Why should teachers think about using Project-Based Learning right out of the gate during the 1st quarter of school? Here’s why.
Here’s a headlines I just read…
NYC schools reopen with fewer resources, higher standards
Schools in New York City reopened today with higher academic standards for students but fewer resources to support them. Budget cuts have caused reductions in staff, increases in class sizes and the elimination of after-school programs, even as more students have fallen behind on state tests in reading and math because of the higher standards. “There’s never been more of a need to change educatHere’s a headlines I just read…
NYC schools reopen with fewer resources, higher standards Schools in New York City reopened today with higher academic standards for students but fewer resources to support them. Budget cuts have caused reductions in staff, increases in class sizes and the elimination of after-school programs, even as more students have fallen behind on state tests in reading and math because of the higher standards. “There’s never been more of a need to change education, but the dollars to support that don’t seem to be there.”
Funny, but this could have been California. Or this could have been Michigan. Or this could have been Illinois, New Mexico, Washington or any one of a zillion other states.
(Actually, we all know there aren’t a zillion other states. There are only two states when it comes to public education in America: those that operate in a sane, admirable manner and those that bubble test their kids under the unfunded mandates of NCLB which perpetuate me writing the same thematic blog week after week after week of my freakin’ life!)
So what’s the solution?
Put a moratorium on all bubble tests this year and give the money that would have gone to the bubble test makers back to the schools.
Yep, take a testing hiatus. It would financially feel like winning the lottery.
Just a year. Not asking for the moon, here. Just allow our nation to take a break, catch our breaths and use the funds we already have allotted for schooling in a different area of schooling that doesn’t involve paying millions and millions of dollars to people who are under-serving our needs and over-charging us to do so..
And don’t tell me it can’t be done.
Snow days come and schools close on the drop of a bad-weather dime. Right now we have about 8 months advance notice. Call it a snow year for the bubble tests and resume the inanity – I mean the effective, insightful, assessment – next year once we have a few more sheckels in the cupboard.
It’s not like the tests will go bad. They are not fresh fruit. Just put them in a cabinet – like I do with textbooks – and whenever you find the need to re-open the cabinet you can rest assure that the materials are still in there safe and sound.
Of course, the great secret we all might discover is (like I did) we might never need to go re-open the cabinet ever again. And be better off for not doing so as well.
And so, we can 1) continue to read more and more headlines like this NYC schools reopen with fewer resources, higher standards or 2) call it a Snow Year for the Bubble Tests
Who’s making these decisions anyway?ion, but the dollars to support that don’t seem to be there.”
Funny, but this could have been California. Or this could have been Michigan. Or this could have been Illinois, New Mexico, Washington or any one of a zillion other states.
(Actually, we all know there aren’t a zillion other states. There are only two states when it comes to public education in America: those that operate in a sane, admirable manner and those that bubble test their kids under the unfunded mandates of NCLB which perpetuate me writing the same thematic blog week after week after week of my freakin’ life!)
So what’s the solution?
Put a moratorium on all bubble tests this year and give the money that would have gone to the bubble test makers back to the schools.
Yep, take a testing hiatus. It would financially feel like winning the lottery.
Just a year. Not asking for the moon, here. Just allow our nation to take a break, catch our breaths and use the funds we already have allotted for schooling in a different area of schooling that doesn’t involve paying millions and millions of dollars to people who are under-serving our needs and over-charging us to do so..
And don’t tell me it can’t be done.
Snow days come and schools close on the drop of a bad-weather dime. Right now we have about 8 months advance notice. Call it a snow year for the bubble tests and resume the inanity – I mean the effective, insightful, assessment – next year once we have a few more sheckels in the cupboard.
It’s not like the tests will go bad. They are not fresh fruit. Just put them in a cabinet – like I do with textbooks – and whenever you find the need to re-open the cabinet you can rest assure that the materials are still in there safe and sound.
Of course, the great secret we all might discover is (like I did) we might never need to go re-open the cabinet ever again. And be better off for not doing so as well.
And so, we can 1) continue to read more and more headlines like this NYC schools reopen with fewer resources, higher standards or 2) call it a Snow Year for the Bubble Tests
Who’s making these decisions anyway?
