Illinois Policy Institute – A Rising Tide: School Vouchers and Their History of Improving Public Schools

Illinois Policy Institute – A Rising Tide: School Vouchers and Their History of Improving Public Schools.

We always knew that students in poorly performing schools who could attend private schools with voucher help improved academically. Now in Illinois it appears the schools they came from also begin to improve. This would suggest that competition benefits everyone but non-performing teachers.

Zero Tolerance and the Never-Ending Lockdown in America’s Public Schools

Zero Tolerance and the Never-Ending Lockdown in America’s Public Schools.

Jason Pinning Me at Court of Honor. Yes, he owed the camping eating tool that included a knife.

This is the kind of thing that will make actual criminals out of innocent students. Take the case of Zachary Christie mentioned in this article. He is six years old and a Cub Scout, learning to be a good citizen. He innocently brought a camping utensil to school that’s an all-in-one knife, fork and spoon to be used for eating. For this offense he was sentenced to serve 45 days in reform school. I’d wager that will be a much worse influence on him than a Boy Scout camping trip. He’ll probably learn how to commit real crimes, disrespect authority, etc.

We’ve known for a long time that legislators on the state and federal level have been short on common sense, but it appears this lack of common sense also exists in public school administrators. I’ll bet a lot of them played cops and robbers (or violent video games) when they were young. In fact, if we want to prevent  gun violence, maybe those violent video games are a great thing to make unavailable for children. If the first amendment keeps those legal, maybe the second amendment can at least keep fingers and harmless guns on play figures that can’t even move legal.

A common sense approach would be that students who probably didn’t realize the items administrators find offensive  were considered weapons be informed and warned . Parents should then be called to the office and have it explained to them, and then have the parents come get the item with instructions never to let it come to school again. Things that are normally not thought of as weapons that are forbidden on campus should be listed on the school website that parents use for school policy information. The list should also be on a note sent home at the beginning of the year. Students should also be informed in their classrooms the first day of school and again about once a month.

Meanwhile, while the police are being called to drag these young and probably unintentional offenders from their classrooms, they are not available to track down the real criminals on the streets who are killing each other with real guns. Where have our priorities gone? Where has our common sense gone?  No wonder children aren’t learning critical thinking skills in some schools. Teachers can’t teach what they don’t have.

Maybe the idea is to label these children as terrorists now so they will never be allowed to own a gun when they grow up.  Then they won’t be able to protect their family someday from a real terrorist or common criminal breaking into their home.

Lies About Public Education: Socialization

Lies About Public Education: Socialization

Many people believe one of the virtues of sending children to public school is their socialization. This article claims this is not necessarily a good thing.

Home schoolers have known for years that life in the real world does not consist primarily in dealing with people the same age you are. I had a public junior high school teacher tell me that he has little influence over his students — that the real influence on them is the peer pressure from the other students. When my daughter was in fourth grade her elementary school principal told me there wasn’t much that could be done about the sexual harassment Sarah got from the older boys on the playground, since the teachers couldn’t see everything that happened during recess periods. That was the last year my children attended public schools. The next year I discovered that some private schools also have problems with socialization that’s not well supervised.

It’s my opinion that no student should be forced to go to an unsafe school when there are alternatives parents could choose. No student should have to face cruel peers for months on end because a law meant to be a blessing has become a curse for many children and their parents. Public education used to be a privilege and students and their parents could choose to drop in and out of according to their families needs. It would be interesting to see how many of today’s public school students believe getting their education is a privilege.

The River as an Educational Resource

Whether you are a home educator or a classroom teacher, if you have a river nearby, you have a wonderful educational resource. I live near the Salinas River and often hike the Salinas River Trail in Larry Moore Park in Paso Robles. It normally has water only a few months of the year, and only if there’s a normal amount of rain. Most of the year the Salinas River is subterranean. You don’t see the water. The river normally appears during winter, and I usually start searching for water around January. This year, though, we had our heavy rains start earlier than usual. So I went out in search of the river today, December 28, 2012. I found it.

Water in Salinas River flowing north toward Niblick Bridge, Paso Robles

I followed the river bed for some distance, since I always get excited about what I see. Today it struck me how much science there is to investigate in the river and the riverbed.

Is there a story under this willow?

As I walked along the edge of the river, I saw these small clumps of willows everywhere. Those closest to the west channel, which always stays full of water the longest, seemed to live on top of brush piles. Let’s take a closer look at one of these. Do you think a child might wonder how all this material happened to be under this willow? Might one try identifying different types of trees from what’s in these piles? What might one learn about a river by observing this small tree?

What’s under this willow?

Although the overall impression as one walks along the river in late December is colorless brown and tan branches and dead leaves, some plants show they are very much alive, or host things that are. On the ground beneath are new weed seedlings. There are red buds on some of the twigs. Moss and lichens also add color. Children turned loose with a hand-held microscope would have fun discovering this variety of mosses and lichens of different colors and identifying the new weed seedlings.

