Table Of Contents

1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Running
4. Watching

P.S. One of my favorite design blogs wrote a timely entry about a problem I experienced during this whole process. I got around the color shift by using Photoshop to adjust the Brightness/Contrast on the GIFs, but the resulting images just about tripled in file size. Not a problem for me here, but I shudder to think of what I’d have to go through if I needed these files to stick around their original 45 KB.Similar Posts:

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As hard as they both tried, even Broken Social Scene‘s superb score and Ryan Gosling’s impressive performance fail to save this film. Gosling’s Dan Dunne demonstrates that it only takes a pulse and two brain cells connected by a tenuous synapse to “earn” a teaching credential. The administrator, in an attempt to portray the “heavy hand” of standardized curriculum, merely throws a soft look of scorn compared with how she should treat him. Mr. Dunne represents the kind of teacher who needs to be kicked violently out of the classroom without hesitation or a smile.

I never had a moment of sympathy for the guy. Every day he walks into his classroom, as Sting once wrote, “is a humiliating kick in the crotch.” If this guy can roll into work high, sleep at his desk, consent to kids cheating on a test, and get paid the same amount I do, why do any of us bust our humps? I see this movie as a portrayal of a real classroom somewhere — hopefully not at my school, but very possibly so. Maybe a crack-smoking teacher stretches things, but we all know teachers for whom the title is only technically correct.

My biggest issue with the film is the “teaching” it depicts. I fear that most movie audiences will see Dunne’s teaching as “what teaching outta be.” I can imagine people excited about the way Dunne “connects” with his students and teaches them about “real life” through his lectures. “History is the study of change over time” and he launches into a discussion of how conflict fuels history, a veiled reference to Dunne’s love of dialectics. Really, the best he does is rap rhapsodic about conflict to a group of eighth graders who are far too young to understand his esoteric rants. The worst he does is waste 50 minutes until the bell rings.

“I don’t know, I think some of them get it,” says Dunne. Possibly, but just as possibly not. To make matters worse, that’s all he ever talks about. The introductory “What is history?” lesson should have been finished in September at the latest. His administrator is right to ask him “Did you even open the binder on civil rights I gave you?”

Teaching is more than simply philosophizing with teenagers. There needs to be instruction in the content area because that’s what teachers are hired for: expertise in the subject. If philosophy facilitates that instruction, fantastic. Otherwise, save it for after the bell, when students ask you questions that you shouldn’t answer during class time (“Are you a republican or democrat?” comes to mind as such a question — and could easily produce such blathering).

So watch Half Nelson if you want to be reminded about why you should take time to plan or consider what you’ll do in class tomorrow. Don’t just wing it like Dunne does. If you do, at least go out in style and smoke some crack the night before. Yeah, that sounds ridiculous to me, too. So plan.

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The amount of time it would take to explain the CPR system to the students is much greater than the educational benefit the system would provide. Dan wrote a good posting about this ratio. Think about it. I’m trying to figure out how to explain this system very quickly to my students. If I can do that, I’ll actually use it in an effort to help improve the system and learn to work within the constraints.

The Process

1. Students write their essay in response to the prompt.
2. Students read three “calibration” essays, with properly gaging student understanding of the rubric as the goal.
3. Students move on to peer review. Since students have been calibrated, they ideally leave appropriate marks on three peer essays.
4. Now that students have assessed six essays, they finally evaluate their own.

Troubles

While writing their response to the prompt, students have to type P tags at the beginning of each paragraph or else their response will run together as one paragraph. There’s surely a simple fix (probably something with nl2br), yet adds a burden to students who should focus on their ability to write, not their ability to properly render HTML tags. The essay is enough to occupy 100% of their intellectual energy.

Students need to calibrate within a certain margin of error from the correct marks. If a student’s calibrations do not match the correct answers, the student is put back through that loop twice. Not a bad idea and I’m glad that’s not an infinite loop. A better solution here might be to give the student an explanation of how close they came to expectations after the first time through the calibration.

No troubles that I can see with the peer review phase of this. In fact, this is a nice system for gathering this kind of information. Students can see how their peers evaluated their writing.

The rubric has six rows, so each of the first six questions of the evaluation are yes/no questions about each of those rows. By its very nature, a rubric imply shades of gray, making yes/no questions the wrong ones to ask. “Does the response have an effective, fluent style marked by a clear command of language?” If a paper isn’t very strong in this area, but then again isn’t entirely lacking, what’s the right answer, yes or no?

The seventh question of each evaluation is “Does this essay earn a 4 or higher on the rubric?” A fair question, but that question includes directions for how to answer the eighth question. Why are there directions for how to answer the next question here? Why aren’t those directions, I dunno, on question eight?

To make matters worse, those directions could be completely unnecessary. Question eight is “how would you rate this text?” The rubric uses a six-point system so you’d think students would just have to select a score of one through six, right? Sadly, question eight offers scores of one through ten. The students are just told not to mark a score higher than a six. Remember that they were told this key info back on question seven.

Benefits

This system is all online, allowing students to complete this work whenever they have time. Personally, I want discussion about the samples so students really understand why they receive the scores they do, but it’s not a bad thing for students to read these essays outside of class.

A big thing this system allows for is students walking through the peer review period at their own pace. Teachers are secure in the knowledge that there’s another paper waiting for the student to review because it’s automated. It saves the teacher from having to manage who gets what paper and what to do with the students who finish earlier than others, sitting without a paper to read.

Another big thing is that this system frees up class time. If the different steps of this process were required to be completed by certain dates outside of class, class time is available to cover other matters and students are still expected to think critically about their writing.

