Thursday, February 17, 2005

Georgia's curriculums rank among best in nation By MARY MacDONALD The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 02/17/05 A national review of state academic standards in English and math ranks Georgia among the best in the country for the depth and clarity of its expectations. I'm not really surprised by this. Our state has put a lot of effort into developing a comprehensive and well-defined set of standards, to be adopted next year. Teachers are being trained on it now. Of course now the challenge...to rank above 49th in the performance on those standards. (Not to mention teaching the next generation of newspaper editors that the plural of "curriculum" is "curricula.") 8:56:32 PM    comment []

GA Legislators Listen to the People, Drop Student Obesity Legislation The Georgia legislature was about to jump on the "report obesity" bandwagon by adopting legislation, similar to that of other states such as Arkansas, that would have required schools to report the body mass index of students on their semester report cards, and to furnish parents of overweight students with literature. But fortunately, the state was spared this ridiculous action by an apparent plethora of responses to the sponsoring legilators on the day that the proposed bill was featured on the front page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Thank God for the voice of the people. I wrote the following letter to the editor, which unfortunately didn't get printed. It was good news to hear that the sponsors of the so-called student obesity bill decided so quickly to drop this absurd piece of legislation. Sadly, though, I think we’ve seen how out of touch with reality our legislators are. For surely, if a single educator had been consulted beforehand, our representatives would see the absolute hypocrisy of the idea of schools telling parents that their kids are fat, when a) Physical Education has been cut to the bone; b) recess, in many districts, was eliminated years ago; c) the school cafeterias feed children a diet heavy on fried and fattening foods; and d) vending machines crowd school hallways. It’s not rocket science: The reason our students are obese is not that we haven’t told them so. They are obese because we have made them so. 8:30:32 PM    comment []