From: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/06/AR2008080603683.html?hpid=topnews
By N.C. Aizenman
A surge in Hispanic immigration over the past decade has dramatically altered the racial and ethnic composition of the region's youngest residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released today.
As with minorities in general, immigrants tend to be younger than non-Hispanic whites and still in their childbearing years. As a result, in five suburban Washington counties, more than half of children age 4 and younger were minorities when the annual Census Bureau survey was taken a year ago.
In three of the counties -- Prince William, Montgomery and Charles -- the share reached about 60 percent. And in Prince George's, where Hispanic immigration has supplemented an even larger African American population, more than 90 percent of these children are minorities.
The implications for governments and communities are wide-ranging, demographers said. As the current crop of youngsters reaches kindergarten age, school systems that would otherwise be losing students will continue to grow or remain stable. They will also need to accommodate an ever-larger number of students who were raised in immigrant households where English was not spoken.
In addition, although most Hispanic children younger than 5 are native-born U.S. citizens and therefore eligible for government health care and other benefits, research indicates that if their parents are not U.S. citizens, they will be less likely to claim assistance, said Michael Fix, director of studies at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.
"All of this really reinforces the importance for counties to increase their investment in early childhood development now," Fix said ."If you don't make that investment, one of the penalties you pay down the line is that you have kids in school who don't speak English well and whose overall performance lags behind."
Fix pointed to studies indicating that as many as 75 percent of elementary school children learning English as a second language were born in the United States.
"Even more worrisome is that over half of the English-as-a-second-language learners in high school were native born," Fix added.
As these minority children mature, counties that until fairly recently were dominated by non-Hispanic whites are likely to shift to majority-minority status, said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.
"The bubbling up [of minorities] that we're now seeing at the younger ages will continue to move up through the age range, through the teenage years, the working-age years and then the housing-buying years," he said. "The child population is really a microcosm of the future."
Minorities had already grown to 47 percent of the population in Charles and 48 percent in Prince William in July 2007, up from about one-third in 2000. Montgomery, at 46 percent minority, is also getting close.
Demographers cautioned, however, that the extreme ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of area minorities makes it difficult to make broad predictions about the impact of the region's impending shift to majority-minority status.
In Prince George's, for instance, 62 percent of children younger than 5 are non-Hispanic blacks, and they include a substantial share born to affluent families.
Similarly, in Fairfax County, Asian children account for 17 percent of those younger than 5. Often born to upwardly mobile immigrant professionals who encourage them to supplement regular schoolwork with additional classes, Asian students are disproportionately represented among the county's top-performing students. And last month it was announced that for the first time Asian Americans will outnumber whites at the county's most prestigious public magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
Nor can Hispanic immigrants, who hail from a wide range of nations, be easily categorized.
"You cannot necessarily predict that just because they'll become majority-minority, all these schools will become low-income," Fix said. "The Washington area has one of the most diverse foreign populations in the nation."
Adding to the complexity of the picture is that the Census Bureau collected its data through July 2007, before the current economic downturn and before Prince William and other counties adopted initiatives against illegal immigration.
In Prince William, the percentage of students enrolled in classes for English as a second language dropped nearly 5 percent from a record of 13,404 in September to 12,775 by the end of the school year. The impact of the downturn and immigration restrictions will be reflected in Census Bureau data to be released next year.
Related
Minority Children Become MajorityGraphic In five of Washington's suburban counties, the majority of children younger than 5 as of last summer were members of minority groups. The number grew over the past decade, largely because of Hispanic immigration.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Easy as ABC: Web apps for students
From: Webware
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10005482-2.html
Posted by Harrison Hoffman
Summer is, unfortunately, almost over and that means that students are starting to head back to school in the coming weeks. There are so many online tools that can help students today to stay more organized and productive that I thought I would outline a few here and hopefully ease the pain of the upcoming school year.
Remember The Milk
Remember The Milk is the best online to-do list out there right now. It plugs into a slew of other services, including their killer Gmail add-on, Netvibes, iGoogle, Jott, offline support with Google Gears, and a promised iPhone standalone app. Given its wide array of features, it should instantly help any student to prioritize their tasks and become more efficient.
Google Docs/Calendar/Gmail/Scholar
I decided to lump all of Google's services that are good for students together. I think that they provide a tremendous amount of value to users and can be put to great use in an academic setting. Google Docs provides a web interface for a suite of tools to make, view, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. As I've said before, the features of Google Docs might not be on par with its Office counterparts, but it really shines when it comes to sharing and collaboration. This makes it perfect for working on group projects or spreading notes around.
Google Calendar can help keep a student's hectic schedule in line. Managing time is one of the hardest parts of being a student and Google Calendar can help . Did I mention that Remember The Milk integrates with it also?
Gmail includes a lot of great features to keep your incoming stream of email organized and prioritized. Gmail's labels help to keep your email organized and bring attention to those requiring your attention. It's helpful, even if you don't receive a large volume of email.
Google Scholar provides an excellent resource for students, looking for sources for research papers. While most schools already provide resources for students in this department, Google Scholar's excellent search provides a good point of discovery.
Evernote
Evernote is a great new web service to handle all of your notes, photos, and clippings from around the web. It has clients for Mac, PC, and various mobile phones, including the iPhone. Robert Scoble did a nice interview and demo with the company's CEO if you want to get a thorough overview. While it might be hard, at first, to integrate Evernote into your workflow, your productivity and organization will see the benefits.
Easybib
This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it's an indispensable resource for every student. Easybib lets you pick from a variety of types of sources, then you just fill in all of the information that you can, and Easybib will automatically generate a MLA or APA formatted works cited page.
Facebook
Apart from being the premiere social network for students, Facebook also offers some applications, such as Courses 2.0 and Study Groups that have academic value. These applications leverage Facebook's social networking features in order to connect students for the purpose of studying or collaborating on coursework. Facebook is also a necessity for any college student, if for no other purpose than meeting new people and staying in the loop on parties around campus.
Socialbib
Socialbib is a really interesting service, where students offer up old textbooks that they no longer have a need for and trade them for ones that they do need. This could potentially cut down on otherwise absurdly expensive textbooks for students.
Those are my recommendations for making school life a little easier. Services like these are easing the load put on students and making everything slightly more enjoyable. For the students out there, what web apps do you find yourself using?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10005482-2.html
Posted by Harrison Hoffman
Summer is, unfortunately, almost over and that means that students are starting to head back to school in the coming weeks. There are so many online tools that can help students today to stay more organized and productive that I thought I would outline a few here and hopefully ease the pain of the upcoming school year.
Remember The Milk
Remember The Milk is the best online to-do list out there right now. It plugs into a slew of other services, including their killer Gmail add-on, Netvibes, iGoogle, Jott, offline support with Google Gears, and a promised iPhone standalone app. Given its wide array of features, it should instantly help any student to prioritize their tasks and become more efficient.
Google Docs/Calendar/Gmail/Scholar
I decided to lump all of Google's services that are good for students together. I think that they provide a tremendous amount of value to users and can be put to great use in an academic setting. Google Docs provides a web interface for a suite of tools to make, view, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. As I've said before, the features of Google Docs might not be on par with its Office counterparts, but it really shines when it comes to sharing and collaboration. This makes it perfect for working on group projects or spreading notes around.
Google Calendar can help keep a student's hectic schedule in line. Managing time is one of the hardest parts of being a student and Google Calendar can help . Did I mention that Remember The Milk integrates with it also?
Gmail includes a lot of great features to keep your incoming stream of email organized and prioritized. Gmail's labels help to keep your email organized and bring attention to those requiring your attention. It's helpful, even if you don't receive a large volume of email.
