I am a teacher that has been highly into technology as a hobby from growing up with computers around me. I consider myself to be very literate in technology - much more so than my fellow teachers most of the time. I've watched districts roll out technology as the savior of classrooms multiple times, and have shaken my head as the technology has failed due to poor understanding of the infrastructure needed to pull off the new 'greatest thing ever!' The fallacy here is related to the other article referenced, kids attention spans are shrinking. So are adults! Technology has some wonderful uses, but at times it's getting shoved into the classroom as the savior of education - when it's not necessarily.
Add to that what happens in the real world and you lose power from a major storm like we did Friday. Our IT department must not have everything properly isolated on UPS supplies or something, because it took all weekend and until late yesterday afternoon before they got our phone and internet system back up. Last I checked our Microsoft Exchange server is still down. If we depend totally on technology in situations like that we'll be even more out of luck. Our attendance systems were fun yesterday...
We don't serve Tex-Mex in New Mexico. That is a COMPLETELY different style of food that New Mexicans disdain as garbage. Come try the chile, I promise a good helping of proper Green or Red Chile will make you understand that it's not Tex-Mex!
Now as far as the methane, the air quality in the area has been terrible forever. I grew up in Farmington and the asthma/allergy issues I believe are higher there than on average elsewhere. Growing up there were 3 major power plants in the area, with the coal mine feeding two of them. The methane is going to be found to be completely coming from that mine and the two power plants on the Navajo Reservation between Farmington and Shiprock if I were to guess.
You as a student don't sign a license as such, but as a teacher you do. Trust me, after a decade of dealing with standardized test NDA's I'm very familiar with them. You're given instructions to monitor conversations during lunch breaks and such. The tricky thing this with this issue is that many times there is a 'window' for a test to be given. The testing companies are worried that students in an earlier part of the window would share with the later part of the window. Honestly I remember reviewing test answers with my fellow classmates following tests... this is just taking it online. Teens are truly ignorant most of the time with Twitter and Facebook... I've had more drama with Twitter this year than I think I could have dreamed of. I'm not surprised in the least they're monitoring sites. Biggest thing would be getting rid of these tests altogether. Sorry, I don't feel they have nearly as much value as the testing companies would lead the public to believe. As long as they lobby state legislatures though with big bribes there's nothing we as teachers can do about them though.
Actually my understanding is that they are not treating patients with the full suits on. The decision to just do face masks, gloves, etc. was pretty common it seems now... I think people have gotten more lax with Ebola simply because wearing the full suits is hot and tough to deal with for a long epidemic like we're seeing. It sounds like the nurse in question wasn't in full protective gear. I agree with the idea this shouldn't be happening... How many of these places really have full training for BL-4 diseases though? Last I knew there were only a few labs in the US capable of fully handling diseases like this in the laboratory. (CDC and USAMRID) How is an average hospital set up for this? Hopefully the Dallas one was, but if this trend continues these will not be the last patients we see coming to the US. My guess is this little incident will get in hand just fine, but I doubt that the ones that are likely to come will be as easy to contain.
I grew up in Farmington, near where the station is. Plain and simple the generating station and two other power plants are on Reservation land. For the longest time the tribes chose to ignore improvements to air quality standards. I presume much of the chronic asthma I and others suffered in the area is related to the pollution. On the flip side most of these stacks are being shut down right now and it's killing the local economy. The area has one of the largest available coal deposits that it has been relying on for a long time. It would be nice if there was some sort compromise possible between the industry and pollution... Of course if it was managed more properly it might not be so bad. The amount of corruption on the reservation is amazing...
And opinions like these are the reasons we see legislatures with no teaching experience making policies that leave teachers banging their heads against the wall about the stupidity of the decisions. Personally I'm a teacher and I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in my field. I've had a great deal of success with my students, so I feel qualified to respond to this. Teachers are definitely qualified to make decisions in the classroom about what they teach! More so than most of the people that are in charge of making those decisions.
