December 2011
3 posts
Killing Students’ Creativity. And Teachers? →
One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity.
Education and child rearing « Property is Theft! →
A century before Reich, Mikhail Bakunin anticipated him when he argued that children “do not constitute anyone’s property: they are neither the property of the parents nor even of society. They belong only to their own future freedom” and the “rights of the parents shall be confined to loving their children and exercising over them … authority [that] does not run counter to their morality,...
Guatemala, Reagan, Newt Gingrich And The... →
In reading Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind I came across a review he wrote for the London Review of Books in 2004 of Greg Granlin’s Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How could any serious examination of the reactionary mind— particularly the American reactionary mind— not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on...
November 2011
6 posts
Such Dummies, or Why I Didn’t Have To Decode... →
Jose Vilson: ….more importantly, it let me know on a profound level just how unready teachers are for a profound change in education. Part of the reason why education hasn’t changed is because little has changed about who we ought to listen to when it comes to education. Too many of us profess that we want to be at the forefront of what happens in the classroom, but mimic and worship...
Alaska's education woes profiled by Texas TV... →
It’s no secret in Alaska, but the state is constantly hiring teachers from Outside, especially for its rural communities, and the turnover rate for administrators and teachers is ridiculously high. WFAA-TV, from Dallas, Texas, has published a report — complete with a Manokotak dateline — about the challenges posed by Alaska education, with a focus on perennially troubled rural...
Polar bear cam: View live the white giants of the... →
The town of Churchill, Manitoba — with around 900 people and located on the coast of Canada’s Hudson Bay — bills itself as the polar bear capital of the world. Tourists from all over the world visit the community each year to board the so-called tundra buggies and ride out to get a close look at the bears. But a new webcam has been set up to let people watch the bears in real...
Yukon First Nations warn they'll block pipeline →
Liard First Nation Chief Liard McMillan says the federal government has ignored demands to negotiate an agreement on a gas pipeline. CBCGroups want social and economic benefit agreement Yukon First Nations warn that they’ll block an Alaska gas pipeline unless social and economic benefits are negotiated for their people. Chiefs from the Liard and White River First Nations, as well as the...
OWS has resonated with millions of normally apolitical people across the country who recognize in it the crucible of their own struggles. If the movement moves beyond the occupied squares and into foreclosure defense (as has already begun in Los Angeles and New York) and student debt strikes—if it becomes not only the voice but the arm of those resisting immiseration at the hands of the 1...
Chris Hedges: A Master Class in Occupation →
The park, like other Occupied sites across the country, is a point of integration, a place where middle-class men and women, many highly educated but unschooled in the techniques of resistance, are taught by those who have been carrying out acts of rebellion for the last few years. These revolutionists bridge the world of the streets with the world of the middle class.
May 2010
1 post
Resume
It’s been so long since I used this little blog that i forgot how to get into it. Hoping to pick it up and do something with it now.
Last week of school. I’m up looking out the window at the midnight sun going down behind the hill across the valley. Peace, this time of day, nearly 10:30 in the evening. Still night, big clouds drifting with white backs and dark underbellies.
...
October 2009
1 post
WatchElliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh when police raided his hotel room. Police say Madison and a co-defendant used computers and a radio scanner to track police movements and then passed on that information to protesters using cell phones and the social networking site Twitter. Madison is being charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal...
September 2009
21 posts
TBogg » A pop-up book for Rich Lowrey to pop-up to →
I agree to a certain degree with Steve (who has forgotten more about the publishing industry than I have ever known) that the Palin book with be a best seller out of the chute. Where I part company with him is the notion that those sales will be driven only by the true believers. Sarah Palin has achieved that unique brand of American freak show singularity by becoming equal parts Paris Hilton,...
Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India's... →
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s speaking to us from New Delhi, India. She has just published a new book called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati, why “listening to grasshoppers”? ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was the name of a lecture that I did in Turkey last year on the anniversary after the death of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was shot outside...
Meet the Hazzards →
by Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes
As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government’s actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn’t an accident. The government hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about how it’s made...
SmallTalk: King's dream vacated by a court in... →
While Arne Duncan was invoking the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, in an effort to rally support for NCLB re-authorization, a federal court, in his home town was putting the final nail in the coffin of Chicago’s 29-year-old school de-seg agreement. Catalyst’s Sarah Karp reports that, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras scrapped the CPS desegregation consent decree—a move that...
Why Standards Aren’t Sticky at The Core Knowledge... →
Let’s be blunt: Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.” This is not a standard, it’s a platitude. As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as...
RebelReports - Where is the Defund Blackwater Act? →
By Jeremy Scahill
Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch-hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working class people. This campaign now unfortunately has gained bi-partisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009 which has now passed the House and Senate. As Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has pointed out, the...
Tuttle SVC: NCTE Response to Common Core Standards →
Not too bad. Even more galling than the Common Core‘ers disregard for the overall critique is their rejection of smaller suggestions for improving the clarity and precision of specific standards
Math Apprentice →
Who does Math in the Real World?
Intelligent YouTube Video Collections | Open... →
This is something to keep handy for a day when you don’t have a lot going on.
Vagabond Scholar: More Proof That Torture Doesn't... →
Torture is immoral, illegal, and does not “work” reliably at all if one wants accurate intelligence - in fact, humane and legal methods are significantly more effective. Sure, torture is great for inflicting pain, producing false confessions and terrorizing populations, but the truth-to-lies-because-oh-my-god-make -the-pain-stop ratio is pretty shitty. I would hope this was common...
