Melanie Oudin

wow

from the WSJ:

Melanie Oudin, 17, stunned another high-ranked opponent Monday and became the youngest woman to reach the U.S. Open quarterfinals since Serena Williams in 1999. "That's amazing," Leslie Oudin, Melanie's mother, said. John Oudin, who flew in Sunday from a sales meeting in Atlanta to watch his daughter defeat Nadia Petrova in three sets, marveled at his daughter's toughness. "She doesn't seem nervous out there," he said. "I don't know where that came from."

—Tom Perrotta

She was homeschooled:

Making a stab at normalcy within the bubble of youth tennis, the Oudins could not bear the idea of sending a daughter away to some academy to be raised by a coach. It even took Melanie the better part of a year to persuade her mother to begin home schooling her in the seventh grade.

It was the only way to accommodate the minimum of four hours a day devoted to hitting and conditioning.

Love for Tennis Paved Journey to US Open

The Career Path to Pro Tennis Often Passes High School
By DAVID V. JOHNSON
Published: August 30, 2009
New York Times

the President's speech to school children

It's here. (Haven't read yet - just came across a link.)

Looks like I'm headed back to Evanston ---- 

update - he's telling the 'before schooling' story!

And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

Prepared School Remarks

I love that story. 

Speaking of parents who teach, I had a long conversation with one of the doctors taking care of my mom today. She's back in the hospital, this time in ICU. Towards the end, my sister started to give him my number and, when he heard the exchange, he said, "Westchester County."

Turns out he grew up in Mt. Kisco.

This sparked my sister to ask him whether he had attended public schools or private. He said, "Public, but my wife and I may not send our kids to public schools." 

Then he said, "We're thinking about group homeschooling."

21st century skills

Solitaire-playing legislators draw criticism

I'm sure you've all seen this, but I couldn't resist.

help desk: project based learning

I'm posting this email without the writer's name:

My local school district is talking about reinventing the high school around a project-based learning model. I don't know much about this stuff, but I'm concerned about some of the things I'm hearing. Are you aware of any scholarly research that's been done on PBL? There will be some public forums coming up soon, and I'd like to have some hard evidence (one way or the other) to rely on. I just recently found your blog, so perhaps you've written something on PBL that you could recommend as well?

That reminds me: I never got around to writing a post about what happened in Holland when the public schools there moved wholesale to integrated, interdisciplinary, project-based learning.

People hated it. Hated it. People hated it so much they pulled their kids out of the schools and put them in the Gymnasium. I don't know what the Gymnasium are, but I do know that they are in some way associated with Erasmus and that students attending Gymnasium learn Latin and Greek. 

We heard this story from a professor friend of Ed's, who said her sister had attended Gymnasium and had read Homer in the original Greek by the time she was in 8th grade. As I recall.

Ed's friend said so many people pulled their kids out of the project schools that they finally had to drop the project method and go back to teaching subjects. 

I cherish that story.

compare and contrast, part 3

In countries where there is a single health care system -- and thus a single pool of money to pay for it -- it is somewhat easier to control costs. Britain's NHS often decides, for example, that it won't pay for kidney dialysis for a 90-year-old. That means somebody's grandmother will die, but at least Grandma and her relatives know that the money saved is going to be used to help some sick baby or some accident victim.

Q&A with Correspondent T.R. Reid

I came across this passage quite by accident; I was looking for info on the Swiss health care system, and suddenly there it was. The NHS "often" refuses to pay for dialysis for 90-year olds. 

yikes

Seeing as how my own 80-year old mom needed an emergency dialysis last year, I took that amiss, and I don't see myself feeling any more friendly to such a policy 10 years from now, when she's 90. Assuming she lives to see 90, which, given her determination and the medical care she's had, she may. Unfortunately, by the time she's 90 she probably will need dialysis, so thank heavens we live here, not there.

At some point, mulling this over, I realized: the wording of this passage is odd.

The NHS often decides not to pay for dialysis for 90-year olds?

Because Britain has a lot of 90-year olds needing dialysis? 

And does often mean not always? Do some 90-year olds who need dialysis  get dialysis? (And how does a person get in that queue?) 

The glaring anomaly, however, and it took me a little while to notice this, is the choice of the word "grandmother." Somebody's grandmother, no less. Not your grandmother or my grandmother. Somebody's.

Of course, when somebody's grandmother dies because the NHS won't pay for dialysis, the people who are most distraught aren't the grandchildren, usually. 

The people who are most distraught are the children. 

So let's try it that way:

In countries where there is a single health care system -- and thus a single pool of money to pay for it -- it is somewhat easier to control costs. Britain's NHS often decides, for example, that it won't pay for kidney dialysis for a 90-year-old. That means somebody's mother will die, but at least Mom and her children know that the money saved is going to be used to help some sick baby or some accident victim.

