I Speak of Dreams

Update on CEDU Schools

Personally, I am deeply ambivalent about the need for therapeutic schools, and the culture within those schools (see The Lure of Gunny Therapy and my response to Elliott Curie's Road to Whatever).  Boot camps aren't effective in changing kids' attitudes. However, it seems there are children who can benefit from strictly controlled environments.

The CEDU family of schools closed abruptly earlier this year. (History of CEDU). Universal Health Services purchased the Northwest properties and buildings, and are reopening the facilities with former staff.

This is good news for the hard-hit Bonners' Ferry area.  I don't know if it is good news for kids in difficulties.

Inspect Your Trailer Floor

Lots of horse trailers have wooden floors, especially older ones.  I've always been told to inspect the floor of the trailer before loading to make sure it is solid.   I know I've been careless about it, but floors can give way. as they did in Tyler, Texas.

How Things Snowball

Robin Wright writes an enlightening account of her journey from hale and hearty to disabled.

[I]t's hard for my colleagues and my friends to understand how debilitating it is, since it is an invisible pain -- without cast or sling or conspicuous impairment.

A seemingly straightforward medical problem can snowball into a crippling long-term condition. When that happens, it's harder to find help than might seem due you. ·

I saw it first chez Shrinkette.

Instead of Banning, Why Not Teach Appropriate Use?

If I were a student at Msgr. McHugh's highschool, I would be facing suspension for the crime of keeping this blog. 

MySpace is popular with the highschool and under set.  There's a similar phenomenon, called The Facebook,

The Facebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at schools.

Anyone with an email address ending in .edu may sign up.  The members are categorized by their respective schools.  Members may place a picture of themselves as well as information about who they are. Students can also join clubs for people with common interests and other students can post messages on their respective "walls."

Rather than banning these kinds of networks, universities are starting to teach students how to use them responsibly.

Learn About Lavender

My sister Suz, the lavender farmer, (who employs the hard-to-employ) is giving a lecture on lavender cultivation.

PACIFICA GARDEN CLUB meets on the second Wednesday of the month from 7 9 p.m. at the American Legion Hall, 555 Buel Ave. off Rockaway Beach Avenue. The speaker on Nov. 9 is Susan Ditz of Rancho Alegre in Pescadero. She will share her expertise in the growing and cultivation of lavender. Products made at the farm will be for sale. Call Joy at 738-8661 for more information. The public is welcome to attend.

Autism Study

A new Australian study has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study what happens in the brains of boys with autism.  The study found

children with autism have less activation in the deep parts of the brain responsible for executive function -- attention, reasoning and problem solving. Research leader Dr Ross Cunnington said autism is known to have a biological cause, but the neuroimaging research clearly shows the dysfunction in the brain that accounts for why children with autism have problems with executive function. "Specifically, we found activity in the caudate nucleus, a critical part of circuits that link the prefrontal cortex of the brain, is reduced in boys with autism," he said. Cunnington, along with PhD student Tim Silk, have also been studying children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and have found similarities in the impairment of specific executive function in children with ADHD.

I wonder if this type of information will lead to improved therapies.

Politicizing the Reading Wars

Sandra Stotsky has an excellent essay that outlines how teaching phonics became identified with conservative ideology and fundamentalism, while the disaster that is whole language reading instruction became identified with progressive thought.

Phonics instruction was one of the first areas of pedagogy to be politicized, and by the author of Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game—Kenneth Goodman, with the help of his educator wife, Yetta Goodman. They were the founders of the whole language movement. 

In an attempt to ascribe the low reading achievement of low-income children to language differences, not language deficits, Goodman claimed that phonics instruction imposed standard forms of speech on dialect-speaking children through the teaching of conventional sound-letter correspondences and led to a lack of motivation to learn to read and the failure of these children to connect what they decoded with their native language. Because these children could not associate the words they identified with the language they spoke, he argued, they could not read with meaning.  Phonics instruction, he also implied, was the preferred strategy of Christian fundamentalists, darkly hinting that it was favored by conservative parents because it fit in with attempts at controlled literal understandings of a text.  In effect, Goodman made phonics instruction a civil rights issue and smeared it as a tool of both white middle class oppressors and white fanatics.

