My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

Somebody constructed this video explaining SOPA.  It’s a great teaching tool for something few understand.  It is also crafted in such a way that if SOPA were passed the distribution company of this movie would be able to pull down my site, and remove referenced to my entire site from all search engines.  I would, and do, have a legal basis for using it because it is fair use and is definitely parody by being paradoxical (using copyrighted content as a social meme to explain how the law is wrong).  However, if SOPA is passed, my site would be taken down first, then I would have to hire a lawyer and go to court with a major Hollywood studio to make that point and get my site re-established.  And I didn’t even make or post this video, I just have a link to it.

SOPA is a shoot-first, ask questions later law, which is why it would cripple the Internet.

In today’s Washington Post, Jay Mathews writes:

You’ve missed the mark. Teaching has to start with the students sitting in the class – their abilities, challenges and attitude. It doesn’t start with a lesson plan. Great lesson plans are drafted by skilled teachers to best broach the subject to their specific students in their specific class on that specific day.

It would be like you asking for journalistic story model on which you can base all your writing. They might help, a little, but as you got to be a better journalist, they would be almost worthless. That’s why you can find story models in journalism 101, but not in an online sharing site for the top reporters at the Washington Post.

Teach For America has a lot of good-hearted amateurs, trying to do the work of professionals. Unfortunately for us professional educators, journalists like you put too much credibility to the gripes of some TFA newcomer months into their new career. I’m also a career changer – 25 years in journalism at the highest levels and 7 years in teaching. I might have said the same thing about lesson plans my first year or two, of course, I didn’t know anything about teaching then.

Che Guevara wrote about popular uprising and one of the main tenants is, one can’t win a battle against a major organized military force.  One can create a climate of fear within the establishment which prompts violent and unwarranted backlash, and such force when seen by the general population is galvanizing for the great sea of populace which makes up the support and force of the rebel vanguard.

I guess nobody’s read anything about popular uprising lately.

So the media lampooned the Tea Party, and nothing was done about them.  Jokers in hats.  Nobody in the group really stood for anything.  Ignore them and they’ll go away, peter out, become irrelevant after their 15 minutes of attention.

Then they came back in the mid-terms and kicked everybody’s ass, especially the Republicans who thought they had cooped the group.

Fast forward to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everything.  Nobody’s taking that chance.  They are forcibly removing them, just before the freezing cold can set in and Winter gets the job done without any show of force.

And at college campuses, the type of decisions that lead to the shootings at Kent State (May 4, 1970) are being made, again.

Here’s a letter by a University of California, Davis professor about the recent non-violent protests there and the violence that was used to break them up:

The youtube links tell the story.

—————————

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

18 November 2011

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons,hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

One of the things I do is work with the Education Study Group, an organization that supports teachers doing cheap and fast experimentation and data gathering on what works and doesn’t in their classroom and education as a whole.

This video explains the rational, from a Fortune 500 perspective:

Data should not be about Teacher Evaluation and Accountability, nor should it be another lever where the teaching relationship between teacher and student is managed from four levels above the classroom.

Keep this in mind when you look at the management of Education Policy.

“Happy Black Friday!” one hears repeatedly around Thanksgiving from the newly minted residents of the USA which make up the bulk of our Title-One students.

One hears it on the playground, in the hallways, the cafeteria and art room, “Happy Black Friday!” for the weeks leading up to our November break.

It’s apparently a national holiday, clearly, and these folks just want to fit in.

It’s not their fault.  They are using the information provided … in the media.  Searching the past week’s Washington Post Online, there are 65 articles about Thanksgiving, and 69 about Black Friday.

Stories about Thanksgiving are recipes and the other fluff journalism. Black Friday is about our national economic health.    Thanksgiving is relegated to inserts and the last 2 minutes of local newscasts.  Black Friday are headlines and top stories.

A recent CBS MoneyWatch piece, “Black Friday shopping: 5 reasons to stay home” did not mention Thanksgiving, which, in my book, is the main reason to stay home.

So what do the kids see as most important when processing their limited-English-proficiency-media-gestalt?

It’s all about Black Friday and how fast we can get through the fourth Thursday in November so retailers can start putting up (if they haven’t already) Christmas decorations.

Black Friday (not Thanksgiving) gets the media-hype building in the weeks before our November Holiday Break.  You know, the break for Black Friday.

So “Happy Black Friday!” everyone, and don’t eat too much so you’re in shape to head out to the stores at midnight, Thanksgiving night.

Thanksgiving, you know, “It’s the day before Black Friday.”

Related articles

• Most Toys R€ Us stores in Mass. will open at 1 a.m. on Black Friday (boston.com)
• Letters: Stores rushing Black Friday (knoxnews.com)
• Ask the Readers: Black Friday Shopping Secrets? (getrichslowly.org)
• Thanksgiving Black Friday Hours Have Retail Workforce Raging (inquisitr.com)
• Black Friday shopping: 5 reasons to stay home (cbsnews.com)

Image via Wikipedia

There’s a small debate going on to decide if kids in grade school will be using QWERTY keyboards in the future. My bet, and the bet of most science fiction writers, is yes it will be a required skill.

If we’ve kept it until now – even though it was designed to keep the swinging mechanical arms of a manual typewriter from sticking together – we’ll probably use it into the future.

MSWord, PowerPoint, Excel are probably not going to be used.

They are already being usurped by wikis, blogs, google docs, WordPress, google wave-like things, all of which provide the basic functionality, but allow multiple people to edit a document simultaneously and keeping only one copy prevents the ridiculous organizational head-ache of making sure everyone edits the latest copy.

And the basic functionality of these options is getting more and more like Word, PowerPoint and Excel every day.

The new media is easier, cheaper, faster and has additional functionality like instant publishing and collaboration.

The kids in K-5 for the past five years have been Myspace- (at first) and now Facebook-ready. That’s their baseline. Learning Word and PowerPoint is extra, not a starting place.

Three years ago I was called down to a 4th grade classroom, because the kids were writing reports and “Didn’t know how to use Word.”

Upon arriving, I found the kids had inserted audio files in their word documents and were perplexed by the teacher who was demanding they “print their reports.”

They were making myspace pages about their reports using Word documents. They were using MSWord because the assignment had dictated which software to be used.

These kids were already multimedia. They are highly self-motivated by this new media, and that’s proved out by the hours and hours a day they spend publishing at home, after school, unassigned.

I asked the 4th grade teacher in the future to provide a rubric as to what media the students were not allowed to do with Word–problem solved.

Another teacher forces her students to do reports in PowerPoint. She’s aghast they don’t know how to use it. Why should they? They have Google Sites which allows multiple team members to edit a webpage with almost the same functionality as PowerPoint, and it is published and can allow (though we don’t allow this) for comments and global interaction. WordPress also allows for the same presentation as PowerPoint but with added functionality.

In that type of world, what’s the point of PowerPoint?

I realized this morning teaching Microsoft Office to K-5 students is like teaching Latin–something else that’s dead. They get certain skills, such as booting up, launching software, font and media placement. They learn to insert pictures and audio. All these skills learned using PowerPoint can be transferred onto the newer Internet-based media they work with 7 hours a day at home.

So, yeah, I guess there’s some benefit, but of course they learn those skills at home by 3rd grade without any intervention.

Seth Golden wrote, “Too often, we look at the new thing and demand to know how it supports the old thing.”

Perhaps that’s why Educational Management is having such a hard time adopting new technology.

So here’s the answer to that question:

All the skills students need to use the Microsoft Office Suite are learned in the K-5 environment using new media. They can easily pick up Word, PowerPoint and Excel in highschool if the workforce is still wedded to those stand-alone software options 15 years from now.

So, for now, let’s use the better, cheaper, faster technology they are motivated to use.

Related articles

• Is Google Docs compatible with Microsoft Office (wiki.answers.com)
• Swiss Party Makes Dislike of PowerPoint a Political Issue | PCWorld (makeapowerfulpoint.com)
• How to send a Microsoft Office document from Windows Live Hotmail (theangleofthepoems.wordpress.com)
• A free substitute for Microsoft Office (atropregor.wordpress.com)

Well, the world sure has changed. Five years ago, when I started looking at social networking use in K-5, the numbers worked out like this:

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Box You Want to Uncheck on LinkedIn

LinkedIn recently changed its settings enabling a “default” setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising.

1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select “Settings”.

2. From the “Settings” page, select “Account*”.

3. In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising” .

4. De-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising” .

5. In E-mail Preferences deselect Partner InMails

6. In Groups, Companies & Applications deselect Data Sharing with 3rd-party applications

This is the stuff that makes social networking scummy.

Related articles

• Facebook Privacy Settings (zzeem.com)

This video of uncontacted tribes in Brazil, shows long-houses and bow and arrow of tribes living now.

Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage from Survival International on Vimeo.

It’s worth a look even if you don’t teach this stuff.

