I Speak of Dreams

The State of Public Education

Two moms speak, Geeky Mom and Badgermama on the frustrations and shortcomings of their kids' schools.

Kids in Modern Life

Link: apophenia.

the consequences of 'modern' life

Yesterday's UK Telegraph printed an open letter from numerous academics, professionals, and artists concerned about the health of youth. The piece, signed by hundreds, is called: Modern life leads to more depression among children:

    Sir - As professionals and academics from a range of backgrounds, we are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions. We believe this is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development.

    Since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust-- as full-grown adults can -- to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed "junk"), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

I'd sign this.  I have a friend with a 3rd grader who has 90 minutes of homework a night.  I know kids who have never been to a state park (let alone a national park)--their knowledge of nature is from television.

Talk About It

I am a white heterosexual female.  I support the rights of all kinds of people to live openly, in freedom, fully supported by society--the civil protections of marriage ought to be extended to same-sex couples.  Heterosexual couples have the option of choosing marriage (with its legal and financial advantages)  or choosing cohabitation.  Homosexual couples don't have the choice.

National Coming Out Day is October 11. 

The Human Rights Campaign is sponsoring the Snapshop project, and

has created the first online public art project encouraging Americans to Talk About It. The project celebrates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and straight Americans who support living openly and talk about the things that make us all different — and, just as importantly, the ways that we are all the same.

find out more here or find instructions on how to post your photograph here.

Blogger SAT Challenge

Boy, get behind on your blog reading and you miss great stuff.  I can't wait for this!!

Link: Cognitive Daily: The Blogger SAT Challenge!.

Then Chad laid down the gantlet threw down the gauntlet:

Somebody ought to get a bunch of bloggers together, and give them the writing SAT under timed conditions, and see what they come up with.

I think you can figure out where this is headed. Chad and I have set up a test for you to use to find out if you can do any better than a bunch of highschoolers.

We're especially interested in finding out if bloggers, because of their regular practice in short-form writing, might be able to perform well on the test. On the blogger's side, they're used to cranking out pointless rants on a moment's notice. But highschoolers are well-practiced at responding to their teachers' inane writing prompts. Bloggers get to choose their topics, so blogging may not transfer well to the SAT's writing prompt. Who can perform better on the SAT test? There's only one way to find out.

Update later:

The survey required participants to enter at least their name before moving on to answer the essay question. The most popular name was "asdf," but no one claiming the name asdf actually wrote an essay. Clearly plenty of participants only "participated" in order to see the question (you'll see it soon enough -- I'll give it below the fold). So, of our 500, how many wrote essays? Just 155. Of those, 20 opted out after completing their response. Of those remaining, just 109 finished in under 21 minutes.

Update as of today

We are nearly finished grading the 109 entries for the Blogger SAT Challenge. Chad Orzel has designed a way for our readers to view and rate the essays themselves, but it's not quite ready yet. We're going to take the weekend to make everything perfect (well, nearly perfect), and then we'll unveil the rating system and the official, professionally graded results.

Concept Inventories and Bioliteracy

This is exciting.  Link: Bioliteracy Project Home Page. 

Welcome.  Our goal is to generate, test and distribute the tools needed to determine whether students are learning what teachers think they are teaching.

We assume that   accurate and timely assessment of student knowledge will encourage the educational world toward more effective teaching and better student understanding of basic biology.

And Ed's Tools

Building concept inventories can be a daunting task, since it rests on research into student misconceptions.

The standard approach to capturing student misconceptions involves extensive interviews that probe what they really think.

Ed's Tools enables you to capture misconceptions in a more efficient manner.

Students are asked open-ended essay type questions.

Their answers can then be coded with respect to which concepts are present (up to 25 different concepts for each question/coder combination) using the java-based Ed's Tools webware.

Captured concepts/misconcepts can then be easily retrieved, while retaining the students' natural language.   

We are currently using Ed's Tools to generate the Biology Concept Inventory, and have begun work with Professor Mary Nelson and colleagues (UC Boulder), to generate a Math and Calculus Concept Inventory (MCCI). We are also working with Isidoros Doxas (CU Boulder), Mark Moldwin (UCLA), and Wendell Horton (U Texas) to generate a Space Physcis Concept Inventory (SPCI).

If you are interested in using Ed's Tools in your project, let us know.

 

      

Gumstix Coolness

I was in the Konditerei this morning and ran into my old pal Gordon Kruberg, who is one of the principals in Gumstix (more at Wikipedia).

The coolest Gumstix-powered project Gordon showed me was

The Pegasus High Altitude Balloon project is a UK based amateur student run project that involves launching payloads to "Near Space" (between an altitude of 60,000ft (20km) and 325,000ft (99km). This is achieved through the use of helium weather balloons which are designed to burst at a certain height and then the payload returns to earth via parachute.

But you might find  Huosheng Hu's robotic fish cool, or the flying gridstorm

These projects are exploring ways of getting a group of small              aircraft to fly like a flock of birds, while at the same time              performing non-trivial task-related distributed computation across a            wireless network.

Spying on the Nanny

Mir writes about spying on the nanny at Forget secrets and confessions; how about nanny narcs? | BlogHer, referring to I Saw Your Nanny.

The "I saw your nanny being good" posts are outnumbered 10 to 1 by the "your nanny is mean/careless/doesn't meet my standards" posts.

Liz Henry as usual nails the problem:

The tattletale-on-random-park-nanny emails often have racist overtones. They make quite a lot of assumptions. It is not just the fact that (at least around here) the tattletales are always white women, reporting on Hispanic babysitters who have white children in their care. It is that what the white park moms see to tattle on, is filtered by their own racism. And classism. They assume who is a nanny and who isn't. They don't give a presumed babysitter any slack to be a human being. They think that their way to raise a child is the only way. Frequently the complaints are of perceived neglect... from people who think that they must hover over little Connor and Brianna every second, micromanaging how they scoop up some sand from the sand pit, in the name of educating them or something.

Drive-by parenting.

Some of the "sightings" are just plain weird.

Political Correctness in Schools of Education

Two posts, one from Dennis Fermoyle and one from a dedicated teacher in a low-income, low performing district, on the vapidness and one-sidedness of teacher education.

Quick Reports

• JenEx, who I started reading when they were struggling to adopt, delivered a baby girl today.  Congratulations!
• Moomin takes a big step towards independence.
• Julie Moos has been ill, has had surgery, and is beginning to recover.
• So is Jax --happy birthday!
• Koan has a post about Steven Fry's bipolar disorder that is worth reading.
• Check out Sarpy Sam's workday.
• Suzanne stacked the firewood--mostly
• Denise solved a mystery
• Dell Glines and Cobb start up a SWOT analysis on black folks.
• Dan's teaching his students how to use study groups to raise performance
• Joey plots attractiveness.
• Charlie greets a friend.
• Michael Drout reads Beowulf aloud, with techno questions.

Why SpEd Parents Go Ballistic, parts 4567 and 4568

Parents of kids with disabilities often are in confrontational postures with their kids' schools.  The following two stories, one from a parent and one from a SpEd teacher, offer two vignettes of frustration.