jenbrdsly
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Posts posted by jenbrdsly
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Is she a visual, an auditory, or a hands-on learner?
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Here are a few pages I wrote up for my blog after going to the SENG conference in Seattle. This will give you an example of the type of information I learned back in 2011. I thought the conference was very useful.
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I've been making these non-verbal logic games for my kids this past week and they LOVE them. Both of my kids thing this is the most fun game ever and they keep begging me to make more. I thought I'd share the idea in case other kids found this fun too. (I have more examples up on my blog.) What's funny is that there is a similar game at the very end of the PBS show "Cailou", but it is a lot easier.
I've been using stamp dotters to make my cards, but you could just use plain markers. The prompt is: Which one is different?
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very cool
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You could try making base ten sticks out of craft sticks, glue, and beans. Then glue 10 together and you have 100.
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I wish I had taken a gap year.
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What happened to failing a grade? What is a child not knowing the ABCs doing in a third grade class to begin with?
If you are teaching first grade material to a third grader, shouldn't that kid still be in the first grade?
I did retain several kids. But when a whole school is failing, then that means that practically every child would have to be retained. The kids who would enter my third grade class not knowing the ABCs were usually new to the country and facing severe poverty issues.
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It is ridiculous that well behaved students with educated parents have to afterschool in order to get the grade level learning objectives covered. In my time, the teachers taught effectively or the school board let them go. What's your take? What do you think the teacher should be responsible for?
Sorry! 3 posts in a row. The multi-quote on the new board is confusing.
I think that teachers should be responsible for bringing all of their students up at least one grade level every year, assuming that the students aren't coming and going all the time. Most of the standardized tests I've seen aren't measuring this. They are measuring whether or not the teacher brings the kid up to the current grade level. That makes things really hard if you have a third grader for example, who enters your class not knowing the ABCs. You might do a stellar job bringing that child up to the first or second grade reading level that year, but the kid would still fail the third grade test and the teacher would look incompetent.
This would of course, allow for more differentiated instruction, which in my view is essential.
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PS: I have a friend who teaches PS 1st grade in SoCal and her stories about children of immigrant laborers who do not have any parental help (ability or time) to do even simple posters like favorite foods, favorite animal, culture of any country etc is heart breaking. Some of them send their kids to school because it has subsidized lunch and acts as a free child care center and she says a lot of the kids just disappear and move on every few months.
This is what happened to me when I taught in NoCal too. That's why I felt that the movie was a bit biased because it didn't into the effect poverty plays into student achievement.
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What would you like the parents to be responsible for?
In my district, I am responsible for instilling behavior expectations, seeing that the child attends regularly, arranging for care when he's sick, and ensuring that homework and studying is done. I am responsible to see that he arrives ready to learn (fed, emotionally calm). I agree to all that.
This. (What you said.) That is what would help. When I taught at a "good school" in a "good neighborhood" this is what I got from parents. But when I was teaching in an impoverished neighborhood, I didn't get this type of parental support at least 95% of the time. The kids who were getting this type of support at home, did a lot better.
The frustrating thing was that I could tell that ALL of the parents really loved their kids. But some people knew to do these things, and some didn't.
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So I have a hard time with the attitude that if you don't at least "afterschool," your kid's chances for a decent future are poor. Again, kids are sitting in school for so many hours. Kids are sponges. I can't fault parents for expecting a reasonable amount of information to enter their kids' brains at school.
I agree with this.
What I'm saying though, is that your kids’ lives don't have to be ruined if you are zoned for a bad school. Parents can make a difference too. It doesn't have to be formal Afterschooling. Things like going to the library regularly and having your kids watch PBS kids instead of Cartoon Network can make a big difference. It's possible that a lot of parents don't know this, especially if they didn't grow up with that.
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Aren't students who have been in the states for 12 cumulative months or less allowed to take California's Standards-based Tests in Spanish? Also these students would have been classified as ESL for the purpose of STAR testing reporting. I guess each school district does things their own way.
Not all chartered schools required uniforms. Two chartered school that we toured did not not require uniforms but did ask for big optional monetary donations. One asked for $3k and one asked for $6,500.
I'm not sure of the rules in CA now. This was many, many years ago with Ron Unz had just passed through an English only initiative. At the time, teachers were only allowed to teach in English by law.
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How in the world does a neuro-typical kid sit in a room full of books for so many thousands of hours and not learn to make sense of printed material?
This is frustrating yes, but I can partially answer this. When I was teaching third grade at a Title 1 school, I only had 20 students at a time. But over the course of one year I had 40 students! That's because the children were constantly coming and going from Mexico. I got one kid who didn't speak any English the week before the standardized test. His scores went into my "effectiveness as a teacher" record.
The other problems is when school districts don't give teachers enough control. I HAD to use 3rd grade materials, even though many of my students didn't know the ABCs. (They had just come from Mexico.) So in many ways, my hands were tied. Also, there wasn't a classroom full of books. The school library had burnt down TWICE! and the only books in my classroom were ones I had purchased.
(This made me in favor of Charter schools.)
