There are no "Friday Night Lights" at Grove City, OH. All extra curricular activities have been cut including sports, cheerleading, band, drama, and student council. Since the city voted No on the levy, the district had to further nip the expenses from the 18 million already being cut. The board decided to cut extra curricular and bussing after they already cutting 12% of staff. Check out the debates of the levy.
This we already know can affect the town, the article discusses families, athletes, coaches, and teachers choosing or being forced to leave. Along with this, Grove City will have a hard time attracting new arrivals of families. The discussion could go in this direction as well as the debate of weather I think the levy should pass or the heated debacles that are taking place throughout the town. However, the direction I would like to go with this blog is the impact that the cutting of extra curricular activities will have on the students.
Students need these extra curricular activities. Aside from learning hard work and teamwork, football offers many things. Players can learn how to work with another person through adversity and other than ideal conditions. Along with this they can learn how to put the group's interest above their own. They can learn how to handle themselves when faced with adversity, failure, success, and being outmatched. Another thing they can learn is accountability; now their actions do not only affect themselves.
If students can learn this and much more from football alone, what else are these students missing out on? I understand that sports can get too much attention at times and that athletes miss a lot of school, but there are undeniable learning that comes from these activities. School is not just about math and reading. Much like college, school has a lot to do with experiences, exposure, and memories. We need to work hard that these privileges are available to our students.
We must also remember that extra curricular activities can be the candy. Sometimes these are the motivators that get that at-risk student to school. Have you been involved in drama, student counsel, or band as a teacher or coach? What things can they learn here that they can not anywhere else?
If the financial crisis does not turn around, this debate will be a hot topic that needs to be looked into. Extra curriculars has too much bang for it's buck to just be cut!
What do you think?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
UbD Discussion
Blog #9 UbD Discussion
UbD (Understanding by Design) is flipping things around. Why start a project without the ending in mind? This is the basis for Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins book. You have to understand what you want your students to know before you can start teaching them. Many times teachers teach and piece together an assessment as an afterthought. This book tries to looking at lesson prep backwards by introducing Backwards Design.
I chose this book for my book review because I am in the Technology Education department and they want the teachers using this design. I have been using this design for 2 classes but we were only required to read the first chapter or so. When I saw the book on the list, I thought I should really learn how I am supposed to be planning. For a quick overview visit this PowerPoint presentation or Grant Wiggin’s website.
The purpose of this blog is to gather pros and cons from discussion boards, book reviews, and reader responses. Sometimes I pick up a book and am immediately intrigued by the information and without looking at both sides, I consider the book the only way to do things. By looking at discussion boards, book reviews, and getting feedback from you who read this, I will get both sides of the story and here the pros and cons which will help me filter the good information from the bad.
I first checked Amazon’s site to get the book reviews. On this site there were 12 reviews, with all of them being positive. The review that stuck out to me was by Christopher Davis. He wrote, “One of my pet peeves is books on applied topics that talk about theory but cannot bridge the theory to application. This handbook does a great job of assisting educators from going from the ideas of backward instructional design to implementing these ideas in actually developing educational plans.” The only improvements listed were that some of the references in the back were not useful and a computer program would make things a lot easier.
Google had all positive except one person reported a fallacy on page 139. The reviewer stated that there is misinformation about Turkey militants. Since he is from Turkey, he claims that the information is totally inaccurate. Goodreads.com has lots of positive reviews with only length and repetition causing concerns.
I was surprised at the lack of negative feedback for this book. Often times if you search reviews for any book there are people that did not like it. From what I have gathered from the book, it does make a lot of sense. I do find it hard to come up with assessments before you know what you are going to teach. I like the importance that it has place on assessment, but I have found that you need to bounce back and forth from instruction to assessment and back again.
Please give me your feedback on this book. Use your experience or just research some reviews.
Philip
UbD (Understanding by Design) is flipping things around. Why start a project without the ending in mind? This is the basis for Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins book. You have to understand what you want your students to know before you can start teaching them. Many times teachers teach and piece together an assessment as an afterthought. This book tries to looking at lesson prep backwards by introducing Backwards Design.