Believing in Wet Works
by digby
Scott Horton discusses the available scientific evidence showing that torture doesn’t work and then notes this new information:
Now another important contribution to the scientific literature has appeared. Irish neurobiologist Shane O’Mara of Trinity College Dublin, writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, takes a special look at the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation...
Official Google Docs Blog: Electronic Portfolios... →
An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google’s suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:
“E-Portfolios for Learning” provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working...
Tuttle SVC: What "Internationally Benchmarked"... →
Of these, the Common Core standards only address the first — language for information. Arguably, language for social interaction is less applicable when English is the native tongue, but more alarmingly, we’re proposing to virtually remove “language for literary response and expression” from our curriculum. I’m not going to spend the whole evening looking up reading...
Pass or Fail Jorge? A Teacher’s Dilemma « Larry... →
Pass or Fail Jorge? A Teacher’s Dilemma Jump to Comments Today, she must tell the principal who has to be held back. What should she do with Jorge? Jorge is a year older than everyone else in the class; he had been held back once. In reading and math he is still at least a year below grade level but he has improved a lot in each subject. He does his homework turning in papers often filled with...
Half an Hour: Facts versus skills →
How do you define facts versus skills? Tracy, you get to the core of a deep issue very quickly. Let me try a brief response, with the admission that a longer response may be necessary. My response is this: there isn’t really a distinction between facts and skills; what we call ‘facts’ and what we call ‘skills’ are the very same thing. However, what people mean when...
Education's Rotten Apples →
But what if something that works to accomplish one goal ends up impeding another? And what if two very different strategies are inversely related, such that they work at cross purposes? As it happens, converging evidence from different educational arenas tends to support exactly these concerns. Particularly when practices that might be called, for lack of better labels, progressive and traditional...
The Forgotten Technology
How It All Began
I am a retired carpenter with 35 years experience in construction. In my work experience, over the years, many times I had to improvise on tools that were not at hand in order to get the job done. At one of these times, about 12 years ago, I had to remove some 1200 lb. saw cut concrete blocks from an existing floor. The problem was that we did not have a machine that could...
More than 500 extra teachers rated...
More than 500 extra teachers rated “unsatisfactory” this year Ohanian Comment: Hats off for a wonderful statement! I’ve been preaching this for years, but Fiorillo nails it in a concise, passionate statement: Do you want to improve the lives of poor and minority students? Then improve the lives of poor and minority students: provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate...
“Saturn rings”
– Fantastic Photos of our Solar System | Photo Gallery | Smithsonian.com
What is “The Gold Standard”? | GothamSchools →
Did you hear about the big report that came out this week? You know, the one that “shows” that NYC charter schools are better than traditional non-charter public schools? It has gotten a ton of attention, probably because it uses “‘the gold standard’ method[ology].” The report is not subtle about this. It is right there in the very first sentence of the executive summary, “The distinctive feature...
“Magical thinking? The idea that, confronted with an inextricable situation,...”
– t r u t h o u t | Magical Thinking
February 2009
1 post
July 2008
2 posts
Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Warning: Mercenaries at... →
Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. (See Thomas Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, for a superb analysis of Ronald Reagan’s slogan “government is not a solution to our problem, government is...
Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door -... →
As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.
June 2008
4 posts
Associated Press expects you to pay to license... →
Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license)
Posted by Cory Doctorow, June 17, 2008 4:55 AM | permalink In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow...
May 2008
7 posts
The Great Oil Swindle →
The Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating trading in oil futures to determine whether the surge in prices to record levels is the result of manipulation or fraud. They might want to take a look at wheat, rice and corn futures while they’re at it. The whole thing is a hoax cooked up by the investment banks and hedge funds who are trying to dig their way out of the...
“to get the kids right into the new consciousness you can’t just give them...”
– Making Yippie! — an excerpt from Chicago ‘68 by David Farber
Karl Marx and informal education →
What significance does Marx have for educators and animateurs today? by Barry Burke. Karl Marx never wrote anything directly on education - yet his influence on writers, academics, intellectuals and educators who came after him has been profound. The power of his ideas has changed the way we look at the world. Whether you accept his analysis of society or whether you oppose it, he cannot be...
Wall Street's Racket Has Gone Too Far, and We're... →
by James Howard Kunstler Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into...
Press Action ::: How Class Works 2004: An... →
Because class is a question of power, class is a relationship. One cannot have power alone or in a social vacuum. This means that to understand working class experience one must understand all other classes in society and how they interact. Likewise, to understand the life of the middle class (professional people, small business owners, and managerial/supervisory personnel) one must place their...
The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To... →
April 2008
15 posts
Reading Online - Articles: Contexts for Engagement... →
Classroom contexts can promote engaged reading. Teachers create contexts for engagement when they provide prominent knowledge goals, real-world connections to reading, meaningful choices about what, when, and how to read, and interesting texts that are familiar, vivid, important, and relevant. Teachers can further engagement by teaching reading strategies. A coherent classroom fuses these...
The Science Creative Quarterly » THE MYTHOLOGY –... →
Public intellectuals are symbolic figures in society, who represent social ideas and utopic visions rather than individual perspectives. Their influence and power comes from their ability to channel public fears and desires in specific directions, and to portray problems in personally affective ways.
“The need for the founding of Progressive Education on an adequate social theory...”
– George S. Counts: Dare Progressive Education be Progressive?