Students Need To Be The Authors Of Their Own Education!

"IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.

We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.

That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself."

Read on...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15engel.html

Translating Teenglish

"It's the mystery of mysteries -- especially to parents -- the unpredictable and sometimes incomprehensible moods and behaviors of the American teenager. Generations of adults have pondered its cause. Hormones? Rock music? Boredom? Drugs?"

Frontline: Inside The Teenage Brain
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/adolescent.html

Sweating the job?

"We should be inspiring, not perspiring."
- Unknown

Who's working the hardest to make your classroom function? Do your students arrive each day expecting to be entertained complacently, jumping through one-size-fits-all hoops, or thinking rigorously? My goal is to focus on this quote and these questions this week.

Evolution Still Struggling in Public Schools

Despite 80 years of court battles ousting creationism from public classrooms, most public high school biology teachers are not strong advocates for evolution.

While vocal advocates of intelligent design and similar non-scientific alternatives to evolution are a minority, more than half the teachers in a nationwide poll avoided taking a strong stance for evolution.

Such teachers “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists,” wrote Penn State political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, the poll’s architects, in a Jan. 28 Science paper.

Read the WIRED article:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/scopes-weeps/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

Separate Autism Schools Proposed in New Jersey

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/nyregion/17njautism.html?ref=education

Two sides of the debate:
A) "...children with disabilities gain valuable academic and social skills from interacting with their peers without disabilities, and also develop closer ties to their communities... It would also send a message to parents that children with autism can’t be included."

B) "...specialized autism schools would provide a much-needed alternative for some families. Many districts lack the staff, training and resources to educate children with autism... The governor has a vision to expand the continuum of options for our students. There are currently not enough high-quality school options for children with autism. Not every child is being educated in an effective program."

What's your opinion?

Protecting Kids From Violence?

A thought-provoking quote from Time magazine's review of The Hunger Games (a popular dystopian young adult novel which I'm currently reading).

"The Hunger Games and Catching Fire expose children to exactly the kind of violence we usually shield them from. But that just goes to show how much adults forget about what it's like to be a child. Kids are physical creatures, and they're not stupid. They know all about violence and power and raw emotions. What's really scary is when adults pretend that such things don't exist."

Kids & Gadgets: Focus vs. Distraction

A must-read article from NY Times (Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction) about the effect of gadgets on learning. Great interviews with students, families, teachers and perspectives of neuroscientists.

The article caused me to reflect on a conversation with teachers at a recent professional development meeting. The discussion centered on the statement that students are growing up in the most stimulating age we've ever known. This article presents some of the obstacles students may face in the barrage of all of this gadgetry. Here's a quote from the article that really struck me:

..Major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.

Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and setting priorities.

“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html