10. Your guidance counselor gave you a booklet on how to operate a fryolator
9. In History Class, you identified Roe v. Wade as “Two ways to cross a stream”
8. On the true/false test, you answered every question “C”
[Read more →]
Here in New Jersey, education is a front-and-center topic. Public schools are under pressure. I live in Riverton, a small town with its own K8 grammar school that sends its students to a high school in the town next to us, Palmyra. Palmyra and Riverton are in many ways a unified community of 3.5 total square miles, sharing activities and services, like our youth sports teams. [Read more →]
The art of writing. The mysterious skill of writing. Writer Jack Dann once said, “For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.” Alas, for many of our children, writing will never be about exploration, discovery, art, or the challenge of learning complex technical skill. Instead, writing will be standardized, boxed-in, formulaic. It will be an obstacle they need to figure out strategies to get around. Lucky for me, a pre-teen who may or may not live in my home, bless her heart, always has it all figured out. More about that in a moment. [Read more →]
As an alumnus of Rutgers Camden (BA, ’91; MA, ’95), I have received a lot of information through alumni channels and talked with many former classmates about Governor Chris Christie’s proposed “merger” of Rutgers University Camden with Rowan University. After digesting this information as best I could, I realize I am against this forced joining, for many reasons. But being faced with this issue has rekindled an embarrassing aspect of my thinking: My utter ignorance about educational branding. No, that’s being too generous: When it comes to educational branding, I’m stupid, naïve, and pathetically out of step with my fellow humans.
I was talking to a teaching colleague the other day — a man I respect and who I would unreservedly call the finest teacher I know. We were discussing a slight drop in our school’s SAT scores, particularly in the area of “Critical Reading” and he said, “The only way to improve this is to drill the kids on critical reading questions until they get good at them. Making them write a lot is not going to do it.”
This might have been a slight “dig” at me. I am not a giver of objective tests. I have my students write until their eyes fall out and roll off of the desk. I have them reach for Bloom’s higher levels of learning (analysis, synthesis and creativity) every day. The reason I have them do this is because no one else does — at least not enough teachers do. They don’t do it enough in grade school and they don’t do it enough in high school.
So, here we are in that all-too-talked-about place: being put in a position of “teaching to the test” so that we will look like a good school — so that our success with our students can be measured; so that benchmarks can be set in order for us to follow growth. Measuring progress and analyzing data can be really, really helpful, but when the principle behind producing the data is flawed, you have a problem. [Read more →]
Wikipedia, for most, resides on the Web like a neighbor we see and interact with often, so we may be surprised to learn that this seemingly friendly presence has caused all kinds of trouble with schools. Some teachers and even a few institutions have considered banning their students’ from having a relationship with Wikipedia at all. [Read more →]
Early in 2011, New Jersey instituted rigid school anti-bullying laws that require schools to follow strict guidelines about HIB: harassment, intimidation, and bullying. While the intention is good, HIB’s over-zealousness creates a stifling bureaucracy for educators, and these blanket regulations, in their effort to eliminate the child bully, are perhaps empowering other types of bullies. [Read more →]
Novels about academia have never held a strong appeal for me; there seems very little at stake in the tweed-clad genre except for tenure, which doesn’t make for the most riveting reading. But in Alex Kudera’s debut satirical novel, Fight for Your Long Day, there is a lot more on the line for the protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, than mere tenure: his very life, it seems, is doomed to extinction as the world around him erupts into a frenzy of violence. [Read more →]
They are enthusiastically for elimination, these chilly, sodden folk who gather at my doorstep. Eliminate debt, eliminate taxes, eliminate property, eliminate poverty, eliminate wealth and the wealthy too and once in a while, publicly eliminate on the sidewalk. Who claims they lack coherence? They Occupy Wall Street and Main Street, meaning they reside there; sleeping rough, eating roughage and are roughly handled, so they complain, by the authorities, the media, the neighbors, business, academe and above all by harsh and increasingly cold Reality. I depart from most of the critics of the Occupiers however. No, their problems are not strictly speaking in their heads. There is, actually, an underlying, unifying rationality among the commies, hippies, dippies and loons. Finally polling has investigated our modern Bonus Marchers and found a diagnosable malady; not just debt but student debt. [Read more →]
Plagiarizing was once clear-cut. Those intrepid college students who drove to a paper mill (which back in the day was a real warehouse full of papers) and bought someone else’s paper — they knew they were cheaters. If someone wrote a paper for you, you knew you were a lazy cheater. Xeroxing a big chunk of an encyclopedia and putting it word for word into your paper: Obviously, cheating! [Read more →]