Google Scholar provides an excellent resource for students, looking for sources for research papers. While most schools already provide resources for students in this department, Google Scholar's excellent search provides a good point of discovery.
Evernote
Evernote is a great new web service to handle all of your notes, photos, and clippings from around the web. It has clients for Mac, PC, and various mobile phones, including the iPhone. Robert Scoble did a nice interview and demo with the company's CEO if you want to get a thorough overview. While it might be hard, at first, to integrate Evernote into your workflow, your productivity and organization will see the benefits.
Easybib
This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it's an indispensable resource for every student. Easybib lets you pick from a variety of types of sources, then you just fill in all of the information that you can, and Easybib will automatically generate a MLA or APA formatted works cited page.
Apart from being the premiere social network for students, Facebook also offers some applications, such as Courses 2.0 and Study Groups that have academic value. These applications leverage Facebook's social networking features in order to connect students for the purpose of studying or collaborating on coursework. Facebook is also a necessity for any college student, if for no other purpose than meeting new people and staying in the loop on parties around campus.
Socialbib
Socialbib is a really interesting service, where students offer up old textbooks that they no longer have a need for and trade them for ones that they do need. This could potentially cut down on otherwise absurdly expensive textbooks for students.
Those are my recommendations for making school life a little easier. Services like these are easing the load put on students and making everything slightly more enjoyable. For the students out there, what web apps do you find yourself using?
Fewer Minnesota students hit yearly progress goals
From: Minnesota Public Radio
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/05/average_yearly_progress/?refid=0
by Tim Nelson
Minnesota is falling farther behind a key national education goal. Rankings just released by the state's Department of Education show the number of schools making annual yearly progress fell nearly 10 percent last year. And for the first time, most of the decline was in the suburbs.
St. Paul, Minn. — This is one of those good news, bad news stories.
The good news came earlier this summer, when test results showed that Minnesota kids improved their reading and math scores on the statewide tests they took in April.
The trouble is, they didn't improve enough. Each year, the No Child Left Behind education law ratchets up the goals for standardized tests a little bit, intended to get every kid learning at a level appropriate for their age. Every kid is supposed to catch up by 2014.
But even though students did get better test scores this year, only half the schools in Minnesota made the higher federal goal this year. That's down from two-thirds last year and three-quarters in 2006.
Most of this year's decline was in the suburbs, since Minneapolis and St. Paul schools showed little change. Only four more urban schools were added to the state's watch list this year, out of about 160.
But data from the Minnesota Department of Education show that more than half of the 208 schools that are new to the state's watch list are in the outlying Twin Cities area.
That list now includes surprises like Edina High school, Eastview High School in Apple Valley and Woodbury Junior High. Students in fully half the suburban schools are considered to not be making good progress, compared to a third just last year.
Jim Angermeyr, an analyst with Bloomington Public Schools, which added a school to the watch list this year, says the district itself is also on the list for the first time.
"Suburbs have been able to dodge that bullet a bit longer than urban schools because they are both less diverse and have fewer of the high risk students. As a group that was probably next in line to be flagged, it was probably suburban schools."
They aren't likely to be alone for long, either. By next year most of the schools in the state will probably be on the state's watch list.
Being on that list can trigger a whole list of penalties, from forcing schools to offer private tutoring, replacing the staff and even sending kids elsewhere.
Very few schools are facing anything that drastic, though.
About half the schools that didn't make the grade this year fell short in only one of about ten factors that are used to calculate annual progress, or AYP. Those factors range from attendance to how kids with subsidized meals scored on tests.
"It might have been English Language Learners, or special education students," said Education Commissioner Alice Seagren.
There's more to consider about a school than whether its legally defined as in need of improvement, she says.
"You have to look in general at your school site. We don't have that many districts or schools that have chronically underperformed," said Seagren. "So you have to look at the total package, if you will, before you get real concerned."
The state is rising to the occasion, according to Seagren. It launched math and science academies this summer to better train teachers and last year started similar program for school principals. Better teaching is widely considered a good way to turn the trend around.
But the steady decline in the number of schools considered to be working is the center of a growing debate in education.
Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz has been at the center of the debate this summer. A former Mankato teacher, the First District Democrat also authored a bill to suspend the federal sanctions for schools that don't make the grade, at least temporarily. Schools need help, he says.
"If you're going to have these penalties, they better be showing that they're doing what we want them to do. As it appears right now, they take resources from the school and lower the scores. I'd say that's indicative of what's happening, so I'd like to see a change in it."
Walz's bill was turned down in a preliminary hearing, but it's helping spur sentiment in Washington that the goal of getting every kid to grade level in the next six years may be unrealistic.
A final set of this year's test results, from a new science test, is due out later this summer.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/05/average_yearly_progress/?refid=0
by Tim Nelson
Minnesota is falling farther behind a key national education goal. Rankings just released by the state's Department of Education show the number of schools making annual yearly progress fell nearly 10 percent last year. And for the first time, most of the decline was in the suburbs.
St. Paul, Minn. — This is one of those good news, bad news stories.
The good news came earlier this summer, when test results showed that Minnesota kids improved their reading and math scores on the statewide tests they took in April.
The trouble is, they didn't improve enough. Each year, the No Child Left Behind education law ratchets up the goals for standardized tests a little bit, intended to get every kid learning at a level appropriate for their age. Every kid is supposed to catch up by 2014.
But even though students did get better test scores this year, only half the schools in Minnesota made the higher federal goal this year. That's down from two-thirds last year and three-quarters in 2006.
Most of this year's decline was in the suburbs, since Minneapolis and St. Paul schools showed little change. Only four more urban schools were added to the state's watch list this year, out of about 160.
But data from the Minnesota Department of Education show that more than half of the 208 schools that are new to the state's watch list are in the outlying Twin Cities area.
That list now includes surprises like Edina High school, Eastview High School in Apple Valley and Woodbury Junior High. Students in fully half the suburban schools are considered to not be making good progress, compared to a third just last year.
Jim Angermeyr, an analyst with Bloomington Public Schools, which added a school to the watch list this year, says the district itself is also on the list for the first time.
"Suburbs have been able to dodge that bullet a bit longer than urban schools because they are both less diverse and have fewer of the high risk students. As a group that was probably next in line to be flagged, it was probably suburban schools."
They aren't likely to be alone for long, either. By next year most of the schools in the state will probably be on the state's watch list.
Being on that list can trigger a whole list of penalties, from forcing schools to offer private tutoring, replacing the staff and even sending kids elsewhere.
Very few schools are facing anything that drastic, though.
About half the schools that didn't make the grade this year fell short in only one of about ten factors that are used to calculate annual progress, or AYP. Those factors range from attendance to how kids with subsidized meals scored on tests.
"It might have been English Language Learners, or special education students," said Education Commissioner Alice Seagren.
There's more to consider about a school than whether its legally defined as in need of improvement, she says.
"You have to look in general at your school site. We don't have that many districts or schools that have chronically underperformed," said Seagren. "So you have to look at the total package, if you will, before you get real concerned."
The state is rising to the occasion, according to Seagren. It launched math and science academies this summer to better train teachers and last year started similar program for school principals. Better teaching is widely considered a good way to turn the trend around.
But the steady decline in the number of schools considered to be working is the center of a growing debate in education.
Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz has been at the center of the debate this summer. A former Mankato teacher, the First District Democrat also authored a bill to suspend the federal sanctions for schools that don't make the grade, at least temporarily. Schools need help, he says.
