Station math, part 2

Julie writes:

My 7th grader, who was in an accelerated math class this year (in GA) experienced these same math stations. He said it was like being in elementary school all over again.

This same teacher "flipped" her classroom by making videos of her reading the textbook and examples aloud. He was expected to watch the videos each night before doing homework problems...but he couldn't stand it. He wanted to just read the book to himself and get the homework done.

Same teacher wanted parents and students to follow her on Twitter to keep up with daily assignments...my son has no interest in using Twitter.

Part of what is going on in my district, and I imagine in Julie's district, is that administrators here are focused first and foremost on "infusing technology into the curriculum." This is the prime directive.

Just how to infuse technology into the curriculum remains a mystery, however, so the district has elected to buy a bunch of stuff and have teachers "innovate."

Which reminds me of a funny conversation. (Not funny ha-ha, I'm afraid.)

A fellow dissident here in the district invited me to a meeting she had scheduled with the high school principal re: flipped classrooms. As we sat down, the principal, who is new to the district, told us he "believes in" flipped classrooms.

"I encourage teachers to take risks," he said.

Having spent years of my life chewing over this and related issues, I had a response at the ready: "You're taking risks with other people's children," I said.

"Teachers have tenure and a union, they're not the ones taking the risk. The kids are taking the risk, and they haven't been asked whether they want to take the risk you're forcing them to take."

(I actually said these sentences, out loud. I didn't just think of saying them later on and wish I had. Very satisfying!)

The principal, who seems like a very nice guy, looked horrified. Clearly, it had never crossed his mind that "teachers taking risks" could be construed as anything other than an unalloyed good--let alone a borderline abuse of his authority as head of school, which is pretty much what I was suggesting.

Since then the administration has gotten a bit of an earful on the subject of experimenting with other peoples' children.

But the experiments continue apace.

"Station math" is, I gather, another effort to infuse technology into the curriculum, I guess because one of the stations has movies, and movies are technology.

So....time flies. I'm old enough to remember when SMART Boards were technology.

My district has beaucoup SMART Boards. We had to buy one for every classroom because we had a SMART Board equity gap.

Heat, but no light?

Due to TABOR, our elections were held this past Tuesday, instead of next week. The three candidates I supported for the School Board Election went down. (BTW-each of the winners received a significant amount of their campaign contributions from teachers' unions!) Three weeks ago, my neighbor had a community forum with some of the candidates. A little wine, cheese, and school topics chat with the neighbors.

I asked the candidates questions about the Common Core, school funding, and Educator Effectiveness plans in Colorado. I was a minority. Nobody seems to know what goes on in a school, these days. The main question many wanted answered had to do with the district start date. Not all schools in my district are air-conditioned and the kids get really hot in August. Really hot. Boy those little sweetpeas get hot. For about two weeks, it can be over 80 degrees in some classrooms. So yeah, their kids come home sweaty.

Of course start dates are driven by many things, one of which would be the mandated test dates in March and April. What school district chooses to start after Labor Day when the rest of the state starts mid August? Another start date driver is the desire to end first semester before the Christmas break. Which allows us to get out of school by Memorial Day, which allows high school students the ability to get summer jobs, take community college course over the summer, etc.

Back the the whine and cheese forum...
Since it's hot, the classrooms run fans. The fans make noise and it's hard to hear the teacher, so one candidate discussed having seen a teacher using a microphone (you know, like Brittney Spears) and the classroom had speakers in the ceiling. A school I've worked at in the past used such a system to accommodate hearing impaired students.  "Oooh", the parent who complained about the noisy fans said, "I don't want to take away from money that might be spent on technology and smartboards in the classroom for that"

So I guess, to many parents' minds, a smartboard trumps the ability to hear a teacher.

When I start to worry about education, I am grateful for our charter school. It's not perfect and we do get complaints, but none of them are about the heat.

Oh brave new world!

photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Time

CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.

In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.

The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.

“This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman says of her 21st-century classroom. “I really hope it works.”

Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.

Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.
In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: September 3, 2011

Spend first, find out the stuff you bought doesn't work later!

My district, one year after the crash (or was it two? time flies--) bought SmartBoards for every single classroom in the district still remaining SmartBoard-free after the first go-round of SmartBoard acquisition.

The reason?

SmartBoard equity.

Seriously. Those were the actual words our administrators and then-school board members used. SmartBoard equity.

There were kids in classrooms with SmartBoards, and there were other kids in other classrooms without SmartBoards. Not fair!

Hence: SmartBoard equity. Taxpayers had to buy SmartBoards for all the classrooms so all the kids could have SmartBoards all the time.

We've got high school kids who can't do long division (I tutored one such student this summer), but no worries. Our district has achieved SmartBoard equity, and that's what counts.


addendum

I realize I've told the SmartBoard equity story before.

I will probably tell it again, because I can't get over it. Where tales of SmartBoard equity are concerned, once is not enough.


High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian


Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom

the founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
speaking of technology and stagnant scores
oh brave new world!
codswallop, part 2

Codswallop, part 2

Education Needs a Digital Up-Grade

by Virginia Heffernan

If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one number with all those back-to-school forms: 65 percent.

Chances are just that good that, in spite of anything you do, little Oliver or Abigail won’t end up a doctor or lawyer — or, indeed, anything else you’ve ever heard of. According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

[snip]

Ms. Davidson herself was appalled not long ago when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers. But instead of simply carping about students with colleagues in the great faculty-lounge tradition, Ms. Davidson questioned the whole form of the research paper.“What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school — the term paper — and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?” She adds: “What if ‘research paper’ is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?”

What if, indeed. After studying the matter, Ms. Davidson concluded, “Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”

[snip]

A classroom suited to today’s students should deemphasize solitary piecework.

[snip]

The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web, where they should regularly be aiming, from grade-school on, to contribute to a wide range of wiki projects.

Number one: I write books, and I write a blog. Books are harder.

Number two: Kathleen Porter-Magee deals with the forget-the-past-teach-the-future folderol.

Number three: As always, I object to other people telling me what my kids must spend their childhood doing -- and, more importantly, not doing -- at school. Especially seeing as how other people's folderol means I have to pay for a Jesuit high school because the public schools I am also paying for are assigning posters in Honors English. If Cathy N. Davidson and Virginia Heffernan want their kids contributing to a wide range of wiki projects starting at the age of 5, fine. Leave my kids out of it.

extra credit: Does that 65% figure apply to Smart Boards?

the founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
speaking of technology and stagnant scores
oh brave new world!
codswallop, part 2

edspeak

At other times, the board is moved to the front of the room, and students take turns solving math problems, sorting items into groups and matching words with their meanings.

letter to the editor quoted in:
The Great Whiteboards Debate Rages On
Anthony Reborda
Education Week

In my world, the set consisting of students who spend class time "solving math problems" does not intersect with the set consisting of students whose teachers ask them to "sort items into groups."

21st century

SMART Boards & SMART Tables, too




Senior Bertrand Ngampa gives a presentation on an interactive whiteboard at W.T. Woodson High. (Dayna Smith/Post)