Do you see all the colors here?

Children would also be fascinated at all they can see growing on a rock.

What grows on a rock in winter?

Not all growing on this rock is moss or lichen. We also see green seedlings. They need soil. How did soil get on this rock? How about the weed seeds? Is soil created on the rock itself? Or does it all blow into crevices? And why does the rock itself look the way it does? How was it created? There is geology as well as life science to be learned. All these questions can be answered through research and observation. As a teacher, you can inspire the curiosity that will make students want to solve the mysteries.

If you aren’t in a position to take your students on a field trip, you can at least make the trip to the river yourself with a camera. Take the pictures that will arouse interest in what you want students to learn. And don’t forget the videos. Watch the river’s current. Study the rocks in the riverbed to try to understand how they became what they are. You can even collect a few rocks to bring into the classroom. Here are some specimens I found.

Egg-Shaped Rock and Some Other River Rocks

Interesting River Rocks and Milk Thistle Seedlings

What Kind of Teacher Do You Want to Be?

My Mother, in her English Classroom

My mother, Marjorie Hart, was an excellent teacher.  She got her B.A. and her credential to teach English  in California when I was in high school. She started her first teaching job in Artesia with only an emergency credential, when I was in college. Her first year was very hard on her physically and emotionally, since she still had one school age child at home and she was still having to take classes at night. She almost didn’t make it.

She kept at it, though, and finally got tenure. She finally became head of the English department and trained her share of student teachers. She also taught English as a Second Language at the high school and, for a semester, at the adult school as well. She loved teaching the adults, until the district forced an unimaginative curriculum which her students hated on all adult ESL classes. So she did not continue the adult class when the semester ended. At various times in her teaching career she was the advisor for the school yearbook and the the school newspaper.

Beside me I have my Mom’s scrapbook. It’s devoted to pictures students gave her or sent her after they left her class.  There are wedding pictures, Valentines, birthday, thank you, and Christmas cards. Here is a sampling of messages on the backs of the pictures and in the cards. The student year book for 1969 is full of similar messages.

Mrs. Hart, from one of your most grateful students (I actually know a little about grammar.)

Mrs. Hart / One of the finest teachers I’ve ever known. I hope that the rest of your life is as beautiful as you’ve made mine. I love you always. / Ed-in-chief, Class of 76

Mrs. Hart, / Words can’t express my gratitude to you. I want to thank you for all the help you’ve given me. Your (sic) my favorite teacher and I’ll always remember you. With love, T.D., -76-

My mom did not teach all college prep classes. She taught a lot of the students who would probably never go to college. Many had trouble speaking English. Many had problems at home and  confided in my mom. She would tell me about how hard it was for some  to finish homework when they had to care for siblings at home and fix the meals while their parents worked. I know my mom cared about her students. If they weren’t learning, she kept trying to find new ways to help them.

Contrast that with this high school teacher in Pennsylvania who was just fired for blogging that her students were  “rat-like”, “frightfully dim”, “lazy whiners”, and suggested that their future employment was with the local trash company. She considered it all their fault if they didn’t learn.

I have had some English students who did not want to learn anything and did not want to be in school. Many of them had bad attitudes and were in trouble with the law. But I tried to show them the respect due to every human being. Although I was able to help and reach some of them, I failed with some others. I was young and inexperienced and came to the conclusion that teaching in public school was not the right job for me. I only knew how to reach the college prep students. I simply wasn’t prepared enough to give the unmotivated students the inspiration they needed to succeed.

Steven David Horwich, who introduced the Pennsylvania teacher I mentioned above, in his blog, spends the remainder of his blog describing the job of a teacher. If you are planning to go into a classroom to teach this fall for the first or  the twenty-first time, you might want to read this for inspiration.  These are just a few of the words Horwich shares:

It is the teacher’s job to provide the environment wherein a student can experience and grasp information, develop ideas and ambitions, experiment, try, fail, try again and finally succeed. We will need our young people’s ideas and ambitions if we are to progress in any direction as a culture and a people. A teacher who berates a student for failure, who makes an issue of it, is a teacher helping to build human beings who will refuse to try, refuse to reach, will not experiment, try again or ever succeed. The price for trying and failing will be seen as simply too draconian and painful, the lesson students actually learn from teachers who cannot control their critical instincts.

It is a teacher’s job to find any and every way to open up the world and its possibilities to a child. And when that child smiles and reaches for a particular idea, it becomes the teacher’s job to fan that flame of interest into a bonfire with additional experiences and ideas along the same line. This is how a teacher helps to build the next great artists, athletes, business and political leaders.

My mom was that kind of teacher. What kind of teacher will you be this year?