"If you're going to have these penalties, they better be showing that they're doing what we want them to do. As it appears right now, they take resources from the school and lower the scores. I'd say that's indicative of what's happening, so I'd like to see a change in it."
Walz's bill was turned down in a preliminary hearing, but it's helping spur sentiment in Washington that the goal of getting every kid to grade level in the next six years may be unrealistic.
A final set of this year's test results, from a new science test, is due out later this summer.
Ariz. educators embrace trend of technology in their curriculum
From: The Arizona Republic
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2008/08/06/20080806bts-classtech0806.html
by Megan Gordon
Just two decades ago, many schools had only a few computers and taught lessons about typing. But Monday marked a drastic change for Arizona schools as one of the first K-5 technology academies opened its doors to students.
Scales Technology Academy in Tempe boasts a 1-1 ratio of students to laptop computers. The school's principal, David Diokno, said it is the first Arizona elementary school to do so. The Arizona Department of Education does not track such information.
"We saw that there was a need that was expressed by parents in our district," Diokno said. "We did a lot of research, and now we're opening a brand-new school with close to 600 students."
The academy is part of a growing trend within state districts to incorporate technology into classrooms. Almost every school district has some ban on tech toys that many say interfere with classroom discipline, such as cellphones and iPods. Recently, many of these districts are using some of the banned technology as a way to educate students in the classroom.
"A lot of our classrooms use Smart Boards," said Kristen Landry, Madison Elementary School District marketing and communication director. "The computer image is projected onto a screen. The students can go up to the screen and touch it. It's almost like the iPhone."
Smart Board is a product many districts around the Valley have integrated into classrooms. This interactive white board combines the uses of overheads, scanners, projectors and the Internet into one system. It can cost upwards of $5,000 to install one Smart Board.
"I truly believe Smart Boards can be used in every single classroom subject," said Diokno, whose school has the board in every class. "Almost any subject you can think of can be enhanced through the power of the interactive white board."
Other tech toys that districts use are Nintendo Wii for fitness and education games, podcasts and Internet resources such as YouTube and Google Earth. VoiceThread is a Web site that allows teachers to upload classroom videos for students to comment on.
"I can put a picture or a video of something that is going on in our class on (the site) and after, kids can plug a microphone into the computer and add comments or thoughts verbally," said John Enright, a second-grade teacher at Madison Rose Lane Elementary School in Phoenix. "It's kind of like graffiti or message board. It's one way that I can assess kids who have trouble learning in the written form."
With all the new technology, some parents are worried that it has become a "convenient curriculum."
"It's made things way too easy for assignments. It's too cosmetic and too easy," said Chandler resident David Harbster, a parent of two grown children. "To me, the computer is just a very big fancy filing cabinet. I think we need to slow this baby down. It's a two-dimensional space on a computer, but we live in a three-dimensional world."
Harbster said he agrees that technology is a good learning tool but believes that many schools are overusing it.
"It's almost become a video drug," he said. "I think it's becoming, "How much we can do?' rather than asking what the real benefits of this technology are. It's very seductive, and it's designed to be that way. And schools are trying to stay ahead as best they can, but it's too much."
Diokno said Scales Technology Academy stresses Tempe Elementary School District's curriculum standards but uses technology to enhance the learning process.
"We're not going to be only about technology. We're going to infuse it into the curriculum," he said. "Our kids are in the digital age. So now we are enhancing our curriculum through the infusion of technology. It's an added resource."
Many teachers and districts are at different stages of the implementation of technology in the classroom. Although it may be challenging and time-consuming to keep up with new technology uses, Madison teacher Enright said it is how children learn.
"I think the imagery we use with technology is really a more effective way to teach kids than simply telling them something," he said. "The bonus is a lot of those materials are interactive, which is a better model of teaching."
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2008/08/06/20080806bts-classtech0806.html
by Megan Gordon
Just two decades ago, many schools had only a few computers and taught lessons about typing. But Monday marked a drastic change for Arizona schools as one of the first K-5 technology academies opened its doors to students.
Scales Technology Academy in Tempe boasts a 1-1 ratio of students to laptop computers. The school's principal, David Diokno, said it is the first Arizona elementary school to do so. The Arizona Department of Education does not track such information.
"We saw that there was a need that was expressed by parents in our district," Diokno said. "We did a lot of research, and now we're opening a brand-new school with close to 600 students."
The academy is part of a growing trend within state districts to incorporate technology into classrooms. Almost every school district has some ban on tech toys that many say interfere with classroom discipline, such as cellphones and iPods. Recently, many of these districts are using some of the banned technology as a way to educate students in the classroom.
"A lot of our classrooms use Smart Boards," said Kristen Landry, Madison Elementary School District marketing and communication director. "The computer image is projected onto a screen. The students can go up to the screen and touch it. It's almost like the iPhone."
Smart Board is a product many districts around the Valley have integrated into classrooms. This interactive white board combines the uses of overheads, scanners, projectors and the Internet into one system. It can cost upwards of $5,000 to install one Smart Board.
"I truly believe Smart Boards can be used in every single classroom subject," said Diokno, whose school has the board in every class. "Almost any subject you can think of can be enhanced through the power of the interactive white board."
Other tech toys that districts use are Nintendo Wii for fitness and education games, podcasts and Internet resources such as YouTube and Google Earth. VoiceThread is a Web site that allows teachers to upload classroom videos for students to comment on.
"I can put a picture or a video of something that is going on in our class on (the site) and after, kids can plug a microphone into the computer and add comments or thoughts verbally," said John Enright, a second-grade teacher at Madison Rose Lane Elementary School in Phoenix. "It's kind of like graffiti or message board. It's one way that I can assess kids who have trouble learning in the written form."
With all the new technology, some parents are worried that it has become a "convenient curriculum."
"It's made things way too easy for assignments. It's too cosmetic and too easy," said Chandler resident David Harbster, a parent of two grown children. "To me, the computer is just a very big fancy filing cabinet. I think we need to slow this baby down. It's a two-dimensional space on a computer, but we live in a three-dimensional world."
Harbster said he agrees that technology is a good learning tool but believes that many schools are overusing it.
"It's almost become a video drug," he said. "I think it's becoming, "How much we can do?' rather than asking what the real benefits of this technology are. It's very seductive, and it's designed to be that way. And schools are trying to stay ahead as best they can, but it's too much."
Diokno said Scales Technology Academy stresses Tempe Elementary School District's curriculum standards but uses technology to enhance the learning process.
"We're not going to be only about technology. We're going to infuse it into the curriculum," he said. "Our kids are in the digital age. So now we are enhancing our curriculum through the infusion of technology. It's an added resource."
Many teachers and districts are at different stages of the implementation of technology in the classroom. Although it may be challenging and time-consuming to keep up with new technology uses, Madison teacher Enright said it is how children learn.
"I think the imagery we use with technology is really a more effective way to teach kids than simply telling them something," he said. "The bonus is a lot of those materials are interactive, which is a better model of teaching."
A positive attitude is key to maintaining a positive classroom climate
From: Teachers At Risk
http://www.teachersatrisk.com/2008/08/06/a-positive-attittude-is-key-to-maintaining-a-positive-classroom-climate/
http://www.teachersatrisk.com/2008/08/06/a-positive-attittude-is-key-to-maintaining-a-positive-classroom-climate/
A positive attitude is key to maintaining a positive classroom environment.
I couldn’t agree more with Wade Boggs when he says
A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events and outcomes. It is a catalyst and it sparks extraordinary results.
