Kids and teachers at the Hurley School in Boston bring you this fun video. Strap on your dancin’ shoes and sharpen your #2s! It’s MCAS time!
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Top 10 Myths about Math Education December 29, 2011
The following article and its 10 myths about Math education were posted on the Gideon Learning Blog. From inquiry being the catch-all to memorization being a dirty word, this article hits all the kinks in the way we teach, or at least how we’re told to teach (see Myth #10), math today. You can see the full article by clicking on the picture or by following the link underneath. p.s. It’s not just the reps of the Boston Teacher’s Union who roll their eyes at the mere mention of TERC (see Myth #2)….
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How About Better Parents? November 20, 2011
Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-about-better-parents.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman or by clicking the article above.
Middle School predicts your future… right? January 16, 2011
The very interesting Middle School Friends Are Critical For Future Success by Rick Nuaert is a discussion on how important a student’s middle school years are to his or her future. If you’re well adjusted by middle school then your future is bright. If you’re hanging with the wrong crowd in sixth grade, you can expect to be a bum at age 30. Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but is the jist of the article. Worth checking out.
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The article does beg the question of why middle school is always a person’s most hated years. I’ve never in my life heard someone say that their best years were spent in sixth through eighth grade. People point to high school, others point to college, some even point to when they were a small kid (me) when they define their best years. Never have I heard someone say, “I was in my prime in middle school” It just doesn’t happen. We all suffered through them, some more than others, but we were all completely miserable.
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So how can we make a kid’s middle school years less destructive, given that we now know how influential they are? How important really are those high-stakes, anxiety-ridden State exams? If a kid’s socially formative years are in middle school, maybe we shouldn’t be imprinting them as failures or setting them up to lose sleep. Maybe instead we should think about what’s really important – teaching kids how to react to stress and how to build strong friendships with good people, helping kids discover a creative outlet, impressing on our kids how great it is to LEARN and not just to pass exams – instead of filling them with fear and hatred of school.
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Were you forced to take a State exam? Aren’t you successful anyway? Well, think about how much more successful you’d be if you hadn’t stood in that parking lot drinking Night Train before your first middle school dance and gotten caught with that joint by Ms. Sutherland who didn’t call your house because she was drunk herself. Imagine if your parents had just taken you ice skating instead.
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But I digress. Whether or not I subscribe to Rick Nauert is still up for debate even in my mind, but it does present an interesting angle on the torturous middle school years.
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3,000 denied diplomas because of MCAS – The Boston Globe June 20, 2010
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for popping me out in 1977 so I could take art and law my senior year, get class ranked, take the SATs, go to college, graduate college, go to grad school, and become a productive member of society. Thank you for having me when there was still money for electives in high school and the SATs were the big exam. Thank you for bringing me into the World when a 12th grade semi-diverse education- not a 10th grade one measured by four MCAS exams- was the goal of high school. For all of this, I am forever in your debt. I love you SO MUCH!!!
3,000 denied diplomas because of MCAS – The Boston Globe. <– Boston Globe article for anyone with a tough stomach.
One More to Graduate. Make that 50.000001% June 7, 2010
With a graduation rate in the US hovering at 50%, getting every kid to graduate from high school should be our #1 prority. Alex wasn’t a student of mine but he took precalculus in my classroom during my off period. Because our school is a small school, classrooms are shared. One day, Alex asked to use my computer to work on his credit recovery for the Algebra 2 class he had failed the year before. I let him use it, and sat with him as he worked on the problems. I taught Algebra 2 that year so it seemed only natural I help him. Alex needed to get through just this one course to graduate high school.
Before I knew it, I was helping Alex every day during my off period, and when the school year began to wear down, Alex began staying in my room all day working to get through the program. The program was difficult; much of the material isn’t covered in the Boston Algebra 2 curriculum. It started to become clear that Alex was exceptionally smart, but the program involved a lot of difficult work that would give even m top Algebra 2 students difficulty.
On Thursday June 3, 2010, Alex and I stayed at school until 10:30 PM when the custodian politely asked us when we’d be leaving. The credit recovery program deadline was at midnight and we weren’t going to be done. We were on section 10.5 and had to get to 11.11, and it was clear there wasn’t’ enough time. Alex was devastated. I was devastated. After all that time, we were defeated. Worst of all, there were errors in the program that had wrong answers as correct answers and not achieving a 75% or better on each mini quiz (there were approximately 20 in each section) meant we couldn’t move on to the next subsection.
The next day was field day. As I was waiting in my classroom for our bus to come, the director of credit recovery came to tell me he’d give Alex another day because he had gotten so far in the program. He had been given another chance! WE had been given another chance! Hard work does pay off! I called the phone number I found in the office fir Alex and told him to come in immediately to continue working.
Because I wasn’t allowed to stay behind from the field day trip, I asked another teacher to work with Alex. Alex began working again at 9AM. When I returned from field day at 1:30, Alex had gotten through just one more subsection. I was so exhausted from staying so late the night before, from field day, and just from a week of work in general, that the thought of staying late on a Friday almost brought me to tears. Still, we had to take the chance. I had to be there for Alex. He was so close to graduating that I couldn’t give up. We worked from 1:30PM to 5PM and got to section 11.5 when we ran into the advanced probability questions. Probability has never been strength of mine. I can do problems that involve using formulas, but these problems were less “marbles in a bag” or even “out of 10 people, you need to choose a president, vp, and secretary” and more “If Monty Hall opens one of the doors with a goat…” We were on section 11.5, we needed to get to 11.11, and we were stuck. I was stuck. I felt like a failure. We had been given another chance and it seemed we were defeated again. Alex wasn’t going to graduate because I couldn’t grasp that the Monty Hall probability is 2/3.
I couldn’t imagine what Alex’s weekend looked like. If I felt defeated, he must have felt devastated. If I felt frustrated, he must have felt destroyed. To get that close and have it count for nothing.
Then came Monday June 7, 2010, two day before graduating seniors were scheduled to sign out of high school forever. I was concentrating on final exam review for my juniors when the credit recovery director came back in. He has overridden the last half of chapter 11 so that Alex could take the final exam. I immediately called the phone number I had for Alex and left a message for him to come in. I had assumed Alex wasn’t in school, but he was. Maybe Alex had ore hope that I did. About 3 hours after seeing the director of credit recovery, Alex was at my door. He took the final exam. He was graduating. I called his mom to let her know, as I promised I would. I had never heard a parent so excited. It was then that it was reaffirmed in my mind and heart that hard work, as painful as it often is, always pays off. Thanks Alex.
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UPDATE: Alex was shot and killed on September 3, 2011 on his way to a barber shop in Boston.
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