I have reached the age of 60 today, an age I never conceived possible.
I found this article rather interesting as part of my reflection.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Posted on22 October 2009 at The Uptown Chronicle
It means different things to younger people
Sam Walters* hates Hamlet. If he had his way, he would never have wasted time reading the play in high school. “I don’t like reading very much and I don’t like Shakespeare. The only line I like is ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,’” the 11th grader said during his school lunch break.
Speaking in computer room 227 on the second floor of Edward Reynolds Westside High School on 102nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Walters did not hesitate when asked what his literary leanings were. He detested assigned texts like Hamlet, any book that was “full of stuff on government laws” and things like Obama’s Back to Education speech, he said, but was forced to read and write about them.
“I don’t know why we have to read things we don’t like. If I had a choice, I would go for a book like Walter Dean Myers’s Beast, which I can relate to,” the tall and well-built teenager said, looking older than his 18 years despite the schoolbag on his back.
Beast was a love story but not the usual “happy ending” kind, he explained. It was a young-adult novel about a Harlem teenager who was forced to leave behind his girlfriend when his family moved and returned to find that she had begun to do drugs. The book charted the boy’s struggle to rescue his girlfriend but the story ended in tragedy, he said.
“I identify with the book because I am going through a break-up now. So if I have the choice to read such a book, my commitment, my drive to read and write about it will be greater,” he said. “I hope you get what I mean.”
But did he think he knew enough at 18 to pick all the right books and make all the right choices without help? “I guess you’re right. Then it should be half and half. The teacher should pick some texts and we should be allowed to pick some,” he said, before walking toward his English teacher, Ted Nellen, who was working on a Mac in the room.
Read the rest of the story...
Monday, October 19, 2009
Many years ago, in the mid 80's, I used to teach drama. During one of the semesters, I came upon a play called "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night." It was for high schoolers. It was like Spoon River Anthology. Each character was on stage in bed. Suddenly one of the sleepers would wake and deliver a monologue dealing with the reason for waking up in a cold sweat or troubled. Then s/he would fall back to sleep and another sleeper would rise up. I loved it and the kids loved it. The class would write their own sketches and then we presented them to the school. We would have a week of performances so we could get to the whole school. They became very popular especially with our guidance department.
In that semester a young girl wrote a painful sketch of how she was awoken by her stepfather on many evenings. While she sat in bed she was blaming herself, she couldn't tell her mom, because she believed her mom would blame her, and she just didn't know who to turn to. Eventually she decided she had to speak to someone and decided she would speak to a teacher at school or to her guidance counselor. It was a brilliant piece, in fact in her first performance, two girls sitting in different parts of the auditorium left abruptly and I discovered later had gone to the Guidance offices. I learned of this because the head of the Guidance department came to ask me what was going on in the auditorium. When I explained to her our play, she was thankful. During our week of performances, no fewer than a dozen girls visited their counselors. Drama had served more than a vehicle for entertainment, it had provided a path for too many of our young ladies to find help about a troubling issue.
As it turned out this sketch was drawn from the girl's life. It was happening to her cousin. I discovered this when I spoke with the girl's mother.
I was thinking about this play recently as I am discovering that a play like this with this topic and others may be needed right now in our school. The students seem so much more tough than we were, but they are only playing at it as a protection against the difficulties they face. They think they are alone in their problems and we must let them know they aren't. I'm in a school with more social workers than that other school had Guidance counselors. Life is so much tougher for our young people and we need to find ways to help them discover their paths to recovery. This kind of play I did so many years ago, sadly may still have an audience and a need to be revised.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
"What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing."
-- Aristotle
Perhaps the most obvious way to help students become more 21st Century computer literate and to help them learn the new media skills is to have them become 'producers and not just consumers.' Recent articles in many educationally oriented publications, both print and digital, have extolled the need for students to become more tech savvy and the need for schools to provide such instruction that will advance technological skills for the 21st Century. This sounds very much like the clamor of the early 20th Century when schools needed to educate the students for that business world. We learn by doing.Today's students are far more advanced with the tools of technology than the students of the past and even most of their teachers and parents. The problem is that they are consumers and not producers. Tweets are not enough, they are thoughts that need to be expanded. e-texting, notepassing 2.0, is not enough. These new tools are not advancing literacy as they should, because the students are not producing much if anything and are simply consuming the toys of technology. We have not seen a surge in literacy skills with these new tools, instead we have seen a loss in effective literacy as the results from our schools are telling us.
