Puck Arne, Eli, and Bill

I used to play a little hockey. I was never really good at it, but I was decent at defense for two reasons:

I was quick (which is not the same as fast)--a gift, true, and in hockey, a huge one, and...

I learned that the only thing that mattered was watching the puck on the stick.

Motivations, feints, needs, dekes, desires, wants--all of that ultimately translated to watching the puck on the stick. Where was the stick, where was the puck.

Via Wikipedia, CC 3.0, Hockey1993

I do not care what Arne or Eli or Bill say--I am focused on the puck.

And right now, the puck is aimed right between the eyes of your young child entering school this September. The puck is flying towards the temple of a young woman headed for community college in January. The puck, if not batted down, will smash the nasal cartilage of your young adolescent, still dreaming of a life lived well.

I am not sure what the motivations of the ed reformers are, but I am aware of what happens to schools and children when the "reformers" get the reins, and if I am aware, yet accept this complacently, then I am complicit.

I did not raise two children to become part of the global economy. I raised them to be happy, thoughtful, loving people who care about their community, the concrete one. It's ridiculous, ridiculous, that we're even having this conversation, that Arne or Eli or Bill, three men who all exhibit signs of psychopathy, even matter.

Take care of the children you know, as well as you can. Do not do anything you feel will harm them. If we all do that, ferociously (as we should), fearlessly (or at least with all the courage we can muster), then these strange men lose their power.

It's really that simple.

Do the right thing...

Observation vs. information

There's the difference between "information" and "observation."

An alert letting you know it's raining outside is information. Standing outside getting hit by drops of water under gray clouds while your brain melts from the earthy aroma, that's observing.

Both can be summed up as "it's raining outside." On a multiple guess test, you'd be hard-pressed to separate the two--but it matters.

Here's a piece of information--that rainy day smell comes from geosmin, and chemists draw it like this:

"Geosmin" means "earth smell"--that's information.
Letting a child dance under the first raindrops of a late May rainfall, letting her sniff the ethereal aroma, that's observing.

If a child is to have any hope understanding the natural world, she first need to observe it.

Yeah, ethereal is the wrong adjective there--
chemists use it to mean related to ethyl ether. That would be information.

NGSS and Achieve

I have been nipping at the heels of Achieve for a flawed draft attempting to push their corporate world-view into public schools. The board of Achieve is made up of "leading" state governors and high level businessmen.

You can squeeze crap into a platinum tube trimmed with gold, but when you squeeze it out, it still stinks.

I may be unfair. It may be that no committee can create the kind of document a teacher needs to effectively teach to a specific group of kids.

Individual teachers, however, create these sorts of documents daily--we call them lesson plans. We tailor them for our classes, playing to our individual strengths, adapting to the real-time assessments good teachers do every minute of class time.


When you're ready to listen, give one of us a call....

 

Here's a list of their contributors:

The Battelle Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Boeing Company
Brookhill Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
The Cisco Foundation
The GE Foundation
IBM Corporation
Intel Foundation
JP Morgan Chase Foundation
The Joyce Foundation
Lumina
MetLife Foundation
Nationwide
Noyce Foundation
The Prudential Foundation
Sandler Foundation
State Farm Insurance Companies
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

More NGSS sputter

The Next Generation Science Standards draft has a mindset error.

We all carry myths. We tend to separate the science myths ("facts") from cultural myths ("stories"), but there are lots of basic science ideas most of us get wrong most of the time even when we can easily observe the contrary evidence.

If you read the above without specialized knowledge, it implies at first glance that we need telescopes to see planets. A careful reading dispels this, since obviously the moon can be seen without a scope, but if you're an elementary school teacher without a background in science you may not be aware that several planets are quite obvious in the night sky.

That we can see Saturn easily in this particular part of the world surprises most folks.

That stars are points of light, and remain points of light even in powerful scopes (excepting a few monsters like Betelgeuse), also surprises most folks. Telescopes add little detail to stars (though the color may be more obvious).

How do I know? We have a sidewalk astronomy club at our school--we go outside and look.

***

So how can we do better?

How do we know a star is a star and a planet a planet? Can a young child tell the difference without a telescope? Does this even matter?

