“My greatest skill in life was wanting but little.”
–Henry David Thoreau
Here’s an old journal entry I wrote when I was student-teaching in a second grade class with Mehrnoosh Watson, a master teacher who had a profound influence on me. I’ve been reflecting more recently on the value of children’s play (something I do a lot) and it seems to me that play is not only a cognitive imperative but a moral one, too.
Reflections from a Second Grade Classroom
How do teachers integrate moral lessons in daily teaching practice? Many teachers ignore the subject altogether, arguing that it has little role in the academic life of a child. Other teachers focus their moral teachings on fair play on the playground or teaching children to take turns. Sometimes a holiday or assembly comes up and there is a brief flurry of activity around moral issues. In the school…
Banned Books Week is currently celebrating its 36th anniversary! This year’s theme, “Banning Books Silences Stories,” is a reminder that everyone needs to speak out against the tide of censorship.
Did you know that some of the best works of all time, and very often the ones you’ll have studied in school, have at one time or another been censored from the public? Did you know that the practice of censorship in literature still goes on today?
Yup, somewhere out there, a blinkered individual could actually be pondering at this very moment the dangers of a mind raised on an “occultist” story like Bridge to Terabithia, while someone of the same mindset argues that the bildungsroman The Perks of Being a Wallflower is “unsuited to a teenage audience.” Seriously.
And it’s not all Sex, by Madonna, Gossip Girl and l8r, g8r that are considered poised to corrupt our…
I watched about fifteen minutes of the first debate then turned it off. I didn’t want to waste any more of my time. I had better things to do.
Instead, I waited for the fact checkers and the analysts to examine the claims made by Obama and Romney during the debate.
The morning after the debate, I learned that the perception was that Obama lost the first debate by a WIDE margin.
Further reading revealed that President Obama lost because he wasn’t as aggressive as Romney or should I say he only exaggerated and made half as many false claims as Romney did and many of Romney’s exaggerations were WHOPPERS.
For example: inflating the unemployment numbers from 12.5 million to 23 million compared to Obama inflating the number of jobs created to 5 million from the actual number of 4.63 million.
There is a HUGE difference between 370,000 jobs and…
My friend and fellow HCSSiM 2012 staff member P.J. Karafiol explains some important issues in a Chicago Sun Times column entitled “Hard facts behind union, board dispute.”
He first explains that CPS teachers are paid less than those in the suburbs. This means, among other things, that it’s hard to keep good teachers. Next, he explains that, although it is difficult to argue against merit pay, the value-added models that Rahm Emanuel wants to account for half of teachers evaluation, is deeply flawed.
He then points out that, even if you trust the models, the number of teachers the model purports to identify as bad is so high…
It would be great if teachers did rule over the education system in the US as they do in Finland where the public schools are considered the best in Europe and one of the best in the world. However, sad to say, in the US politics decides the fate of schools and teachers have little or no control. Thank you for this post.
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire – William Butler Yeats
I have been feeling teary all day today. Yesterday the Principal at my son’s school (who was also his infants teacher for his first three years at school) announced that she will be retiring at the end of the year. I must have looked stricken because she rang me last night and left a message asking if I was ok, and came over to my house this morning to have a chat with me before school started. See? I’m getting teary again.
Not only has she been a fabulous teacher and a dedicated, capable Principal, she has also been a seemingly never ending font of patience, kindness, wisdom and humour for me personally, as well as the staff, members of the P&C and school community. To say she will be sorely missed is an understatement.
When Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed, arrived in my mailbox, I opened it with great anticipation. I love Tough’s writing; his pieces on This American Life and in The New York Times have always impressed me with their warm, clear prose. What’s more, last year, an excerpt from this book, published in the New York Times Magazine, inspired me to turn around my approach to some serious classroom problems.
