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Monday, June 21, 2004 |
This essay is a call to arms: http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/lobotomized.html
"Every child in the United States, more or less, is being taught to write and to think in this way. I teach these kids when they reach college. I try to tell them that the idea that there is some specifiable way to write an essay is just hoo-ha made up by some bureaucrat in 1987. This makes them nervous.
I am not particularly concerned about the youth of today; if the world goes to hell I don't really care. But I do care about coming to the middle of a semester and being forced, in order to make a living, to read 35 five-page papers written by thoroughly fried lamb chops whose writing style has been nurtured over the years by a computer."
6:16:45 PM 
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Saturday, June 19, 2004 |
Pressed to raise Test Scores, principals are resorting to new Gross-Out Stunts
from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required):
Last winter, Principal Karla Onick issued a challenge to her students at L.B. Johnson Elementary School. If each grade met its goal in a book reading contest, she would eat worms.
On May 21 , Ms. Onick stood up in the school cafeteria and ate two 8-inch night crawlers sautéed with mushrooms and onions. The children squealed. Then Assistant Principal Alberto Reyes plucked two Worms from a jar and ate them raw.
" 'I bit the first on and it squirted all over my mouth', he says,. ' so the second time I just swallowed.'
"Under state and federal programs, schools face penalties if students don't continue to improve on tests. In Texas, home to one of the strictest sets of standards in the nation, the state has already closed several charter schools for failing to show adequate progress.
Last month, Charles Brunder, the principal of Forest Meadow Junior High in Dallas, let his students clip his hair with dog shears after their test scores indicated the school would move up a notch in the state ranking system. Earlier this spring, Robert Gordon, principal of Hendrick Ranch Elementary School near Riverside, California, kissed a potbellied pig after students met a reading challenge. And in Hampton, Va., Principal David Gaston modeled a pink tutu for his students at Burbank Elementary after their state tests scores improved.
'I even had a little tiara', says Mr. Gaston
The article had some critics saying that such stunts make tests the focus of education. As someone who has experience eating worms for personal and social gain, I can tell you that it is a degrading act.
I am good at taking written tests. I passed the ASA certified technician brake test without ever doing a successful brake job. In high school, I took lots and lots of practice tests for the SAT and improved my score by more than 200 points. If I can improve my score through studying, what does the SAT really show? It shows a willingness to practice taking tests, which is even more degrading than eating worms. So I make the argument that standardized testing is degrading, forcing students and educators to jump through hoops as described above instead of living life.
I can take a step back from my argument and say that a standardized test I took once did show a clear deficiency in the part of my brain that handles spatial relations. Those 2 dimensional patterns that fold up into 3 dimensional shapes and you have to predict the resulting shape? I sucked at that section and the results showed it very clearly.
10:48:24 AM
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Friday, June 11, 2004 |
I rode the bus this morning and for some reason remembered this time in 3rd grade where the teacher, Mrs Kawecki, handed out a packet of mimeographed pages, about 20 pages long, that contained detailed instructions for a bunch of crazy exercises. The teacher said it was very important to follow the directions for this packet and that the first direction was to read the exercises first, the whole way through.
Of course, every kid began to do the exercises right away. I was too lazy to start, so I started browsing through the packet, curious to see if the exercises on page 20 were as bizarre as the ones on page 1. When I got to the end of the packet, there was a page with the instructions: "Do not do any of the exercises. hand the blank pages back to your teacher" I did that and sat there while the rest of the class enthusiastically completed the exercises like draw 20 ears of corn on one page and draw a large circle with 45 smaller circles inside it, write the alphabet with one a, two Bs, three Cs, etc.
When they got done, I was singled out as the only person who followed the directions. I felt some pride at this even though it was purely by accident that I read to the end of the packet. I can't think of an exercise that could be better at teaching the class that our work was meaningless, that our ability to draw nice looking ears of corn was meaningless in comparison to our ability to follow directions automatically and completely.
5:31:32 PM
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004 |
Our homeschool group is getting together tomorrow to perform skits. I can't wait for the next person to ask, "But what about socialization?"
Person: "But what about socialization?"
ME: "would getting together to do skits count?"
Person: "bible skits?"
ME: "No just skits"
Person: "depends what kind of skits"
ME: "what does it matter what kind of skits?"
Person: "well if the skits are like practice drills for what to do if the government comes to take them away, then I wouldn't count that as socialization"
ME: "Me neither. These aren't brainwashing drills. "
Person: "Who makes up the plots?"
ME: " I dunno, the kids?"
Person: "You don't really know, do you? "
ME: "No..."
Damn. I get argued into a corner even in imagined conversations.
7:14:31 PM
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 |
Woodland Mayhem Cold and windy morning. Took my kids plus the kids next door to Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield. On a long path through the woods, I got far ahead of the gang and while waiting, I picked up a stick and started whacking dead branches off of a tree. Whack whack whack.
