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Powerful.

I was here reading this and was again inspired by my fellow edubloggers out there.

College does not necessarily equal success to many people. My wife has a friend who is a hair-dresser who is making over 6 figures every year and the guy is 25 years old. No college.

I have a friend who went to college and is currently unemployed. He has too much education and not enough experience.

Obviously friend A is doing better than friend B.

Why don’t schools have vocational education programs anymore ? It only makes sense to offer alternatives to the college track that is being pushed by so many political talking heads and policy makers for those kids who have skills in working with their hands or who have families at an early age or those who simply want to work for themelves.

Providing students with more choice is a good thing. Choice leads to empowerment. Empowerment leads to personal investment and personal investment usually yields better results overall. I imagine that violence in schools and horrible test scores will severely diminish if kids are actually treated like human being and allowed to choose what they want as opposed to being told what they need.

Educational ideology suffers from schizophrenia. Is the goal of education simply to be educated or is it to be able to take care of yourself as an adult ? If it is the former we should definitely offer more classes of interest at earlier ages. If it is the latter we should teach kids how to make and manage money. If the goal is bother well then shouldn’t we do a little bit of both ?

Maybe educational ideology isn’t about either. Maybe it’s designed to make us all employees and if that is the case the current system is doing a wonderful job. Either way, it’s time for a change.

I wonder how the educational industrial complex would deal with that….a nation of students actually interested in their studies because their studies would actually have some use to them later on.

Imagine that!

Tags: cream, Education, vocational schools, wu tang clan

I was over at Jose Vilson reading his post about educational carnivals and he stated something that my co-workers and I often argue about; the need for a national curriculum and standardized test.

State’s rights aside, math and the sciences are supposed to be universally accepted truths about the world and as such there is no logical reason for differences in mathematics or science education in any of the 50 states or US territories.

I’d like to see one of the presidential nominees from either party to adopt that as part of their party platform.

I’d like them to take the idea one step further and actually institute standardized tests that are designed to measure a child’s relative progress against a set of standards rather than absolute progress.

Every child is not equally equipped at the beginning of a school year and this fact should be taken into consideration. No Child Left Behind often require so much paperwork and so many interventions that if a child who really isn’t ready to move on to the next grade has a scatterbrained teacher who does not do the required paperwork then that child will just be moved to the next grade based on a technicality without the prerequisite skills needed to be successful.

Standardized testing should be subject to the same specifications for good research as any other form of respectable data collection. By this I mean that there should be a standardized pre-test to assess where a child is currently. Personal experience has shown me that prior year ( in my case elementary school standardized test results ) are often not a good barometer for student knowledge. The pre-test should take place during the 1st weeks of school after which a treatment ( in this case standards based instruction ) would prepare the child for the end of year post-test.

This testing design ( Pre-test Treament Post-Test ) would allow for an individualized barometer of student success while still teaching to National standards. Teachers would be able to differentiate instruction effectively and testing would reflect this.

The current batch of norm referenced tests shouldn’t even be used in math and science and the current batch of criterion referenced tests do not take a child’s prior knowledge or lack thereof into consideration when score reports are published.

Relative growth should be a determinant of a child’s success on standardized tests as well as measurements of a child’s ability to meet certain nationally mandated standards.

I haven’t really been posting as much as I’d like. It’s been crazy in my little world. So I suppose I’ll just give an update on the goings on in my world.

I finished my first graduate semester at Georgia State. I finoished with a 4.0 which is great. I have my sights set on an Ivy League PhD or EdD program once I’m done with the Master’s at G.State.

I’m almost done with my classes for clear renewable teacher certification in Georgia. God willing, I’ll be done once I wrap up this Linear Algebra and Calculus II class over at Georgia Perimeter.

Work is bananas. The kids had 5 days to go and it’s all the staff can do to keep the fights to a minimum. I’ve had some success with teaching my 6th graders integers and graphing on the coordinate plane. I think the students who aren’t showing progress in those areas have really just shut down mentally.

I’m currently addicted to George A. Romero’s “Dead” movies right now. I downloaded Diary of the Dead last weekend and this week I’ve seen both the 1968 and 1990 versions of Night of the Living Dead.

Like I said….I have writer’s block. Hopefully this little exercise will release a flow of creativity…or at least motivate me to try to put something on paper ( or wordpress ) again soon.

He’s back at it. Crazy is crazy son….it was easy to tell shorty was off his rocker from the last video…

Like I said before, no one will be satisfied until Teachers start to protect themselves with force.

Police: Asst. Principal Nearly Raped By Students

Mary Bubala BALTIMORE (WJZ) ? Staff under siege–there have been more than 100 separate cases of violence this school year. Now we have the first that’s sexual in nature.

Mary Bubala gets reaction from the community.

Her cousin describes her as dedicated to the school.

Some leading educators are calling the pattern of high-profile violence a crisis in Baltimore’s schools.

Teachers and administrators are now advised not to stay in schools alone after dark after a chilling attack at the Calverton Middle and Elementary campus.