Related articles

• Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil Missing (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Uncontacted Tribe in South America Goes Missing (izabael.com)
• Indians Set Up Guard Posts to Protect Uncontacted Tribes (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Uncontacted Brazilian Tribe Apparently Slayed By Peruvian Drug Gang (portugueseblog.org)
• Uncontacted tribe’s forest sprayed with chemical defoliant (feministphilosophers.wordpress.com)
• Reclusive Amazon tribe missing after attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• Reclusive Amazon tribe missing after attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• After Attack, Reclusive Amazon Tribe Feared Missing (livescience.com)
• Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil Missing After Drug Traffickers Invade Area (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Satellite images discover uncontacted Amazonian tribe (theinformativereport.com)

Republican New York State Senator Roy McDonald is one of the few Republicans who’s said he will vote to legalize gay marriage in New York.

Reacting to pressure from the Conservative Party, anti-gay marriage groups, and religious leaders, McDonald gave a statement to the press which included a remarkable quote.

From The New York Daily News:

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,” McDonald, 64, told reporters.
“You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.
“I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”

McDonald’s support for the gay marriage bill leaves it only one vote shy of having enough support to be made into law. Today, senate Republicans met behind closed doors and say they’re undecided if they’ll let the bill come to the floor.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg–an outspoken gay marriage advocate and the single biggest donor to New York Republican senators–visited Albany today to try to persuade a handful of undecided Republican senators to vote ‘yes’ on the historic measure. Bloomberg has publicly threatened to stop funding any Republican who doesn’t vote for gay marriage.

“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Math is the only place I hear of someone buying 60 watermelons.

I’ve got 10 candy bars, and I eat nine of them, what do I have then?  Diabetes.

“Jimmy, Jack, and Joanna want to split the fare to fly to Africa for the day—”

40 literary terms you should know

Aphorism: Short, sweet little sayings expressing an idea or opinion are familiar to everyone — they just don’t always know the technical term for them. Dorothy Parker was a particularly adroit user of aphorisms.

Apostrophe: Beyond a term for daily punctuation, apostrophe also pulls audiences aside to address a person, place or thing currently not present. O, Shakespeare! Such a sterling example of apostrophe use!

Applicability: The venerable Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien coined this term when badgered one too many times about whether or not his beloved fantasy series was supposed to be a World War II allegory. It wasn’t, but he thought readers could easily apply such an interpretation to the text without losing anything.

Bete noire: While not an exclusively literary term, many critics do use it to denote the idea of avoidance found in many narratives. Family dramas, for example, are almost obligated to involve some sort of elephant in the room.

Bildungsroman: Coming-of-age stories, known as bildungsroman, are the warm, cozy socks of the literary world. Every writer has one, even though some are kind of gross and full of holes. For extra bibliophile points, try tossing out the term “kunstlerroman” when appropriate. That’s a special kind of bildungsroman following the growth of an artist or other creative type.

Bowdlerize: Because of his numerous silly cuts and edits to Shakespeare (SHAKESPEARE!), Thomas Bowdler has become immortalized as the unintentional founder of yet another word for censorship and needless meddling. When American The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy editions replaced the f-dash-dash-dash word with “Belgium,” it found itself on the receiving end of a serious bowdlerizing.

Byronic hero: Popularized by romantic poet Lord Byron’s life and works, this jaded, flawed hero archetype typically exhibits highly emotional, erratic, disrespectful and self-destructive behaviors isolating him or her from the rest of the world. Basically, Byronic heroes were emo before emo was a thing.

Caesura: Typically found in ancient Greek and Latin poetry, caesura represent pauses after a word, though not at the end or foot of a piece.

Death of the author: As hair-rippingly awful as Twilight may be, this literary phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with clunking Stephenie Meyer’s head onto a pike for her egregious crimes against books (which would be absurd and rather mean). Rather, it stems from Roland Barthes’ argument that an author’s ideologies and life story have little to no bearing on a textual interpretation.

Denouement: The denouement occurs shortly after a story’s climax, but before its end. This serves to wrap up any dangly bits the author wishes to resolve.

Didactic: Everyone knows didactic literature, even if they don’t know the fancy term. It takes on an academic tone meant to educate, carrying with it connotations of heavy-handedness.

Epigraph: Many writers like to include quotes or passages at the beginning of their works to reflect the overarching theme or message. Mark Twain and his warning about shooting anyone wanting to critically analyze Huckleberry Finn (oops) famously parodied this trope. Iron Chef’s use of a George Bernard Shaw quote before each episode is a notable non-literary example. Allez cuisine!

Epistolary: Frankenstein, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Color Purple may have little in common on the surface, but they all share epistolary structure. Most or all of the narrative comes to readers through letters or other correspondence rather than a more traditional storytelling manner.

Fin de siecle: Put away the Ramones album and pick up some Oscar Wilde for a fin de siecle fix. Meaning “end of the century,” this phrase refers to creative works completed towards the end of the 1800s, reflecting Europe’s social and political mores.

Foil: Foils are characters meant to play off one another’s tics and quirks, like Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Or Batman and Robin.

Hamartia: Aristotle coined this word to describe tragedies, particularly those brought about by an aristocrat’s ego, gluttony or silly mistake rather than outright sin.

Heresy of paraphrase: New Critic Cleanth Brooks believes in the impossibility of discerning meaning in poetry, and that it’s entirely possible to just enjoy its mere existence at a specific point in space and time.

Hubris: Hubris, or raging ego with a heaping helping of overestimation on the side, oftentimes brings about hamartia — and not always in Greek drama!

Humours: Ancient Greeks and Romans believed the human body to be comprised of four humours — blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm — that corresponded with different personality types, seasons, organs and elements. It’s pretty much accepted as complete scientific doodie by now, but the concept has left an indelible impression on literary history all the same.

In medias res: More than literary narratives use the in medias res device, which drops audiences straight into the middle of the action and builds upon the recent past as the tale unfolds.

Intertextuality: Literary critics comparing different works to one another, especially as they relate to retellings and references, practice intertextuality — as do the writers using the device. Adapting religious or traditional stories remains popular in almost every nation’s canon.

Irony: It’s not about rain on wedding days, free rides after payment or 10,000 spoons when a knife is needed. Look at it as a situation where the outside and the inside exist in a dissonant state, though there exists a couple other interpretations Read O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” for a particularly bittersweet, memorable depiction of irony.

Literary agent hypothesis: Bookworms with a postmodern bent will find the literary agent hypothesis fascinating. It posits that authors of fiction serve as “literary agents” to real events, changing around the reality to make for a more compelling narrative. Like the philosophy from which it stems, this critique style enjoys playing around with the nature of the known and unknown world.

Magic realism: Like the best surrealist paintings, magic realism blends the wholly terrestrial with the wholly oneiric to form one frightfully beautiful, emotional atmosphere. Anyone fortunate enough to have read Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel will know exactly how much it can punctuate a novel and make it something memorable and special.

Malapropism: When used properly, deliberately replacing words with different ones (usually homophones) can really make a humorous scene pop. This technique comes from the character Mrs. Malaprop, created by Richard Brinsley Sheridan for his play The Rivals, whose verbal quirks reflected such things.

Meiosis: Satirical works, particularly those hailing from Britain, will oftentimes use understatement to greatly hilarious effect. Impress or (more likely) annoy book club friends by using the technical term “meiosis” instead.

Meta: Though meta as a word and a prefix usually means an abstract offshoot of a concept, many critics today use it to mean a self-referential text. This list is meta because it’s aware of its list status. Also, it’s kind of scared of this newfound awareness, and its lack of maturity may cause a lashing out at those trying to help. Please teach it to love.

Mise en scene: While mostly used in cinema or theatre critique, literary aficionados can still (and often do) use “mise en scene” to describe the setting, mood and atmosphere of a text.

Picaresque: Swashbucking adventure stories with a scrappy, ne’er-do-well scamp of a protagonist are a beloved narrative staple. Known as “picaresques,” they’ve heavily influenced a diverse selection of authors and spawned some of the world’s most lauded works.

Purple prose: Authors oft-utilizing egregiously eloquent, ornate prose possessed of sterling caliber and astronomical romanticism may indubitably find themselves indicted for their “purple prose.” There’s a time and a place for eloquence and SAT words, but it definitely isn’t every time and every place. Any text referring to eyes as “orbs” without any sort of irony is automatically guilty of this linguistic sometimes-offense. No matter what. No exceptions. Also, every romance novel ever written. Even if a long-lost manuscript attributed to Bukowski ever materialized and proved a romance novel, it would still be made of purple prose.

Roman a clef: Real-life figures and adventures oftentimes end up thinly and not-so-thinly appearing as fiction in a device critics like to call roman a clef because it sounds fancy and stuff. Hundreds of examples exist, but some of the most popular can be found in Jack Kerouac’s oeuvre.

Scene a faire: Not all scenes a faire are always cliche, but all cliches are scenes a faire. This critical phrase refers to idioms and tropes audiences expect of a narrative and authors feel obliged to provide, particularly when it comes to genre fare.