In an earlier post, I wrote about how I set about establishing a positive classroom climate at the beginning of the semester and included the Slideshare presentation that I created to summarize the classroom agreements and what they meant. If you want a copy of the Slideshare presentation I’ve created , just email me I’d be delighted to send it to you.
Implementing the classroom agreements of mutual respect, appreciation/no put downs, attentive listening and the right to pass establishes a positive classroom climate where students can feel save and valued. Of course establishing a safe, positive climate and maintaining it day in and day out are two different things. What’s the key to maintaining that safe, positive classroom climate once it is established. Without a doubt, it’s a positive attitude.
If you have a positive attitude you’ll believe and act as if all students will be successful in your class. If you have a positive attitude there are no losers in your classroom despite what you’ve might have heard. Students will live up to your expectations. Think and act as if students are trouble, believe me they won’t disappoint you. I’ve learned that the hard way in my early years of teaching.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. I’ve found that often well meaning colleagues will give me a heads up about the troublemakers they’ve had in their classes. When they find out I’ll be teaching these kids, they tell me how bad the students were. Just for a nanosecond I think great. Just what I need- trouble making students. But then I quickly remind myself that attitude is not a useful attitude to have about these new students whom I don’t even know. I really try hard not to prejudge them. I figure even if these kids were troublesome in the past, it doesn’t mean they are now. Things change.
A few years back I had two students whom I’ll call Chris and Kyle, not their real names of course. They came to my class with a negative reputation and promptly started living up to it. After a few days I decided that I wasn’t going to engage these kids in their battle. It would be totally counter productive to use all my energy battling with these two fourteen year olds, and besides they’d probably win the battle. So I decided that I needed to sit down and talk with them to see what’s going on.
Chris and Kyle proudly told me about their reputation for being bad in class. I told them I didn’t believe they it. They couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard about them, so they promptly gave me all kinds of proof to support their reputation.
I decided that I would show them I didn’t believe that they were trouble makers and would treat them with respect and worked extra hard to develop a positive relationship with them. Whenever they were disrespectful to me, I’d go to them quietly and ask them why they were being disrespectful to me when I wasn’t being disrespectful to them. I did the same thing when they weren’t listening attentively or showing appreciation. They’d actually apologize for their inappropriate behaviour. I figured being disrespectful had just become a habit with them, and they would learn to be respectful over time. It wasn’t easy, but these two students got to see that they didn’t need to live up to their reputation as trouble makers because I refused to see our relationship as student vs teacher, as them vs me. I really did respect them as human beings and really did expect them to respect me as a human being.
I thank the classroom agreements of mutual respect/no put downs , appreciation, attentive listening and the right to pass for establishing a positive framework that enabled mutual respect to develop. Chris and Kyle became my biggest boosters and did all kinds of positive PR for me and even came back to visit all the time to laugh about how immature they were in grade nine and how they were not like that now. They were proud of being respectful and not of being troublesome.
I truly believe that a teacher’s positive attitude does cause a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events and outcomes. A teacher’s positive attitude is a catalyst and it sparks extraordinary results. Just because I believe this doesn’t mean that I don’t forget this lesson too from time to time because I get distracted by the challenges of my own life, and I regretfully adopt a negative attitude towards a student. I know better, but I also know I’m human and not perfect. When this happens, I apologize to show my respect for them. I want them to see mutual respect in action in my classroom.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Teaching Secrets: The First Days of School (Part 1)
From: Teacher Magazine
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/08/05/43tln_fungpart1.h19.html
By Jane Fung
You’ve earned your first teaching job. Congratulations! Now what do you do? As I anticipate my 22nd opening day of school in California, I think back to my first years of teaching and all those things I wish I had known then that I know now. To help make your life as a new teacher a little easier these first few months of school, I’ve interviewed some of my friends (colleagues, mentees, and former student teachers) and collected a few helpful hints. As you read through them, please feel free to contribute your own ideas in the Comments section.
I will begin my first teaching assignment very soon. Any quick pointers?
No matter where or what you teach, there are some common things you can do to make your first weeks and months in the classroom a little easier. Here are just a few of them:
Find a Friend – Don’t work alone in your classroom. Go out and meet other teachers and staff. They are your best resource for getting to know your school. Find a mentor! There will always be teachers who are willing to open up their classrooms, time, and expertise to help. Be open to working within and outside of your grade-level. Collaborating with others will not only help you develop as an educator, but your students will benefit from the experience as well.
Take a Tour – Get to know your school’s physical layout. Walk around with a colleague or explore on your own. Find the bathrooms (adults and students) and how to access them. Will you need a key? Where are the nurse, resource teacher, office manager, cafeteria, and plant manager located? Where are the different grade-levels located? Where do students play during recess? (I hope you have recess.)
Planning & Schedules – Ask other teachers at your grade-level what they usually do for the first week. Plan time and activities during the first days for students to get to know each other and you. Overplan! It is much easier to have more planned and not get to everything than not to have enough. Create a general schedule for the first days of school. You can always adjust times accordingly when needed later on.
Procedures – Have a plan for classroom procedures. Will students sharpen pencils as needed? When can they use the bathroom? Are cell phones allowed? Where are materials kept? (More tips below.)
Classroom Management & Expectations – Know your discipline/classroom management strategies. Take time to think about what is and is not acceptable in your classroom. What kinds of things are NOT okay? How are you going to handle them? Think about what kind of learning environment you would like to create for and with students. Work as a class to set expectations for behavior and work habits. Chart, model, practice, and reinforce behavior expectations. Keep it simple—having a long list of rules may be difficult to monitor and enforce. Some of my primary school favorites are: Be Nice, Be Responsible, and Be Safe.
Take Notes – Have a place where you can jot down observations quickly throughout the day. Informal observations early in the year can be helpful further down the road if you have a student who may have a special need or is displaying behavior that continues to disrupt the class. Date each observation.
Know Your Students – Before school starts, find out who your students are. Do any of them have special needs and/or an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that you should be aware of? What level of English development are the English Learners in the class? Do you have students that are identified as gifted and talented? Having more information about your students will help you better plan for their needs.
Take Time to Celebrate – Teaching is not easy, but it can be extremely rewarding. Sometimes we forget to celebrate the small accomplishments that take place everyday in our class. Take time each day to recognize something positive. Share it with a friend, loved one or colleague.
What school procedures should I know before the start of the school year?
Here are some basic things to know before students arrive (or as shortly thereafter as possible!):
Getting your first set of keys to the classroom is like getting keys to your first car or home. You are filled with excitement, but a little nervous at the same time. First step, find your classroom! Once you figure out how to unlock the door, step inside and just sit down. Words of caution, all classrooms are not the same. I have walked into a brand new, clean, empty classroom waiting to be moved into; and also dirty classrooms filled with unwanted materials left by the previous occupant. Whatever the condition, this is your classroom now. With luck, it will be home for at least the next school year, so make it yours.
It’s a good idea to survey the furniture and equipment in the room. Do you have enough chairs and tables/desks for students? Is there a place to store your materials? Are the computers working? Where is the projector, CD player, and screen? Start a list of things that are missing or needed. You may not get that kidney-shaped table or extra teacher chair, but it can’t hurt to ask.
Now comes the fun part, arranging the tables and chairs. Sometimes you have a picture in your mind of how you want the desks arranged — and other times you may not know where to begin. If you need ideas, take a peek inside other teachers’ classrooms. Talk to them about why the room is arranged that way and think about your own ideas for the classroom. Visualize where you may be teaching in the room and make sure all students will be able to see. Think about traffic flow; will there be enough room for students to move within the classroom without bumping into each other?
