Education: August 2003 Archive Page

The special efforts made by schools to steer more girls into advanced math and science classes came after powerful advocacy groups embraced the problem. But Gurian and other advocates for boys say they run into resistance from educators who point to males' success in the workforce as proof that advocacy for boys is unnecessary. | In spite of the lack of research, anecdotal evidence shows that far more effective strategies are available for teaching boys than plying them with Ritalin. -- USA Today --Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin (USA Today Op/Ed)

And the opposing view from Jacqueline E. Woods:

The message to women and girls is clear: You are taking more than your fair share. You are too successful. You have come too far, and boys are paying the price for your accomplishments."

Sorry -- that's not the message I get when I read the coverage on the education of boys. The message I get is that the healthy behavior of normal boys (on average more rambunctious and physical, and far less verbal than the girls in their class) has been pathologized.

Topics of interest to most boys (sports, adventure stories, comic books, computer games) are sometimes seen as too competitive, too aggressive, etc. While boys from an early age outperform girls in areas like spatial relationships, which may account for why mathematics and engineering continues to be a male-dominated field, see: BusinessWeek, Christina Hoff Summers, CBS News.

"The Berenstain Bears taught me about not being greedy. I used to have the 'galloping greedy gimmies,' but not anymore." ... Delighted by the positive influence of [The Berenstain Bears] Get The Gimmies, Johnson's parents purchased their daughter 14 more books from the series. --Precocious 6-Year-Old Claims Berenstain Bears Book Changed Her Life (The Onion)

Ouch... that one hit close to home

Blair Hornstine, whose court battle to be her high school's sole valedictorian ended up throwing her life in turmoil, settled her differences with the Moorestown School District yesterday to the tune of $60,000 - all but $15,000 to pay her lawyers. -- Toni Callas and Joseph A. Gambardello --Valedictorian settles suit against district (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I've previously blogged about Hornstine's case.

I have stage-fright. Teaching starts today, you see. I have stage-fright far worse than when I present a paper in front of a few hundred people at a conference, even though I taught all last semester, and loved it, and the stuff I'm planning on doing today is based on a recipe I've used three or four times before with various groups of students. I'm convinced that only two students will turn up and this will prove the basic untenability of my future career in academia.

I'm all aglow. Teaching starts today, you see. I feel that same excitement that I feel at conferences, that thrill at meeting new thoughts and approaches to the world. I taught all last semester, and loved it, and the stuff I'm planning on doing today has worked well before and I love the texts we'll be talking about. Do you know, I've been astounded at how I enjoy teaching. I like research too, but teaching is for me a real reason to stay in academia.

-- Jill Walker --Stage Fright/Glow (jill/txt)

I don't start teaching for a week yet, but Jill's comments perfectly mirror my own.

Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office? I've heard this lament time and again in my son's schools over the years. To listen to these parents, you'd think the schools were forcing children to use a history book that says the world is flat.|Such complaints speak loudly to Apple's (AAPL ) fall from grace in education. -- Charles Hadad --Apple's School Days Are Numbered (Business Week)

--I Feel Faint (Weblogg-Ed)

Will Richardson finds a third NYT article on blogging, and a whole page in Technology and Learning magazine. Now we have more dead trees to hand to faculty members who shift uncomfortably and ask, "What is this 'weblog ' of which you speak?"

"I always wanted my work to be read by someone else, someone out there who would grade me seriously, a regular person," [10-year-old Raya Allen] said. "With a teacher, it's their job. When someone else is reading it, they are doing it on their own free will." --A Young Writers' Round Table, via the Web (NY Times)

Interesting article about the effort to incite enthusiasm for writing by letting kids read each other's work online. Via KairosNews, where EMason also suggested the NYT article "Can Johnny Blog," which offers a good overview of blogs in education.

UK online centres are for people who have limited or no access to skills in using new technologies. The centres will help people to develop the skills to use the Internet to access information, send email using a PC, mobile phone, digital television or games console; (please note not all centres will have the same facilities), and explore the opportunities that new technologies offer such as for further learning and updating skills. --What is a UK Online Centre? (UK Dept. for Education and Skills)

Local businesses are encouraged to join the progam and have their facility identified as a UK Oline Centre. This makes sense -- companies that want to make money via the Internet will benefit if the general public becomes more Internet literate.

"When students in Biloxi, Miss., show up this morning for the first day of the new school year, a virtual army of digital cameras will be recording every minute of every lesson in every classroom.|Hundreds of Internet-wired video cameras will keep rolling all year long, in the hope that they'll deter crime and general misbehavior among the district's 6,300 students -- and teachers." Greg Toppo --Who's Watching the Class? Webcams in schools raise privacy issue  (USA Today)

This article goes beyond the typical "privacy rights eroding" comments you'd expect to find, and even interviews a teacher who likes the cameras:

Page, a former biology teacher, granted open access to anyone who wanted to view his classroom, no password required. He says families tuned in regularly and loved it. ''You could see if the kid was wearing the same thing they left the house in that morning.''

I do think it's very sad that we even have to consider turning schools into panopticons.

Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher and social reformer, published his plan for the Panopticon penitentiary in 1791. Essentially, it was for a building on a semi-circular pattern with an 'inspection lodge' at the centre and cells around the perimeter. Prisoners, who in the original plan would be in individual cells, were open to the gaze of the guards, or 'inspectors', but the same was not true of the view the other way. By a carefully contrived system of lighting and the use of wooden blinds, officials would be invisible to the inmates. Control was to be maintained by the constant sense that prisoners were watched by unseen eyes..... Beyond the metaphor, a model of power also lies in the concept of the panoptic, and it takes us well beyond the Orwellian jackboots and torture, or even the rats. The normalizing discipline, the exaggerated visibility of the subject, the unverifiability of observation, the subject as bearer of surveillance, the quest for factual certainty - all are important aspects of the panoptic as model of power. The question is, to what extent are all these necessarily present in each context? Sociologically, is electronic surveillance panoptic power?" (Lyon, "From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon.")

"I consider my using weblogs in class this summer to be, for the most part, a failure. I'm glad I tried it, but my students didn't enjoy blogging. I even thought to myself, at some points in the semester, that maybe blogging is something someone should do because he or she wants to do it; in other words, it should be more organic, not a class requirement. But I don't really believe that." Clancy Ratliff --Assessing Weblogs in College Writing Classes (KairosNews)

Several meaty comments make this blog thread a keeper.

"Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy, who recently put two dozen teachers on unpaid leave for failing a basic English proficiency test, has flunked a required literacy test three times... Laboy, who receives a 3 percent pay hike this month that will raise his salary to $156,560, recently put 24 teachers on unpaid administrative leave because they failed a basic English test..." --School Chief Failed Literacy Test  (AP/Boston.com)

As with most stories, the truth is more complex than it appears in the blurb: Laboy is not an illiterate idiot -- his first language is Spanish, and apparently doesn't test well. Since the voters in his community voted for English-only classrooms, he was only doing what the voters asked him to do when he suspended his underlings. How many chances did they have before he suspended them? According to the story, this legislation has been in place since 1998.

Over on KairosNews, blacklily8 writes: "Sniff. Poor old super intendent of schools; someone pass me a hanky, please."

Update: Rosemary Frezza sends a link to a Laboy quote in a brief piece about a culturally biased question on a student test that asked students to write about a "snow day".

"Video games offer worlds for players to explore. Parents and politicians aren't always happy with what goes on in digital realms, but now universities want to use gaming technology to build better teaching tools for schools." -- Wired's blurb for an article by Brad King --Educators Turn to Games for Help (Wired)