A public thank you to Kieran for teaching PK two new vocabulary words—”diaphoresis” and “micturition”—which should come in very handy. And for the delivery of a package this morning that prompted PK to get out of bed before noon.
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Tedra Osell
A “bad teacher” named William Johnson talks about the problems we’re having from the other side of the desk.
my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests. [click to continue…]
So. That post I wrote about charter schools? Where I argued that liberal, educated, reasonably affluent parents (like me!) should keep our kids in public schools, advocate for public schools, not buy our way out of problems in the public schools, and so on? Dana Goldstein made a similar argument against homeschooling recently.
Only some things have happened since I wrote that post, and as it turns out, I’m homeschooling Pseudonymous Kid right now. [click to continue…]
Sorry, this isn’t a job posting. Instead, it’s a request for adjuncts or recent adjuncts to add their salaries to a database, intended to “recognize the schools that are doing a great job . . . [and to] expose those schools that have chosen to ignore the basic human rights of their employees and shortchange their students and their communities by devaluing the very education they pretend to celebrate.”
Having worked, for precisely one semester, at an adjunct job that paid about $2k, if memory serves, along with other indignities, I totally endorse this project.
If you haven’t come across Jourdon Anderson’s 1865 letter “To [his] Old Master” yet, do read it; it’s marvelously pointed, far more rhetorically adept than its recipient deserved. Jason Kottke did a little digging—wait, is this some of that digital humanities stuff all the kids are doing nowadays?—and found out what happened to Jourdon Anderson and his family. The short version seems to be that they lived happily ever after.
In case you hadn’t heard, the latest you-must-be-shitting-me news in re. lady parts is that the massive fund-raising organization responsible for all those pink mixers and spatulas at Target, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, has decided that preventing breast cancer is less important than Taking a Stand for The Babies. [click to continue…]
I challenge everyone who has commented in the “Do You Trust Women” post and considers themselves pro-choice to donate $2 to Planned Parenthood (or your abortion rights organization of choice) per comment to celebrate Roe Day.
That’s $126 for me, and I’ll round up to $130.
If you do it, leave a comment saying how much you donated. No checking people’s math, and obviously no one can check to see if you actually did donate; we’re on the honor system here.
Sunday is Roe Day [edited to add: and some good news to celebrate!]. I wrote this piece a long time ago, and I’ve reposted part of it since then. And now I’m doing so again because I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read, let alone said, on the subject. [click to continue…]
To wit, a mandate that educational mandates be in line with actual current research on education rather than pulled out of someone’s butthole.
So, for instance, some teacher(s) at this school in Georgia thinks that “Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick” and “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week? 2 weeks?” are appropriate interdisciplinary math word problems. For elementary students.
Even if we agree to completely ignore the fact that these questions are blatantly offensive, have these educators never heard of stereotype threat? (See also.) The research on this has been around for almost twenty years, people.
Research also shows us that equality actually improves everyone’s performance; this nonsense may well be depressing white students’ learning as well as black students’. I can guarantee you that questions like that would make it a lot harder for me to get my kid to finish his math homework.
Speaking of whom, Pseudonymous Kid overheard me ranting talking about this earlier, and asked what stereotype threat was, so I gave him a brief explanation. Then he tells me that apparently the state mandated STAR tests have the students indicate race and gender on them. (And that “on the race question, “white” is separated from all the other categories—it’s right on top, and all the other options are underneath a dividing line.” God only knows what message that sends, but obviously PK finds it offputting.) Because apparently it’s important that we annually remind all students in California which of them belong to groups that stereotypically aren’t good at math/school/science/whatever. Before we have them take a test the results of which determine all sorts of things: what reading level a kid is at, school rankings (hm, maybe stereotype threat has a measurable impact on “failing” majority-minority schools?), whether kids qualify for certain kinds of programs, whether or not kids are “below basic, below basic, basic, proficient, advanced,” at certain subjects, and god only knows what else.
I’m wondering, now, how many states have students fill in this kind of data on standardized tests. Does the SAT still do it? And for god’s sake, why haven’t we yet put demographic information (which yes, there are good reasons to collect it) at the end of the test or even have teachers fill it out so that we don’t emphasize this nonsense to the students themselves?
