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?

Education Week 3-17-2011 Reflection

Schools Use Digital Tools to Customize Education:  One of the things that I question about this article is the fact that, in a way, moving away from a one-size-fits-all method of teaching into a more personalized way is in fact pandering to students.  It is not to the degree that Vikram Savkar suggests when he says the pandering is complete and total personalization.  The reality of it is that when you change your curriculum to include a variety of different learning styles is that the teacher is pandering to students.  Admittedly, the teacher is not going out of his/her way to personalize assignments for each of thirty students, but moving from a lecture based lesson to one in which the students are interacting with each other and sharing their knowledge is pandering to those students who work better that way.  One of the most interesting things about the entire article is when it brings up programs that allow kids to work at their own pace and tailor their lessons around the subjects which they are least comfortable and not quite as good.  I, personally, would not fare very well in that program because I wouldn't want to spend very much time on the things that I am not good at!  Math would be a subject in which I would continually try to avoid doing the hard parts of it as much as possible because I am not good at it at all.  It is very comforting to know that Savkar knows about the challenges that teachers face and that we as teachers have to rise to the occasion if we are going to be successful in the world of education as it currently is and in the ways that it is changing.  He is completely correct when he says that more talented teachers are going to be required to teach students in the coming years because they will have to incorporate all of these new technologies.  Old teachers could very well be left in the dust (pun intended).  Older teachers must be able to push themselves as well.  It does not take very much talent to be able to create a lecture based classroom, or as this article would call it, a one size fits all classroom.  "All" the teacher has to do is get up there and talk and the students have to listen.  That isn't belittling those teachers, because yes it does take quite a bit of effort to do that.  Even more effort is going to be required if they are going to help the future students of this country succeed in the ways in which this article has pointed out.  One of the things that this article mentions is 1 to 1 laptop initiatives and I would be very much interested in learning more about those.  I love having a laptop for my personal use, but I'm not sure if I would be particularly successful as a student if I were to have one with me at all times as a student growing up and in high school.  It's the same way with cell phones.  I didn't get one until I was 16 years old, and even by many of today's standards that is very late for a kid to get a cell phone!  Would I have been as successful as I was as a student if I had one as a 7th grader?  I'm inclined to guess that I wouldn't have been.

Education Week 316/2011 Reflection

Study Links Pupils' Stress to School Environments:  It totally makes sense that "the lack of adequate, appropriate materials can affect children negatively in part because teachers become more harsh or frustrated when they cannot teach properly given a lack of resources" I can say for sure that I would experience a lot of frustration if I didn't have all the materials necessary to teach my students the things they need to be taught.  I think that is one of the most interesting things about Teach for America is the fact that they dump teachers in low income neighborhoods and expect them to teach students when they are woefully unequipped to handle the situations.  My friend Steven Millard went into Teach for America and he went to Chicago and some of the experiences he has described to me have been absolutely frightening.  I'm not sure if there is any way that I would be able to do the things he was able to accomplish under the circumstances.  I guess I never really thought about the consequences that it would have on the students.  My question is how are the researchers able to distinguish the mental damage done to the children that is a result of the kids not having the benefit of the resources that would help them and mental damage that is a result of the teacher being stressed.  Perhaps there isn't any difference?
School Health Centers:  I'm very curious as to what district they took the study from in Washington State.  And I'm also curious as to what they mean by Health Centers.  Does that mean that it is just the nurses office?  I honestly don't even know if my high school had a nurses office.  We definitely had an athletic medicine office though.  I spent a lot of time in there but I was never really sick in high school, and even if I was I probably just went home rather than to the office.  Greater access to the health is indicative of a lower dropout rate in part because the students get another resource for help.  People who care about them are showing them that they care and the kids probably take notice of that and want to stick around.

Education Week 3-9-2011 Reflection

Seattle Ousts Superintendent After Program Audit by State:  Well I have to say that I'm glad they got her out of office cause it definitely sounds like she was siphoning funds into her own pocket!  Seriously, 300,000 dollars are missing for services that the district never received?  Doesn't think make people want to do an audit of her personal finances just to see if she happened to get something like thirty ten thousand dollar checks over her three years in office?  More than 1.5 million dollars spent on questionable services?  They only gave one example of these questionable services.  Are relaxing weekends at the spa or private getaways with some lover part of these questionable expenses.  Based on this article it sounds like the school district decided to get rid of her based on the fact the school district wasn't getting everything it was paying for.  I think she should be personally investigated.  in addition to all of this they are still giving her a severance package of a 1/4 of a million dollars and benefits on top of that.  "Thanks for doing a really terrible job for us, but we are still going to give you a giant severance package.  Good luck in life and good luck in ripping the next school district off that you work for!"  How is it that it isn't in these people's contracts that if they are fired for conduct like this that they won't get any benefits whatsoever?  It's a gross misallocation of state and district funds.  She shouldn't receive a dime for the money she stole/wasted during her time in office.
Tying Class Sizes to Teachers Skills:  Now doesn't this just seem like a wonderful idea in theory?  Give the better teachers more students, and subsequently more pay, and the worse teachers fewer students and less pay.  First of all, you better make sure that however you are evaluating these teachers, and from what it sounds like they would be evaluating them on whether or not their students do well enough on tests, is going to be an accurate way of measuring teacher effectiveness.  I can easily see a situation happening in which teachers teach to the test even more so than they already do in an effort to get a few more students and a few more bucks added to their salary.  What does this say about teachers who teach mostly electives classes?  How are you going to judge them and even then what are you going to do about their class sizes?  I'd be willing to guess that a lot of those classes they have are totally determined by the number of students who sign up for them.  That is how it was done at my high school.  Of course, this comes into question that Bill Gates is bringing this up, and wasn't he one of the biggest sharks of the computer industry next to Paul Allen?  I'm not sure if his advice is the kind I would be seeking in terms of figuring out how I would want to pay teachers.