Posted on 09/05/2011 4:46:00 PM PDT by smokingfrog
CHANDLER, Ariz. - Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or on the floor. They are studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It’’ - but not in any traditional way.
In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.
The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens, and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.
The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.
Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.
Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.boston.com ...
No wonder the rest of the world laughs at us.
Facebook tolerates these pseudo-characters?
Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.
Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.
________________________________________
DUH
Teach them to read...
The old fashion way...
No longer need the teachers, just hire a few techies.
It wouldn't be the first time.
These kids think that the more likes’ you have on Facebook, the quicker they get their diploma.
It’s going to be chaos when a dozen classes all go Shakespearing at Facebook at once.
I’m sure the intent is high minded — to assist the students in getting the sense of the work being studied. Trouble is, the tests aren’t going to be asking how Shakespeare characters felt. They’re going to be presenting samples of text for the students to read and interpret. And this can’t help at all in things like science and math.
Unfortunately speaking as a foreign teacher, in contact with many teachers around the world, most of the world is doing the same thing.
Actually, the 'blogging from the perspective of a character' doesn't seem like a bad idea to me - as long as it is assessed properly, with kids being marked on whether or not they actually have good insight into the character, and on grammar, and on spelling - and it's not just treated as an exercise to try and keep them quiet.
So much of what we hear about renders us speechless. This is one such matter.
I guess we’re not supposed to ask how rap music adds to anyone’s education.
Nor should we ask how playing with Facebook contributes.
Nor should we ask how much the teachers are really interacting and teaching, as opposed to telling the kids to go on the internet and do all this stuff.
I guess we’re not supposed to ask any questions. We taxpayers are just supposed to pay for it, and let it happen to prove how liberal we are.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I just see it as pandering to the kids who regard traditional learning as kryptonite. They refuse to engage unless the delivery system is electronic or kinetic.
I honestly think I got a better education in the 60s.
We did math up to and including beginning calculus.
Advanced biology and chemistry.
Read a sh!tload of books and novels and had journalism english.
Latin and Spanish for languages.
And advanced mechanical drawing. Made a full set of blueprints for a lawnmower engine by measuring and translating from the real parts.
In many respects I feel my hs education was equivalent to what lot of kids today achieve in 2 yrs college.
It's a tricky one. Certainly you don't want to pander to kids who simply don't want to work - those kids need to learn self discipline, and if necessary, to achieve that goal, be disciplined into working. And all too often, teachers do adopt practices like this simply because it's easier than doing the work required to deal with a non-compliant child.
But it can also be a matter of giving a child who because of a genuine matter of learning style, an alternative way of expressing themselves that actually allows them to reach a level of understanding that is superior to what they personally could reach through a more traditional approach. And that's a different situation.
That's why I say assessment is the key - whatever method you use you need to be able to genuinely assess and prove whether or not it is working. If a teacher wants to use unorthodox methods and can point to the fact that their students achieve at a higher level than otherwise, then that's very different from a teacher who disdains traditional methods and whose kids are doing poorly.
I'm a real traditionalist as a teacher myself - 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, I use different approaches. And I'd say that's reflected in my results - it's the traditional teaching that gets my entire class to at least a B average. It's the other measures that get twice as many of them to an A than I would if I only used the traditional methods.
Well, Gee!.... 33 million here, 33 million there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money. /s
I homeschooled my kids at the kitchen table using one-room -school methods. By the age of 15 all three had finished all college general requirements and Calculus III and two had B.S. degrees in math by the age of 18.
My goodness, how on earth did I manage without all that technology? Guess what? NO NO NO teacher, principal, or professor of education has ever contacted our family to find out how. How that for intellectual curiosity?
I taught in a “high tech” classroom for 4 years. The district insisted that student performances were benefitting. But...they never showed us any data to indicate that it was true. They LIED.
Congrats on your home schooling your children.
And beyond this one story, it saddens me to frequently hear that test scores and student achievement have declined so much in recent years, when we are spending more money than ever, and theoretically have high-tech computer technology to assist in education.
I once heard an older black man say that he got a better education in his inferior legally segregated school in the days of Jim Crow, than the black youth get today in our schools. That’s a sobering thought.
I, too, agree. Assessment is the key!
So?....Where are the studies that prove institutional schools are effective?
Where are the studies that definitively show **where** learning is occurring? Is it in the classroom that knowledge is acquired, or is it at **HOME**.
Is the knowledge acquired due to the efforts of the parents and child himself in the HOME? How much learn is due to AFTERschooling?
These studies have **never** been done, yet we spend nearly a quarter of million dollars per child for 13 years of education and we do NOT NOT NOT know if schools even teach the child anything. Any academic success and knowledge acquired could be entirely due to the efforts of the parents and child in the HOME!!!
It is **insanity** that we construct multimillion dollar schools and we do NOT know if they are even effective!!!!!
Unbelievable!!
How can we create an effective school if we do not know **where** learning is occurring ( home or class), and **who** is responsible ( parent, friends of the family, child, or teacher)
Would you read my post #17?
We build multi-million dollar schools and no one has any studies to show where ( home or school) learning is occurring, or who ( parent, child, friend, or teacher) is doing the **real** instruction.
My guess: Likely not!
I see your two years and raise you two--more like four years of college.
We learned more basic grammar by the sixth grade than the average college graduate of today. We were taught subject/verb agreement and whether a pronoun is the subject or the object of a sentence. Today, one can barely get through a television show (often written by an Ivy League grad) without hearing the ridiculous, "She brought a gift for Helen and I." I guess when one's only interest is in texting ttfn to your bff, diagramming a sentence becomes nearly impossible.
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