I chose this book for my book review because I am in the Technology Education department and they want the teachers using this design. I have been using this design for 2 classes but we were only required to read the first chapter or so. When I saw the book on the list, I thought I should really learn how I am supposed to be planning. For a quick overview visit this PowerPoint presentation or Grant Wiggin’s website.
The purpose of this blog is to gather pros and cons from discussion boards, book reviews, and reader responses. Sometimes I pick up a book and am immediately intrigued by the information and without looking at both sides, I consider the book the only way to do things. By looking at discussion boards, book reviews, and getting feedback from you who read this, I will get both sides of the story and here the pros and cons which will help me filter the good information from the bad.
I first checked Amazon’s site to get the book reviews. On this site there were 12 reviews, with all of them being positive. The review that stuck out to me was by Christopher Davis. He wrote, “One of my pet peeves is books on applied topics that talk about theory but cannot bridge the theory to application. This handbook does a great job of assisting educators from going from the ideas of backward instructional design to implementing these ideas in actually developing educational plans.” The only improvements listed were that some of the references in the back were not useful and a computer program would make things a lot easier.
Google had all positive except one person reported a fallacy on page 139. The reviewer stated that there is misinformation about Turkey militants. Since he is from Turkey, he claims that the information is totally inaccurate. Goodreads.com has lots of positive reviews with only length and repetition causing concerns.
I was surprised at the lack of negative feedback for this book. Often times if you search reviews for any book there are people that did not like it. From what I have gathered from the book, it does make a lot of sense. I do find it hard to come up with assessments before you know what you are going to teach. I like the importance that it has place on assessment, but I have found that you need to bounce back and forth from instruction to assessment and back again.
Please give me your feedback on this book. Use your experience or just research some reviews.
Philip
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Something Positive
One of the great currently in my life uses the phrase, "you get a lot more out of people by giving them honey instead of vinegar." I have just realized that this is my 8th blog, and I am not sure how much honey I have been putting on the educational system. I have been voicing opinions on subjects, but they have not had a lot of positive overtones. So, this week will be a step in a different direction.
Rural school in New Mexico goes from poor academic performance to great in 3 years. George Bickert the principal built his success off of building relationships with kids. Lovin' on them with hugs, high fives, and early morning basketball games. He believed in his staff also. The other thing he did was threw out boring assessment names like "curriculum based measures" and replaced them with Math Monster and Cougar Readers.
D.C. schools are also trying this. They understand that if you look at any company or situation you can choose to point out the bad or the good. They are choosing to campain and promote the good.
I am here looking for current, positive news and striking out. So anyone commenting on this blog, please insert some positive news on the education systems in place.
One positive thing that I have seen in schools is students ability to pick up sarcasm! Our students are amazing at picking up social sarcasm. Sarcasm in a fun, joking sense. Try it sometime. Many times I use sarcasm instead of getting mad and frustrated at a student. Instead of blowing up and telling a student to stop playing with his pile of pencil lead that he has been collecting all month, I will say, "Jim Bob, if I see those out on your desk again, I will sell them on EBAY and use the money to advertise and promote to your mother a campain to ground you for the rest of your life." The student smiles, gets the point, no one is frustrated and we move on. I have found that students rise to our expectation. If they are low they will meet it, if high, they will also.
Give me some posiitve highlights for the last 2 weeks.
Rural school in New Mexico goes from poor academic performance to great in 3 years. George Bickert the principal built his success off of building relationships with kids. Lovin' on them with hugs, high fives, and early morning basketball games. He believed in his staff also. The other thing he did was threw out boring assessment names like "curriculum based measures" and replaced them with Math Monster and Cougar Readers.
D.C. schools are also trying this. They understand that if you look at any company or situation you can choose to point out the bad or the good. They are choosing to campain and promote the good.
I am here looking for current, positive news and striking out. So anyone commenting on this blog, please insert some positive news on the education systems in place.
One positive thing that I have seen in schools is students ability to pick up sarcasm! Our students are amazing at picking up social sarcasm. Sarcasm in a fun, joking sense. Try it sometime. Many times I use sarcasm instead of getting mad and frustrated at a student. Instead of blowing up and telling a student to stop playing with his pile of pencil lead that he has been collecting all month, I will say, "Jim Bob, if I see those out on your desk again, I will sell them on EBAY and use the money to advertise and promote to your mother a campain to ground you for the rest of your life." The student smiles, gets the point, no one is frustrated and we move on. I have found that students rise to our expectation. If they are low they will meet it, if high, they will also.