Some teachers can set up a room and leave it the entire year, but I am not one of them. If the class set-up does not work for students once they get there, I change it until it does. It’s your room; play with it until it works for you and your students.
One final tip for now: I’d be surprised to learn that there is a new teacher in America who hasn’t come across Harry and Rosemary Wong’s invaluable book, The First Days of School. But you may be less familiar with their eight-year series of advice columns, many of which are also aimed at the needs of novice teachers. Check them out!
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/08/05/43tln_fungpart1.h19.html
By Jane Fung
You’ve earned your first teaching job. Congratulations! Now what do you do? As I anticipate my 22nd opening day of school in California, I think back to my first years of teaching and all those things I wish I had known then that I know now. To help make your life as a new teacher a little easier these first few months of school, I’ve interviewed some of my friends (colleagues, mentees, and former student teachers) and collected a few helpful hints. As you read through them, please feel free to contribute your own ideas in the Comments section.
I will begin my first teaching assignment very soon. Any quick pointers?
No matter where or what you teach, there are some common things you can do to make your first weeks and months in the classroom a little easier. Here are just a few of them:
Find a Friend – Don’t work alone in your classroom. Go out and meet other teachers and staff. They are your best resource for getting to know your school. Find a mentor! There will always be teachers who are willing to open up their classrooms, time, and expertise to help. Be open to working within and outside of your grade-level. Collaborating with others will not only help you develop as an educator, but your students will benefit from the experience as well.
Take a Tour – Get to know your school’s physical layout. Walk around with a colleague or explore on your own. Find the bathrooms (adults and students) and how to access them. Will you need a key? Where are the nurse, resource teacher, office manager, cafeteria, and plant manager located? Where are the different grade-levels located? Where do students play during recess? (I hope you have recess.)
Planning & Schedules – Ask other teachers at your grade-level what they usually do for the first week. Plan time and activities during the first days for students to get to know each other and you. Overplan! It is much easier to have more planned and not get to everything than not to have enough. Create a general schedule for the first days of school. You can always adjust times accordingly when needed later on.
Procedures – Have a plan for classroom procedures. Will students sharpen pencils as needed? When can they use the bathroom? Are cell phones allowed? Where are materials kept? (More tips below.)
Classroom Management & Expectations – Know your discipline/classroom management strategies. Take time to think about what is and is not acceptable in your classroom. What kinds of things are NOT okay? How are you going to handle them? Think about what kind of learning environment you would like to create for and with students. Work as a class to set expectations for behavior and work habits. Chart, model, practice, and reinforce behavior expectations. Keep it simple—having a long list of rules may be difficult to monitor and enforce. Some of my primary school favorites are: Be Nice, Be Responsible, and Be Safe.
Take Notes – Have a place where you can jot down observations quickly throughout the day. Informal observations early in the year can be helpful further down the road if you have a student who may have a special need or is displaying behavior that continues to disrupt the class. Date each observation.
Know Your Students – Before school starts, find out who your students are. Do any of them have special needs and/or an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that you should be aware of? What level of English development are the English Learners in the class? Do you have students that are identified as gifted and talented? Having more information about your students will help you better plan for their needs.
Take Time to Celebrate – Teaching is not easy, but it can be extremely rewarding. Sometimes we forget to celebrate the small accomplishments that take place everyday in our class. Take time each day to recognize something positive. Share it with a friend, loved one or colleague.
What school procedures should I know before the start of the school year?
Here are some basic things to know before students arrive (or as shortly thereafter as possible!):
- How to take attendance and (if it’s not all computerized) where to send attendance cards.
- Where to sign in and out each day.
- Official reporting hours.
- How to arrange for a sub when ill.
- What is the general bell schedule for recess, lunch, and dismissal?
- How do students purchase a lunch and where do they eat?
- What if a student becomes ill or gets hurt in class?
- Where do students play at recess/lunch?
- Where (depending on grade level) do I pick up my students?
- Where do I dismiss students at the end of the day?
- In case of an emergency (or fire drill), what do I do?
- How do I contact the office if there is an emergency?
- How often will my class be cleaned?
- Procedures for ordering class materials and what is available.
- Where do I check out playground and/or PE equipment?
- Will I have a mentor?
Getting your first set of keys to the classroom is like getting keys to your first car or home. You are filled with excitement, but a little nervous at the same time. First step, find your classroom! Once you figure out how to unlock the door, step inside and just sit down. Words of caution, all classrooms are not the same. I have walked into a brand new, clean, empty classroom waiting to be moved into; and also dirty classrooms filled with unwanted materials left by the previous occupant. Whatever the condition, this is your classroom now. With luck, it will be home for at least the next school year, so make it yours.
It’s a good idea to survey the furniture and equipment in the room. Do you have enough chairs and tables/desks for students? Is there a place to store your materials? Are the computers working? Where is the projector, CD player, and screen? Start a list of things that are missing or needed. You may not get that kidney-shaped table or extra teacher chair, but it can’t hurt to ask.
Now comes the fun part, arranging the tables and chairs. Sometimes you have a picture in your mind of how you want the desks arranged — and other times you may not know where to begin. If you need ideas, take a peek inside other teachers’ classrooms. Talk to them about why the room is arranged that way and think about your own ideas for the classroom. Visualize where you may be teaching in the room and make sure all students will be able to see. Think about traffic flow; will there be enough room for students to move within the classroom without bumping into each other?
Some teachers can set up a room and leave it the entire year, but I am not one of them. If the class set-up does not work for students once they get there, I change it until it does. It’s your room; play with it until it works for you and your students.
One final tip for now: I’d be surprised to learn that there is a new teacher in America who hasn’t come across Harry and Rosemary Wong’s invaluable book, The First Days of School. But you may be less familiar with their eight-year series of advice columns, many of which are also aimed at the needs of novice teachers. Check them out!
Oregon Tech Looks To Be World's First Fully-Geothermal Campus
From: OPB News
http://news.opb.org/article/2760-oregon-tech-would-be-worlds-first-fully-geothermal-campus/
BY ETHAN LINDSEY
Oregon Institute of Technology, in Klamath Falls, outlined plans Tuesday, to build a $7.6 million geothermal power plant on campus.
In a few years' time, the school says it will become the first university in the world to be powered completely by hot water. Central Oregon correspondent Ethan Lindsey reports.
The school is already entirely heated by hot water.
And to hear boosters talk about it, the country's energy future is coming to the surface - right here.
Klamath Falls sits near a fault line in the planet's crust. Engineers can pull heat and energy right out of the earth.
It's cheap and renewable, says Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. He was on campus to promote federal support for the project - to the tune of at least $1 million.
Ron Wyden: “Oregon, and in particular this part of the state, can be the Saudi Arabia of renewables. All the sun, and geothermal, and wind. We're really well positioned to go gangbusters on renewables.”
Critics say geothermal power is limited and won't be much more than a small piece of an overall energy solution.
The school says that's why it hopes the plant will also allow students to learn and research geothermal innovation.
http://news.opb.org/article/2760-oregon-tech-would-be-worlds-first-fully-geothermal-campus/
BY ETHAN LINDSEY
Oregon Institute of Technology, in Klamath Falls, outlined plans Tuesday, to build a $7.6 million geothermal power plant on campus.
In a few years' time, the school says it will become the first university in the world to be powered completely by hot water. Central Oregon correspondent Ethan Lindsey reports.
The school is already entirely heated by hot water.
And to hear boosters talk about it, the country's energy future is coming to the surface - right here.
Klamath Falls sits near a fault line in the planet's crust. Engineers can pull heat and energy right out of the earth.
It's cheap and renewable, says Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. He was on campus to promote federal support for the project - to the tune of at least $1 million.