That Said…

If more development happens I might change my mind, but I’m voting “no” on this one right now. Save time with pen and paper. If there was a way to bypass the calibration phase, assuming that this would happen in the classroom, I’d use it more readily.Similar Posts:

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ESUHSD Causes All High School Stress!

We are well aware that the current configuration of our community’s educational resources dictates that our children leave this great elementary environment for the uncertainty of high school within the East Side Union High School District (ESUHSD). I believe that this uncertainty is ripping at the very fabric of our community, I believe that this uncertainty is ripping at the very fabric of our community, as families begin to focus on developing coping strategies to reduce increasing stress as children approach high school age. Private school or moving from the community are only two of the most common options. Other alternative strategies are available and there are those in the community that seek your help in their full development. (Source)

We’re “well aware” that the current system requires students to move from a “great” situation to the “uncertainty of high school”? Students move from “great” to “uncertainty”? I’m not “well aware” of this idea and I’d need some statistical evidence (NOT anecdotal, thank you) in order to be convinced. However, failing to support and/or explain his attacks on ESUHSD does not stop Mr. Robichaux. He continues.

Mr. Robichaux cites this stress as induced by ESUHSD and as a primary reason for students moving to other areas for high school. It is beyond all reasonable logic to think that this stress, the normal stress involved with being a teenager and in a new schooling environment, is the fault of ESUHSD high schools. Yet again, I’d need some hard evidence to believe that to be the case and Mr. Robichaux has none.

He states that families in the Evergreen community are “developing coping strategies to reduce increasing stress as children approach high school age.” Does that sound any different than what parents all over the globe are doing as their children enter high school? What does that have to do with the quality of the high school the student is attending? Doesn’t this stress have more to do with the teenage years and less to do with the quality of instruction? Is this stress unique to the Evergreen community?

High school is a very tough place that steps up the demands placed on a student. Greater responsibility, greater independence, greater maturity, all of these things and more are expected of high school students. It is as challenging to move from junior high to high school as it is to move from high school to college. A quick comparision of the California Content Standards for 7th grade and 9th grade in any subject area will show the increased complexity of the demands high school requires. So it’s no wonder that students and parents stress about that move and therefore focus on developing coping strategies for such a trying time in one’s life. But we must remember that it is these challenges that make one grow.

“Private school or moving from the community are only two of the most common [coping strategies].” Does Mr. Robichaux mean to imply that students attending private schools do not have to face such stress factors? Does he mean to insinuate that a move from the Evergreen community means that this stress disappears?

But Wait! There’s More!

Add to that the impending SAT, ACT, CAHSEE, and STAR testing, college application process, thoughts about a career, ideas of moving out, growing independence, and all the other tramatic influences that come with being a teenager with active hormones, any student in any high school anywhere will have the stress that Mr. Robichaux indicates as “ripping at the very fabric of our community,” a very heart-felt tug at the reader’s pathos, though empty of any valid logic. Evergreen is not special in that it deals with any more stress than students entering high school in any other community.

No Statistics? Just Make ‘Em Look Good!

A page from his Web site reflects Mr. Robichaux’s appeal to emotions, thereby earning the reader’s trust, regardless of logic. The graph presented on that page is not labeled, so I’m not entirely certain what it measures. It looks bad, though, I’ll give him that. I assume it’s displaying the disparity in API scores. During which years? Who knows. The source of the scores he reports there? Also unknown. Any discussion of why Evergreen community schools are compared to Palo Alto schools? None. I know the reason, but a critical look at that data would suggest that comparison is illogical and ill-founded. Mr. Robichaux entertains no such discussion of his data, instead perpetuating the notion that such comparisons are valid and worthy of note.

Aside from poorly documenting his created graphics that are supposedly there to strengthen his view and not critically analyzing the data he’s representing, his comparison of Evergreen community schools to Palo Alto schools is troubling:

Now truly, Palo Alto is an older more established community with a somewhat different socioeconomic makeup. But when these differences are factored out kids leaving the elementary grades can be directly compared as they eventually exit Middle School and High School.

I’m not sure how one goes about factoring out such a huge influence, but I’d love to see the math on that one.

Ten Events That Have Nothing To Do With Anything

Near the bottom of Robichaux’s page, he lists ten “Recent events that tend to strengthen the view that the community is concerned about ESUHD.” The events listed there show no direct correlation to an increasing concern about ESUHSD and there’s no commentary provided as to how those ten items demonstrate this concern.

A Complete Lack of Ethos

allaboutthekids.org is replete with logical errors, as pointed out above. The spelling and grammatical errors take a chip away from his credibility. How much credence can you give someone who does a syntactically poor job of expressing his views about education? A bit ironic, isn’t it?

Wait a minute, where is the ethos for Paul Robichaux at all? Who is he to be talking so authoritatively about education? He is not a teacher. He never has been. He’s a man who made all his money in the computer industry. To the best of my knowledge, he’s never gone to school to learn about pedagogy. He holds no college degrees in such matters. What makes his voice one that we should listen to more than anyone else? He’s a local parent, but he’s certainly no expert in matters of education. This is akin to Bill Gates speaking up on education: he is not an expert and his opinion should be treated with a grain of salt.

Evidence? What Evidence?

I’d expect to find mounds and mounds of evidence supporting the move to a unified school district, analyses of school districts that made such a move and how the move impacted the students. Where is the evidence that creating a unified school district would solve the problems he points out? If you’re looking for evidence of any kind, Mr. Robichaux’s site is not the place for you.

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