The best teachers I've seen are the ones that take the time to develop their own Hypothesis about problems in their classroom and have gone on to try new ways to teach. Sure they have some failures, especially as young teachers, but they learn from them and adapt new strategies. That is if they stick around long enough to improve. The biggest problem with education right now is keeping teachers long enough to develop into master teachers. With the average length of career for teachers being about five years... well there are plenty of problems out there.
The pay is addressed all of the time, it's not great. Supposedly there's a three month vacation every year, but if I have two weeks personally I'm having a long break! Between professional development and other expectations, that summer doesn't really exist for anyone but the students. But, most teachers know the pay isn't great going into it. They do it because they have a passion for teaching.
Too many of them see the passion ebb away though thanks to the fact that they are expected to work miracles with students that have no support networks at home. Then they are expected to hold students to a high standard - and then have their jobs threatened when they do so! The levels of paperwork make the Office Space reports seem quick and painless, and they have to keep track of that with each student. Other than in elementary school most teachers are expected to keep track of 100+ students/day with probably at least 20% of those students having modifications that require separate lesson plans for them.
It's all a recipe for burn out! The fear of being held accountable for the students that care doesn't scare most teachers. It's the students that have no support network at home and most likely will not succeed no matter what is done that scares these teachers.
I was thinking of this website as well. This is a CLEAR case of prior art and usage. (BTW thanks for the website name, I could not remember the second word!)
Some of those stadiums actually generate more than enough revenue to fund those programs and more... Not that I think money should be wasted, but in those larger state schools I have no doubt they pay for themselves within ten years or less.
The way it's written will negatively impact a lot of the higher ranked colleges from the past with the financial incentives that are mentioned. For the large private schools they're not going to care so much, but I have to imagine this will be dead in the water from the get go. Too much alumni power in the legislature for this to be something that will ever make its way through!
They didn't have any casino's on the Navajo Nation until about two years ago. It was probably the one that held off the longest on building them, partially because they could never come to an agreement with the State of New Mexico, but mostly due to tribal opposition.
The bigger thing is that it will benefit those that have power... What many people don't realize though is that much of the reservation is like a third world country without running water or electricity!
Some of it isn't even eBooks. The students at my school rarely use textbooks anymore due to the curriculum that's been implemented. Most of the time their reference material and assignments is being given to the teachers in pdf form by the curriculum office. Being able to have the kids just look at it on an iPad as opposed to making lots of copies has some value.
I just wish my district had at least been smart enough to go with iPads. They ended up with some grant and bought Nooks for all of the kids... Great until you realize that B&N is pretty much shutting down with that now or soon. We'll probably have wasted more money in the end by trying to save money!
Is it really? I don't know about your school, but with all of the required training, paperwork, etc. I know quite a few teachers that work some ridiculous hours grading. Personally I spend about 14 hours a day at work in the fall, but I do get paid a bit extra based on the amount of extra time I put in. This 9 months stuff though simply isn't true anymore. The expectation is that teachers spend at least 4 of those weeks doing workshops and training opportunities that mostly don't involve pay to do so. If you're fortunate the district might pay for the training.
Also, 64k is plain and simple not much I'm guessing cost of living wise there. Personally I started in another state at 31k with a Bachelor's Degree just nine years ago. My colleagues in other fields jumped in at similar degrees at 55k+. I had probably 60 more credit hours when I graduated than them too! At this point I'm paid about as well as I could expect at 50k where I'm at. That's with significant extra duty pay amounts built-in, and I feel bad for the teachers without that because they're not being paid well enough.
Oh, and the fact you don't see the homework doesn't mean teachers have nothing to grade. Many of those teachers are teaching seven periods a day with the maximum number of students in each class. Figure roughly 210 students a day with a grade expected from many of them on every assignment. Even if you're just putting a checkmark and marking it in the computer at a rate of.5 minutes per assignment you're talking 105 minutes of work. You figure you get home at five or so, fix dinner, eat, you're up to seven. Let's say you have kids and have to take care of them, some of them don't start grading till nine, and don't finish till nearly eleven at that rate.
Just because you don't see your childs' teachers working does not mean they do nothing. You probably get to leave your work at work. Must be nice?
