BlogHer - K-12 - Comments

The Golden Rule is missing

Beverly Flaxington — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:18:09 -0500

I don't claim to have answers to school violence, but I do notice a disturbing trend generally among children. The "Golden Rule" seems to have all but disappeared from the lexicon. Instead of treating others as you'd like to be treated, it seems most kids are ready to "put 'em up" everytime someone else upsets them. This goes on even with the so-called "good kids" who may have a stay-at-home mom, or a working mom but be generally financially healthy. I hear it in the teen gossip and read it on the Facebook pages of my own kids and their friends. I don't know if it is lack of spiritual direction, or lack of being in touch with something Greater than they are, but generally both the boys and girls seem ready with a chip on their shoulders looking for a fight. The Counselor at the grammar school says she has to start now with the Kindergarten kids when it used to be the 5th grade where it began. Maybe in each of our homes if we could watch our language and try to be a bit "kinder" toward others, kids would hear that message. Even in "good homes" we're often so harried and stressed, some days it is hard to be nice. It's possible that our kids feel this stress and don't know what to do with it, so just act it out in many different negative ways. I also think we don't teach kids, at least in public school, good coping skills -- how to communicate effectively, how to deal with emotion, or how to deal with stress and as such, it all builds up and for some kids, they don't know what to do except explode. Getting away from standardized testing and putting an emphasis on life skills might be one good place to start.

Beverly Flaxington

Blog: Dealing with Difficult People

Book: Understanding Other People: The Five Secrets

Abby, Thanks for your

Leslie Madsen Brooks — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:07:58 -0500

Abby, Thanks for your comment. I didn't say it's only the poor kids beating up on people--see all the cases I cited, as well as my comments about cliques, bullying, and suburban ennui.

There's more than one kind of poverty. If parents are working so hard to pay the bills that they can't spend time with their children, that strikes me as a particular form of poverty as well, a living-on-the-edge sort of poverty where the choice is between working/paying bills and spending time with the kids.

Leslie

BlogHer Contributing Editor, Research and Academia
My blogs: The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox

School violence

Abby Winters — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:43:10 -0500

There are a great number of things that could be causing school violence. I do not believe poverty is one of them. It is not always the poor kids who are beating up people. I honestly think that one of the biggest causes can be the way we all live our lives. Parents are so busy working to pay all the bills that they may not have the time to see that their child may be headed for trouble. blagues

Professor Support

aspergers2mom — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:25:17 -0500

Elise http://asd2mom.spaces.live.com

I have a son with asperger syndrome who attends college, We provide private support for him. We have been thanked by several professors for providing this support. There is a great desire among true educators to find a way to reach all of their students. I think it is high time that post-secondary education catches up with the rest of society and trains their professors on how to help these students. It is not always just about access in a physical sense. Access also means the ability to access the information taught and if you have learning issues that ability of access needs to be triggered in a different and much more creative ways than tradtional lecture and listen methodology. Thank you for your blog. It was very interesting and very heartening to know that there is a generation of future teachers who take these concerns seriously and that it is an active area of discussion.

UDL sounds a lot like Culturally Responsive Teachinglar

Kim Pearson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:05:04 -0500

National standards make sense to me

Lisse — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:32:41 -0500

There is no reason why a child in Mississippi shouldn't have the same standards as a child in Massachusetts, and it is ridiculous that states were allowed to develop their own standards and testing system. The result is the places like Texas have a very basic skills test while kids in Mass are asked to perform at a much higher level in order to graduate.

This is only evident when you compare state to state performance on a national test like NAEP. Hardly anyone knows what that is and is therefore truly understanding what their child's scores on the state test really mean.

McCluskey's arguments are bogus. Massachusetts has one of the highest bars in the country when it comes to testing and the best public schools in the state strive to go way beyond what the standards dictate. We all know that it is a minimum measure.

- Lisse

@ Home in the World: International Adoption and Other Travels

I am for standards by the

cooper — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:14:01 -0500

I am for standards by the way of every 9 year old will be able to read books at such and such a level, know history and geography up to this point, and do math at this level. Other than that I think locality is important. States and even counties should have a choice.

It is very clear that success varies according the state or county, with wealthy areas tending to have the better schools anmd outcomes.