Getting Your Students Off to a Good Start in the New Year with Goals

 Perhaps you’ve made New Year’s Resolutions. But have you made measurable goals for your students this year beyond the objectives for individual lesson plans?  How about this for a starter? I will challenge each student to write down what  he want to be doing with his life when he is 22 and /or make a visual page for it.

It’s easy to make a page to visually represent a goal in life, short or longterm, using pictures from newspapers or old magazines. If those aren’t available, students could draw their own pictures or be invited to do this as homework or a first week project after coming back from the winter break. The information in the article  How to Set Goals with Pictures will give you some how-to’s and some inspiration you can adapt for any sort of goal-setting project.

Part of the reason our students don’t get where they’d like to be in life and have trouble breaking out of old family patterns is because they can’t visualize anything better. Even if they may secretly dream of going beyond where their parents have been in life, they may have no idea of how school might relate to getting there, or what baby steps or short-term goals they need to set to climb the ladder to where they’d like to be.

One of the most important things you need to do as a school or home educator is to inspire your students to aim high and help them begin to see what is possible for them in life.  If they are proactive in setting short term goals to achieve long term goals, they have a target to aim at and the arrows to shoot at that target.

If taking some time to do this exercise with your students this week will help even one to break out of old thought patterns and a tendency to just drift toward the future, you will have given your students more than any math, social studies or science lesson could. Those who at nothing will achieve it.

What will you do to inspire your students toward a better future when this break is over?

One-to-One-Instruction

One-to-One-Instruction

A lot has been said about the importance of parents in a child’s education, but today I found an article that shows we were using the right approach in our homeschooling –Learning from Explaining: Does it Matter if Mom is Listening?

I’ve written a lot about the need to read aloud to young children often and in past posts we’ve given a lot of hints on how to to that, especially in When You Read Aloud, Ham it Up. I haven’t said as much about the other technique we used to see how much the children understood. That method was to ask the children to explain something to us or to put something they had read into their own words.

Now in the article referenced above,  a study suggests that explaining something to Mom (and I think the same would be true of Dad) is the best way to fix the  problem solving method a child uses in his brain so that the information will transfer to a different situation. The study used four and five-year-old children and gave them some classification problems to solve. Some were instructed to just solve the problems and repeat the solutions. Others were asked to solve the problems and explain to themselves how they did it (while recording), and the third group was asked to explain to their moms how they solved the problems. (The article will give you several pages of details on this experiment and the data generated.)

The results showed that those who explained the solution to themselves or their moms did much better at retaining the information than those that just repeated the solution. But those who explained to their moms did better than the other two groups at transferring what they had learned to solving different problems.

Explaining a solution forces a child to think critically about his method. Explaining to a parent is even more helpful. I would imagine that this would also extend to explaining to a teacher or tutor, but it illustrated once again how important  verbal interaction with significant adults is in student learning. It’s not just important to get an answer correct, but also to know the process of getting that correct answer.  Remembering that process is much easier if the student has explained it to an adult.

 

New Consumer Math Series for Adolescents and Adults

The Mathematics of Banking and Credit

I am happy to announce that Steck-Vaughn has finally published a series of six  consumer math workbooks that go into detail on math subjects of great interest to teens and adults. These books are designed for classroom use in high schools, job training centers, and even junior colleges. The books can also be used for self-instruction at home.

Each 160-page book begins with instruction in basic math operations and concepts with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, and percents. There is also help with solving real-life problems and interpreting data from tables and graphs.  The books also teach how to not only use a calculator, but also how to compute mentally and estimate — all necessary skills in the world of work.  The instruction pages at the beginning section of each book are the same, but the practice problems and tests are different. All student pages are reproducible for classroom use and answers for exercises are provided at the back of each book.

Once the student has finished the first section on basic math, each book has distinctly different instruction and practice in line with its title topic. Topics of books in the series include

• Housing and Taxes
• Banking and Credit
• Work
• Automobiles and Transportation
• Personal Finance and Investments
• Trades and Professions

Because each book is so specialized, a general class in consumer math might need to use all of them, whereas classes built around a special interest might only need one or two books to fit a math module into a unit study for a  class focused on learning what’s involved with car ownership, math in the workplace, or some other narrow topic.

Teachers using these books will not have to explain to their students why they might need to learn the skills covered. Everything taught has practical applications in the real world and that is reflceted in both the practice problems and the illustrations. Each book also has practice forms and supporting resources related to its topic. Example: the Trades and Professions book includes a Unit Estimate Sheet and  Job Application. The supporting materials in the book include a chart of  Fraction, Decimal and Percent Equivalents, a chart of Formulas for Perimeter, Area, and Volume, a Conversion Chart of measurements, a chart for Plumbing Measurements and Conversions, an Advertising Rates chart, and a graph of Education and Job Opportunities. Each book also includes a topic-specific Glossary.