Personally I saw it take off at my college my last year or so there. It was a university that has many umm... socially awkward... individuals. We also used AIM a lot at that point and I can remember times when we had conversations over it, even though the person was in the same room as us. (Granted that was mostly pure laziness too...) For that kind of setting the idea of being able to 'meet' over Facebook was a lot more comfortable.
The one thing I find myself still on Facebook for more than anything is a professional group that's started up. There are about 10k members and it's a pretty good professional development tool.
The point and problem of this has been known to us as educators for a long time. Other countries do not force everyone into the same mold and test every kid in the end. By the time students reach the test as seniors here, the ones that don't care aren't in the system in other countries. We have a higher populace tested, whereas other countries give up on the lower students earlier. The articles point is if we remove the lower end (like most other countries do) we fair much better than the existing stats. Personally I think we're foolish to continue our existing system. It's not working!
There are many reasons I see girls do better in school on the whole. I think one of the main reasons though is that the majority of teachers tend to be women. These are women who took getting an education seriously, and often times know what worked for them to learn the subject. I think those teachers are often able to reach those that are similar to them. The interesting thing to me though is that I think competitiveness rises for the top spots in classes frequently from the boys still. They'll do anything to be number 1, and sometimes that hard work pays off. Often times though you see a couple boys clustered in the top ten still, with a significant portion of girls following that before more boys. I think the last 6 years of valedictorians in my school district have all been girls.
With only two other male teachers at the junior high campus I teach at, a science teacher and a PE teacher, I really do think that a lot of boys get left behind in learning styles.
There was actually a study conducted with real babies I believe in Canada... might have been US in the 1950's or so. They were given absolutely no nurturing at all, fed, changed, that was it. No stimulus was given. It was a terrible chapter in psychology that I remember reading about in college. It was eventually shut down after it went on far too long and the neglected children were permanently scarred from it. I can't seem to find the exact study right now, but it was a very visible and terrible result in those children. If MRI technology had been in use then I'm sure it would probably verify this study too.
So true. When I went to Cleveland to go to school I couldn't believe the story at first. Moral of that story is never eat anything from Lake Erie or the river!
I think there is something to be said for this. The only problem is do you really know what you want to do when you're 13? 14? 18? For me I didn't make my decision between a degree in Biology, or Music Education until my third semester of college when I was 19. It's a lot to ask a kid to decide the rest of their lives when they're 13. Unfortunately I watch that one happen all of the time.
I believe that students do need to have a good basis in math so that they have options open to them in the future. By not keeping those options open they have limitations that are tough to overcome. That being said, as I watched a student I admired greatly drop out of high school and decide to do his GED instead this past month - Solely because he couldn't pass the state math test... I am nodding my head at a lot of the points of this article. Most kids really don't need to do much past basic functions and statistics when they get to the real world. I know that sounds like a load of dung... but I use something on the Algebraic level a couple times a year... Maybe? At the Calculus level never. Statistics is almost a far more useable form of math so they understand things placed in front of them. I think that's ultimately what this writer is trying to get to. Not to get rid of math, but understand that it's foolish that we keep this massive hurdle up to prevent the masses from being able to move forward in their educations.
I don't know how much better this would be than a password or the pattern unlock idea... Fingerprint scanners can be fooled, and a financial incentive to do so would make it tempting for thieves anyway. I guess it'll keep the honest people honest though. It would be quicker than either of the first two in theory. I can't see apple wanting to clutter up their devices with a scanner somewhere though, this is probably just a patent grab.
Unfortunately I think the argument that Apple itself isn't responsible will probably be considered true in the end. The book publishers on the other hand can, and should, still get nailed to the wall. Charging as much for an ebook as a physical book is completely off-base. You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount. As it is, much of the time you can buy a print edition cheaper than an eBook version on new releases...
Apple certainly deserves some of the blame, but I just can't see the DOJ managing to make it stick against them in this case.
Originally xylophones were all wooden, and the expensive ones still are, but many are made of synthetic material now.