There is one thing that is never addressed any longer, it is the most expensive, and it has been known for decades, but ignored due to cost. If all else remained the same, a decrease in student to teacher ratio would make a much larger difference than any curriculumn change. If they had actually looked at this for what it was 25 years ago, and been willing to work with that one fact, despite the cost, the cost in the longrun would have been much less.

cooper

The standards or the testing

Virginia DeBolt — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:52:41 -0500

I'm not sure if setting standards is the problem. It seems reasonable to say that students need to learn a certain level of math or reading skills. (Or web design skills, which is where my curriculum efforts have gone lately.) The problem comes from our system of testing skills and rewarding schools and teachers for test performance. The idea that particular skills and knowledge are basic to an education doesn't get implemented well at the proof of success end of things.

Virginia DeBolt
BlogHer Technology CE | Web Teacher | First 50 Words

Inspiring

Vered — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:08:39 -0500

Many on the web have complained that Obama's speech to kids was too mild. I thought it was appropriate and inspiring.

My kids didn't listen to the speech at school, but I actually printed out the part about having to work hard to become good at something and read it to my kids. One of my kids expects to excel at things immediately and becomes very frustrated when she doesn't.

I wanted her to listen to a strong message from a successful person that explains you only get good at things if you work hard.

Thank you for the round-up and thank you for including a link to my blog.

----

Need to hire a blogger? I’m a mommy blogger and a blogger for hire.

Critical thinking, please

lauriewrites — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:08:56 -0500

I may have recently spent several hours helping normally-functioning individuals who cannot easily locate a door when it's pointed to and who do not grasp the concept of sitting down and deciding between two classes based upon such simple criteria as 1. Which one appeals to me more? 2. Which one am I less likely to fail? Instead they want me to tell them, after knowing them for five minutes.

Some of my brightest students cannot handle open-ended questions without point values assigned.The time to embrace the importance of critical thinking as a national pasttime? Now. Make no mistake. NOW. (Hi, choir, I'm preaching to it.)

I watched the speech on Facebook (haha, the backchannel, HAHA) with a colleague yesterday and we loved it in spite of it not being revolutionary in content. I kept thinking of my students who may have never heard anyone talk to them about their ability to achieve anything, because I know some of them have not had much positive input. Therefore I was really ok with it, as trite as some of it sounded to my jaded, educator self.

And yes yes yes to Joan Gallagher-Bolos, who said it much more eloquently than I did:

The idea of disagreeing with the president's thoughts is as welcome as
agreeing with them and as welcome as not understanding them...as long
as a student has a well-formulated opinion. This is the foundation of
developing a constructive educational community. Without this freedom,
I would not have the opportunity to make this lesson really come to
life. And I believe my students will find the day eye-opening,
challenging and—dare I say it—even inspiring. This is the type of
environment in which our greatest historical thinkers thrived.

Laurie

LaurieWrites

Photos on Flickr

I'm a community college counselor/professor

lauriewrites — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:30:27 -0500

And I'll say off the top that you know way more than I do about this topic, Leslie, so this is just a reflection from my little corner of the education world.

Much of what I do is rooted in career counseling. I tell my students that they MUST think entrepreneurially now. They have no choice. Zero. it's a different hiring and working world and the only way they're going to be well-prepared for it is to be flexible and think of themselves and their talents before loyalty to an organization. (NOT that they should be jerks at work - be respectful and good workers but always know the sands are shifting.)

ALL of our students are so different but the one thing they have in common is that they all need to or want to be employed in some way (this is how I keep myself from going insane while trying to serve an incredibly diverse student body, anyway.) I think we do a pretty cool job in our career and transfer programs in focusing on the ways we can help them do that - obviously better in some of our programs than others. As an institution, however, or as individual teachers? It's all over the map. I think it's still our responsibility to stay pretty much in the public domain, given our funding and our mission, but I do think it's our responsibility as well to help them CONNECT with entrepreneurial resources.

And for my students, sometimes just giving them an idea or showing them how to access a resource is enough, even if it's not monetary reward that results. For instance, I worked blogs into my last career development course. I am INSANE about forcing them online and helping them learn how to communicate in this environment. Society makes assumptions about access to and awareness of digital resources that many of my students don't have access to or if they do they don't understand the value of them or how to use them appropriately. Just getting them on Blogger was like pulling teeth for some. Others really took to it and I could tell were jazzed - just like I was once upon a time - by the immediate, relatively easy-access route to self-publishing. We were contacted by Roadtrip Nation through the wonders of SEO and they came to our campus as a result. That was a learning opportunity I couldn't have planned.

So I guess where I'm coming from and where I work every day, it's still teaching the basic concepts, no matter what organizations, entrepreneurial or otherwise, are involved. Because as i repeat, without fail, multiple times every semester to students who are crushed because they can't get into our most competitive business bachelor's program and have to choose another major: you don't have to have a business degree to open a lemonade stand. You just have to know how to run it, and those skills can come from lots of different places.