For more specific information about what is included in each title, see our new Consumer Math Page, which includes all of our books one can use for consumer math. If you are more interested in books organized by specific math skills that are needed in the workplace, you might also check out the Math Skills for the Workforce books. You can order individual titles at discounted prices by following the title links on our web site to their shopping cart pages on our secure server at tomfolio.com. These books can also be ordered with a school purchase order.

It’s Time to Teach the World Geography in Earnest

Building Skills by Exploring Maps: The World

I remember in high school I took a ninth grade geography class, but it didn’t mean much to me. About all I can recall from that class was that the teacher had a habit of writing on the board and then sitting on her desk with her feet dangling very near the trash can beside it. We spent most of the time as we listened to her talk of products and regions, etc, waiting for the big moment that usually came — the moment the teacher would get off her desk. Very often, on her way to the classroom floor, she would land in the waste basket, and we anticipated it every day. What I don’t remember is if we ever saw a map of the world. We must have, but I don’t remember it.

I inherited a lack of interest in geography from my mother, who told me she used to keep a book she’d rather read inside her geography book in class. I think my first interest in the subject surfaced when I was homeschooling my children. A couple of things happened during those years that rekindled that interest. First we read a lot of books aloud that were set throughout the United States. We found an old AAA map of the USA and put it on the hall wall. As we read each book, we would use a map tack to pin the name of the book in the place it was set in. Later, we actually visited many of the placed we had read about and pinned.That travel helped all of us learn more about the geography of our country. Here’s how we incorporated this travel into our homeschool curriculum.

We got more interested in world geography when Desert Storm, the first war in Iraq took place. We used a globe and a map of the Middle East in a reproducible book we had so that we could follow what was happening as we got the news reports each day. All of a sudden what was happening in that part of the world became very relevant to our lives. We decided it was  a good time to study the Middle East and why it was important.

I’m wondering how many of our young people today would be able to find Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Egypt, or Israel on a map or globe quickly , and how many could give at least one reason why the United States is interested in them.  Perhaps someday soon I will conduct my own student in the street interview and find out.

When your students look back at the geography they learned in your class or at home, what do you think  they will remember?  Parents, do you ever get out the globe or a map after the news and see if your children can find the places the news anchors pointed to or talked about? Do you discuss the news with your children? Could you find these places yourself?

Teachers, do you care about what’s happening in far away countries? Do you know how to make your students understand what those countries  have to do with their lives? Or are they reading a textbook and memorizing population figures or product lists that they will soon forget after they are tested? The future of the world will someday be in the hands of today’s students? Will they know much about that world?  The answer is partly up to you.

National Constitution Week is September 17-23

We the People: Exploring the U.S. Constitution

In 2004 Public Law 108-447 came into being requiring each school that receives Federal Funding in the United States to hold a special program on the Constitution on September 17. This year this it happens to be a Saturday, but you can pick any day between September 17 and September 23, which is designated as National Constitution Week. Has your school decided how to implement this program yet? 

If you’d like a quick and easy solution that will fulfill the requirements, I have a suggestion. The National Center for Constitutional Studies has produced a curriculum for National Constitution Week  that complies with the law’s requirement. Its main component is the DVD, A More Perfect Union – America Becomes a Nation, a two-hour movie which brings the Constitutional Convention to life. I saw it myself, and it was easy to follow the issues and controversies that were part of the process of putting the Constitution together.  After seeing this movie, the Constitution will no longer be a “dead” document, but the result of men trying to lay the best possible foundation for the United States of America. Your students will learn how and why the Constitution was written.

The entire curriculum package includes a teacher guide , posters of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the DVD of the movie, and an individual pocket-sized copy of the Constitution. For a limited time, schools can order this entire package for only $19.95 plus shipping . It’s an opportunity your school should take advantage of , especially if you don’t have a curriculum for National Constitution Week in place yet. 

If you would like to go into more detail on the history, founders, and issues of the Constitution, click on the picture of the We the People book above, which is found at Barb’s Teaching help, my e-commerce website. It also contains vocabulary activities, a series of critical and creative thinking activities, and a list of additional resources.

Be aware that the local chapters of the Tea Party Patriots will be monitoring schools, as part of their “Adopt a School” program,  to see if they are going to comply with the law. They might be contacting your school district to see what you are planning to do. They also might be letting the media know if you are in compliance or not, since they are very interested in citizens being educated about the Constitution.

If you aren’t in school any more or connected to a school, but still want to see this movie, the DVD alone is currently on sale (as I write this) for only $9.95 at the web site linked to above. I saw the movie with a group of my neighbors in a home, and that’s a very good setting, as it allows friends and neighbors to discuss it informally afterwards. Enjoy!