Sobriquet: Sobriquets are nicknames almost everybody knows when they encounter them in speech or text, such as “The Big Apple” for New York City, where every American novel ever written takes place. Even the ones set in Texas.

Syllogism: Rhetoric buffs amongst the bookworm set need to know the definition of syllogism, lest the Ghost of Aristotle arise and get its poltergeist on. It involves a 3-part deductive, logical reasoning structure comprised of the major premise, minor premise and conclusion.

Synecdoche: When readers encounter a part meant to represent a whole, they’ve come face to face with the synecdoche who sold the world. Moby Dick’s iconic albino tail, for example, symbolizes the entire cetacean.

Tranche de vie: Use “tranche de vie” in place of “slice of life” to sound all sophisticated and French when discussing Raymond Carver’s Cathedral.

Trope: Tropes actually have a few definitions, but are frequently used to refer to familiar literary devices, events and archetypes. A great many of the vocabulary words listed here, for instance. They can also be metaphors or other types of figurative language.

Ubi sunt: At some point in their lives, everyone reads a literary work (or its corresponding Cliffs Notes) about the transience of mortality and how people are really just ants, man, ants in this big cosmic soup. At some point in their lives, everyone reads an ubi sunt, they just didn’t know there was a Latin phrase for it because that language is dead.

Unreliable narrator: Humbert Humbert, that scumbag around whom Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, is one of literature’s most notable unreliable narrators. Readers can’t exactly trust everything these speakers say as what exactly transpired, especially since they usually only get one side of the story. Try layering an unreliable narrator on top of the literary agent hypothesis for hours of mind-bending metaedutainment!

Verisimilitude: An easy way to remember “verisimilitude” involves noting that unreliable narrators don’t practice it.

Found at OnlineClasses.com

In a meeting yesterday, somebody made a serious misstep. She said the truth. She said what was best. Apparently two very serious mistakes.

She said, out-loud, that all Google search engines in the county had been hard coded to default in “safe search” mode. The safe mode, together with the county’s Internet filter, brought Google searches to a level of safety, in which we should be teaching our kids in school how to use Google Search safely and responsibly.

Apparently voicing such wisdom, truth and technical understanding is a talisman of the type of fear and loathing which make up the technical world view of most educational managers.  It’s not their fault. Their ignorance has been cultivated by lawyers, vendors of Internet Safety products and the media which loves a salacious story.

Ignorance, fear and loathing though, are not good for building understanding.  They are really no good for making strategic decisions.

Most folks don’t really understand what a blog is. See Blogs in Plain English on youtube.com for a 3-minute explanation, which will de-fuzz your fuzzy definition.

The problem we face is as we move up the ladder of educational management, the definitions of these media types get fuzzier and fuzzier, until one gets to the point where one says the word “blog” and the only thing the manager hears is the word “porn.”

This is a disservice to our kids.  There is a need to educate teachers (and more importantly, Educational Management) about how to keep kids safe on the Internet rather than taking it away all together.  It’s like candy….kids are going to find ways to get it when their parents aren’t looking and this skill is learned at a very early age.

Research at a Title One school (that’s the poor folk who don’t have a laptop for every child at home) shows that 12% of 2nd graders, 67% of 3rd graders and 94% and 95% of 4th and 5th graders have their own personal Facebook page. And not just one, most of these kids have two or three Facebook accounts. (They make three additional fictitious accounts and make friends with themselves so they come out of the gate with friends.)

People don’t seem to understand the average 2nd grader spends 1 hour online after school each day. 3rd graders 2.5 hours. 4th and 5th graders 3 hours, online mostly unsupervised, doing Facebook, surfing youtube, google searching everything “randomly”. We are doing insufficient preparation of our students for this activity. In fact we do them a disservice, by having them on Blackboard where their name and student number are on anything they type. We then send them home and they do the same thing on Facebook and elsewhere. (see my other post on Blackboard here)

And educational librarians, normally the standard bearers of freedom of speech, are some of the worst at shining light on this new area of publishing.

It’s as though the leaders of educational librarians are trying to keep the validity of their expensive databases (which are great, don’t get me wrong) by limiting our ability to use Google.

That teamed with throngs of luddites padding the ranks of educational librarians, and they get to manage via imposing ignorance (a pastime of tyrants) while simultaneously singing to their choir of bibliotechnophobes.

Base fear and loathing seem to make up the bulk of their technical world view.

I have wonderful tech-savvy friends who are also educational librarians, and they rant coming home from every meeting about the level of technical ignorance which is pervasive and outwardly expressed without anyone raising their hand and saying “Now hold on now.”

The technical savvy librarians need to be given a voice – a legitimate voice — not just a brief moment to present to a bunch of librarians who’s only take away is, “Well, THAT will never happen.”

I guess all this is to say, we need to focus on educating these folks (some against their will) about the new age of publishing in which they are currently living, working and educating our children.

As we all move into a new age of data-driven Professional Learning Communities. Like all new product development marketing, we have two choices.

We can do it the wrong way, which includes a lot of Powerpoint-toting, suit wearing, acronym-spewing middle managers (to paraphrase Seth Goden) with process and no substance.

Or we can learn from the inventor of the digital camera. He could have made the first camera store thousands of images, but instead chose 30 images, because it was like film worked.

Twenty five years later, film was dead and mobile phones now store thousands of images. I think he might have had something.

Click below to watch the video:

Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.

The point of the new data-driven PLC regime is to do what we’ve been doing–better.

Let’s not lose sight of what teaching is, while we lose sleep chasing ghosts of some new fangled methodology.

The data is to put some social-scientific meat on the bones of the core scientific method of trial and error which is, and always will be, good teaching.

PLC is not some panacea to replace the fundamental process of connecting with a child and seeing what works (and doesn’t) and adjusting.

We are studying a student newspaper mentioned in a previous posts.

I got together with our Librarian and we plan on comparing student data.  Tracking students who engage with the newspaper and their NCLB Standards and DRA scores with students who have not engaged with the student newspaper.

Although open to all, students and their teachers self-select (volunteer) to engage with the student newspaper. Those that do have logins, those that do not don’t. There is also an easy way to track user posts and comments on the newspaper.

As a short term solution, we are drafting a survey of student opinions on the skill sets used in developing content for the newspaper.

In general terms we are interested in looking at how student engagement and performance in reading and writing are changed when given a student-centered, student-lead, student-self-selected writing environment.

Some questions follow. We are writing them for 5th grade and will differentiate the language and focus for lower grades.

Your suggestions in the form of comments below are welcome.

How many times a week do you do non-fiction writing which is not assigned by your teacher?

How many times a week do you write anything creative which is not assigned by your teacher?

What sort of writing do you do?

How many hours a week are you online after school?

How do you use this time?

Why do you think punctuation is important?

What is your purpose in writing?

Related Areas of Learning:

Research, Organize, Inquiry, Analyze, Reading, Writing, Purpose, Audience, Poetry, Oral Language (video interviews, voicethread)\

List of related NCLB Standards:

Oral

5.1             The student will listen, draw conclusions, and share responses in subject-related group learning activities.
a)   Participate in and contribute to discussions across content areas.
b)   Organize information to present reports of group activities.
c)   Summarize information gathered in group activities.

5.3             The student will make planned oral presentations.
a)   Determine appropriate content for audience.
b)   Organize content sequentially or around major ideas.
c)   Summarize main points before or after presentation.
d)   Incorporate visual aids to support the presentation.
e)   Use grammatically correct language and specific vocabulary.

Reading:
5.5             The student will read and demonstrate comprehension of fiction.
a)   Describe the relationship between text and previously read materials.
b)   Describe character development in fiction and poetry selections.
c)   Describe the development of plot and explain how conflicts are resolved.
d)   Describe the characteristics of free verse, rhymed, and patterned poetry.
e)   Describe how an author’s choice of vocabulary and style contributes to the quality and enjoyment of selections.

5.6 (Research)            The student will read and demonstrate comprehension of nonfiction.
a)   Use text organizers, such as type, headings, and graphics, to predict and categorize information.
b)   Identify structural patterns found in nonfiction.
c)   Locate information to support opinions, predictions, and conclusions.
d)   Identify cause-and-effect relationships.
e)   Identify compare-and-contrast relationships.
f)   Skim materials to develop a general overview of content and to locate specific information.
g)   Identify new information gained from reading.

Writing
5.8             The student will write for a variety of purposes: to describe, to inform, to entertain, and to explain.
a)   Choose planning strategies for various writing purposes.
b)   Organize information.
c)   Demonstrate awareness of intended audience.
d)   Use precise and descriptive vocabulary to create tone and voice.
e)   Vary sentence structure.
f)   Revise writing for clarity.
g)   Use available technology to access information.

