Teachers

Anyone who saw my last post will know that I'll probably be checking in late and without much success to report this week! But 'not much' isn't the same as 'none' - at 17:40 this evening I was just shutting things down at the office and feeling grumpy about my unproductive week, then decided to write one bad paragraph on the paper that I was particularly aware of having neglected. That took about fifteen minutes, and being written at that time means it truly deserves to be called bad, but bad words are better than no words in a draft - they're progress! Elizabeth Anne Mitchell asked last week for advice on how to keep right side (urgent) things from stealing all the resources away from top left things - and I'd love to hear your tips too!I'll start: my tip is do SOMETHING, however teeny tiny, on the TLQ thing before you let the urgent thing have the rest of your day. Even a couple of minutes contact with it, a new line of data entered or few words translated or reference formatted or downloaded, keeps it alive in your mind... Now I just have to learn to take my own advice...Roll call: Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Amanda: (1) Read 4 papers this week, (2) Put corkboard up on the wall in my office (I’ve had this on my to do list for a long time now) (3) Plan schedule daily (4) Spend 15 mins a day tidying up in the evenings. Contingent Cassandra: spend at least 50% of time on restful/rejuvenating activities (basically, recreational reading on paper, walking, or gardening). Spend rest of time on loose-end-tying, planning, and working on the beginnings of some household/financial tasks. Daisy: More revision, have to get into the figures and tables part of it and make that go away Elizabeth Anne Mitchell: List what needs to be done on each project, and put them in order of best/quickest returns. JaneB: a) continue to collect data for the interim report. b) Look at the last report and outline this one. c) rough draft the intro and discussion of DCP 2 (without restructuring it) - that's 15 paragraphs. d) a minimum of 30 minutes on at least three days tidying and rearranging upstairs Jodi A Campbell: get through 4 ILL books and write 2500 words luolin88: next report in week 5 Matilda: make a practical weekly plan, record my activity, not too much into details. metheist: go through 2 ILL books that are due soon; outline chapter 4; write 1500 good words. Cook 3 days; go to the gym 2 days. Propter Doc: 2 blog posts, plan data analysis for project A. think about project B. Plan the summer a little more theorydave: try to sort out the glaring inconsistences in paper one (part way through writing it I found a whole tranche of papers that made some of the introduction wrong and analysis incomplete). Sort out outstanding figure and references. Meet with paper two coauthor.

With the Summer school break quickly approaching, now's the perfect time to add some fresh titles to your child's bookshelf. To help, we asked moms who have also been teachers to share some of their favorite children's stories. Whether you have a color-loving toddler, a beginning reader needing practice, or a preteen looking for an exciting plot, there's something in here for kids of all ages.

While there is little doubt that excellent early education sets students up for long-term academic success, the definition of "excellent" varies along with communities' diverse needs. This is nowhere truer than with dual language learners. Great early education for these students requires reorienting educational and developmental perspectives away from unduly "monolingual perspectives" in favor of research-based metrics that take this core difference into account. While English proficiency is enormously important for students' academic careers, social mobility, and economic opportunities along the course of their lives, it is a grievous mistake to stress it at the cost of other critical developmental goals.

Once upon a time, the Big Bad Wolf was a mighty fearsome fellow. In the folkloric tales of Aesop and the Grimms, he terrorized small children and other helpless critters. He blew down houses in Disney's "Three Little Pigs," and in "The Three Little Wolves," a somewhat sinister Silly Symphony cartoon from 1936, after the Nazi ascent to power, he is saddled with a German accent.

Downtown Silver Spring isn't exactly Hollywood, but for Montgomery County middle school students, it was transformed into a scene as thrilling as any L.A. movie premiere Wednesday. Silver Spring International Middle School students filled the seats of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center to see their documentaries and films roll on the big screen, part of a two-day film festival that continues Thursday morning. The event is the culmination of the school's "Lights, Camera, Literacy!" classes, designed to teach middle school students about storytelling and the elements of literature through movies and other visual media.

The Idaho elementary school is unsure if or how it will continue to issue tablets to students next year. Students in Ashley Johnson's fifth-grade class have been using individually issued iPads to produce video papers on matter, volcanoes and the pros and cons of school uniforms. But when these fifth-graders leave Paul Elementary School for West Minico Middle School in the fall, they will go to a school with fewer devices than students.

A fun project for nature studies is to find out what edible plants grow in your neighborhood. I love this project from homeschooling mom Rebecca Angel, who explains how to make delicious color-changing tea using violets from your yard -- complete with an explanation of the chemistry behind it....Read Full Post

HOW is it Friday?? Where did the week go?? I'm meant to be getting stuff done now teaching ended (even if exams and grading are dripped tediously all over the next month) but it's Friday and I haven't and... oh, it would have been so nice to stay in bed this morning.