I am not sure why more attention was not paid to the news that the federal gov is trying to re-shape assessment… AWAY FROM BUBBLE TESTING. That’s right, the game of assessment overhaul is afoot.
For me, this brings up bittersweet feelings.
I loathe the bubble tests and think they stink. I’ve said so a zillion times over. I also abhor the fact that those who make the bubble tests have been feeding us the company line that “we offer penetrating, objective insight into our nation’s classrooms” when really bubble testing has more shortcomings than Tiger Woods has mistresses.
However, I will be sad to see them go as well. Why? For the same reason that so many late night comics were sad to see George Dubya Bush leave the White House.
There is just so much professional mileage I have been able to glean out of mocking bubble tests that really, what’s going to fill my comedic gap?
Michelle Rhee? Hmm… not much humor there.
Arne Duncan? Not self-righteous enough to make for a sustainable target of perennial funny-bone tickling.
Mindless administrators who act like they know what they are doing when really, it’s clear to all of us that they don’t have a clue? Sure, but more than enough admins are actually quite good at their jobs so the bulls-eye isn’t always that big or that fair.
And whenever I stereotype people, I always strive to be fair.
Well, lucky for me that the bubble tests will be in full effect this year… even though as Mr. Duncan says…
The No. 1 complaint of teachers has been that “bubble tests pressure teachers to teach to a test that doesn’t measure what really matters.”
Hmm… where have I heard that before?
Bubble Tests, I am gonna miss ya.
Raise your hand if you know who Jason Calacanis is? If not, you might be missing something. Why? Because this is how Jason puts out Help Wanted ads for jobs.
Mahalo is hiring developers, either out of school or with one to 700 years experience, provided they are hard-working, resilient, resourceful and driven to change the world. If this describes you, send me your resume and a cover letter explaining why you kick ass. If you are lame, weak and want balance and peace in your life, please send your resume and flowery cover letter to Jimmy Wales at jobs@wikia.com.
Now at first glance, a person who remembers what it was like to look for a job in the 20th century might easily dismiss the above as a type of nonsense that could never really be credible, reputable legitimate employment… much less a career.
But we’re not in the 20th century any longer.
Jason Calacanis, the guy doing the hiring, is a tech legend. He co-founded a company called Weblogs in 2003 (and many credit Jason with bringing blogging to the mainstream. BTW, he sold Weblogs for like 30 million smackers… and this was after the tech bubble popped.)
Mahalo is Jason’s “next big thing”. It can somewhat be described as a “human powered search engine”.
Jason has money. Jason has drive. Jason has his eyes set on conquering the world. The above Help Wanted is 100% serious.
In the world in which we now live, so many rules by which we used to play are out the window. Protocol? Unabashed “explain to me why you kick ass” is the attitude that the Young Turks of the web world now seek. Forget diplomacy… they want to know if you think you have the skills and the confidence to stand up and say, “Hell yes, I have the chops. Put me in, Coach!”
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Go forth boldy in the direction of your dreams; live the life you’ve imagined.”
Us teachers, we like Henry David Thoreau. But do we like Jason Calacanis?
What’s the difference between sagacity, chutzpah, braggadocio, over-inflated ego and a go-get ‘em attitude?
Michelle Rhee?
Sir Ken Robinson?
Erin Gruwell?
The rabble-rouser down the hall?
One last interesting thing about Jason Calacanis. (His wiki has some good details.) Jason was involved in a web hoax involving his Twitter postings regarding the iPad just before its launch. In tweets, he claimed to have a “reviewer’s copy” of an iPad – and the web went wild. Hysteria. The iPad never existed but the mainstream media reported it as fact allowing Calacanis to expose the fact checking and verification faults of the modern day mainstream media who published the hoax story of the iPad as true and is always in a perpetual rush to be first as opposed to being right.
Interesting stuff.
Brick by brick, the brick and mortar world – and the world of print – is being disassembled, reconfigured, re-imagined, re-constituted and re-discombulated right in front of our astonished eyes.
(But go ahead and keep doing things “same as it ever was” as David Byrne of the Talking Heads would say. Repeat after me: Bubble tests are yummy for student brains. Bubble tests are yummy for student brains. Bubble tests are yummy for student brains. And good for teachers, too!)