Currently students consume large amounts of data and facts to satisfy the need to pass a test that asks them to regurgitate that consumed data. They are not producing anything, merely consuming, regurgitating, and then consuming again. We know learning isn't happening because the next stops after K-12, college, military, or work, tell us that these students aren't prepared. In order for us to know they have learned, we need them to produce something that shows us they know how to do.
I have always liked the construction of webpages to show me the scholars are learning. The webpages are online magazines. Their webpages contain other webpages that represent the essyas or articles they write based on research. These webpages are not just text, they are hypertext, colorful, graphical, and multimedia rich. In the construction of these webpages, the scholars have to do research, they have to verify their sources, they have to include hypertext links to these sources, they have to analyze their resources and present their findings and observations. They have to create substantial webpages that become digital portfolios or webfolios of their learning. I also have them produce in the basic language of HTML, because when they begin to incorporate other web tools, knowledge of HTML will make them more fluent and adroit with these other tools. They will use software that allows them to create graphics, music, videos and add them to their work on their webpages. Blogs, twitter, wiki, and other tools augment the webpage, they are not replacements of the webpage and can be linked to from their webpage when necessary. These webfolios become far better tools for us to evaluate the scholars as they move on into their next worlds following K-12. When these scholars are producing their own webpages they are more engaged in their own learning and go beyond what the expectations of the class were so often. Oh and this goes for teachers, too.
In short:
Friday, July 17, 2009
ISTE and Congress are way too late and short on the push to provide funds for training new teachers to be prepared to use technology in the classroom. Good idea, but it will probably not work or succeed. Too bad, too.
Why will it fall short? Simple, the teachers who work in the schools of education have no clue about how to use technology in the K-12 classroom, let alone teach the new teachers how to use it. How do I know this? Again, simple. What school of education has a staff using the technology in their own teaching and has had their own students using it in their own work. Teachers are still coming to us not having a clue how to use the technology as a teacher. Sure they have used some technology as students, but they have not developed their own webpages or blogs as teachers, only as students; and that is a huge difference. Sure the new teachers are still better consumers in the technology age, but they have yet to prove themselves as good producers. They still muck about with such inferior products like Facebook and MySpace, which are filtered in the schools in which they will teach. Blackboard too is an expensive program not used in K-12 schools, heck, Moodle doesn't have a big following. And, too, these new teachers are again using these programs as students, not as the teacher.
It doesn't matter how much money and how much technology a school of education has, since the old dogs in these professorships and who are tenured have no incentive to learn how to use technology let let alone teach something about which they have no clue. They still teach the way they were taught and have since earning their own adavanced degree. Just look at their online syllawebs. They are sorely lacking in any kind of 21st Century thinking or application in preparing the teachers of the future. ISTE has always been disappointing on this front, something some of us have been saying for the past decade if not longer.
The problem with the use of technology in the K-12 environment is in our schools of education. The advancement of education in this country has always found its weakest link on the ramparts of the ivory towers of our schools of education, that staid bastion of tenure and status quo. And ISTE is loaded with these folks who talk better they they walk.
To verify this criticism, simply look at how far behind the use of technology schools are as compared to other professions. Schools should be in tghe forefront of tgechnology use and yet when students leave the K-12 environment, they have barely had much experience with technology. How many teachers in a K-12 school actually use technology? How many teachers in the K-12 environment have a webpage of their syllawebs? Schools are further hamstrung by the odius filters. It is very obvious that there is no plan to determine how to use technology in our K-12 schools, otyherwise we would see it happening. Giving more money to schools of education to lead the charge in the advancement of technology in education is a huge waste and will embarass us even further. And surely we don't want to look to Secretary of Education Duncan for leadership or even direction in this matter, because he is clueless on so many fronts when it comes to education.