Go read the whole thing.  I wonder why black parents aren't leading the movement to reform education.  Minority children are those most injured by poor instruction.

Bill Honig, the chief of public instruction during the whole-language debacle, said:

"It is the curse of all progressives, who control much of what happens in the field of education, that we are anti-research and anti-science, and we never seem to grasp how irrational that attitude is. This is probably our deepest failure."

The State of California implemented whole language standards in 1988. (Stewart's history of WL instruction here)  By 1992, roughly 90% of the California fourth graders scored near the bottom of all states participating in a National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) assessment of reading.

Friendly Blog Design

Ronni Barrett has an alter ego, Crabby Old Lady.  Today Crabby has a list of suggestions for making your blog user-friendly for those of us who remember sputnik:

She’s reading as fast as she can, but Crabby lately finds herself skipping some blogs because they are too hard to read. Old eyes are different from young ones - they tire more easily and don’t function as critically as young eyes. But there are easy adjustments bloggers can make to their sites so that older people can enjoy them too:

Entry Date: Unless there is a photograph or other image at the top of a post, all blog entries look alike when the page loads – words, words, words - and Crabby feels cheated when she gets to sentence three or four and realizes she’s already read and maybe even commented on the post.

So those dates at the bottom of an entry aren’t much help. Better to have them at the top since Crabby usually knows about how long it’s been since she last visited.

I see some serious blog redesign is in order.  Is your blog easily readable (and navigable) for older readers?  Go read the rest.

Lineages

PZ Meyers and Joanne Jacobs both today refer to The Politbureau Diktat, who is asking bloggers to help in making  a family tree of the blogosphere.  The questions to answer in (in comments at the Politbureau, please)

1. Who is your blogparent:  who inspired you to start blogging: Nobody really.  I'd wanted to start a blog for months, but lacking technical chops, delayed until Typepad was available.
   
2.   Include your blog-birth-month: December 2003.
3. Identify your blog as Left, Right, or Other: Other
4. If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned any blog-children, mention them, too.  None, as far as I know.

More Reading Wars

James Horn is a professor of education  at Monmouth University.  (Loathes: synthetic phonics, Direct Instruction, high-stakes testing), who writes Schools Matter.

and  anti-testing advocate who believes in Reading Recovery

The Reading Recovery Council of North America (RRCNA), which offers a truly balanced reading alternative to the drill and kill phonics approach favored by the current regime in Washington, has requested a federal investigation into the implementation practices of Reading First. Reading First is part of the NCLB reading improvement initiative that shovels out a billion dollars a year to raise reading scores, most of it going to test prep and scripted teaching programs developed by McGraw-Hill.

Reading Recovery has critics of its own.  Roger Sensenbaugh  has an introduction and a balanced view.    Gossen and Coulter find that RR has many flaws.

Horn seems to believe that the teaching of reading at the K-5 level is in good shape.   Many disagree:  The Greenwood Institute ; 

Louisa Cook Moats writes first:

 This article will offer some evidence that graduate level teachers are typically undereducated for the very demanding task of teaching reading and spelling explicitly. It will document and give examples of common gaps in teachers' knowledge and awareness of language structure along with reasons those gaps may exist. Further, the importance of specific linguistic knowledge for instruction will be illustrated. Finally, the article argues that policy changes are needed to improve the preparation and performance of literacy educators.

Louisa Cook Moats, in a second article, writes:

The fields of reading and learning disabilities have suffered from the absence of a canon, or body of truths that are known and practiced by those in the field. Because it is an ungrounded discipline, instruction in reading and writing invites extreme points of view, overly defended practices, simplistic arguments, and political squabbling.