Learning is a wonderful thing, it's a shame we have to go to school to get it. In the hopes of improving schools, a bad student tries to figure out why he became a teacher.
The other day when my Head of School walked into my classroom with Bob Woodward, I was like…
Just a quick update on the Triangle Learning Community Middle School that I’ve blogged about here before. Founder Steve Goldberg reports that he’s just signed a lease, and that there will soon be some serious inquiry-based, student-directed learning going on in North Carolina this fall.
thescribbled asked: If this were like a real classroom, that would work. But I can't send him in the hallway. I'm not supposed to be a "teacher," but rather a student peer. It's a supplemental discussion class offered in conjunction with a US history survey course.
That’s ridiculous. If you are a peer, why are you planning, facilitating, and leading the discussions? Put him in the driver seat and ask him to lead a discussion on some topic. Then, watch what happens - either the other kids will eat his bigotry for breakfast or he’ll show his true colors as someone who just wanted to get attention that’s not that bad after all. If you need to disguise it, make it a project where they each lead one discussion (or mini-seminar 15 minutes or so)
Harvard graduates explain seasons. Incorrectly. How come our country’s top Universities graduate students who leave with the same misconceptions they entered with? Why were none of these people able to correctly explain why seasons change?
For more shocking footage of America’s top graduates unable to answer simple questions about science please see this, a site for a documentary about why even the brightest students fail to grasp the simplest of concepts.
Three Pennsylvania classmates get perfect SAT scores
(Photo: NBCPhiladelphia.com / Deanna Durante)
Three students from Montgomery County, Pa., accomplished something extremely rare — they all scored a perfect score of 2400 on their SAT.
And the best quote?
Benjamin She, 16, says the test is all about skill. “Taking a standardized test like the SAT is just like doing a skill like Poker, it’s all about what you need to do to analyze the questions.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Are the reformers listening?
(via nbcnews)
Video Games vs. Real Life by Aled Lewis
Via lehtipalo:
About a year ago I made an effort to summarize the books, blogs, and conferences that have informed my understanding of Information Visualization. I recently went over the list again and I think it holds up for the most part so I´m republishing it here for everyone who is interested in the field.
Follow the jump for a long list of great resources.
good:
Announcing The Great American Teach-Off 2013: Nominate an Innovative Teacher to Win $10K
- GOOD Maker wrote in Education, Great American Teach Off and NewsGOOD and University of Phoenix are proud to announce the launch of the second annual Great American Teach-Off for teachers in grades K through 12.
This program is a nationwide competition to celebrate U.S.-based elementary, middle and high school teachers that are engaging students to learn effectively and graduate successfully. Whether these teachers have innovative teaching methods, create unique classroom projects, or organize inspiring after-school programs that encourage community involvement in their school, we want to hear more about them!
Here’s how it works: Nominate an outstanding teacher currently teaching in grades K through 6 or 7 through 12—it can be a teacher you’ve had, your child’s, or even yourself—by February 15 noon PT. We’ll select the finalists based on how they foster creativity in the classroom, help students learn beyond the classroom, and impact the greater school community.
We’ll announce the top 20 finalists on March 4 noon PT. Finalists will share videos responding to a short list of questions about their teaching experience, and the GOOD community will vote for their favorite teacher over the course of five weeks. At the end of five weeks, the top voted K through 6 teacher and the top voted 7 through 12 teacher will each receive a $10,000 classroom grant.
Dedicated teachers that are pushing students to learn and think in different ways deserve to be recognized. Give these teachers the chance to further learning in their classroom by nominating them in The Great American Teach-Off by February 15 noon PT. Watch profiles of last year’s winning teachers, Terry Dougherty and Daryl Bilandzija to get inspired.
You can join the conversation with this challenge on Twitter at @GOODmkr and @TeachOff via #teachoff.
This post is brought to you by GOOD with support from University of Phoenix
What would you write in your memoir about your teaching career? Can you sum up your teaching career in six words or less?
ThinkTechEd would like to challenge all teachers to sum up their teaching career (thus far) in six words or less. We will be compiling all replies and posting them on…
Isolation vs. Collaboration. Subjects don’t need to be isolated, but they are. Teachers need to work on jumping into the same pool together! After all, one doesn’t walk down the street and notice things that are “Biology” or strictly “History”. The world is seamless so schools can be too. From Steven Weber @curriculumblog on twitter.
The wonderful paradox of school safety. This graph pretty much explains it - the more vulnerable students are, the more they learn. A successful learning environment is one where students are free and vulnerable. As Pedro Noguera put it, we all know that in schools “safety is illusory”.
If you want to know why some would even consider arming teachers, it’s because we haven’t talked about this enough. Schools work because even though everyone in them is vulnerable to attack, all feel the safety that they won’t be. This is what makes school shootings so terrifying - the vulnerability has been exposed.
When schools work and learning flourishes, students are vulnerable. And this is where their freedom is derived. Students are free to disagree, free to question, and free to create without reservation.
Schools ought to be protected from those who would make them “safe” by giving teachers guns. One way to start would be to arm ourselves with the reality that a school’s vulnerability is a beautiful and necessary thing to have. We would then do well to speak about it with those who wouldn’t have otherwise thought about it in this way.