Ron Wyden: “Oregon, and in particular this part of the state, can be the Saudi Arabia of renewables. All the sun, and geothermal, and wind. We're really well positioned to go gangbusters on renewables.”
Critics say geothermal power is limited and won't be much more than a small piece of an overall energy solution.
The school says that's why it hopes the plant will also allow students to learn and research geothermal innovation.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Kids Who Sleep Poorly at Risk for Being Overweight
From: Health Day
http://healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=618082
Author: Robert Preidt
Even an hour's less rest linked to doubled chance of weight gain, study finds
MONDAY, Aug. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Getting too little sleep or not spending enough time in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is associated with being overweight among children and teens, a new U.S. study.
For three consecutive nights, researchers assessed the sleep patterns of 335 youngsters, aged 7 to 17. They looked at total sleep time, time spent in REM, and time it took to fall asleep. Body-mass index was checked at the start of the study, and 45 participants (13.4 percent) were overweight, while 49 (14.6 percent) were at risk for becoming overweight.
Compared to normal-weight children, those who were overweight slept about 22 minutes less per night and had lower sleep efficiency (percentage of time in bed that a person is asleep), shorter REM sleep, less eye activity during REM sleep, and a longer wait before the first REM period.
After they adjusted for other factors, the researchers concluded that one hour less of total sleep was associated with a twofold increased risk of being overweight. One hour less of REM sleep was associated with a threefold increased risk.
Although the precise mechanisms are currently under investigation, the association between short sleep duration and overweight may be attributed to the interaction of behavioral and biological changes as a result of sleep deprivation, wrote Dr. Xianchen Liu, of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, and colleagues.
They explained that sleep loss causes changes in hormone levels that may affect hunger, and less sleep also means a person has more waking hours in which to eat. Sleep loss also contributes to fatigue the following day, which may lead to less physical activity and fewer calories burned.
Given the fact that the prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents continues to increase and chronic sleep insufficiency becomes more prevalent in modern society, family- and school-based sleep interventions that aim to enhance sleep hygiene and increase sleep duration may have important public health implications for the prevention and intervention of obesity and type 2 diabetes in children, the authors concluded.
"Furthermore, our results demonstrate an important relationship between REM sleep and high BMI and obesity, suggesting that the short sleep-obesity association may be attributed to reduced REM sleep time and decreased activity during REM sleep," they wrote.
The study was published in the August issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
More information
The Nemours Foundation has more about overweight and obesity in children.
http://healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=618082
Author: Robert Preidt
Even an hour's less rest linked to doubled chance of weight gain, study finds
MONDAY, Aug. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Getting too little sleep or not spending enough time in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is associated with being overweight among children and teens, a new U.S. study.
For three consecutive nights, researchers assessed the sleep patterns of 335 youngsters, aged 7 to 17. They looked at total sleep time, time spent in REM, and time it took to fall asleep. Body-mass index was checked at the start of the study, and 45 participants (13.4 percent) were overweight, while 49 (14.6 percent) were at risk for becoming overweight.
Compared to normal-weight children, those who were overweight slept about 22 minutes less per night and had lower sleep efficiency (percentage of time in bed that a person is asleep), shorter REM sleep, less eye activity during REM sleep, and a longer wait before the first REM period.
After they adjusted for other factors, the researchers concluded that one hour less of total sleep was associated with a twofold increased risk of being overweight. One hour less of REM sleep was associated with a threefold increased risk.
Although the precise mechanisms are currently under investigation, the association between short sleep duration and overweight may be attributed to the interaction of behavioral and biological changes as a result of sleep deprivation, wrote Dr. Xianchen Liu, of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, and colleagues.
They explained that sleep loss causes changes in hormone levels that may affect hunger, and less sleep also means a person has more waking hours in which to eat. Sleep loss also contributes to fatigue the following day, which may lead to less physical activity and fewer calories burned.
Given the fact that the prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents continues to increase and chronic sleep insufficiency becomes more prevalent in modern society, family- and school-based sleep interventions that aim to enhance sleep hygiene and increase sleep duration may have important public health implications for the prevention and intervention of obesity and type 2 diabetes in children, the authors concluded.
"Furthermore, our results demonstrate an important relationship between REM sleep and high BMI and obesity, suggesting that the short sleep-obesity association may be attributed to reduced REM sleep time and decreased activity during REM sleep," they wrote.
The study was published in the August issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
More information
The Nemours Foundation has more about overweight and obesity in children.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Excellence in Teaching Technology
From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/funding/funding-news/index.cfm?i=54738
Primary Topic Channel: Grants
$2,000 for classroom technology integration
This award recognizes and encourages the integration of a quality technology education program within the school curriculum.
Contact Information
Contact Website:
http://www.iteaconnect.org/Awards/granthearlihy.htm
http://www.eschoolnews.com/funding/funding-news/index.cfm?i=54738
Primary Topic Channel: Grants
$2,000 for classroom technology integration
This award recognizes and encourages the integration of a quality technology education program within the school curriculum.
Contact Information
Contact Website:
http://www.iteaconnect.org/Awards/granthearlihy.htm
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Planning for Your First Day at School
From: NEA
http://www.nea.org/teachexperience/ifc080715.html
by Linda Starr
On the first day of school, the secret to success is in the planning, not the pedagogy. How's your back-to-school planning going? Have you forgotten anything? Our checklist can help!
It's official. You're a teacher! You aced all your education courses, know the subject matter backward and forward, can rattle off the names and philosophies of dozens of educational theorists, and achieved a pretty respectable score on the state certification exam. You finally have an actual job and an official class list. There's only one problem. The first day of school is drawing near and you have no idea what to do. Are you really ready to face that first terrifying day?
The secret to success in any new endeavor is planning. But for this particular endeavor, don't just plan, over plan. Don't just prepare, over prepare. Don't just write enough lessons plans to fill one class or a single day. (They never do!) Write more than enough!
When it comes to planning ahead, of course, the secret to success is in the details. Use the checklist below to help you with any details you might have overlooked in planning for your first day at school as the teacher.
Prepare Yourself
Although it's not generally a good idea to clutter your classroom with framed family pictures or your collection of ceramic apples, there are a few personal items that can help you make it through the year. They include:
A diary. Take a few minutes at the end of each day to jot down your thoughts and impressions about the day's events. Was there a lesson that went particularly well, or particularly badly? Why? Did a difficult discipline problem arise? How did you handle it? What was the result? What successes did you experience? What compliments did you receive? As the year progresses, the diary will help you identify what works and what doesn't word, and it will help you find alternate strategies. It will also document your growth as a teacher, something you may not recognize otherwise. Who knows? There might even be a book in it!
A personal appointment calendar. Yes, a date book will come in handy for reminding yourself of faculty meetings, PPTs, and scheduled observations. More importantly, it can be used to document the unscheduled events that crop up during the day, and often come back to haunt you weeks later. You might think you'll never forget the day Darrell's father called to complain about your discipline policies (the first time!), or that Tamika's mother stopped in to request a speech evaluation, or what you did when Patrick bloodied Jose's nose on the playground. But you will! Jot it down immediately in your date book. And keep the date book in, not on, your desk!
A personal survival kit. Store (out of reach of students!) a personal teacher survival kit. Include such items as a small sewing kit, safety pins, bandages, suntan lotion, change, snacks, tea bags or coffee singles, bottled water, breath mints, tissues, hand sanitizer, a spare pair of pantyhose (if appropriate!), sneakers and socks, a scarf and gloves, and any other items that will make bad days and minor catastrophes a little easier to deal with. None of those things are absolutely necessary to your success as a teacher, of course, but having them handy will make your life a lot less stressful.
