Education Week 5/25/2011 Reflection

Specialists Weigh Common Social Studies Standards:  This is an interesting article because it touches on some really delicate issues.  Anything having to do with History going across a wide area is going to have a drastically different effect.  One of the largest issues that comes to mind in recent memory is when Japanese-Chinese relations came to a head when I think Japanese history textbooks decided to neglect all of the atrocities that had occurred in NanKing and the rest of China when the Japanese invaded prior to their involvement in World War II.  I could definitely see some of the same issues here in the United States.  Any number of issues ranging from slavery to the succession in the south and other topics could draw the ire of states that border others that happen to adopt history lessons that residents of another state don't like.
here are a lot of benefits to adopting a common standard across the nation as we are beginning to do with math and english.  One of the things that I think of most are the kids from families that move from place to place with great frequency.  These are the kids that really suffer from the lack of a common standard in subject areas.  We talked in class at the beginning of the year about some of the folks who went from school to school and ended up learning many of the same things that they had learned at their old school.  Other times they would move to another school district and then find that they are woefully behind because the school district that they moved from had significantly lower standards than the school district they moved to.
It doesn't necessarily mean that all students across the country would have to learn the same thing all year.  I definitely think that it would be a good idea to have a decent amount of what the students learn should have some commonality.  Outside of that, each region of the country should try to incorporate their own specialty.  For instance, the Northwest should (and does) incorporate elements of history such as the Oregon trail, Lewis and Clark, a lot more Native American history and logging and everything else Pacific Northwest.  The Florida and Southeast could incorporate a lot more history involving the age of exploration (explorers such as Ponce de Leon searching for the fountain of youth which awesome!) and everything else related to the Southeast.  As a whole though, the general information regarding things other than local history should try to have as much commonality as possible.

Education Week 5/18/2011 Reflection

Why Wrong Is Not Always Bad:  I thought this was an excellent article about issues surrounding our society when it comes to teaching kids about results.  It really hit the nail on the head.  The quote "victims of excellence" really stands out to me because its so hard to imagine anyone being a victim when they are associated with excellence.  I definitely feel like a victim of excellence sometimes.  The times in this program where we are doing nothing but sharing our feelings and sharing the "process" of our learning experiences, I experience boredom because there isn't any product involved.  I came directly from Undergraduate school where so much of the focus is product oriented so there are times in my mind where I don't care too much for the process and am much more interested in the product.  Even more interesting is the study (which I think I have heard before, not sure where, maybe it was something that was associated with the Alfie Cone stuff we have listened to) in which the super-majority of students who were praised for being smart chose not to take the harder test that may lead to a lower score.  This is a perfect example of "victims of excellence" because once those students have been associated with being smart, they don't want to let it go.  Staying "smart" becomes more important than learning.  Getting the good grade isn't the means to an end in which the end is learning and understanding the material, instead the good grade becomes the end and learning and understanding be damned.
Another portion of this commentary that I found interesting was the use of the example in comparing American and Japanese (and some Chinese) cultures.  I was just talking with Ian Mansfield in class recently and he described a situation in which a student incorrectly working out a math problem would never happen here because he said that teachers want to immediately "correct" a wrong way thought because the sooner it is gotten rid of and fixed the sooner a student or the classroom will be able to learn how to do it the correct way.  However, I don't agree at all with the teacher the writer referenced at the end of the article who said they would rather hire a B or C student than an A student because the B or C student is willing to take risks and be wrong.  This seems like a very silly thing to determine because who says that that was the reason they got Bs and Cs?  Couldn't it just be the case that they were just lazy and didn't want to work hard enough for the A?  It just seems way too much of a jump to assume that they got a B or C because they were not afraid to make mistakes.