Laurie

LaurieWrites

engineering philosophy

edtechdev — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:10:16 -0500

I think taking more of an 'engineering' point of view may change/reform/improve education.

And all teachers are tweak or design or fiddle to some extent in the same way that engineers do.

And open education and other efforts I think will enhance this, perhaps allow educators to become even more like engineers, and less like consumers of curricula and so forth (although being a smart consumer is always important and useful too).

So perhaps another way to put it is that the engineers will fix education, be they entrepreneurs, educators or other folks.

entrepreneurship

mashadutoit — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:48:48 -0500

Scary stuff, some of it. I agree with your points on the value of teaching entrepeneurship, especially as you seem to be suggesting, with a good dollop of ethical perspective.

This post made me think of a dillema we have here in South Africa.

As you may be aware, we have enormous challenges with providing even the most basic equipment to schools in our poor comunities. Many schools dont even have classrooms and happen wherever the class gathers. No books, desks, nothing.

Someone came up with the idea of a "lapdesk" which is a curved piece of board which a child can hold on their lap and write on. It is easy to carry around and store. Its sounds great till you get to this bit:

Each Lapdesk is printed with a design and message that is meaningful to
the Lapdesk sponsor - thus fashioning the portable desk into a media
platform that effectively delivers information on social issues and
corporate branding to hard-to-reach emerging market communities.

The quote is from here http://www.lapdesk.co.za/main.html

Which all sounds all very nice and shiny - but it simply makes my hair stand on end.

Who gets to decide what is an apropriate message to reach "the emerging market communities" which in this case are small and very poor children?

Would it be OK if skin whitening creams sponsored these desks? Or junkfood companies? Or even if it is something merely dubious like Kellogs - this feels like seriously shaky territory. The company presumably gets some kind of tax break for contributing to the community. You know, "corporate social investment". But this corporate social investment is purely - advertising.

Sometimes It's Hard to Know the Right Thing

JC — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:05:28 -0600

When my son was young, I was convinced that our local public school would be fine; that it wasn't the school so much as parent/child involvement and expectations. While the latter is certainly true, what we found during his elementary years is as a consequence of the mandated testing and NCLB, the main efforts were focused on the kids in the bubble; those who were underachieving and could be brought up to increase the test scores. No enrichment, arts, school plays; minimal science. My son was only served after meeting with his principal and matching him with the right teacher (who he ended up having for 4th and 5th grades).

My point is I don't think educators have hit on the right formula yet. The gifted kids need to be challenged, but do you take them away from the mix? And I like what Kelly says in her post. It's important that we also let our kids be kids. Let them play in the sandbox, paint, explore the world around them. Let them be bored once in a while.

I think education is a work in progress, but one thing I did take away from my son's elementary experience, if I had the power to change things (which I tried but nothing came of it) I'd add enrichment to the mix and the test scores would have gone up.

http://www.storyrhyme.com/jcsblog

Harvard isn't looking at your kids preschool transcript, ya know

conversemomma — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:31:35 -0600

I think what you are talking about is the problem of tracking, which not surprisingly came about right around the same time as schools being forced to segregate. When school districts realized they were going to have to "mix" they developed this genius(note my sarcasm) idea of separate but equal in the schools themselves. As an educator in middle school, I see these problems still exist.

However, magnet schools in the city of New York do seem to thrive. Kids have the option of applying anywhere, to schools geared around things that interest them. Yet, these schools should not happen until the secondary years when natural divergence of talents and desires arise.

I think the idea you touch upon here is disparity. Could you imagine how the playing field would change if ever single school district around the country had the same quality of teachers, books, supplies, and pedagogy? We would have a revolution. It won't happen. It is too "socialist" of an idea for the terrified american looking for communist red around every corner. (this is me laughing at myself)

I'm floored at the over-acheiving parents who compete to put their kids in ivy leauge preparatory pre-schools. But, then I just laugh at the irony of it. All the right research talks about the idea of play. Kids brains develop best when they can imagine, and manipulate, and navigate the tea-parties, and backyard sand-lots.

My little guy is heading to pre-school next year. It will be in a basement of a local church. He'll wear his daddy's backways shirt as a smock, and learn that pulling pigtails won't get him what he wants. He'll draw pictures and at night we will re-sing his newly learned songs.

He may not be getting groomed to take over the world, but I'm quite okay with that.

Peace,

Kelly (conversemomma)

Check me out here http://www.ordinaryartblog.com