A sturdy canvas bag to keep it all in.
Prepare the Way
Confidence breeds competence. You'll feel a lot better about facing that first day of school if you take the time to become familiar with the school and with the people you'll be working with. Before school starts:
Familiarize yourself with the school building and grounds. Sure the principal took you on a quick tour, but how much did you absorb, or remember? Take the time before school starts to retrace your steps. Locate the bathrooms (not just the one closest to your classroom!), the gym, the cafeteria, the media center, and the nurse's office. Note where they are in relation to your classroom. Ask where resource classes are held. Find the audio-visual equipment and supply closet and ask about checkout procedures. Take notes or draw yourself a map.
Visit the school Web site. A school Web site can provide valuable information about the school and community, as well as insight into what's expected of students and teachers.
Review school policies and procedures. Ask about any procedures that are unclear. Learn the reasons for any policies that don't seem to make sense. Every school has its own history and problems. You'll be better equipped to follow policies and procedures correctly if you understand the reasoning behind them.
Make friends with the school support staff. They're the best friends a new teacher can have. Introduce, or re-introduce, yourself. Remember names. Ask about attendance and lunch count procedures, if you're not sure about them. Find out how to get an e-mail address. Make it clear you expect to make mistakes at first and that you know they might be inconvenienced. Ask how you can make their lives easier. Bring doughnuts!
Make a friend. Choose a teacher at your grade level or in a nearby classroom and ask if he or she would be available to answer questions or give friendly advice during the first few weeks of school. Let that teacher know that you're open to suggestions and eager to learn.
Prepare Your Classroom
Your classroom will be your home-away-from-home for the next nine months. You'll want it to reflect your personality, your educational philosophy, and your goals for your students. How do you do that? Consider some of these suggestions from veteran teachers.
Prepare bulletin boards. Most of your bulletin boards should be reserved for displaying student work. Simply cover the surfaces with butcher paper or a sturdy fabric and add a title and appropriate graphic. Depending on the grade level of your students, you might want to designate one bulletin board as a calendar board, which will remain constant throughout the year. Elementary and many middle school students also enjoy a student-of-the-week bulletin board. (To get the ball rolling, start with an autobiographical bulletin board of yourself!) For older students, consider setting aside a section of a bulletin board for posting the day's schedule, objectives, class assignments, homework, and upcoming events. Another section of the same board could hold a running assignment log and a handout folder (for students who are absent). For additional bulletin board ideas, check out Back to School Bulletin Boards and the Education World article Your Search for Bulletin Board Ideas Is Over!
Set up the room. Desks and activity centers can be arranged in a number of ways, depending on your individual teaching style. You'll find some of the most common room arrangements, along with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each, at Creating an Effective Physical Classroom Environment, Teachers Helping Teachers: Classroom Management, and the Education World article Do Seating Arrangements and Assignments = Classroom Management? Assign seats, at least initially. It will help you learn students' names, establish mutual respect, and maintain classroom control.
Obtain student supplies. Depending on the grade level of your students, you may need paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue, construction paper, rulers, or calculators. You'll also need textbooks and possibly workbooks. Be sure to count them!
Obtain teacher supplies. You'll probably need (among other things!) pens and markers, a stapler and staples, paper clips, tape, rubber bands, a plan book, a seating chart, hall passes, and attendance and lunch forms.
Post classroom information. Post your name, room number, and the grade or class you teach, both inside the classroom and outside the classroom door. If you have a telephone in your classroom, post important school numbers next to the phone. Include the main office, the nurse's office, and the phone numbers of nearby classrooms.
Although not, strictly speaking, part of preparing your classroom, this is also a good time to:
Review lesson plans. Look over your first day's lesson plans and obtain all necessary materials.
Prepare materials for students to take home the first day. These might include emergency data cards, a school welcome letter, a calendar showing the class specials schedule and upcoming events, a syllabus, and a homework assignment.
Check books out of the school or public library. Start a habit of reading aloud to your students for a few minutes each day, whatever their grade level!
Prepare Your Students' Parents
Establishing rapport and a cooperative working relationship with parents is essential to any teacher, but it's especially important to the first-year teacher, whose inexperience may be an issue for some parents. You can get off on the right foot with a welcome letter, sent to the parents of each student on your class list. Mail the letters a week or two before school starts. If that's not possible, send it home with students on the first day of school. You might include information about yourself, a list of supplies students will need to bring from home, a schedule of opening day activities, policies for parents' visits, phone calls, and volunteer opportunities (include a volunteer sign-up sheet!), a discussion of classroom rules and consequences, a curriculum overview or syllabus, and your school phone number and school e-mail address.
You can find a teacher welcome letter template among Education World's Back-to-School Templates, and in the Education World article Back-to-School Letters and Survival Kits Build Communication. You might want to send an introductory letter to your students too!
Be sure to have your principal, mentor teacher, or another veteran teacher check out parent or student welcome letters before you mail them. They know the community and school policies better than you do and are in a better position to evaluate whether your letter is effective and appropriate.
The Big Day Arrives
Survival Guide for New TeachersThis guide from the U.S. Department of Education offers lots of stories and advice from teachers who have been there.
Works4Me TipsThe NEA offers tips for teachers on such topics as content, teaching techniques, classroom management, technology, organization, and relationships.
The First Days of Middle SchoolMiddleWeb provides an extensive list of links to resources for all middle school teachers.
Ideas for New Teachers and Education StudentsThis site contains many links to valuable teaching resources, on such topics as how to write behavioral objectives, lesson planning, teaching methods, and much more!
New Teacher's Home PageAbout.com provides lots of resources, including articles, tools, suggested student reading lists, and more.
http://www.nea.org/teachexperience/ifc080715.html
by Linda Starr
On the first day of school, the secret to success is in the planning, not the pedagogy. How's your back-to-school planning going? Have you forgotten anything? Our checklist can help!
It's official. You're a teacher! You aced all your education courses, know the subject matter backward and forward, can rattle off the names and philosophies of dozens of educational theorists, and achieved a pretty respectable score on the state certification exam. You finally have an actual job and an official class list. There's only one problem. The first day of school is drawing near and you have no idea what to do. Are you really ready to face that first terrifying day?
The secret to success in any new endeavor is planning. But for this particular endeavor, don't just plan, over plan. Don't just prepare, over prepare. Don't just write enough lessons plans to fill one class or a single day. (They never do!) Write more than enough!
When it comes to planning ahead, of course, the secret to success is in the details. Use the checklist below to help you with any details you might have overlooked in planning for your first day at school as the teacher.
Prepare Yourself
Although it's not generally a good idea to clutter your classroom with framed family pictures or your collection of ceramic apples, there are a few personal items that can help you make it through the year. They include:
A diary. Take a few minutes at the end of each day to jot down your thoughts and impressions about the day's events. Was there a lesson that went particularly well, or particularly badly? Why? Did a difficult discipline problem arise? How did you handle it? What was the result? What successes did you experience? What compliments did you receive? As the year progresses, the diary will help you identify what works and what doesn't word, and it will help you find alternate strategies. It will also document your growth as a teacher, something you may not recognize otherwise. Who knows? There might even be a book in it!
A personal appointment calendar. Yes, a date book will come in handy for reminding yourself of faculty meetings, PPTs, and scheduled observations. More importantly, it can be used to document the unscheduled events that crop up during the day, and often come back to haunt you weeks later. You might think you'll never forget the day Darrell's father called to complain about your discipline policies (the first time!), or that Tamika's mother stopped in to request a speech evaluation, or what you did when Patrick bloodied Jose's nose on the playground. But you will! Jot it down immediately in your date book. And keep the date book in, not on, your desk!