5.9             The student will edit writing for correct grammar, capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure.
a)   Use plural possessives.
b)   Use adjective and adverb comparisons.
c)   Identify and use interjections.
d)   Use apostrophes in contractions and possessives.
e)   Use quotation marks with dialogue.
f)   Use commas to indicate interrupters and in the salutation and closing of a letter.
g)   Use a hyphen to divide words at the end of a line.
h)   Edit for clausal fragments, run-on sentences, and excessive coordination.

There is an elementary school student newspaper done by a friend of mine using wordpress.

It is still “early days” but the kids are taking to it.

I’m told some student editors were appointed in 4th grade yesterday.

By this morning, they were holding court in the school library, before school started.  Each had a table with a netbook and were having writing conferences with authors from their class as they edited their submitted work for publication.

No direction was given for this activity – it was organic.

Very cool stuff.

terracetimes.com

The security on it is flawless. No information is given to identify anything about the school – whatsoever. No school names, no student names, no county names, no state, no country. Very, very cool stuff indeed.

No walled garden here – just the safety of anonymity.

And the kids don’t seem to care. They know what they’ve written, and their friends and families know too.

I’ve written about the perils of web filtering just 15 days ago: http://clairvoy.com/2011/02/09/the-best-use-of-web-filtering-system/ and it looks like the man has caught up with me.

God forbid if teachers want to get together and discuss how they can better their practice.

Who the hell is making these decisions?  What goes in and what stays free?  Not a thinking person, we know that much.

Here’s what happens at a normal kid’s birthday party.
Click on video below:

All media used in this campaign is free.

Why aren’t we using this technology and methodology in schools to reinforce curriculum?

Answer: No vendor to pay for expensive sales dinners …

Or Why Education Reforms Aren’t Really Changing Anything

(I’m about to tell you that grieving is responsible for NCLB, so let me give you a little foundation, first.)

I was raised by a psychoanalyst, in fact by two psychoanalysts – Mom and Dad. I get asked a lot, “What was that like?” often with a look normally reserved for scandalous gossip or peeking at a car accident while stuck in traffic.

Truth be told, it was pretty darn normal. Some things were different than my friends. Mine was an intellectual household. I learned early a man sitting at a desk with hands folded in his lap staring without moving, was working. Thinking was work.

We had a lot of other thinkers passing through the house, sitting at the kitchen table while I was a kid. Us kids used to refer to Noam Chomsky as “Chomp, Chomp, Chomsky.” Jacques Lacan, Paul Recoeur, Judith Viorst, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida and a host of others were familiar names. I can remember Harold Bloom sitting in my parents bedroom talking to them as they got dressed (Harold doesn’t like to be left alone). Familiar also were a bunch of dead people–the great thinkers of history–through their books.

Along with writing a great deal about Death and Dying, Dad did a lot of work using psychoanalysis as a tool to interpret different areas of the humanities. He wrote/edited a number of books about psychoanalysis and subjects such as Religion, Literary Criticism, Linguistics, History, Film, and on and on. Great dinner parties (family included) with wine and coffee flowing late into discussion. Just as at a lawyer’s, teacher’s, or any other family dinner table, we learned to talk shop. We could interpret one another about as well as any shrink, and we could hold our own with a table full of philosophers, linguists, psychoanalysts and writers. Otherwise, it was normal. We did bad things as kids, we got punished in the standard ways — we never got stuck on the couch.

Dad’s now 84 (just turned). A while back, he wrote two pages about conservatives and liberals and how they were very much the same type of animal. It was in response to a news story. Dad’s always been a news hound, probably because he had much of the Washington elite as patients – both on the right and the left. One really can’t help these folks without staying current with the news, and one can’t listen to these people’s problems for 40 years without figuring out what makes them tic.

Dad’s still addicted to television news. So when Senator Simpson presented the Iraq Study Group findings and appealed for “seekers” (people who sought the truth) and Simpson went on to label right and left wing extremists “seethers” (or people who didn’t seek the truth, but instead held to their ideological guns), Dad wrote a piece outlining a host of commonalities between conservatives and liberals, and the relationship between the far extremes of both parties and the folks in the middle ground.

I bring it up now, because we need change within Education.  We’re going to get change one way or another.  However,  there is general agreement change within the current sphere of “Education Reform” being proposed by both the left and right will not really change anything.

But why?

Perhaps because of some of the fundamental commonalities which make conservatives conservative,  liberals liberal, and people people.  These commonalities are universal,  and they are at work in this process of “reform.” They are preventing real reform, and nobody is noticing them.

I’ve included Dad’s article below, but here’s a summary in plain English.  Bold italics are quotes from the article.:

Life is about coming to terms with loss, in an ongoing daily healthy manner. “Mourning, the mourning of everyday life, is an ongoing, unending work, ordinarily with no conscious anguish.”

We adapt to this by overcoming small, inconsequential, losses every day, all day long, but it takes time. Initially, we fight loss, in one of two ways. We as humans either emotionally hold onto what is lost, or we turn toward something new as a replacement. Initially both these responses are done in an unhealthy way. We see this in children every day, with things as simple as the loss represented with the sharing of a toy.   “Response to loss is denial of loss. Either desperately holding on to the lost object, the prototype of the mature conservative, or frantically turning to new objects, the prototype of the mature liberal, are ways of denying loss and deferring mourning.”

As we “grow up” we learn to manage our loss in healthier ways.  We become well balanced mourners, about everything. “Mourning is the process whereby loss is acknowledged but also the means of holding on in the sense of integrating at a higher level the relationship with the object acknowledged as lost. It is a means of change, development, achieving a higher level of understanding of what it is to be a human being with a past and a future while living in an ever-changing present.”

However, the basic conservative or liberal modality of holding on, or turning toward a replacement for the lost is maintained in the mix.

Mourning and Change in Education:

As politicians, parents, teachers and others look to change Education the mourning process is being blocked and that’s impacting everyone’s ability to implement change.

“[T]here is always some mixture of mourning and denial of mourning; one is called upon to constantly take stock of the extent to which he or she might be unknowingly defending against loss and thus partaking in the extremism of childhood.”

In addition to simple ideological approaches, there is a deeper layer of shared experience.  We have all been through the same Education process.  This means, no matter what faction you represent, no matter how different your ideas for change may be from another, everyone is talking about initiating a shared loss of the current Education system.  I’m just not sure we’re ready for that.  I think we may be denying our mourning on that issue.

It’s odd the NCLB / “Accountability” movement seems to be pushing Education toward a 19th century model of skill and drill, rote learning.  My son came home Friday, pulled out his homework and wrote without prompting, “Richmond is the capital of Virginia.”  That would be a correct answer on an upcoming standardized NCLB test.  The problem being my son is non-verbal and autistic, so he doesn’t really know what a state is, what Richmond is, what a capital city is, what Virginia is … but he will pass the required NCLB standardized test allowing his school to maintain their accreditation.  What useful learning was denied him to teach him this trick?  Isn’t this an archetype of the “teaching” which will happen more and more as the standardized tests drive changes within Education?  His teacher is good, mind you.  She’s just being motivated by a system to do bad things.

NCLB and the Accountability movement are not changing Education.  They are pushing it backwards in time.  The tenets of these “reforms” are protecting the fundamental nature of Education as it was in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s time.

It’s also odd, the movements pushed forward by liberals don’t seem to attack the basic problem.  They either adopt the accountability movement’s standards, or they push for advancements within Education without changing the box in which they are administered.  I think we might have “altered” Education about as far as it will go.  I also think everybody kind of gets that.

Education is based on a model developed during the Enlightenment and refined during the Industrial Age.  The world no longer needs a large workforce limited to enough basic math to buy things, able to show up for work on time, behave and communicate adequately about basic rote tasks.  Even truckers have satellite based computers in their cabs.  Even the FedEx guy has a hand-held computer with more power than any computer on the Apollo lunar lander.  We expect our lowest level employees to be creative and collaboratively team in ways which were reserved only for highly functioning management teams as little as 20 years ago.  The factory model of education isn’t going to serve going forward.  “Civilization” is throwing more complicated problems at us at a greater rate of speed than at any other time.  This acceleration will continue.

The looming baby boomer retirement and crushing financial situation of the country has brought us to the point where spending must be curtailed, everywhere.  This year it is “Healthcare Reform” and in a couple of years we’re going to hear “Education Reform” every time we turn on the radio.  But cutting spending without changing the way we do things isn’t working smarter, it’s just working poorer.

In order to change Education — fundamentally — it will take dismantling the current system, and that’s a common loss we will all have to mourn together.

And if, “Mourning is the process whereby loss is acknowledged but also the means of holding on in the sense of integrating at a higher level the relationship with the object acknowledged as lost,” then I think we will have to start mourning it, before we can fix it.

Right now, all the suggested reforms in Education are simply a complicated denial of this loss and postponement of mourning–an extremism of childhood.