Blog: Confessions of a Community College DeanThe New York Times reports that instructional spending at research universities has risen much more quickly over the last decade than at community colleges. In 2009, community colleges spent $9,300 per student on educational resources, virtually unchanged from 1999 once inflation was taken into account. Public research universities spent $16,700, up 11 percent from 1999, and private research universities spent $41,000, an increase of 31 percent. Community colleges often receive substantially less money per student than elementary or high schools, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin professor who served on the 22-member committee that wrote the report. By an absolutely astonishing coincidence, the more expensive settings are just about as white as they ever were, and more affluent than they’ve been. Meanwhile, community colleges are far more diverse, and their students more economically downscale, than ever. Between 1994 and 2006, the white share of the community college population plummeted from 73 percent to 58 percent, while black and Hispanic representation grew from 21 percent to 33 percent, in part reflecting growing diversity in the population as a whole. By contrast, the change was much less dramatic at the most selective four-year colleges during this time period, when the white share dipped just three percentage points (from 78 percent to 75 percent) and the black and Hispanic shares barely moved (from 11 percent to 12 percent). Funny how that happens. --- A few months ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom did a post about the sorting function of different tiers of American higher education, in which she quoted some students at a fairly elite place saying that for-profits were “not for people like them.” (I did a response piece here.) It reminded me of a piece I read in the late, lamented Ann Arbor News in the summer of 1990. The Detroit Pistons were in their glory at that point, but tickets to games were expensive and hard to come by. So the Pistons broadcast their away games to their home arena and sold tickets to those, well, screenings, for three bucks. The idea was to give fans from Detroit (as opposed to its suburbs) a chance to have the experience of rooting for the team in a crowd. The article quoted a vendor at the arena who wasn’t happy about the broadcast attracting the wrong element. The line has stayed with me since then. “When you sell three dollar tickets,” he sniffed, “you get three dollar people.” And the three dollar people could see their team, but only when the team wasn’t there. --- Technology has changed since 1990, with paradoxical effects on cost. Now the very wealthiest institutions are tripping over each other to give away their teaching for free. As with the 1990 Pistons, the great unwashed finally get to see the stars, except that the stars aren’t actually there. If you want presence, you go to your local community college. America has a long history of valuing institutions or programs based on the people they serve. That’s how we could “end welfare as we knew it” in 1996, and yet have transfer payments occupy an ever-larger share of the federal budget; in the American mind, transfers to “deserving” people don’t count as welfare. Section 8 rent subsidies are politically suspect, but the mortgage interest tax deduction is sacred. Food stamps are questionable, but farm subsidies are beyond dispute. Flagship research universities -- and their football teams and alumni associations -- get respect in its most concrete form. Community colleges are told to keep doing ever more with ever less. --- This isn’t a new story, of course. But it isn’t inevitable, either. We’ve had periods in American history in which the economic classes got clo

Commencement: T-minus 6 weeks. Into my hands, my assistant Jan places a black three-ring binder. In it, in 14-point font, triple-spaced for easy reading, are the names the registrar has determined should be read at commencement: students who are expected to complete their requirements either by the end of the semester or, in a few cases, the end of the summer. My hands begin to shake. The notebook feels like it weighs 12 pounds. It becomes, in an instant, The Notebook. How I ended up with the job of reading the names at commencement is one of the many quirks of history that make up Wheaton College, the small liberal arts institution in Massachusetts where I work. My predecessor did it to great acclaim during her 23 years in the post I now occupy (dean of students), so when she retired and I stepped in, I am not sure anyone gave it a second thought. "You read the names at commencement!" I was told repeatedly as my first year wore on. At first I was baffled, then a little freaked out. At every other institution I'd been at, the dean of students was lucky to sneak into the faculty procession, or occasionally get onto the platform if none of the academic deans minded. But his or her part in commencement, the most academic of academic ceremonies, was minimal. I think what worried me most was a singular experience I had witnessed at another small liberal arts college where I once worked. The new provost was given this task, and so thoroughly butchered even the easiest names (I think she suffered from severe stage fright, because she was normally not an inarticulate person) that she never quite recovered her credibility with the community and was gone after her second year. What I learned from that disastrous day was an obvious lesson: when a student has chosen a small college where being known is an expectation, when a family has paid a small fortune for a student to attend a small college, there is simply no excuse for a mispronounced name at the most public of ceremonies. It doesn't matter if that name is seven syllables long, is Chinese, Thai, Croatian, Arabic, if it looks utterly different than it sounds, if the middle name is so obscure and tongue-twisting that you think it had to have been the result of a bet the parents lost, or an inheritance they hoped to secure. You'd better get it right. And thus it begins. Five minutes after receiving The Notebook, I send out an e-mail to the senior class, asking them to send me the phonetic pronunciation of their names, even offering examples of popular faculty whose names they will recognize, or to call the "pronunciation hotline" I created two years ago that allows them to record their names for me to hear. I sign the email, "Dean Will-yums." Seven minutes after receiving The Notebook, the first of about 75 e-mails arrives in my inbox. In my e-mail, I have encouraged them to challenge me, that I am pretty decent at accents, and if they give me their best description of the way their name is pronounced in their non-English language, I will do my best to master it. They take me up on my offer. Students with complicated names take great care to coach me, giving me examples of words their names sort of rhyme with. One student with the last name Dikicioglu writes, "It's like three men's names: Dicky, Joe, Lou." Over the next few weeks, the e-mails continue to trickle in. They often involve a back-and-forth exchange. "What about your middle name?" I ask, if they have not mentioned that in their pronunciation coaching. "You don't have to say it." "But what will make your parents happy? Will they want to hear it? It will be printed in the program." "No one will care." But someone may care. Someone may take my omission of a middle name as an indication that Wheaton College does not know, or care, about their student. They will be so stung by this apparent lack of singular affection that they will discourage