Give me some posiitve highlights for the last 2 weeks.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Blog #7 Writing vs Typing
Blog #7 Writing vs Typing
I have recently been subbing in a 6th grade class and have been astonished at much they have to write. They have to write everything down from math problems, social studies answers, reading class discussion questions, and on top of this, they have a writing portion. My questions are this, are we making our students write too much? Should we be teaching and encouraging typing along with writing?
I know cursive is important. Students should be able to write in print and cursive, but are we making them write too much, and what is the purpose for all this writing? Are we assigning writing assignments in order to improve their handwriting skills? My impression is that writing class is in place in order for them to learn how to put together thoughts into proper grammatical form. Is there any way to decrease the writing time and increase learning and comprehension?
I think we can eliminate some of the wasted time due to hand writing time. We should introduce typing classes. Writing classes are very important! They need to learn how to spell and put thoughts on paper. They need to learn correct punctuation as well, but can’t we “kill two birds with one stone?” Can’t they do all this while typing?
I have a student that types instead of writes during writing time. Alphasmart is the name of the keyboard he uses. It’s not a laptop, but a keyboard with a screen. He plugs in a USB cord and prints off his paper. With wireless printers, every student would not have to hook up their keyboard. They could do all this wirelessly.
Writing class would be a natural time to implement typing skills. Kids get plenty of time to write throughout the school day so this would not sacrifice their handwriting skill development. This presentation gives some positive benefits that keyboarding has to offer such as improving manual dexterity, spelling, and reading.
On the other hand, I did hear a mother tell her student, “You do not need to write in cursive, you never will again for the rest of your life. All you need to do is write your name!” On the extreme end, some people feel like cursive is outdated and needs to be thrown out. I disagree; it is important but let’s prepares students for the real world. They will need to type when they get to junior high, high school, and an occupation. Writing and typing should get equal importance in 5th and 6th grade in my opinion.
Is this even a debate in the education realm? It was hard to find much information. I think this is an important debate that will gain more heated debate attention in the future.
What do you think?
Philip
I have recently been subbing in a 6th grade class and have been astonished at much they have to write. They have to write everything down from math problems, social studies answers, reading class discussion questions, and on top of this, they have a writing portion. My questions are this, are we making our students write too much? Should we be teaching and encouraging typing along with writing?
I know cursive is important. Students should be able to write in print and cursive, but are we making them write too much, and what is the purpose for all this writing? Are we assigning writing assignments in order to improve their handwriting skills? My impression is that writing class is in place in order for them to learn how to put together thoughts into proper grammatical form. Is there any way to decrease the writing time and increase learning and comprehension?
I think we can eliminate some of the wasted time due to hand writing time. We should introduce typing classes. Writing classes are very important! They need to learn how to spell and put thoughts on paper. They need to learn correct punctuation as well, but can’t we “kill two birds with one stone?” Can’t they do all this while typing?
I have a student that types instead of writes during writing time. Alphasmart is the name of the keyboard he uses. It’s not a laptop, but a keyboard with a screen. He plugs in a USB cord and prints off his paper. With wireless printers, every student would not have to hook up their keyboard. They could do all this wirelessly.
Writing class would be a natural time to implement typing skills. Kids get plenty of time to write throughout the school day so this would not sacrifice their handwriting skill development. This presentation gives some positive benefits that keyboarding has to offer such as improving manual dexterity, spelling, and reading.
On the other hand, I did hear a mother tell her student, “You do not need to write in cursive, you never will again for the rest of your life. All you need to do is write your name!” On the extreme end, some people feel like cursive is outdated and needs to be thrown out. I disagree; it is important but let’s prepares students for the real world. They will need to type when they get to junior high, high school, and an occupation. Writing and typing should get equal importance in 5th and 6th grade in my opinion.
Is this even a debate in the education realm? It was hard to find much information. I think this is an important debate that will gain more heated debate attention in the future.
What do you think?
Philip
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