What’s supposed to be a safe haven turned dangerous for an assistant principal there Sunday. Police say two thirteen-year-old students broke through a window and tried to rape her.

“She’s been at the school for a while,” said Quiezita Smith, who says she’s the victim’s cousin. “She’s a dedicated educator, very loving person, very friendly, outgoing. She’s very friendly, willing to help anybody. That’s just her nature.”

Investigators identified the boys through surveillance video. Police arrested them when they showed up for class the next day.

“This is now a crisis and we have to call it what it is,” said Marietta English, president of the Baltimore teacher’s union. “I would not stay in these buildings alone late at night.”

The alarm over violence in city schools began with the release of a videotaped attack on a teacher at Reginald Lewis High.

Eyewitness News spoke exclusively with the mother of a student there, who says her daughter’s classmates tried to sexually assault her.

“My daughter said they threw her on the floor and tried to take her clothes off of her, but they couldn’t get them off because she was fighting them off,” she said.

The attacks drew outrage from the mayor and the head of city schools.

“It’s a shame that one can’t do that to prepare for the upcoming week and be safe in that environment,” Mayor Sheila Dixon said.

“No way to predict it. No way to guard against it. There’s no way that we can police a system in this way,” said Dr. Andres Alonso.

Nationwide, there were 1.5 million victims of school violence last year; 78% of schools reported a violent incident.

In Baltimore, the scope of the attacks is escalating. This is the first report of a sex crime against an administrator.

Countless teachers are bruised and battered while their principals look the other way. Still, about 1,500 suspensions and expulsions were issued for assaults on teachers in the city and Baltimore region during the 2006-07 school year. In a five-part series, our partner “The Examiner” takes a look at this rampant violence in the classroom.

*Yo, if this is the future of New York rap, please count me in…son is a beast! His vocab is amazing and his flow makes me think this is what Lil Wayne would sound like if he stopped getting high and actually took out a pen and pad and tried to write coherent, inspiring, original lyrics.

But on to other matters…yesterday one of my co-workers was out and we couldn’t get a sub for her class so we had to adjust.

I had both of our home rooms combined and toward the end of the day, the babies just went bananas. We were playing a kind of math Jeopardy game using my laptop and overheard projector and the kids get really competitive sometimes, which is cool. I dig it when they’re excited about math and are willing to argue their point…but then it got ugly.

The two teams started yelling at each other across the aisle, hurling insults about mothers, possessions, and cursing at each other and I had to shut the game down. I had to talk to them about how their attitudes about competition, communication, and their willingness to belittle their classmates over a game can translate into self imposed barriers for success later in life.

I had one of my new students who came to us from Dekalb county explain to my west side babies what his school experience was like. He told them that when they played games like this at his old school everyone sat in their seats, listened to the teacher, and no one argued like they did during the game. My babies didn’t believe him and they said something to the effect of “you must have gone to a White school”

Pause.

That comment messed me up. They equate bad behavior with being black. They equate anybody who takes school seriously as being or acting White. I was pissed and I had to break down some of my life to them.

Most of the babies didn’t listen. They sat and let me talk but the message was lost on the ones who needed to hear it most…accept except for one little girl. I told her she was really mature during the game because she encouraged her teammates to be more gracious and less confrontational during the game. After school she came up to me and said thanks for talking to the class like that.

Obviously, the feelings are bitter sweet. I got one more student to see some of the light. I’m up to a whopping 5 converted knuckleheads for the year! There is hope!

Math education has got to be one of the most frustrating field to find and/or conduct any meaningful or useful research because the findings keep changing from year to year.

When I first started teaching I hated the idea of using manipulatives and too many culturally specific real world examples because I felt that those kinds of things limited a child’s learning of universal concepts in mathematics. And now, in my 3rd year of teaching, I’m more accepting of some of those techniques and strategies that I had previously shunned.

I tried introducing integers to my students using direction and magnitude in the MARTA system here in Atlanta and initially, the students got it. They were hooked into the idea. The challenge has been trying to translate that concrete understanding to the abstractions of integers.

The latter has proved to be somewhat difficult…and then I stumble across the following article over at Popular Science…which suggests that focusing on real world examples may actually hinder one’s understanding of abstract concepts by focusing too much on the concrete.

You can read the article after the jump.

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Grandma has custody…Mom is MIA…and this lil Negro stole grandma’s whip, crashed up the streets, and caused all types of mayhem.

SMH.

I’m a big nerd and I’ve been a comic book fan for years. Instead of doing the predictable thing and writing about the new Iron Man movie ( which I haven’t see yet so don’t post any spoilers ) I wanted to put ya’ll on to Incognegro by Matt Johnson.

Incognegro is the story of a light skinned black reporter who passes as a white an in order to infiltrate their world and later write about it for a newspaper based in Harlem. The story is sort of like under cover brother but with a better plot, believable characters, and better writing. The story is set during the Harlem Renaissance and is full of humor, mystery, and, commentary about the social constructs of race, the fluidity of identity, and the convoluted logic of White supremacists.

I would most definitely recommend this one to anyone with kids, students, or comic fans in general.