It would be fun to put together a collection of political euphemisms^* from all realms of the political spectrum^** to use teaching writing.  

I wonder if anyone's done that. 

^* I realize that this passage is not, on the whole, what you would call euphemistic, seeing as how it states directly that the NHS withholds critical care from the elderly in order to reduce costs. Nevertheless, the use of the words "somebody's grandmother" and, later, "Grandma" avoid calling a spade a spade. 

**balanced euphemisms! Balance is good.

Politics and the English Language

Can we clone her?

Excerpts from an article entitled "Head of the Class" by long-time science teacher, principal and college professor Louse Butler, author of Beating the Bell Curve, in the August 2009 Mensa Bulletin (emphasis--and any typos--mine):

On entering education:

The politics of education was a disappointment and a shock to me. Our boards of education are purely political entities, state boards of education even more so. The two largest teachers groups, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are nothing but political organizations. Throw in the colleges of education [which] are populated by frighteningly political professors, and you have lots of people in power with plenty of axes to grind, many of which bear only tangentially on education. Our schools should be places where barriers are removed and doors of opportunity are opened through the common denominator of knowledge, but they should never be tools of social engineering.

On science education in the US:

There are too many people in education who think that science and math are elite subjects. They think they are too difficult for the average student and therefore are not to be emphasized in curriculum or in practice. These people are wrong. Science and math not only provide essential information, but they give us a logical and critical way of thinking. Science is a process of thought as much as it is a body of knowledge Science and math should be part of all instruction, enhance all instruction, and clarify all instruction. Sadly, the same people who want to reserve science for the few are the same people who don't want us to teach phonetic reading, civics, or geography.

Right. Science and math, as disciplines and over time, promote the development of critical thinking. Critical thinking cannot be taught in a vacuum.

And essential information to boot!

Where would she like science curriculum to go?

I can tell you where [it] shouldn't go. The consolidation of science curriculum into general science instead of its component disciplines is nothing more than a dilution of scientific knowledge to accommodate the shortage of qualified science teachers. We saw the same think happen when "social studies" was substituted for the real disciplines of history, geography, civics, and economics [ed: right, Catherine?]. And look what a mess that has turned out to be!

On the state of education in the US in general:

The drop out rate of first-year teachers is ridiculously high. The children don't seem to want to learn, and their behavior runs from difficult to outrageous. Our schools have, frankly, fed their students a load of manure. At the very least, the first-year teacher feels that their training doesn't reflect the real world. They become disillusioned, frustrated, and angry with themselves and the system and they quit. It is a terrible waste of time and talent. Show me a teacher who went into education just because they love children, and I'll show you a person who will be found bound, gagged, and abandoned in her closet by a group of third graders some time in mid-September. What you have to love is knowledge.

Bingo.

I see school systems that seem to have decided their first and only function is educating their students in a rigorous and challenging curriculum, and those systems are beacons of light in a dark night. It is interesting that these positive changes seem to be all in small and isolated spots. There aren't any "big course" corrections coming out of our colleges of education.

On why education in the US has slipped:

Part of the problem is teacher preparation. Another problem is our decision to excuse poor performance instead of correcting it. Starting in the 1970s, there was a "feel good" movement that pushed for a mea culpa for the world's ills by giving students a pass on anything that might make them feel challenged. What we got was a generation that was very comfortable with failure. We are having a hard time recovering from that, because the students who grew up with that are now teaching the next generation of teachers.

That's the most concise synopsis of the main problem I've ever seen.

On what the next generation of children can expect:

If we are going to compete with students in the emerging nations, especially in Asia, we are going to have to stop using schools for social experimentation and return to using them for education. We are going to have to accept that students must be reading fluently by third grade. They must be ready for algebra in eighth grade.

On how to reach students in mixed ability classrooms:

Many theorists in the educational community will be shocked to hear me say that I reached all of my students by teaching to the top of the class. You put in plenty of safety nets to catch the students who need extra help, but the forward direction of the class should always be the top. By doing that, you make sure you reach the students who will return the biggest bang for the buck, and you make success the standard. The key is to assume that most of your students can achieve the same standard. You help everyone, but hold no one back. . . Not that my class was a democracy. I was in charge, and any one who doesn't think that children need a leader hasn't tried to organize so much as a rock fight.

Wow. If we had 100,000 Louise Butlers, just imagine where US education would be!

the sorting machine

I'm sick as a dog^* -- who knew stress had anything to do with the immune system? 

And, on a directly related subject: Who Killed Health Care? by Regina Herzlinger is great. Wonderful! Especially the chapter on 'dysfunctional culture.' 

