Quasi Dictum

A place for educational perspectives and opinions. Legalese: The statments at this site are of the writers only. Quasi Dictum has no control over the information you access via links, does not endorse that information and cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.

Name:
Location: Vancouver, WA, United States

Teacher

Friday, April 23, 2004

Here is Common Good's (from the last article) web page:

http://cgood.org/

The precedent is now set: A teacher fights back against unruly kids

Elizabeth Anne Moore, a reading teacher at a west Phoenix high school, has a new ending and a new title for the 350-page book she has written about being an educator. She'll call it, "Violated No More."

This week, Ms. Moore won a court injunction against a 15-year-old student who had been harassing her in class - including, by her account, telling her daily to "go [expletive] myself."


Now we have to go to court? Should we laugh or cry about this?


More testing problems, this time in PDX:

With more than half of Oregon's high school sophomores tested, this year's 10th graders so far are bombing the state math problem-solving test.

State officials are racing to answer why: Was the test too hard, or did schools fail to teach this class to write clear, mathematically sound answers to elaborate math problems?

Monday, April 12, 2004

It can be done: Nebraska schools skip mandatory tests

Yes that does mean the whole state.

Students aren't pushed to do well on 50-minute tests that will determine whether their teachers and their schools are considered successful — the kind of pressure faced across the nation as children take their states' standardized achievement tests.

With criticism mounting over implementation of the federal accountability law and states scrambling to overhaul their testing systems to comply, Nebraska alone has succeeded in saying no to mandatory statewide tests.

The state has persuaded federal education officials to approve the nation's most unorthodox assessment system, which allows school districts to use portfolios to measure student progress.


The downside:

Nebraska's system is far from perfect; it is expensive, it is time-consuming for teachers and it makes comparisons among districts difficult.

Saturday, April 10, 2004

This is a double edged sword:

The Houston school board on Thursday abandoned a short-lived policy that had required high school students to pass core courses such as English and math before they move to the next grade.


HISD administrators hope the new high school promotion policy, which is based on accumulated credits, will keep struggling students from getting discouraged and help cut HISD's dropout rate. More than 5,000 freshmen and sophomores who would have been held back under the old policy will now be promoted.

"The ninth grade has become a bottleneck year," said Abe Saavedra, HISD's executive deputy superintendent. Forty-three percent of the district's freshmen are over age, he said. More than a third of 10th-graders have already failed at least one grade.


Is this social promotion? No says the school board

... because those students will still have to pass the classes they failed before they graduate. Instead, they said, the new promotion policy offers more flexibility and avoids branding students as failures when they fail just one class.

Monday, April 05, 2004

The evolution of language:

Classes had only been in session a few weeks when eighth-grade English teacher Gayle Sands began to notice the curious shorthand and abbreviations creeping into her pupils' essays.

"The story introduces 2 diff. bus drivers," one girl wrote.

"She thinks she needs to defend the young people b/c she is young," scribbled another pupil.

With three computer-savvy teen-agers of her own, Sands instantly recognized the culprit: instant messaging.

With the casual lexicon of instant messaging, or IMing - where btw replaces by the way, where b4 substitutes for before and where 2 becomes the stand-in for to, two and too - infiltrating students' schoolwork, such mistakes are soaking up nearly as much red ink as the perennial spelling and grammar errors that typically catch teachers' eyes.

"It's not laziness. It's shorthand," said Sands, who teaches at Northwest Middle School in Taneytown. "A lot of the abbreviations they're using are good for note-taking. The trick is to teach them to separate it out from the formal writing in class."

Instant messaging has become the computerized version of passing notes in class. Like an on-screen conference call, kids can plunk down in front of a computer and strike up online conversations with friends who have access to the service.


So is there a problem?

For all the corrections required of students' IM shorthand, teachers acknowledge its academic benefits.

Every act of typing improves students' keyboarding skills, instructors say, and any writing, no matter how abbreviated, can be a good thing.