Education Week 5-11-2011 Reflection

School Lunch Applications:  Continuing on with a trend of reflections on food comes this tasty tidbit from the US Department of Agriculture - only half of the applications, of which 279,000 was a mere sampling of the applications, were found to be accurate.  As a result of this, twenty percent were getting free meals when they should have only been getting reduced price meals.  On top of this, one third of the students will lose their free or reduced meal pricing because parents would not provide documentation of how much money they make.  This completely flabbergasts me.  How is it that these families were even on the program in the first place?  Did they provide documentation to start with?  I'm assuming they did.  If they didn't then we have a whole other issue with how this aspect of our school system is run because that is ridiculous!  After that, one has to ask how often these families are supposed to provide documentation to keep getting the benefit of free or reduced lunch.  Hopefully it has only been one year.  Any long than a year and I would begin by saying that is a gross neglection of responsibility.  Go ahead and fire all of those people.  They have been letting people (extreme emphasis) steal from the government!  Those people become responsible for what I am assuming to be millions of dollars "wasted" on families that do not deserve to have free or reduced lunch.  What it's really doing is stealing from the other needy families who deserve those free or reduced meals more.
Former GM Exec Named Detroit Emergency Manager:  See, this a move that I absolutely do not understand at all.  GM was once one of the great American motor companies before it started to fall behind and eventually had to take a wealth of money from the public in a federal bailout.  Tell me again, why on Earth are we handing the reigns of Detroit's Emergency Finanacial Management over to one of the executives that ran that company into the ground.  Perhaps the Governor of Michigan doesn't realize that this guy is one of many who are the reason I and I'm sure many other Americans probably wont ever think to buy an American brand car.  Yeah this guy probably didn't make all of the decisions that ruined General Motors, but being a high executive comes with it's fair share of responsibilities, which he clearly did not fulfill very well.  It's a good thing that GM cleaned house and decided to get back on the right track, but this seems like a really poor decision on the Governor's part.  It feels very much like a nod, nod - wink, wink kind of deal or doing a favor for a friend where you really aren't comfortable or confident in how he is going to perform.  Would the governor do such a thing?  Get back to me in ten years or so with how Detroit school districts have done.

Education Week 4/27/2011 Reflection

Studies Find "Desirable Difficulties" Help Students Learn:  I have considered myself to be pretty dedicated to my studying outside of the classroom for a long time.  I can remember as far back as fourth grade that I would be studying and doing homework.  Specifically there was one time when my friends were going to have a home run derby tournament at the park a quarter mile from home and I couldn't go because I was studying; that was in fourth grade.  It makes me feel good when I read about certain study tips that I have been doing for years.  I was really surprised to find out the science and the numbers behind those effective and non-effective study tips.  Whenever I study vocabulary words, I always do the whole list.  It has never really made a whole lot of sense to me when people only study a small amount of words at a time because that is not how the test is given to you.  The entirety of the list is shoved in your face on the test, or, my preference, you have to learn a huge list well enough so that when you are given a group of ten people or places (or whatever) you have to write about those one.  In college, I had a lot of history tests and religious studies tests set up in that way.  I really enjoyed that.  Even when I have a giant list of key people, places and events to learn, I try to start early and make a third of the list a week before and study that, and a few days later make the second park of the list and study the two of them together, and finally go with the third.  I always found it helped me out.  The fact that students thought it was easier to learn words that were bigger fonts is kind of strange to me.  I am a person who has always written everything pretty small.  If anything, the larger font would make things even harder for me to remember, especially if it were typed out.  I try to handwrite everything because I find that, more often than not, I am able to remember how I write certain things and that will help me remember the material associated with how its written.  It's sort of like when people do color coding for their flash cards, but instead of colors, I use the way my handwriting looks to help me remember.  When I am a teacher I will definitely want to pull that factoid out to show students that the more you study so that recall can happen is three times as likely when a student is able to answer correctly five times instead of just once.  That is incredible motivation in my eyes.  Why not study a little bit more and make the entirety of the time used to study that much more effective?  A teacher could say, "once you think you know it, study for another twenty minutes" and I really think the ones who are motivated to learn are going to latch on to that and put it to good use.

Education Week 4-20-2011 Reflection

Parents' Deployment Found To Exact a Toll on Students' Learning:  Let me begin by saying that I am a military brat.  That is the common term for people who are the son or daughter of someone in any branch of the US Armed Forces.  Since my father was in the Army, my older brother was born in Florida, I was born in California, and my younger brother was born in Florida after moving back there, and then we moved to Washington.  Since I was only four years old, I don't remember what it was like to move from place to place and have to "start all over" as many kids and families often do when them move to the other side of the country to where they don't know anyone.  I was lucky enough to stay in the same place to go to one elementary school, one junior high school, and one high school.  Some kids go through a heck of a lot more than that.  They go through YEARS without seeing one or both of their parents.  One of my earliest memories is sitting on my mom's lap at the computer looking at a blue screen as she would type the words I was saying in a letter to my dad while he was on a six month long cruise on the USS Nimitz.  Six months isn't much compared to twelve or fifteen months.  I would argue that it was much easier to get through the time my dad was away during that six month cruise on the Nimitz than it was when he was gone for eight months getting trained to become a teacher in Georgia.  I was in seventh grade at that time and it was very difficult for me as a 12 year old to be without my dad.  People say that the most formative years of a child's life is when they are a toddler to eight years old.  My thinking is that a kid is growing up to be the person they are going to be the rest of their life from about age eleven or twelve years old onward.  Not having either a father or a mother figure in your life is potentially going to give the child a skewed upbringing.  What I mean by skewed upbringing is that more often than not, one parent is going to be more disciplinary and the other more nurturing.  If the disciplinarian of the two is gone, I think it could be argued that the child would be more likely to have behavioral issues that could definitely find their way into the classroom and affect a student's performance.  If the more nurturing of the two is gone, a child will miss out of that portion of parenting and could potentially have emotional problems.  It just goes to show you that these wars we are involved in the Middle East take a much greater toll than just our country's budget.  The children of this country are suffering because they aren't being raised by their parents.  Not only are we selling this country down the river by digging ourselves into deeper and deeper debt, we are damaging out kids as well.  I'm not sure which is worse, but both are awful and it needs to stop.