In that excerpt (taken from Chapter 2), Tough describes children from difficult backgrounds who nevertheless succeed in school and other endeavours because, he posits, they have developed certain character traits. I chronicled my thoughts on that piece in a post called “Fail Better,” and I then took his ideas to my students, some of whom were having a lot of difficulty. I asked them to analyze some of the fictional characters we were reading about in terms of…
We forget too quickly what it was like in the United States before the Child Labor Laws and women won the right to vote.
Middle class? What was that in America before the labor unions arrived? While doing research yesterday on a history of the American Middle class, I learned that about 700,000 children worked in factories and coal mines and that explains who so few graduated from High School in 1900 (16,000 and there were almost a million 17-year olds). The rest were already working as young as six or seven. About 5% of the population had enough money to live comfortably without money worries.
I always feel a bit sorry for myself on Labor Day weekend, as it’s back-to-school time and usually I am engaged in a mad dash to get my course syllabi done. Of course this is ridiculous, as I have the cushiest job ever and most of the summer I’ve been free to do as I liked. It’s good to remind myself what labor really is, and nothing does that better than the photographs of Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), who transitioned from educator to social activist, all the while armed with a camera. In 1908 Hine became the official photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) and began his life’s work: documenting child labor across the United States. This was a time when one in six children between the ages of five and ten worked outside the home in “gainful occupation”, and the percentage increases dramatically for children over the…
Did you know that about half of students that start college leave before they graduate and of those that go on to graduate, only half end up working in the field he or she graduated in.
However, the average pay of a college graduate, according to the US Census clearly shows that the earnings of workers with college degrees out earn workers without a college education.
Annual median earnings (in 2010 dollars) – Source:US Census
1. high school dropout = $26,313 (based on 4.2 million workers)
2. high school graduate = $37,237 (21 million workers)
3. Bachelor’s degree or more = $67,719 (24.56 million workers)
Now, back to the question I asked in Part 3 about the price of a car, averages wages, cost for a gallon of gas, loaf of bread, and hamburger meat.
The average cost of a car in 1970 was $3,450. In 2008, it was $27,958—800% increase
The average annual wage in 1970 was $9,400, and in 2008, it was $40,523—431% increase
Note: My first year as a full time public-school teacher in California (1978-79), my annual pay was $11,000. The average starting salary today is $35,760—more than three times what I started with in 1978. However, the CPI Inflation Calculator says my 1978 starting teacher salary was equal to the buying power of $56,852,66 today. I had no idea my pay was that good back then and I was still making payments on my student loan.
The average cost for a gallon of gasoline in 1970 was 35 cents. In 2008, it was $2.05—586% increase—today the average national price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.63—1,037% increase compared to 1970.
Bread was 25 cents in 1970 and $2.79 in 2008—1,116% increase
A pound of hamburger meat cost 70 cents in 1970 and was $3.99 in 2009—570% increase
The last comparison and the most difficult to find was comparing college costs between the 1970s and today, and I did not find these facts from the traditional media. I found them from colleges and the government.
What is the media trying to hide and why or is it just poor reporting?
From the University of Texas at Austin, I discovered, “Since 1970 tuition and fees at UT have risen tremendously; for undergraduates, the increase has been around 400 percent. In 1970, tuition was $50 for any in-state student enrolled in any college or school for any number of credit hours. Fees were $54 for anyone enrolled at the University. In the Fall semester of 2002, you won’t get a twelve hour course load for less than $2,300.”
From the Congressional Budget Office, I learned that “in 1970 the average tuition and required fees for full-time undergraduate students was $690. In 1986, the average cost was $2,310.”
Then from College Data.com, I discovered, “The cost for one year of tuition and fees varies widely among colleges. According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2011–2012 school year was $28,500 at private colleges, $8,244 for state residents at public colleges, and $20,770 for out-of-state residents attending public universities.”
Comparing tuition and fees of public colleges from then to today shows a 1,194% increase since 1970 or a 356% increase since 1986. Private colleges cost much more as you can see but no one has to attend a private college. To keep prices down, a student may spend the first two years at a community college, then transfer in his third year to a four-year state college near his home.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 