SKL - it's also probably because those kids know school is the only way out of extreme poverty. In situations like you described, odds are those kids are in school to begin with because their parents valued education and made sacrifices to get them there, not because of government rules. How many others kids were on the streets or working land at the same time? Poor or rich, family culture matters for not all , but many kids.Yes! Also, don't parents have to scrape together money to buy a school uniform? Maybe investing money into something makes you more likely to follow through.
(This would be in favor of the parental responsibility argument.)
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Has anyone here seen the movie "Stand and Deliver"?
There's a pretty good story about what happens when it gets from seat of your pants to actually doing a fine job, and the reward you get...lol.
http://voices.washin...dies_at_79.html
Great article.
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Rewarding as they did in freakanomics works, penalizing does not.
I agree. Thanks for filling in my shaky memory!
I would definitely not be in support of penalizing people. I am in support of using money in creative ways to try to enact change through positive reinforcement.
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:smilielol5: :smilielol5: :smilielol5:
Oh wait, you were serious..... :mellow: hmmm, okaaaaaaay then.
Actually, I think in the documentary Freakanomics they actually tried something close to this. (I sound like a Netflix advertiser, but I think that doc was on Netflix too.)
As I recall, economic researchers from Northwestern? (I could be wrong about that) went into low performing schools and paid kids for good grades. It made a remarkable difference for a lot of them. The researchers point was that if it only takes $100 a year of possible incentive money to get kids to do well in school, then that is a heck of a lot cheaper than society paying the price later for high school drops outs.
Did anyone else see that? Please fill me in on everything I've forgotten. :)
Edited to add, I found the Freakanomics clip here
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Yeah. They highlighted a lot of low income schools like where I used to teach. I had a student get into a charter school, her mom chose not to send her, and I went home and cried. The situation is DIRE in some of these districts. Many of the parents don't speak English or have had apvery little education themselves. So those desperate families really are desperate. A better education is their child's only ticket out.
When I left the inner city, I went to teach at a charter school.
Here's my blog post from when I saw this movie in the theater. It was the year we started homeschooling. http://homeschoolfor...g-for-superman/
I couldn't figure out how to leave a comment on your blog post, but it was awesome! We have similar stories in that I taught in East Palo Alto, CA (around the time it was the murder capital of America), and then moved on to teaching at a charter school.
The part about the teacher's unions is really conflicting for me too. I saw in East Palo Alto how the teachers union was often the only thing protecting children and good teachers from some very bad principals. But the union also protected bad teachers. Arg!
Homeschooling was an option for your family, but it is not an option for every family. I really think there needs to be massive parental education/empowerment about how to support learning at home. That is of course, easier said than done.
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Regarding KIPP. I think those schools are awesome. But it's also sad, because it could be the reason they are so effective is that they are taking children away from the parents for longer periods of time. Longer school days, school on Saturday, etc.
Instead of the solution being: taking children away from parents, why can't the solution be: helping parents be more effective?
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I have a few thoughts on this. One is that in many low income families, there is a single parent who is working, many times more than one job, perhaps at odd hours. It simply isn't feasible for these parents to regularly afterschool their children. Even in many two parent homes it is a stretch. And many parents aren't inclined for other reasons to afterschool. (I am using the term "afterschool" to range from any sort of academic instruction to listening to a child read to helping with math to even simply showing an interest in anything academic.)
Also, frankly, it really shouldn't be too much to ask to make children's 6+ hours in school every day as productive as possible.
YES! I agree with this 100%. But still... I don't think it should be that you expect schools to do everything. Parents have responsibility too.
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Does anyone get Netflix? The documentary "Waiting for Superman" is available on Netflix-streaming right now, so I finally watched it. A lot of the information isn't new. If you saw the Oprah episode about "Waiting for Superman" a while back, then you have seen all of the good parts.
What frustrated me about the film was that so much emphasis was put on schools and teachers. There was basically no focus on parental responsibility. The film made it look like good parents living in bad neighborhoods tried to get their kids into charter schools because that was the only hope. If your kid didn't get chosen in the lottery, than tough luck.
I just wish they had spent ten minutes talking about some of the things parents could have been doing with their children at home to promote learning.
Thoughts?
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Sorry, this is an old thread... I finally watched "Waiting for Superman" last night. Netflix streaming has it now, btw.
What bugged me was that there was so much focus on schools and teachers, but relatively little focus on parents. I think that parents are equally as important as teachers. Your kid's educational future doesn't have to be over because they didn't win the KIPP lottery. You could be supplementing their education at home through Afterschoooling.
Thoughts?
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To the OP. Are you familiar with teaching math from a Constructivist approach? Info here on my blog. It is what Kiana is describing.
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You could check out Science Without a Net. Those plans are free.
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I have some ideas on my blog about helping kids transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Good luck!
Questions about afterschooling my dyslexic 8 year old.
in Parents' Forum Afterschooling Board
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If you just want to keep things fun, light, and meaningful, than I would suggest getting an AL abacus from Right Start. (I sound like I work for the company but I don't!) I have some pictures on what you can do with the abacus here on my blog.
An abacus would give her a hands-on way to see and feel each number she worked with. Maybe that would help.