Education Week 4/6/2011 Reflection

School Meals Makeover Stirs Pot:  I'll begin by first saying that I absolutely love food.  Food is one of the many things I truly enjoy in life.  A really good meal just can't be beat.  That being said, I did not grow up eating meals provided by the schools until about Jr High.  I took a bag lunch to school almost every single day but I think that was largely due to the cost of school lunches as opposed to buying groceries and taking a sack lunch (however it should be noted that not all families are in the same situation financially and must buy school lunch at reduced rates).  In fifth and sixth grade I was waking up early in the morning to pack lunches for myself and my little brother.  I also have to say that I am also a big fan of Jamie Oliver.  If you have not already seen his miniseries special  Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, you absolutely have to see it.  It will dramatically change the way you look at food provided by the schools.  You will also be shocked at what these kids end up getting served.  The chicken nuggets are absolutely disgusting.  He does an experiment in which he brings kids into his cooking shop and grinds up a chicken that just bones and crap meat, breads and cooks them, and the kids want to eat the chicken nuggets.  It is apparent from that scene that many of these kids are not going to want to change the way they eat, regardless of what the food they like is currently made of.
This article is slightly misleading because of some of what is included about the Potatoes council and their being upset about cutting down potatoes from the meals.  The advocate for the potatoes say that "many fries are baked in the oven" but really there are no numbers to back that up.  Many schools could just be an indication of the number of schools that do it and not the percentage of schools that do it.  Who really cares if 10,000 schools bake their fries in the oven but thats only 1% of the schools in the country?  I also thought it was interesting that they mentioned that many of the kids started avoiding whole grain pizza.  Perhaps that is still a good thing though.  Most pizza really isn't that good for you.  As much as I love pizza, changing the bread to whole grain probably isn't going to do too much to increase the total healthiness of that food.  By the time I was in high school I was eating nothing soups and sandwiches for lunch every single day and sometimes an extra donut because those were the most filling things.  Kids mostly want to eat what tastes good and if the school are able to make things healthier without them noticing that much that is great.  In reality though, there needs to be a dramatic change and it doesn't matter whether or not the kids are super happy about it.

Education Week 3-30-2011 Reflection

Studies Shed Light on How Cheating Impedes Learning:  This article caught my eye right from the get-go.  I thought it was interesting that judging from the recent results of a 2010 study that the older a student gets makes it more likely that he/she will cheat.  To me, this can be attributed to a couple of things.  First, the more obvious (to me) of the two, is that students who are getting older are more likely to cheat because of the increased difficulty of their classes and the increased expectations they find in those classrooms.  Is an elementary school student learning addition and subtraction as likely to cheat as a high school student who is learning calculus?  I would venture to guess that it isn't as likely in large part because the material is not nearly as difficult at a younger age.  The more nuanced reason for students most likely cheating in their later years is that fact that students who have already spent time cheating are going to see that there are "no negative consequences" for their cheating.  They will only see that they have gotten a better score on that last test and that means they get an A in the class instead of a B+ or an A-.  It becomes reinforced in their minds because there are no perceived consequences and only the positives of getting a better grade on the test or assignment and in the class.
I actually found it pretty funny that the students at Harvard had duped themselves into thinking that they would be just as successful on tests if they weren't allowed to cheat.  Admittedly the test only had 36 people involved in it and the students were from Harvard.  I don't think that anyone going to Harvard are going to be indicative of normal students who are going to try and cheat on a test or a quiz.  This might also be a little presumptuous but the fact they are from Harvard would also indicate that they are pretty darn confident in their own abilities.  It may not be the case that they are thinking that way because they are cheaters, but rather because they go to Harvard.  This is more or less confirmed when the study showed that social recognition reinforces self-deception.  Anyone who goes to Harvard is probably going to make a big deal of it, or their parents will, or their school will.  It seems pretty unavoidable as it is the top school in the country (or one of them.)
Finally, I thought the biggest point of the article, as it pertains to me as a future teacher is that students are more likely to cheat in an environment in which the teacher is not fair or is not trying to engage them to learn.  This means that I am going to have to do my best as a teacher to make sure that students do not cheat simply by being a good teacher and not by focusing on not having them cheat.  Who wants to work hard for a teacher that isn't working hard for them?