————————

Here’s Dad’s article:

Seekers and Seethers, Conservatives and Liberals all, By Dad

Andrew Sullivan makes a convincing case that all conservatism, the essence of which is the impulse to conserve, begins with loss. Early in his The Conservative Soul, Sullivan, drawing from Freud on mourning and Heidegger on death wrote, “There is a little conservatism in everyone’s soul—even those who proudly call themselves liberals. No one is untouched by loss. We all grow old. We watch ourselves age and decline; we see new generations supplant and outrun us. Every human life is a series of small and large losses—of parents, of youth, of the easy optimism of young adulthood and the uneasy hope of middle age—until you face the ultimate loss of life itself.”

The trouble is that not just conservatism but also everything else, including liberalism, begins with loss. Loss is there from day one but responses to it in infancy and early childhood are extreme. Response to loss is denial of loss. Either desperately holding on to the lost object, the prototype of the mature conservative, or frantically turning to new objects, the prototype of the mature liberal, are ways of denying loss and deferring mourning. Some dimensions of mourning are, in fact, deferred until at least adolescence. Even so, the basic capacity to mourn is gradually established throughout childhood.

Mourning, the mourning of everyday life, is an ongoing, unending work, ordinarily with no conscious anguish. But the same processes occur as in the response to major loss. Every aspect of the relationship with the lost object or loved one is brought into awareness and repeatedly relived. In so doing some aspects of the relationship are internalized. Mourning is the process whereby loss is acknowledged but also the means of holding on in the sense of integrating at a higher level the relationship with the object acknowledged as lost. It is a means of change, development, achieving a higher level of understanding of what it is to be a human being with a past and a future while living in an ever-changing present.

If early trauma and loss are too severe, mourning may be permanently blocked leaving in its wake severe aggressive or unconscious self-destructive motives. In more fortunate development, working through the small losses of everyday life prepares the way for enduring and eventually also working through the ordeal of major loss. It is through experiencing loss and need that we come to know ourselves and the other and are able to love. It is through mourning that we come to understand what it means to be human and the universality of loss and mourning. We learn that what we have in common is far more important than individual differences. Learning that one is separate from the mother, both the product of and a cause for mourning, is one of the steps in coming to terms with loss and coming to own lostness (in Heidegger’s term, “thrownness” into the world) as a core aspect of one’s existence.

The childhood denial of loss by holding on or turning away, gradually yields to the reality of the loss denied. Holding on out of desperate dependency can give way to upholding parents acknowledged as lost. Frantic turning away can become a nondefensive turning toward the new out of an openness to change as always in process. This is to say the move from either extreme conservatism or extreme liberalism is by way of mourning. But throughout life there is always some mixture of mourning and denial of mourning; one is called upon to constantly take stock of the extent to which he or she might be unknowingly defending against loss and thus partaking in the extremism of childhood. Reflecting on this might foster hesitancy to label oneself “conservative” or “liberal” as if there could be a pure culture of either. Maybe the appropriate terms would be “recovering conservative” or “recovering liberal.”

Although never perfectly achieved, a basic confidence in one’s capacity to mourn fosters an inclination to be open to the world and to others come what may. Without such confidence there is a cautious readiness to ward off or repress anything that might be a danger or a loss. Mourning involves repeatedly remembering—reliving—as clearly and honestly as possible every aspect of the relationship with the lost object. Previously unrecognized, inchoate or repressed aspects press toward consciousness. Mourning and the internalization of some dimensions of the relationship is completed only to the extent that clarity and honesty of remembering is achieved. Psychoanalysis is a method of intervening where mourning is blocked. The clarity and honesty with oneself that comes to pass in mourning is then manifested in greater clarity and honesty with others. One becomes a seeker for the truth about an ever changing self and world.

In appealing for bipartisanship at the point of presenting the Iraq Study Group (ISG) findings, Senator Simpson made a call for seekers. By contrast, he termed left and right wing extremists as “seethers.” That phrasing tends to avoid the pitfalls of defining or describing conservatives and liberals exclusively in terms of politics or religion. In those realms conservatives are taken as those who uphold the faith or political positions of parents and parental figures and liberals as turning away. But, as mentioned above, there are different motives for holding on or turning away. Holding on that looks on the surface exactly like that of denial can instead be the product of mourning and internalizing parental values as one’s own. It is often not easy to be certain of one’s own motives, let alone those of others. Seekers, whether conservative or liberal, would be those who try to be aware of denial in themselves and to clarify the truth of that which is being denied.

I’ve written about Charter schools being a non-starter in the debate about education reform here.

In today’s Washington Post, there’s more proof of what nobody says on cable television–poor performing students drop out of KIPP and go back to public schools.

In fact KIPP failed to hack it in the same playing field as Public Schools.  Here is Richard D. Kahlenberg’s piece from the Washington Post Today:

In the recent education debate between Valerie Strauss and Jay Mathews, a question arose about the attrition rates at the highly regarded Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. The issue is important because if large numbers of weaker students drop out of KIPP’s rigorous program, it would be highly unfair to compare the test score gains won by the top KIPP students against the scores of all regular public school students – who include KIPP dropouts.

In the debate, Strauss mentioned some studies finding that KIPP schools “have had a very high attrition rate.” Mathews responded by saying it is a “myth that KIPP schools have poor retention rates” and cited a 2010 study that found that KIPP school “are doing about as well as regular schools in their neighborhoods” in terms of attrition.

Who’s right? While I respect Jay Mathews’s grasp of educational issues, on this question, the data overwhelmingly support Valerie Strauss’s skepticism.

In a rigorous 2008 study of five KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, researchers at SRI International found that an astounding 60% of KIPP students left over the course of middle-school. Moreover, the researchers found evidence that the 60% of students who did not persist through the tough KIPP regimen (a longer school day and week, and heavy doses of homework), tended to be the weaker students.

KIPP supporters, like Mathews, respond that a 2010 study of 22 KIPP schools by Mathematica found that the attrition rates were comparable to nearby high poverty public schools that also have lots of kids leave. Poor people tend to move frequently, so high attrition rates are to be expected at KIPP schools, it is argued.

The big difference between KIPP and regular public schools, however, is that whereas struggling students come and go at regular schools, at KIPP, student leave but very few new children enter. Having few new entering students is an enormous advantage not only because low-scoring transfer students are kept out but also because in the later grades, KIPP students are surrounded only by successful peers who are the most committed to the program.

Below is a figure that shows the attendance at KIPP Bay-area schools. (The figure is part of a Century Foundation document entitled “Charter Schools that Work: Economically Integrated Schools with Teacher Voice.”)

Bay Area KIPP Net Student Enrollment by Grade from 2003-04 to 2006-07 (to access the chart click on the link–go to the Washington Post website.)

In the comments section of the Answer Sheet blog, when readers pointed out that KIPP schools don’t generally fill students back in, Mathews responded “KIPP schools DO take in new students beyond the 5th grade.”

This is technically accurate, but as the figure above suggests, the vast majority of students enter during the 6th grade (a natural time to enter middle school) and then the total number of KIPP students in 7th and 8th grade falls precipitously.

The KIPP Bay-area schools cannot be dismissed as an outlier on the KIPP attrition question. Columbia University researcher Jeffrey Henig’s 2008 review of several studies found high attrition rates at a number of other KIPP schools.

It may well be, in fact, that high attrition rates are a key explanation for KIPP’s success in raising test scores. When KIPP tried to take over a regular public school – where the students are not self-selected, but are assigned to the school; and where students not only leave, but large number of students enter — KIPP abandoned the field after just two years. KIPP long ago realized that what we charge regular public schools with doing is far more difficult than what KIPP seeks to do.

On-the-fly video translations. Unplugged (no Internet or phone connections needed).

This is where we are technologically. This is what many students and teachers can have, now, today. Think about this sort of technology the next time you are using Blackboard to share anything…

questvisual.com
cost: $4.99

Here’s the video if you don’t see it in your RSS Reader:

http://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-12-15

Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch is a thinker and writer about Education without any need for reelection or selling standardized testing or programs to help student pass standardized tests.

She speaks the truth to the motley crew of Education (and I do use that term loosely) experts. The dialog going on in Washington between the Democrats and Republicans is ludicrous, and Diane debunks the foundations on which it is based, item by item, in a research-based, data-driven way.

Every teacher should take the time to watch this video. Take notes. These are our talking points in the war of ideas taking place in Education policy. These are our marching orders.

I’ve become a big fan of Diane Ravitch. Expect to hear more from her.

Fast Forward through the first 10 minutes of introductions, and start listening when you see Ravitch.

Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch
New York University
82 Washington Square East
New York, New York 10003
E-mail: gardendr@gmail.com

http://www.dianeravitch.com

Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
Buy/read more about this book:
Amazon.com

Teaching students to pull, edit and display valuable information from the internet in real time is probably the most important thing we can teach. We must develop a course of study which provides elementary level students with the tools and skills to do this. Use of RSS feed publishing, social bookmarking and use of visual tagging to set up automated online structures that pull valid sources of information and automatically display them in a useful way is the next step in “publishing.” Using the Internet to do “research” and a static display methodology such as Word or PowerPoint is no longer sufficient to prepare them for middle school.