As a band director that teaches percussion it drives me nuts when people call a Glockenspiel (or bell set) a xylophone. I think it's caused by some of the toys that are available for little kids that are mislabeled.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a teacher that has been highly into technology as a hobby from growing up with computers around me. I consider myself to be very literate in technology - much more so than my fellow teachers most of the time. I've watched districts roll out technology as the savior of classrooms multiple times, and have shaken my head as the technology has failed due to poor understanding of the infrastructure needed to pull off the new 'greatest thing ever!' The fallacy here is related to the other article referenced, kids attention spans are shrinking. So are adults! Technology has some wonderful uses, but at times it's getting shoved into the classroom as the savior of education - when it's not necessarily.
Add to that what happens in the real world and you lose power from a major storm like we did Friday. Our IT department must not have everything properly isolated on UPS supplies or something, because it took all weekend and until late yesterday afternoon before they got our phone and internet system back up. Last I checked our Microsoft Exchange server is still down. If we depend totally on technology in situations like that we'll be even more out of luck. Our attendance systems were fun yesterday...
We don't serve Tex-Mex in New Mexico. That is a COMPLETELY different style of food that New Mexicans disdain as garbage. Come try the chile, I promise a good helping of proper Green or Red Chile will make you understand that it's not Tex-Mex!
Now as far as the methane, the air quality in the area has been terrible forever. I grew up in Farmington and the asthma/allergy issues I believe are higher there than on average elsewhere. Growing up there were 3 major power plants in the area, with the coal mine feeding two of them. The methane is going to be found to be completely coming from that mine and the two power plants on the Navajo Reservation between Farmington and Shiprock if I were to guess.
You as a student don't sign a license as such, but as a teacher you do. Trust me, after a decade of dealing with standardized test NDA's I'm very familiar with them. You're given instructions to monitor conversations during lunch breaks and such. The tricky thing this with this issue is that many times there is a 'window' for a test to be given. The testing companies are worried that students in an earlier part of the window would share with the later part of the window. Honestly I remember reviewing test answers with my fellow classmates following tests... this is just taking it online. Teens are truly ignorant most of the time with Twitter and Facebook... I've had more drama with Twitter this year than I think I could have dreamed of. I'm not surprised in the least they're monitoring sites. Biggest thing would be getting rid of these tests altogether. Sorry, I don't feel they have nearly as much value as the testing companies would lead the public to believe. As long as they lobby state legislatures though with big bribes there's nothing we as teachers can do about them though.
Actually my understanding is that they are not treating patients with the full suits on. The decision to just do face masks, gloves, etc. was pretty common it seems now... I think people have gotten more lax with Ebola simply because wearing the full suits is hot and tough to deal with for a long epidemic like we're seeing. It sounds like the nurse in question wasn't in full protective gear. I agree with the idea this shouldn't be happening... How many of these places really have full training for BL-4 diseases though? Last I knew there were only a few labs in the US capable of fully handling diseases like this in the laboratory. (CDC and USAMRID) How is an average hospital set up for this? Hopefully the Dallas one was, but if this trend continues these will not be the last patients we see coming to the US. My guess is this little incident will get in hand just fine, but I doubt that the ones that are likely to come will be as easy to contain.
I grew up in Farmington, near where the station is. Plain and simple the generating station and two other power plants are on Reservation land. For the longest time the tribes chose to ignore improvements to air quality standards. I presume much of the chronic asthma I and others suffered in the area is related to the pollution. On the flip side most of these stacks are being shut down right now and it's killing the local economy. The area has one of the largest available coal deposits that it has been relying on for a long time. It would be nice if there was some sort compromise possible between the industry and pollution... Of course if it was managed more properly it might not be so bad. The amount of corruption on the reservation is amazing...
And opinions like these are the reasons we see legislatures with no teaching experience making policies that leave teachers banging their heads against the wall about the stupidity of the decisions. Personally I'm a teacher and I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in my field. I've had a great deal of success with my students, so I feel qualified to respond to this. Teachers are definitely qualified to make decisions in the classroom about what they teach! More so than most of the people that are in charge of making those decisions.
The best teachers I've seen are the ones that take the time to develop their own Hypothesis about problems in their classroom and have gone on to try new ways to teach. Sure they have some failures, especially as young teachers, but they learn from them and adapt new strategies. That is if they stick around long enough to improve. The biggest problem with education right now is keeping teachers long enough to develop into master teachers. With the average length of career for teachers being about five years... well there are plenty of problems out there.