Why will it fall short? Simple, the teachers who work in the schools of education have no clue about how to use technology in the K-12 classroom, let alone teach the new teachers how to use it. How do I know this? Again, simple. What school of education has a staff using the technology in their own teaching and has had their own students using it in their own work. Teachers are still coming to us not having a clue how to use the technology as a teacher. Sure they have used some technology as students, but they have not developed their own webpages or blogs as teachers, only as students; and that is a huge difference. Sure the new teachers are still better consumers in the technology age, but they have yet to prove themselves as good producers. They still muck about with such inferior products like Facebook and MySpace, which are filtered in the schools in which they will teach. Blackboard too is an expensive program not used in K-12 schools, heck, Moodle doesn't have a big following. And, too, these new teachers are again using these programs as students, not as the teacher.
It doesn't matter how much money and how much technology a school of education has, since the old dogs in these professorships and who are tenured have no incentive to learn how to use technology let let alone teach something about which they have no clue. They still teach the way they were taught and have since earning their own adavanced degree. Just look at their online syllawebs. They are sorely lacking in any kind of 21st Century thinking or application in preparing the teachers of the future. ISTE has always been disappointing on this front, something some of us have been saying for the past decade if not longer.
The problem with the use of technology in the K-12 environment is in our schools of education. The advancement of education in this country has always found its weakest link on the ramparts of the ivory towers of our schools of education, that staid bastion of tenure and status quo. And ISTE is loaded with these folks who talk better they they walk.
To verify this criticism, simply look at how far behind the use of technology schools are as compared to other professions. Schools should be in tghe forefront of tgechnology use and yet when students leave the K-12 environment, they have barely had much experience with technology. How many teachers in a K-12 school actually use technology? How many teachers in the K-12 environment have a webpage of their syllawebs? Schools are further hamstrung by the odius filters. It is very obvious that there is no plan to determine how to use technology in our K-12 schools, otyherwise we would see it happening. Giving more money to schools of education to lead the charge in the advancement of technology in education is a huge waste and will embarass us even further. And surely we don't want to look to Secretary of Education Duncan for leadership or even direction in this matter, because he is clueless on so many fronts when it comes to education.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Ted Shaw, a professor of law at Columbia Law School, made an interesting and appropriate comment about tests while speaking on the Brian Lehrer show on Monday, about the results of a Supreme Court decision on the New Haven Fire fighter's case. He said we should not simply determine the worth of a firefighter based on a single test.
We in education concur. A student's achievement in schools should not be determined by one test. I would like to see portfolios and tests in a fifty fifty combination to determine student achievement. Education is in a quagmire. Teachers who are some of the most educated workers in any profession and are ruled by bosses who have never been members of the educational profession. Didn't the auto industry new head, Ed Whitacre, recently say, "I don't know anything about cars."
Peter Senge may have had a good idea many decades ago, I'm only sorry the educational industry adopted many of his ideas. Arne Duncan is not a teacher, he is a CEO. Now we know how CEO's operate and fair in this country. I only hope real teachers have some say and impact on is decisions, but I doubt it as I teach in NYC and know that teachers get too little respect in our city from its educational leaders. Remember teachers are highly educated in their filed of expertise while the leaders are barely literate in the industry they lead.
We in education concur. A student's achievement in schools should not be determined by one test. I would like to see portfolios and tests in a fifty fifty combination to determine student achievement. Education is in a quagmire. Teachers who are some of the most educated workers in any profession and are ruled by bosses who have never been members of the educational profession. Didn't the auto industry new head, Ed Whitacre, recently say, "I don't know anything about cars."
Peter Senge may have had a good idea many decades ago, I'm only sorry the educational industry adopted many of his ideas. Arne Duncan is not a teacher, he is a CEO. Now we know how CEO's operate and fair in this country. I only hope real teachers have some say and impact on is decisions, but I doubt it as I teach in NYC and know that teachers get too little respect in our city from its educational leaders. Remember teachers are highly educated in their filed of expertise while the leaders are barely literate in the industry they lead.
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