Here’s the thing.

Charter schools get to dismiss any student who is not performing up to their standards.

I’ll say it again.

Charter schools get to dismiss any student who is not performing up to their standards.

Not performing academically, not performing socially, not performing behaviorally, and even if the student is doing ok, if the parents don’t perform, the student gets dismissed.

No wonder they have school-wide success at the end of every year. (Never mind those kids who were dismissed).

Look at the Kipp contract. Look at the rules for entering any charter school. In each case there are clear parent responsibilities and clear student responsibilities. That’s great, sure. But what happens when the parent or student fails to keep up to the charter school’s standards? They get tossed.

To where? Public schools of course.

Just today, we had a kid throw up in the main hallway. We had a kid so wound up he was having a melt-down in the office. Another went home to a friend’s house without telling anyone. If only we were a charter school! Boom, Boom, Boom. All three would be gone. No repeat offenders in the principal’s office. At Kipp, the parents have to be respectful of the teachers or, Boom, their kid is gone. Such a luxury.

In my school, (50%+ English as a second language, 40% special education, 76% free or reduced lunch, 40% student churn rate throughout each year, operating 47% over capacity on student registration, and too many misogynistic parents from developing nations), heck we could probably deep six about 30% of the students in a month. That would bring teacher-student ratios to a much more “successful” level. All the disruptive, don’t pay attention, parents-don’t-care kids would be gone. All the low scorers, gone, with a wave of the principal’s hand. What a dream.

Of course if you are trying to have a rational debate on national education policy, there is one bothersome little question. Where do they go when we’re all charter schools?

On the street, of course. There would be a great national underbelly of 2nd and 3rd grade drop outs. Commercials would depict them standing on street corners selling drugs.
Here’s an interesting thought. If they determine state penitentiary space needs 10 years out by the current reading scores of public school students in 3rd grade (which they do), imagine how much we’d be spending in tax dollars to build prisons? Starting immediately and not stopping.

That wouldn’t happen of course. “Ridiculous!” the charter school supporters would say, “We would just have to have a state school system for those kids.”

And then we’re back to the original discussion, about what we should do about national education policy.

Charter Schools are a non-starter for a general fix for education. They are just state sponsored private schools for anyone who can make them work.

OrganizedChaos has been lamenting the reaction she gets at cocktail parties when she says she’s a teacher.

I quite enjoy being asked. Here’s what I do. When someone has the American crass gall to ask what I do for a living (something done no where else in the world in polite company), I say the following.

“I’m a teacher.” ((Pause for effect)) “Which is a highly respected profession,” ((Pause for effect)) “in many other cultures.”

The Title One school where I work had Open House today. It amounts to registration and meet your teacher day.

Everything went without a hitch, except of course for the parent-initiatied incident of the “extra baby.”

At one point, a family could not get their pram up the stairs, so they rolled it into a classroom near the bottom of the stairs and disappeared for 30-40 minutes. Luckily, the teacher there is a loving mother herself, and although rather surprised to find an unannounced 6-month-old awake and crying, carried the baby around, soothingly, until the mystery was solved.

As the building filled up, I loved it. Schools without children are just tombs of directionless souls, bumping into one another, with no other purpose than to get ready for their purpose. “Purpose,” we learned in our weeks of not having one (or at least getting ready to have one), is critical to happiness. Well, in retrospect, THAT explains a lot.

But the kids were back today. The directionless souls came alive and focused. Hugs were given and received – much more so than when the staff got back together. It’s not that we don’t love one another–we do.

It’s just that we all share a common trait. No matter how much we might love our co-workers, our husband, wife or soul-mate. We all know, down deep in our hearts, that children are just better than adults.

This realization came to me during my first interview to become a teacher, six year ago. When asked by my interviewer why I wanted to spend all day with children instead of adults. I said, almost to myself, “Unlike adults, the personality foibles of children, are rarely self-inflicted.”

A PLC is not a thing.

As Heidegger put it, there are “thingly” things and “unthingly” things and a PLC is a very unthingly thing, unless of course you happen to be lucky enough to find yourself in one and then a PLC is everything.

I’ve worked for principals who could count the number of PLCs they had created — horrible, dark, depressing workhouses these. By counting the PLC things, they could then compare themselves to other principals to see who’s better, “I’ve created 11 PLCs.” “Really, we created five last year, but we added another eight PLCs this year.” These are the utterances of children trying to win a game of “Who’s is Bigger” with phantom progress.

In my current school we are banned (not explicitly) from using the jargon of PLCs, because if we called something PLC, that would exclude everything else, and that would be wrong. Everything is PLC: Teacher Research, Literacy Collaborative, Happy Hour, Team Meetings, Joking Around in the Office, Teachers Who Are a Groups of Friends, Teachers Going on Vacation Together, Committees Working on Solutions for Struggling Students, Clairvoy, Co-Teaching, Grade-Level Long-Term Technology Projects and Everything Else.

It can be compared to the approach of Eastern and Western religion. For a time there during the 1900s Eastern religions brought something new to Western religions. Yogis would say Hinduism is a “way”. Although many Westerners couldn’t quite fathom what that meant, they knew they were missing something and that sounded like it. In the West, religion is a thing. You know, a “thing” you do on Sunday morning, a “thing” you give money to, a “thing” that will keep you from going to hell.

The truly religious in the West (I have a long line of ministers in my family) knew and know it is both. Religion is a way of being, and you need some “things” to help folks along that don’t know what they are doing.

It is when the “things” overpower the “way” that the “way” gets lost. That’s probably why at my school we don’t use the word PLC. Like Lord Valdemort, we know there is a huge unseen presence of PLC, but we treat it as the thing that must not be named. We fear if we speak the jargon of PLC, the thingly things of educational bureaucracy might sweep in and overtake our unthingly everything, causing everything to go down the tubes.

In our kitchen growing up we had a sign which read, “Love One Another”, and in a professional teaching environment, that sums it up just about as well as anything.

We teach how to read a book, its parts, how to interact with the object …

Gestures from João Machado on Vimeo.

A friend of mine died this week. She was my brother’s mother-in-law, Gertrude Peterson.

Every time I saw her, she would laugh, and put her hands into a V under her chin as a sort of NASA docking station for my chin and give me a smooch on the lips.

She was in her late 80s.

Those are some of the best moments of my life.

The book “I Was Vermeer” by Frank Wynne got me thinking…

It’s about Han van Meegeren, a great 20th century art forger. The story exposes “fine art” as arbitrarily defined by critics. Talent is prerequisite, not predeterminer.  The book went a long way toward defining art.

The prosecutor at van Meegeren’s trial said, “The primary function of art is to rouse emotion in the viewer.” He was speaking of fine art.

Art in general terms, as opposed to “fine art,” is rather broad. Writing, design, drawing, photography, music, mashups, sampling, typography, page setup, display and organization, are ALL aspects of artistic expression. Expression being anything which can be interpreted. Even street signs are designed.

When one looks, everything interpreted has artistic elements.

In some ways, everything is art.

In a world in which most of the media’s audience have become producers, knowing that fact is important.

DEFINING THE VALUE OF ART:

At my school our primary use of technology publishing is in 5th grade. “Think about writing to a specific audience.” “Can we choose pictures to better tell your story?” “Are there better videos to embed, which help the reader understand?” “Could we choose colors which are less distracting?” “Look for music which fits your message and audience.” Teachers are directing students–during social studies.

Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” In the 20th century, the real question was how to remain an artist while going through modern education. “Art” has been considered an elective. “You’ll never make money as an artist, dear. Better concentrate on math.”

Looking at Powerpoint, Online Video, Blogging, Flickr, Blip and Twitter one quickly comes to the realization that everything is art. The challenge now is, how to train our children to be better and better artists.

Teachers are falling in line, and one reason it’s working: Nobody has said out loud, “But all this stuff is art!”

God forbid, because in education, art is both worthless and calling it art relegates it all the weekly art “special.”

Whatever we don’t call it, the issues and skills sets used to communicate online, are all from ART.

ART AND PLAGIARISM:

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” — Salvador Dali

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” — Paul Gauguin. It also could be both, or neither. Well timed plagiarism (using Gauguin’s meaning as a copy of style) can be a cultural phenomenon–a social meme, a viral sensation. Artistic revolution never seen, isn’t.

Many bloggers (see Tumblr) are simply self-styled “curators.” They openly post things they find on the web into their blogs.  It’s called “CopyPasta” in the vernacular of the Internet. Those bloggers who curate sites of other peoples’ photos, statements and posts are creating a thing in itself.  A thing with a unique point of view.

“Forgeries are an ever-changing portrait of human desires. Each society, each generation, fakes the things it covets most,” wrote Mark Jones in Fake? The art of Deception. And Marshall McLuhan said, “Art is anything you can get away with.”  In today’s digital economy, copying the art one covets most, is very easy to get away with.