The latest Whoa! in a year full of Whoas! is the news that the Oxford English Dictionary, the standard bearer for the language we all find so dear (so deer, in fact that we butcher it like venison) is planning to yank itself from the rancid ranks of physical incarnation.
That’s right, you heard correct. The Oxford English Dictionary is going out of print. (Well, possibly.)
Roadkill on the Google highway.
Chum in the sharky waters of the web.
A buttery biscuit on the saucer of a plump Englishman’s afternoon teacup.
Sake’s alive what is happenin’ to our world?
As Nigel Portwood (their boss) said, “the print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of percent a year.”
An interesting fact:
The online Oxford English Dictionary, according to CBS World News, now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers. The current printed edition – a hefty 20-volume, $1,165 set published in 1989 – has sold about 30,000 sets in total.
“The print dictionary market is just disappearing.” (That’s Nigel again.)
“All in all it’s just a-notha brick in the wall.” (That’s Pink Floyd.)
“The world is changin’… but bay-bee, bay-bee student assessment is just fine.” (That’s me… dripping with bittersweet sarcasm.)
It’s well reported that the gateway drug to harder drugs is the (ostensibly) less dangerous drug marijuana.
Weed, as anti-drug crusaders, like to say, is the siren seductress which leads unwitting tokers towards the rocky shores of shipwrecked doom. And though they oversimplify matters a bit with this argument, I gotta admit, there are probably very few heroin addicts that didn’t start off smokin’ the wacky tabacky.
Pot is a gateway. Hard to argue.
But what is the siren seductress for teachers in this day and age? What is the gateway substance which almost always can be traced to a teacher’s bad professional place?
Discouragement and demoralization. Those are the emotions which, like pot, often are the valet opening up the door to future train wrecks.
And the forces available to lure educators down the rocky shores of discouragement and demoralization are everywhere.
When I think about it, I realize that teachers don’t just become bitter Lemon educators who ought to be booted out of our classrooms for their professional patheticness. Nope. Instead, it often begins with high hopes that are crushed, fond aspirations which are squelched, lofty aims and noble goals that are bulldozed by the forces of bureaucracy, tomfoolery, politics, apathy and so on.
Really, I’ve never met a new teacher in my life that wasn’t wide-eyed, bushy-tailed and eager to do the best work they could serving the needs of the kids.
And all the best teachers I know that are veterans in this field still show that same spark. Perhaps a bit of the “wet behind the ears” aspect of their lives has been dried off, but that happens in every profession, from NBA ballers to Wall Street traders to Young Adult novelists.
Honeymoons end.
Let’s be honest… discouragement and demoralization, when left unchecked are cancer. They will eat at and destroy everything in a teacher’s professional path. Eventually.
Teachers aren’t afraid of hard work. And they aren’t afraid of monumental challenges. But suck the hope from their hearts that they can make a difference, be a part of the change they want to see, have a positive influence on a young person’s life, the school’s community, the system at large and so on, and that’s when things starts to go downhill.
Becoming discouraged and demoralized is the great classroom enemy which needs to be avoided. After all, a teacher who is characterized by “belief” is usually also characterized by things like energy, industriousness, and work-ethic. But steal an educator’s faith and you have shorn Sampson’s hair. They phone it in, do work at the minimum threshold and bide their time to Friday or the next holiday break.
Discouragement and demoralization might not seem lethal at first, but in my opinion they are clearly the quicksand of our professional lives.
Keep your attitude hopeful and optimistic for if you allow the discouraging and demoralizing side of this job to take root, weed will grow.
A weed that can be the gateway to a much worse place.
It’s hard to go down to the cellar if you never enter through the cellar door.
“How can I better support you?” When is the last time an admin walked into your room and actually uttered those words with nothing more than their “listening ears” on?
I mean really, how dysfunctional are our teacher/admin relationships these days?
I don’t even think most admins view themselves as “supporters”. I think they mostly view themselves as “bosses”.
How would you characterize your admins? Do they…
Or do they…
I know this. The best admins I’ve ever had clearly fall into one category over the other.
