to the highest level work and standard… if differentiation (certainly as it is practiced and taught) is a pleasant fantasy)… where do we go as an educational system?
Topics: reasoned, education | 2 Comments »
unplugged
By audhill | January 19, 2008
Here’s an admission: sometimes…. surfing the net and social networking makes me feel guilty. It makes me feel the same way I feel about watching TV … I feel so guilty that if the phone rings and I’m watching it, I turn the sound down.. not so I can hear you, but so that YOU don’t hear me (and know what I am doing). I don’t know what you will think listening to The Wire, Lost, or Heroes in the background, but I feel like I’ve been caught doing nothing, when I should be out hiking or making art or writing an article.
My fear is that the person who spends all of his or her time chatting people up online, commenting, watching TV or surfing around is a person whose real life is molding away. And my worry for children is that we have the wrong idea. We think we should find ways of engaging them while they are playing video games or IMing and texting their friends, when maybe what we should be doing, is forcing them to go outside, make them learn and do in the real, real world. I’m not a luddite, but even Bill Gates limits his children’s use of media to 45 minutes a day (and he includes video games in that time).
I’m wondering if I should limit mine. Should we limit our children’s? Maybe so. Clearly there’s purpose and value in establishing guidelines for internet use and for looking carefully at what the endgame is.
I used to say that content is everything, but I don’t think so anymore. I can’t fool myself into believing that if it’s educational (The We only watch the Discovery Channel and PBS Defense), it’s okay to stay online all day. This should be my measurement: online activity that replaces an offline life is addiction and is something to avoid. Successful living depends on balancing the different aspects of one’s life and being sure to have a rich, daily life offline as well as on.
Topics: living, personal | No Comments »
worried, night time headache thingy
By audhill | January 19, 2008
I work in a district that has a very active parent body. Most of the time and with most parents, that’s a wonderful thing. But around grading time,it gets a little sticky… mainly because parents want good grades and every year one or two of them try to bully teachers into giving grades that their children do not deserve.
But, crazymaking parents notwithstanding, I didn’t pull any punches in the first marking period. Just as an experiment, I decided that I would give the straight out truth this year. (not that I don’t try to be truthful every year…. but I’ve been known to overlook an assignment here and there. This year…. every kid got the grade he or she deserved. No squinting my way through to a C where a D was called for. You could say I was ethical, but actually I just wanted to see if gloss-free reporting improved performance.
The problem with being ethical (or experimental) is that there ar
e no rewards for it. A little grade inflation would have saved me from parent calls, emails,and meetings designed to deflect a sour feeling of parental responsibility and worry. It would have garnered me more love and much less time creating materials to use in evaluation. Because let’s face it… if you are inflating, you don’t need three essays where one will do.
Giving the grade deserved is a radical stance and many of my colleagues don’t do it. The consensus is that it’s just not worth it. Just before and after marking periods, I have to ask myself… why do I do it? I know I get more and better work when I don’t give an the option to get a undeserved good grade… but I pay a price for it. (as a former student of mine once said, “Grades come first Ms. Hill. It doesn’t matter what you teach or how nice you are, we like the teachers who give us good grades.”)
Last marking period, instead of a good night’s sleep when I posted my grade, I was awake and staring at them… checking them and preparing my defense. I toyed at the end, knowing which grade was the threshhold grade in each case, which parents would ignore any grade of C or better, which ones would be in asking about a B, which parent just wants their child to pass and which ones want to know exactly why their child got an A and not an A+.
I held my ground. I believe in grades… not because grades have value, but for the reason why they were first developed: to give information about performance and effort when intrinsic information is unavailable. Grades are consequences and acknowledgement.
This marking period is upon us; good luck to me.
Topics: education | No Comments »