Taking and using people’s copyright is a problem indeed, but is it art? I would say, definitely.

The forger van Meegeren was clearly an equal of Vermeer in the eyes of the critics. On trial for selling an authentic Vermeer to the Nazis, van Meegeren had to expose himself.  When asked to prove the claim he had forged so many accepted Vermeers by copying a Vermeer in front of witnesses, van Meegeren said anyone could copy an existing painting of a great master. Instead, he forged an original Vermeer. When finished, the critics agreed.

Are forgeries art? I would say yes.

EXPOSURE TO THE CRITICS:

“Painting: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.” — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary. Writing and other multimedia production could work within the same definition.

Is the beauty of a spiderweb in the morning dew, art? Probably not.When two people happen upon the spiderweb and both start arguing over why it is beautiful. Is that art? How about if one of them takes a snapshot (not some artsy photograph) of the spiderweb, frames it on their wall, and then two others start arguing over why the picture is beautiful? Well then sure, that’s art. But is it the photo or the spiderweb that’s art? Clearly the spider did most of the work. If it is a straight snapshot, it would really be a question.  One could say the photographer “recognized” it as art, but what is the art recognized? At what point along this continuum does the “art” happen? Perhaps when people start to discuss the interpretation.

In many ways, when the interpretation of something can be criticized, it becomes art.

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” — Jonathan Swift

With many blogs and other Internet publishing being so personal, it sometimes seems the critics are all in confederacy against one, but it is the nature of art.

What we, the new producer class, create–are things to be interpreted.  Almost everything on the Internet is open to criticism, and getting used to that criticism is one of the real-world lessons for writer/producers on the web.

On the Internet, “comments” is a ubiquitous feature from photos to blogs, from wiki pages to mapping tours. Comments are something we need to teach children to moderate–which comments does one approve, respond or delete? Dealing with critics is part of digital literacy. It certainly is a reality our children will encounter, as all of them will have a significant digital footprint entering middle school.

OVERCOMING THE CRITICS:

“To be one’s self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.” — Irving Wallace, Saturday Evening Post.

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”– Theodore Roosevelt

It takes courage to produce, even more when there are critics ready to criticize.

WE ARE VERMEER:

Anyone who communicates in this modern world is an artist. You are either a good artist or a bad artist, but an artist you are–like it or not. We are all artists, and our students who are publishing are artists. To acknowledge this in our pursuit of education and technology publishing, will help everyone.

There is a proposal to our School Board that recommends extending the school day for a half hour from March 8, 2010 to June 21, 2010 and converting the April 12th teacher workday to a regular school day for the kiddos.

This was my facial expression upon hearing that proposal ...

I can’t begin to tell you what a negative impact that will have on learning, with the students, parents and teachers in psychological free-fall after the storm. We still can’t park, and folks can barely drop off and pick up their kids.  I can assure everyone, absolutely NO learning will take place during that 30 minutes at the grade school level.  Kids below the age of 12 are maxed out in school as it is.  They are burned out by 3pm.  It will tire out the students and teachers and reduce teacher planning time.  The additional last half hour to make up for snow-days will just be baby sitting to cross off a bureaucratic check box.

Our Hero:  In steps the newly minted president of the local union who points out the law clearly states if the Governor declares a state of emergency (which he did) the law says the school board can request a waiver from the state Board of Education.  A fact oddly missing from the proposal memo, in part, titled “Key Points.”  I mean, I would call that a “Key Point,” wouldn’t you?

The union is urging everybody (parents and teachers) to contact their School Board representative and tell them how this decision would impact them. I say, why the heck not.

You need to be a serious astronomy nerd for this to make any sense. www.exosolar.net for more…

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange

This can be said of any technology used for education …

The objective is not to teach our students how to use the technology.  It’s to teach them what, by using the technology, we all can learn about interacting with our world, our learning and our interpretation of things.

Tim Stahmer over at Assorted Stuff has a lot of bad things to say about Interactive White Boards (IWB) being “wastes of money and time.” Pointing to the teacher just using the IWB while students watch. I would agree in this instance there is a problem with the teachers, not the technology.

But there are many classrooms here in this Title One K-5 school outside Washington, D.C. where I teach, using IWBs well.

I’m a big believer in letting groups of kids work together using technology.

The killer app for IWB is the fact that groups of students can easily cooperate using a single GUI.

A video worth watching (you can skip the first 7:30 minutes and still get the point):

See Sugata Mitra’s explanation of his “Hole in the Wall” project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids.

In K-3, Interactive White Boards are a tool with which the whole class can do joint computing.

*1st graders using the edit function in MovieMaker to order the elements of a story and produce a video – together as a group of five. Some pushing the video around, some giving advice.

*K group of students building a photostory, for creating stories with a middle beginning and end. The group includes a special needs student who can interact using the computer running the smartboard and intellikeys – so they’re an equal in the process.

*1st graders Skyping as a class with another classroom and jointly doing voicethread.

Kids naturally work together and learn from one another. The tactile nature and large screen of IWB are ideal for fostering sharing of tech learning in the K-3 environment.

Tim is correct, there are many bad uses, but let’s not throw the babies (K-3) out with the bathwater (IWBs).

And perhaps, if teachers in middle school can look away from the worksheet model for just a moment, they might come up with some good uses too.

Principals are starting to ask their Information Technology Resource Teachers for a list of what children should know regarding technology at each grade.

My answer, “Well, it’s changing every six months. Children are learning this stuff at earlier and earlier ages. Two years ago, there were perhaps one or two 3rd graders who had created a MySpace page at home and three or four 4th graders who worked with online communities on gaming or other interests. Last year that type of skill set climbed into the double digits among 3rd and 4th graders. It is increasing exponentially in 4th and 5th grade and getting pushed down into 2nd and 3rd grade.”

I continued by saying, “I’m teaching them as fast as I can. Every year we are pushing what we teach down a grade level. Typing classes start in Kindergarten. So every six months such a list would change, because we are bringing our kiddos along so fast.”

I know, a bit of an ego, but it works at this school where everybody is a bit of a type-A …

Howard Rheingold brings us an expert.

Here Mimi Ito talks about her findings of interviews with hundreds of students on their use of technology in such a detached way. “Theoretical” and “academic” are words that come to mind.

Yet, we are doing much of the advanced stuff of which Ito talks here at this little K-5 Title One school outside Washington, D.C.. For the last two years we have had 5th graders creating webpages, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and using photosharing sites, producing video and audio media and embedding that media into their webpages.

Ito talks of a small minority of kids who “geek out” using media tools to fashion their own statements and expressions in an interactive way.

We just call it Social Studies.

One of the many hats I wear is that of an Information Technology Resource Teacher (ITRT) at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.

It’s a little break-fix, a lot of training teachers how to use their tools in teaching and with the kids.

Jenny said yesterday she could never do my job because “the job description sucks.”

My response was, “Wait a second! There’s a job description?!?!”

I don’t mind. I like it this way. It’s more like the journalism career I had. My favorite job in news is working the editorial desk. Like any good job, being an ITRT it is defined by the person who fills it and the needs of the environment in which they work.

The mission statement is simple. “Get teachers and students using more technology to reach their goals.”

This means:

1)Everything’s got to work, 98% of the time.

2)And as a separate issue, Teachers have to trust everything is going to work 98% of the time.

3)Teachers have to work in a constructivist teaching model in which the students can bring their spectacular background knowledge in personal technology to bare on their learning. This means teachers taking the role of guide rather than expert.

4)Create professional development environments through which teachers use the technologies one wants them to use in the classroom.

Simple, n’est-ce pas?

Of course, to get working gear in this financial environment there’s a LOT of administrative behind-the-scenes shenanigans one has to paddle through.

Here’s the thing. The more the teachers start to use advanced technology in their teaching, the more there is to do. Small-minded people think ITRTs who work hard are “working themselves out of a job.” I’ve found it to be quite the opposite. Teachers learn to blog, then they learn wikis, then voicethread, and before you know it, they are Skyping with a classroom in another state or country using voicethread to critique one another’s art. Get 10 classrooms doing some version of this and the day of an ITRT is never slow.

Somebody extracted the untamed Id (see Freud for definition) of a middle school boy in Social Studies class and hired it as a writer for this website. See: Hannah Duston. (Caution, the website gets a PG-13 for language, graphic historical story-telling, and unbridled adolescent maleness.)

The Challenge:
Our 4th and 5th grades (12 classrooms, 230+ some students and 17+ teachers and specialists) want to start a single school newspaper.  They are requesting an online work-flow allowing students to write but not publish, teachers to approve and publish.  The look and feel should be of a newspaper, not a blog.  They at first want to print the paper to distribute to students and families, rather than it being an online publication.