I started remembering how I used to do this all the time as a kid. Whack whack whack.
When I returned to the present, I noticed that all four
kids were gathered around in mute astonishment. The responsible adult was whacking the crap out of a tree. And with each whack, they felt a constraint
on their own behavior fall. Once they recovered their wits, they all started searching around for sticks of their own. There were lots of fallen trees around that needed whacking. Were they ever tired when we got home.
3:44:47 PM
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004 |
"When an unclean spirit leaves a person it wanders through waterless places searching for a resting place. When it doesn't find one, it says, 'I will go back to the home I left'. It then returns, and finds it swept and refurbished. Next, it goes out and brings back seven other spirits more vile than itself, who enter and settle in there. So that person ends up worse off than when he or she started"
-Jesus Q11:24
According to: http://www.livius.org/q/q-source/q1.htm
Q is the name used by scholars to describe a lost source on Jesus' teachings. (The letter is randomly chosen.) It can be reconstructed from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which are based on two earlier sources: the gospel of Mark and Q. Stated differently, Q is by definition the material that Luke and Matthew have in common that is not dependent on Mark.
8:25:05 AM
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Kind of a homeschooling morning. Maggie was contemplating a little card with the letter Z on it just now and she looked up and asked me, "Do numbers end?"
Also, she was watching me put honey on her toast and she asked me how bees make honey. We looked it up and found out that honeybees have two stomachs, one for nectar called the honey stomach and another regular stomach. One kind of bee collects nectar and another kind masticates it until it is converted into simple sugar. Then it is spread out to dry and the bees sit there and fan it with their wings until it is thick. Then they pour it into an honeycomb and seal it off with wax. Then we looked at pictures of bee larvae and bee eyes.
We'll have to make a trip to a bee farm this summer.
12:08:33 PM
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Saturday, January 31, 2004 |
This is what I've been thinking about, but without the words or concepts to say it.
By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word.
Thank You!
4:47:27 PM
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Thursday, January 29, 2004 |
Something that homeschooling could never teach: The power of a mob. I remember 50 kids lined up along Woolworth Ave. boldly pelting cars with snowballs while walking home from Williams Middle School. A driver would get out and yell at us and we would jeer them. It felt so POWERFUL to be in that mob. And the cops would come and there was nothing they could do. Picture 50 kids whistling as if it were 50 other kids the cops were looking for. Been trying to get back inside that painting ever since.
12:54:59 AM
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004 |
I went to the ECHO homeschool meeting tonight.
There were about 40 people there. 20 of them were new. When asked how they heard about the group they responded in unison: "THE INTERNET" kind of made me feel that what had been promised about the internet was coming true. Brought a tear to my eye.
Karl Bunday was there and invited everyone to his excellent website.
We discussed screening, the test every child has to take before kindergarten. The advice of the group was to either ignore this or let the district know you would be homeschooling when they call you looking for your kid. One mom said the screening experience convinced her to homeschool because her child tested well in the screening and she realized her child would be completely bored in kindergarten. Knowing how destructive he got when he was bored, she decided to make it easier on everyone and keep him home.
Financial Issues: Besides the usual point that its tough to make up the cost of childcare when both parents work full time, they didn't say much about how to know if you can afford to homeschool. One mom there did say she had a full time job with flexible hours. Most of the talk focused on paying for the stuff you couldn't provide yourself. For example, distance learning is getting huge. Even though the distance learning offerings are expensive, the good ones have financial aid packages that make them very affordable.
The state of Minnesota allows a family to get a tax credit or deduction of up to $1500.00 for purchases they make for extra-curricular education. This is available to homeschoolers. In addition, there is a $63.00 per year reimbursement available in Minnesota for education materials. The materials become the property of the school district, but according to the group, the school district never comes looking for their stuff.
Can you compensate for what they might be missing at school?
Someone said, "Sure, just hire someone to beat them up and take their lunch money" A response that I liked was that there will be times that you get worried because your child doesn't learn things the same year that every other 10-year-old learns them, but don't worry, that stuff all gets filled in.
In regards to socialization, the group was of the opinion that no one can homeschool alone. It is important to form a group and make sure that the adults have solid relationships before going forward.
Do you like teaching enough to homeschool?
One of the women leading the meeting said she was glad she never asked herself this before deciding to homeschool, because the idea of droning on all day at her kids but that looking back, it is a different concept of teaching. You are working one on one with children at the same time you are parenting. The advice of the group was "Don't worry if your answer to this question isn't an automatic yes"
One thing I noticed about the group was that there was an in-group of homeschoolers that had ownership of this group. They often broke off into stories about their experiences together and it was clear that there would be no busing program that would allow my child to be a part of their groovy little homeschool co-op.
11:51:22 PM
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© Copyright 2004 mcgyver5.
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