Children learn early on that "knowing" certain things matters in class. The NGSS standards, like the current NJCCCS here in Jersey, perpetuate this nonsense.

Knowing how we know things matters far more in science than any particular fact.

***

So back to our stars--what can a child see?

Go out and find Saturn tonight--now compare it to the stars. There's a difference. Stars twinkle. Saturn does not.

That may be all a young child needs to know to fuel her curiosity.


Now maybe in high school, we can prattle on about discs vs. points, refraction, and all kinds of nonsense, but for a young child, learning how to compare and contrast matters far more than creating a Sherman who can recite facts (and no doubt do well on a standardized test).

Sherman was a damaged child

This confusion about what matters is endemic in the New Gen standards.

Noam Chomsky would have a field day with this document--the language, upon close reading, is both factually "correct" yet feeds cultural misconceptions.The NGSS confounds animals with mammals, electromagnetic radiation with visible light, physical change with chemical, creating an oddly worded document that values its own internal structure more than the universe it purports to unveil to our children.

If we're going to get science right in public education, we need to get it right at the early grades. A child needs permission to observe freely. 

Watch the wheels....

I've ridden motorcycles on and off (always better on than off) for over thirty years. While a few things are annoying--bugs in the teeth, bits of rotting roadkill kicked up by a car, the unexpected downpour--the joys far outweigh the negatives.


The one thing that threatens to tilt joy to despair are the folks in the 4-wheeled cages who simply do not see bikes. Live cars sitting at intersections make me wary.

When I see one, only one thing matters--its front wheels. Are they moving?

Only that, nothing else matters, nothing.  Riding gets down to the bare physics of things.

If it creeps forward, react. Do not waste time looking amazed, or yelling, or flipping the bird.  All are useless
The motive of the driver does not matter. At all. It cannot be changed even if you knew it.

You'll hear a lot about how Arne cares for kids, how Gates humanitarianism saves thousands of children, how the new nationalized standards and multimillion-dollar tests are good for our children, and a few misguided souls may even believe it.

When the front wheels are moving, it doesn't matter what the driver thinks. We need to react.

The front wheels of the edu-plutocrats are spinnning so hard they're leaving patches of rubber. React

Arne photo from Colorlimes.com; motorcycle photo (no one hurt) from lowellsun.com.

A shore thing

Late December, the back bay, still autumn-warm, gets blown up the beach by the stiff breeze, and washes my feet. 

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."TSE

A shell on the beach, once alive, now falls apart in the dull sunlight, its intricate markings still telling stories.

Winter break is marked by the long shadows of mid-day, as good a time as any to wonder what matters.

The point of education, the only point, really, is to learn how to live a life that matters. Education itself matters no more than the swirls etched on a dead oyster's shell.

It's the stories we read from that shell that define who we are.

If our biggest concern is how well our children do on abstract national standards, we've lost our way.

I'm taking my kids to the edge of the sea in May to help them rediscover the stories that matter.

1st Annual Readamatic Pacer Award

My board certification in pediatrics expires in a few days--I renewed it less than a year before I started my student teaching, and haven't looked back (much). Still, I spent most of my adult life assessing child development, and I know a little bit about learning.

I do not pretend to know a lot about anything, especially matters of the mind, but education glamorizes snake oil salesmen. I spent part of today looking through the research on Accelerated Reader, and hereby awards its promotion department with my 1st Annual Readamatic Pacer  Award.

The "research" pushed by the company demonstrating the value of the AR program fails to tease out the effects of implementing sustained reading practice in a classroom (already known to increase reading) from the high tech monitoring that comes with the program.

It gets worse--there is no consistent evidence  that the monitoring and reward part of Accelerated Reader add any benefit beyond that gained through the sustained reading.

Here's some evidence-based reasoning for you--if you spend less money on nonsense, you have more money available to buy books the kids might want to read. Here's another: the less time spent "monitoring" a child's progress (done via multiple computerized assessments), the more time a child has to get back to Charlotte's Web.

Don't even get me started on Marzano's research....

Image by via Retro Thing--well worth a visit!