Draft Solution:
We can use the work flow process provided by the blogging software WordPress. Students would be given the role of “contributors” and 20 teachers and specialists “editors” or “administrators.” We could use a newspaper looking theme (14 different options can be perused here.) The newspaper could be viewed online or printed out and distributed.

To Publish Online or Not Online:
The 5th grade does a long-form research and publishing project each year which employs all sorts of social and publishing mediums such as blogs and wikis.

We have an Internet Security Protocol which has three components:

1)Don’t provide any personal details (name, school, county, state, country).
2)Don’t allow any incoming communication channels (no comments or text surveys) the only exception being radio button surveys.
3)And we tell students, “Never meet anyone in real life you only met online.”

Thus having students work in a “live” online environment is not a stretch.  Research two years ago found a majority of 4th grade students were actively publishing online (Facebook, MySpace) on their non-school time and equipment.

However, most of the teachers engaged in this project are viewing this as a traditional printed newspaper.  They seek to print the document and distribute a printed version.  This provides another layer of security because nothing will go out unless it is printed and copied multiple times.

Summary:
1)Blackboard is difficult to use and has none of the work-flow needed for this large-scale project.  Blackboard forces students to have their name or student id number on everything they publish (which in violation of our safety practices).  The blog and wiki elements of Blackboard are not viewable by families.

2)Wordpress is a solid solution from a work-flow standpoint and allows teacher and different groups of students to have different roles in the editorial process.

3)Installing WordPress inside the firewall will make it more secure in the short-term to make sure nothing is published without being scrutinized by a teacher.  It gives teachers, especially those with no blogging experience, more comfort to know nothing will go out that is not printed first.

4)However WordPress inside the firewall is not future proof.  It doesn’t allow for a change of heart which would allow for the paper to be published online.  This option of online publishing is one all real newspapers are now engaged.  The backup of data on an internally running installation of WordPress would be dodgy.

5)Wordpress outside the firewall has all the benefits of WordPress inside the firewall and allows for future proofing in several ways:

a)It allows students to access the newspaper’s editorial features from anywhere.

b)It allows the published items to be viewed by anyone anywhere.

c)It requires students adhere to online safety publishing guidelines listed above.  Students could use pen names and the school’s nickname could be used in lieu of the school name.  Everything else could be open.

We will be thinking on this over the next few weeks with the teams in question.

Here’s yet another brag on our school.   Our school is what Title One should be modeled upon. We are like a Charter Title One school in many ways, because we take the money the government provides for low income learners and run with it past what many are doing in schools in more well-to-do areas.

A Title One Heaven.

DateLine:  At a small school in Virginia …

A 1st grade teacher here at Title One Heaven shows her class Mo Willems books.  She participates in an internet interview of Mo Willems her class watches.

The students decide (with our Librarian) to write a pigeon book in the style of Mo Willems.

After writing it with the Librarian, the 1st Grade teacher creates a voicethread (inserted below) of the book written, illustrated and voiced by the students.

But then she goes one step further, and goes social. She sends the voicethread to Mo Willems website and it is posted.

That’s what I’m talking about!!! Reading, Writing, Art and Technology fueled by social media.

Title One Heaven.

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020 is a post in Teach Paperless, a blog by Shelly Blake-Plock.  It’s a great blog about teaching.  I love how this guy thinks.

I’m reading this post in teachpaperless and I’m thinking, “Why write about it, just do it.” (I know, to share, to share …)

Here’s the list from Teachpaperless of 21 things that will be obsolete over the next 10 years, and what we (at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.) are doing about them today.

I’ve put the items teach paperless stated would be obsolete in bold.  I agree with all of them, save two (numbers 8 & 9).

The following is not bragging, I’m just stating the facts about the school at which I’m lucky enough to work:

1. Desks: A 5th grade teacher here removed all desks from her room two years ago.  She did a research project to track data on student performance.  She has not asked for the furniture back.

2. Language Labs: Hah! Forget ESOL, try finding an ETMT student (English as Their Mother Tongue).  This whole school is a language lab, and if the demographers are correct so will be most U.S. schools in the future.  We don’t have a separate language lab as a result.

3. Computers: The majority of our computers are laptops, and going forward we are trying the netbooks and the next step.  School-system finances and classroom real estate both being at a premium, small and mobile is where everything is going, not just computing.

4. Homework: We’re going 24/7 using Blackboard (2 & 3) in the lower grades and wordpress/blogspot & wikispaces in the upper grades (3, 4 & 5).  Students are doing work at home without being asked.  That’s the real power of social media.  A 5th grade teacher is currently doing educational research on best practices for homework, which is NOT the way it used to be done, more along the line of teachpaperless.

5. Standardized Tests: This is a hot topic, the details of which I will cover in an upcoming post.  But we are very much moving toward portfolios as a large percentage of our students (compared with other schools) do a portfolio replacement test for the standardized tests.

6. Differentiated Instruction as Unique: We’re already far beyond this and our teachers differentiate due to language, learning styles and/or special needs.  We have an inclusive model which requires real and meaningful differentiation as a fundamental baseline to everything happening in a classroom or other part of the school, rather than an afterthought or “something the special ed teacher do” (which unfortunately is what many teachers around the world think).

7. Fear of Wikipedia: We use it as a method to teach critical reading skills. And by “critical” we mean “with a discerning eye.”

*8. Paperbacks: Here is the one thing with which I don’t agree.  Radio was to be the end of newspapers, and radio theater the end of paperbacks.  Television was to be the end of Radio, and Computers the end of everything that came before.  People will consume information in a way that is most useful and although the percentage of market share changes we have a ways to go before books go the way of papyrus scrolls.

*9. Attendance Offices: Bio scans are great, but there will still be a frazzled office person handing out tardy slips and calling home to confirm children’s whereabouts.

10. Lockers: Well, didn’t need them anyway.

11. IT Departments: According to TeachPaperless, IT Departments will have more time to innovate as they give up control and budget-line to shared-open solutions.  A lovely sentiment, and clear-headed if one remembers fondly how there didn’t really seem to be anyone in charge of IT on the Star Ship Enterprise.  But the thought of the obsessive, slightly asburger-y engineers (the norm in most IT departments) being “innovative”, well, let’s not be silly now.

12. Centralized Institutions: He’s right on the mark.  He’s talking about school buildings being like a factory where students show up for a shift.  I would also include decentralizing central offices.  “Employees who do not spend at least 10 hours a week with student should be sacked,” is a budget solution suggested by one of the teachers at my school.  All “central office” types should be housed in schools. That way they might accidentally run into a student every now and then.  At our school we house central office types, and it helps them understand the school and students, and helps us by having them more accessible.

13. Organization of Educational Service by Grade: We’re already doing this by necessity, because when one successfully differentiates, it’s done.

14. Education School Classes that Fail to Integrate Social Technology: I agree, but would reword this to say the following will be obsolete in two years, “Education School Classes that Can Successfully Continue to Keep Social Technology Out.” (I mean MiFi kind of screws up all the “firewall technology” on which we are currently spending money.)

15. Paid/Outsourced Professional Development: Our school has a specific model which is co-teaching, coaching and inclusive.  One can walk into any room at any time and nobody bats an eyelash.  The kids and teachers are used to constant traffic.  This raises the bar, because no one can go into their room, shut the door and come out in June.  Professional accountability which includes an AP coming in twice a year is ridiculous.  Constant feedback on everything at all times is what professional development is now and going forward.  Implementing it is the hard part.  We have.  There’s still a place for Paid/Outsourced PD, but the guts of our PD is inhouse PLC, and it works.

16. Current Curricular Norms: We’re doing this, but it is easier in a K-5 environment.  Differentiation demands it.

17. Parent-Teacher Conference Night: More and more classroom blogs are cropping up at my school. These keep the parents in the loop in an ongoing way.  One instance (not at this school) is an individual blog being used for a special needs student instead of a journal they take from home to school and back.  The dialog is deep and meaningful and discrete.  A reality to which I think Blake-Plock is alluding.

18.Typical Cafeteria Food: We’ve made no great inroads here, but one can only hope.

19. Outsourced Graphic Design and Webmastering: Here again is a tension between the creative flow in a school and the need of many DIT departments to assert control claiming “Internet Security” as the cover.  In the future, with social media becoming a utility, and technology becoming ubiquitous, “Internet Security” emanating from within a technology department as a firewall or other technology will not be possible.  “Internet Security” will principally be achieved through behavior management by education of students from Kindergarten forward.  Our 3rd and 4th graders are doing MySpace and Facebook pages at home already.  They are doing google pages, blogspot and wordpress at school.  Given the tools, they could do what Blake-Plock is suggesting next week, but current technology setup of our formal graphic design and webmastering prevents this.

20. High School Algebra I: OK, well, N/A for this K-5 school.

21. Paper: In the last three years, we have moved from a deskjet at every teacher’s desk to a small set of networked centralized printers.  Paper use (and toner) has declined exponentially.

Thanks to Blake-Plock and TeachPaperless.blogspot.com for everything they are doing to support the mission.