The pay is addressed all of the time, it's not great. Supposedly there's a three month vacation every year, but if I have two weeks personally I'm having a long break! Between professional development and other expectations, that summer doesn't really exist for anyone but the students. But, most teachers know the pay isn't great going into it. They do it because they have a passion for teaching.
Too many of them see the passion ebb away though thanks to the fact that they are expected to work miracles with students that have no support networks at home. Then they are expected to hold students to a high standard - and then have their jobs threatened when they do so! The levels of paperwork make the Office Space reports seem quick and painless, and they have to keep track of that with each student. Other than in elementary school most teachers are expected to keep track of 100+ students/day with probably at least 20% of those students having modifications that require separate lesson plans for them.
It's all a recipe for burn out! The fear of being held accountable for the students that care doesn't scare most teachers. It's the students that have no support network at home and most likely will not succeed no matter what is done that scares these teachers.
I was thinking of this website as well. This is a CLEAR case of prior art and usage. (BTW thanks for the website name, I could not remember the second word!)
If nothing else I would think this would expedite this to the Supreme Court since there are two conflicting district decisions.
Fixing Mod
Undoing Mod
Glad to see we've finally unleashed the terminators on Mars!
Some of those stadiums actually generate more than enough revenue to fund those programs and more... Not that I think money should be wasted, but in those larger state schools I have no doubt they pay for themselves within ten years or less.
The way it's written will negatively impact a lot of the higher ranked colleges from the past with the financial incentives that are mentioned. For the large private schools they're not going to care so much, but I have to imagine this will be dead in the water from the get go. Too much alumni power in the legislature for this to be something that will ever make its way through!
They didn't have any casino's on the Navajo Nation until about two years ago. It was probably the one that held off the longest on building them, partially because they could never come to an agreement with the State of New Mexico, but mostly due to tribal opposition.
The bigger thing is that it will benefit those that have power... What many people don't realize though is that much of the reservation is like a third world country without running water or electricity!
Some of it isn't even eBooks. The students at my school rarely use textbooks anymore due to the curriculum that's been implemented. Most of the time their reference material and assignments is being given to the teachers in pdf form by the curriculum office. Being able to have the kids just look at it on an iPad as opposed to making lots of copies has some value.
I just wish my district had at least been smart enough to go with iPads. They ended up with some grant and bought Nooks for all of the kids... Great until you realize that B&N is pretty much shutting down with that now or soon. We'll probably have wasted more money in the end by trying to save money!
Is it really? I don't know about your school, but with all of the required training, paperwork, etc. I know quite a few teachers that work some ridiculous hours grading. Personally I spend about 14 hours a day at work in the fall, but I do get paid a bit extra based on the amount of extra time I put in. This 9 months stuff though simply isn't true anymore. The expectation is that teachers spend at least 4 of those weeks doing workshops and training opportunities that mostly don't involve pay to do so. If you're fortunate the district might pay for the training.
Also, 64k is plain and simple not much I'm guessing cost of living wise there. Personally I started in another state at 31k with a Bachelor's Degree just nine years ago. My colleagues in other fields jumped in at similar degrees at 55k+. I had probably 60 more credit hours when I graduated than them too! At this point I'm paid about as well as I could expect at 50k where I'm at. That's with significant extra duty pay amounts built-in, and I feel bad for the teachers without that because they're not being paid well enough.
Oh, and the fact you don't see the homework doesn't mean teachers have nothing to grade. Many of those teachers are teaching seven periods a day with the maximum number of students in each class. Figure roughly 210 students a day with a grade expected from many of them on every assignment. Even if you're just putting a checkmark and marking it in the computer at a rate of .5 minutes per assignment you're talking 105 minutes of work. You figure you get home at five or so, fix dinner, eat, you're up to seven. Let's say you have kids and have to take care of them, some of them don't start grading till nine, and don't finish till nearly eleven at that rate.
Just because you don't see your childs' teachers working does not mean they do nothing. You probably get to leave your work at work. Must be nice?