Obviously this pissy, difficult parent needs to file a complaint with the state department of education this afternoon.
It wasn’t too many years ago that I was suicidally depressed. Because this is a public forum, I won’t go into what finally got me to a psychiatrist (I’d seen psychotherapists for years, but hadn’t been diagnosed with clinical depression) and onto medication, and I had to try several different pills before I found something that worked. Recently I’ve switched meds again, and I’m really having a great holiday season.
But for a lot of people the holidays suck. Sometimes that’s temporary, but often it’s not. Please take twelve minutes to watch the video below, and please take the time in real life to listen to the people you love. I think one of the profoundest difficulties we have as human beings, despite all our ways of communicating, is that ultimately it’s horribly easy to hear someone say they’re unhappy but not really understand that they are deeply in trouble, especially if the things they seem unhappy about seem small or temporary or like minor fillips in a pretty great life.
It’s impossible to know how someone with depression feels if you haven’t been there. And if you are there, it’s impossible to realize that it really doesn’t have to be that bad. If you think you need help, please ask for it. And if you think someone you know needs help, please listen—because when you’re way down that well, it can be almost impossible even to whisper.
Do you know what’s more boring than the insularity of academia? Bold Rebels Who Take Stands Against the Insularity of Academia by using minor players/subfields as weapons to bash someone who is mistakenly thought to be Really Important because he has a Column in the New York Times.
I so do not miss this kind of wankery. I had spent a few minutes feeling mildly wistful about lacking a reason to go up to Seattle this year, since I like and miss Seattle and would have enjoyed having drinks with some old friends and acquaintances, but dear god do I prefer sitting on my couch in 70-degree December weather thinking about taking a walk to the grocery store to having to listen to people preen themselves on their superior cynicism. If I’d stayed in academia I’m afraid my eyeballs would have gotten stuck staring at the ceiling and I’d be unable to walk anywhere.
If I were smarter, I’d have written this before Christmas so that you’d have an excuse to buy the book I’m going to tell you about. That said, maybe you don’t need an excuse to buy good books, so if you are inclined to like comics, humor, feminist scienceish geekery, and/or all of the above—or if you know someone who is, and in particular if that someone is a young person—I recommend the totally awesome Complete Narbonic Perfect Collection , only recently published. [click to continue…]
My husband sent me this fascinating chart of atrocities throughout history, from the NYT. It’s an excellent chart as chart (Tufte would be proud), and despite the appalling subject it’s really engaging. It’s a nice visual representation of something a couple of us referenced yesterday in comments, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ongoing posts about the civil war as the end of a great tragedy, rather than a tragedy in its own right. And it’s also incredibly, incredibly humbling: the only one of the most deadly events of human history I really know much about is WWII, and many of the others I’ve never even heard of. Clearly my education has been revoltingly Eurocentric; I think I had one half of one semester in high school devoted to the history of Asia, and the only thing I really remember is that we memorized a brief dialogue in Mandarin and I cheated on the test by writing the names and Mandarin characters of the major dynasties on my pencil. Poor Doc Langan; he had a PhD in Chinese (Asian?) history, and he had to deal with ignorant little jackasses like me. I owe him restitution in the form of learning something. Anyone care to recommend a couple of decent histories of Asia (or regions thereof) for the general reader?
If you’re not following Ta-Nehisi Coates as he reads Eliot’s Middlemarch, you’re really missing out. It’s one of my favorite novels, so I’m having great fun reading someone who is really smart read something I’m familiar with for the first time. I love reading Coates, and in this case especially so. He’s no callow undergrad and he writes better than anyone I can think of, which means reading him is not merely the familiar pleasure of observing students’ first encounter with a familiar novel. His frame of reference is totally intellectual but not “academic” in the conventional sense: rigorous but really fresh. His go-to for beautiful language is hip hop, which I like just fine but am not particularly familiar with, so I’m getting new insights into Eliot along with a little mini-education in rap music, plus occasional comparisons to his research into the Civil War (which has anyone posted here about that yet? Because damn). Just so much fun.
(Those are all the posts I could find. The Atlantic needs an easier way of searching their blogging archives.)