I've been planning for months now to write a post called "It's the culture, stupid," a concept that came to me after re-reading Richard DuFour's "Restructuring Isn't Enough." Turns out Herzlinger has a section titled exactly that: It's the culture, stupid. 

Before I retire to my bedroom, here's an excerpt from her book:

"You won't believe what happened to me this week. I checked an elderly diabetic into my hospital. The guy had a lot of troubles. A great guy, but he just can't manage his diabetes. I had operated on his foot a few weeks ago. And what do you know? As soon as he heals, he goes on a bender. His sugar goes out of control. He was in terrible shape. I checked him into the hospital because I suspected he had an aneurysm ... If he tested positive, I knew I had to operate immediately, the next day. That baby could blow any minute and he would bleed to death.

"Well, the PCP (primary care physician) who is my patient's gatekeeper just called me. Because he represents the HMO, the gatekeeper has to approve the bill. He thinks I should not have admitted my patient into the hospital for the tests. He questioned my judgment. He told me I was practicing bad, wasteful medicine. He threatened to throw me out of the insurer's network of doctors if I kept this up. I lost my temper. I told him in no uncertain terms that he just does not understand my kind of medicine. He's out of his league-out of his depth."

[snip]

I have heard Paul's plaint many times in the course of the research I've conducted for my Harvard Business School case studies and after the lectures I've delivered to hundreds of health care groups. I know from decades of interactions with business organizations that when colleagues cannot communicate with each other without rancor and misunderstandings, when competence and motives are questioned without cause, the organizational culture has gone terribly wrong. In successful organizations, confrontations of this sort lead to intervention and analysis by upper managers, and ultimately to a plan to correct the problem ... but in most managed care organizations, this kind of culture does not exist.

[snip]

Here's how a successful health care organization handled a similar problem.

Joan is the Oklahoma-based technical specialist for a firm that manufactures life-support equipment. She is notified that the device in a Louisiana hospital is not working properly. The hospital has no backup and has tried all the usual remedies to no avail. This too is a life-or-death situation that calls for immediate action. But, unlike Paul, who had to "consult" the PCP before he could act, Joan can proceed to do what she knows to do: she e-mails a request to her manager for permission to ship an expensive replacement device ASAP. Permission is expeditiously granted. She also knows that if she does not receive a response within 15 minutes, she is authorized to proceed on her own. Here, everyone cooperates: all efforts are properly focused on the right and expeditious thing to do for the patient's well-being.

Why are these two situations so glaringly different? It is not the existence of clear procedures in one case and not the other. They could have made a difference, of course. But the core difference is that Joan's organization has a culture that lends itself to the development of such protocols and Paul's does not.

People in an organization whose culture relies on a shared vision are positive and action oriented rather than negative and blame oriented. They want to work things out, find solutions, and serve their customers. ... The culture helps them realize that a confrontation is not a clash of personalities, but rather a sign that something deeper is going wrong and a signal that it must be fixed to preserve the organization's ability to perform its mission.

In health care, a productive organizational culture means finding ways to help patients. But such cultures have become rarer and rarer in managed care organizations and hospitals for reason that we will explore....

Who Killed Health Care?

pp. 29-32

That's what we're missing in so many public schools: a culture focused on making sure all students succeed. 

Here's DuFour, writing in 1995:

Ten years ago both the structure and the culture of Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, reflected it commitment to the traditional task of sorting and selecting students. 

[snip]

In this structure, teachers saw themselves as quality control inspectors. Their job was to present information as clearly as possible, assess the aptitude of each student, and promote student success by placing students at the appropriate ability level. Assigning grades according to a bell-shaped curve was a common practice that, by definition, limited the number of students who could achieve at a high level and ensured that a certain percentage were destined to fail. The “teacher as quality control inspector” had little need to collaborate with others. There was no compelling reason to coordinate curriculum, instruction, or assessment with colleagues teaching the same course.

Teachers were not only isolated from one another but from parents as well. No active parent organization existed other than booster groups for specific student activities. Teachers were required to communicate with parents only when a student was in danger of failing. Further, the primary means available to communicate student failure was an individual letter to each parent. Thus, parents received a progress report only if failure was imminent. The majority of parents had no idea how their child was doing until they received a repot card in the 10^th week of the semester. 

“Restructuring Isn’t Enough by Richard DuFour

Educational Leadership April 1995 p. 33-24

^* How sick is that, anyway? I've never seen my dogs take to their beds with fever & sore throat.

All Things PLC (Richard DuFour)

If Health Care Were Run Like Retail by Regina Herzlinger

I vote 'no'

Anonymous asks:

Can anyone think of a good reason for the only required book for 10th grade Honors English to be Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W Loewen?

No, they apparently weren't doing it as an example of propaganda. No, I did write English and not History.

another reason to vote 'no' on your local school budget