Personally I saw it take off at my college my last year or so there. It was a university that has many umm... socially awkward... individuals. We also used AIM a lot at that point and I can remember times when we had conversations over it, even though the person was in the same room as us. (Granted that was mostly pure laziness too...) For that kind of setting the idea of being able to 'meet' over Facebook was a lot more comfortable.
The one thing I find myself still on Facebook for more than anything is a professional group that's started up. There are about 10k members and it's a pretty good professional development tool.
The point and problem of this has been known to us as educators for a long time. Other countries do not force everyone into the same mold and test every kid in the end. By the time students reach the test as seniors here, the ones that don't care aren't in the system in other countries. We have a higher populace tested, whereas other countries give up on the lower students earlier. The articles point is if we remove the lower end (like most other countries do) we fair much better than the existing stats. Personally I think we're foolish to continue our existing system. It's not working!
There are many reasons I see girls do better in school on the whole. I think one of the main reasons though is that the majority of teachers tend to be women. These are women who took getting an education seriously, and often times know what worked for them to learn the subject. I think those teachers are often able to reach those that are similar to them. The interesting thing to me though is that I think competitiveness rises for the top spots in classes frequently from the boys still. They'll do anything to be number 1, and sometimes that hard work pays off. Often times though you see a couple boys clustered in the top ten still, with a significant portion of girls following that before more boys. I think the last 6 years of valedictorians in my school district have all been girls.
With only two other male teachers at the junior high campus I teach at, a science teacher and a PE teacher, I really do think that a lot of boys get left behind in learning styles.
There was actually a study conducted with real babies I believe in Canada... might have been US in the 1950's or so. They were given absolutely no nurturing at all, fed, changed, that was it. No stimulus was given. It was a terrible chapter in psychology that I remember reading about in college. It was eventually shut down after it went on far too long and the neglected children were permanently scarred from it. I can't seem to find the exact study right now, but it was a very visible and terrible result in those children. If MRI technology had been in use then I'm sure it would probably verify this study too.
So true. When I went to Cleveland to go to school I couldn't believe the story at first. Moral of that story is never eat anything from Lake Erie or the river!
I think there is something to be said for this. The only problem is do you really know what you want to do when you're 13? 14? 18? For me I didn't make my decision between a degree in Biology, or Music Education until my third semester of college when I was 19. It's a lot to ask a kid to decide the rest of their lives when they're 13. Unfortunately I watch that one happen all of the time.
I believe that students do need to have a good basis in math so that they have options open to them in the future. By not keeping those options open they have limitations that are tough to overcome. That being said, as I watched a student I admired greatly drop out of high school and decide to do his GED instead this past month - Solely because he couldn't pass the state math test... I am nodding my head at a lot of the points of this article. Most kids really don't need to do much past basic functions and statistics when they get to the real world. I know that sounds like a load of dung... but I use something on the Algebraic level a couple times a year... Maybe? At the Calculus level never. Statistics is almost a far more useable form of math so they understand things placed in front of them. I think that's ultimately what this writer is trying to get to. Not to get rid of math, but understand that it's foolish that we keep this massive hurdle up to prevent the masses from being able to move forward in their educations.
I don't know how much better this would be than a password or the pattern unlock idea... Fingerprint scanners can be fooled, and a financial incentive to do so would make it tempting for thieves anyway. I guess it'll keep the honest people honest though. It would be quicker than either of the first two in theory. I can't see apple wanting to clutter up their devices with a scanner somewhere though, this is probably just a patent grab.
Unfortunately I think the argument that Apple itself isn't responsible will probably be considered true in the end. The book publishers on the other hand can, and should, still get nailed to the wall. Charging as much for an ebook as a physical book is completely off-base. You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount. As it is, much of the time you can buy a print edition cheaper than an eBook version on new releases...
Apple certainly deserves some of the blame, but I just can't see the DOJ managing to make it stick against them in this case.
Originally xylophones were all wooden, and the expensive ones still are, but many are made of synthetic material now.
As a band director that teaches percussion it drives me nuts when people call a Glockenspiel (or bell set) a xylophone. I think it's caused by some of the toys that are available for little kids that are mislabeled.