A personal survival kit. Store (out of reach of students!) a personal teacher survival kit. Include such items as a small sewing kit, safety pins, bandages, suntan lotion, change, snacks, tea bags or coffee singles, bottled water, breath mints, tissues, hand sanitizer, a spare pair of pantyhose (if appropriate!), sneakers and socks, a scarf and gloves, and any other items that will make bad days and minor catastrophes a little easier to deal with. None of those things are absolutely necessary to your success as a teacher, of course, but having them handy will make your life a lot less stressful.
A sturdy canvas bag to keep it all in.
Prepare the Way
Confidence breeds competence. You'll feel a lot better about facing that first day of school if you take the time to become familiar with the school and with the people you'll be working with. Before school starts:
Familiarize yourself with the school building and grounds. Sure the principal took you on a quick tour, but how much did you absorb, or remember? Take the time before school starts to retrace your steps. Locate the bathrooms (not just the one closest to your classroom!), the gym, the cafeteria, the media center, and the nurse's office. Note where they are in relation to your classroom. Ask where resource classes are held. Find the audio-visual equipment and supply closet and ask about checkout procedures. Take notes or draw yourself a map.
Visit the school Web site. A school Web site can provide valuable information about the school and community, as well as insight into what's expected of students and teachers.
Review school policies and procedures. Ask about any procedures that are unclear. Learn the reasons for any policies that don't seem to make sense. Every school has its own history and problems. You'll be better equipped to follow policies and procedures correctly if you understand the reasoning behind them.
Make friends with the school support staff. They're the best friends a new teacher can have. Introduce, or re-introduce, yourself. Remember names. Ask about attendance and lunch count procedures, if you're not sure about them. Find out how to get an e-mail address. Make it clear you expect to make mistakes at first and that you know they might be inconvenienced. Ask how you can make their lives easier. Bring doughnuts!
Make a friend. Choose a teacher at your grade level or in a nearby classroom and ask if he or she would be available to answer questions or give friendly advice during the first few weeks of school. Let that teacher know that you're open to suggestions and eager to learn.
Prepare Your Classroom
Your classroom will be your home-away-from-home for the next nine months. You'll want it to reflect your personality, your educational philosophy, and your goals for your students. How do you do that? Consider some of these suggestions from veteran teachers.
Prepare bulletin boards. Most of your bulletin boards should be reserved for displaying student work. Simply cover the surfaces with butcher paper or a sturdy fabric and add a title and appropriate graphic. Depending on the grade level of your students, you might want to designate one bulletin board as a calendar board, which will remain constant throughout the year. Elementary and many middle school students also enjoy a student-of-the-week bulletin board. (To get the ball rolling, start with an autobiographical bulletin board of yourself!) For older students, consider setting aside a section of a bulletin board for posting the day's schedule, objectives, class assignments, homework, and upcoming events. Another section of the same board could hold a running assignment log and a handout folder (for students who are absent). For additional bulletin board ideas, check out Back to School Bulletin Boards and the Education World article Your Search for Bulletin Board Ideas Is Over!
Set up the room. Desks and activity centers can be arranged in a number of ways, depending on your individual teaching style. You'll find some of the most common room arrangements, along with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each, at Creating an Effective Physical Classroom Environment, Teachers Helping Teachers: Classroom Management, and the Education World article Do Seating Arrangements and Assignments = Classroom Management? Assign seats, at least initially. It will help you learn students' names, establish mutual respect, and maintain classroom control.
Obtain student supplies. Depending on the grade level of your students, you may need paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue, construction paper, rulers, or calculators. You'll also need textbooks and possibly workbooks. Be sure to count them!
Obtain teacher supplies. You'll probably need (among other things!) pens and markers, a stapler and staples, paper clips, tape, rubber bands, a plan book, a seating chart, hall passes, and attendance and lunch forms.
Post classroom information. Post your name, room number, and the grade or class you teach, both inside the classroom and outside the classroom door. If you have a telephone in your classroom, post important school numbers next to the phone. Include the main office, the nurse's office, and the phone numbers of nearby classrooms.
Although not, strictly speaking, part of preparing your classroom, this is also a good time to:
Review lesson plans. Look over your first day's lesson plans and obtain all necessary materials.
Prepare materials for students to take home the first day. These might include emergency data cards, a school welcome letter, a calendar showing the class specials schedule and upcoming events, a syllabus, and a homework assignment.
Check books out of the school or public library. Start a habit of reading aloud to your students for a few minutes each day, whatever their grade level!
Prepare Your Students' Parents
Establishing rapport and a cooperative working relationship with parents is essential to any teacher, but it's especially important to the first-year teacher, whose inexperience may be an issue for some parents. You can get off on the right foot with a welcome letter, sent to the parents of each student on your class list. Mail the letters a week or two before school starts. If that's not possible, send it home with students on the first day of school. You might include information about yourself, a list of supplies students will need to bring from home, a schedule of opening day activities, policies for parents' visits, phone calls, and volunteer opportunities (include a volunteer sign-up sheet!), a discussion of classroom rules and consequences, a curriculum overview or syllabus, and your school phone number and school e-mail address.
You can find a teacher welcome letter template among Education World's Back-to-School Templates, and in the Education World article Back-to-School Letters and Survival Kits Build Communication. You might want to send an introductory letter to your students too!
Be sure to have your principal, mentor teacher, or another veteran teacher check out parent or student welcome letters before you mail them. They know the community and school policies better than you do and are in a better position to evaluate whether your letter is effective and appropriate.
The Big Day Arrives
- You're as ready as you'll ever be! Now what?
- Arrive early! Give the classroom one last check. Turn on the lights and open the blinds.
- Greet students at the door. Introduce yourself and welcome them. Smile!
- As students arrive, hand them an assignment and ask them to get started immediately.
- Help students prepare their own nametags. A variety of nametag ideas can be found at What's In a Name?, and you'll find name tag templates among Education World's Back-to-School Templates.
- Review, explain, and discuss school rules and procedures.
- Work together to develop a list of classroom rules and consequences, or provide students with a copy of your class rules.
- As you move through the day, explain and practice class routines.
- Take pictures of students at work and play. Save some for Parents' Night and for student-of-the-week bulletin boards. Use others to start a class scrapbook.
- Discuss class or individual goals and expectations. Younger students may enjoy hearing and discussing Judith Viorst's "The First Day" poem.
- Try to include an activity that provides opportunities for students to interact or problem-solve. For more than 75 suggestions for first-day-of-school activities, check out the Education World article Icebreakers 2001: Fifteen Getting to Know You Activities!
- Congratulate yourself on a job well done!
Survival Guide for New TeachersThis guide from the U.S. Department of Education offers lots of stories and advice from teachers who have been there.
Works4Me TipsThe NEA offers tips for teachers on such topics as content, teaching techniques, classroom management, technology, organization, and relationships.
The First Days of Middle SchoolMiddleWeb provides an extensive list of links to resources for all middle school teachers.
Ideas for New Teachers and Education StudentsThis site contains many links to valuable teaching resources, on such topics as how to write behavioral objectives, lesson planning, teaching methods, and much more!
New Teacher's Home PageAbout.com provides lots of resources, including articles, tools, suggested student reading lists, and more.
Top 20 Back-to-School Resources
From: NEA
http://www.nea.org/lessons/backtoschool.html
Lesson Ideas, Welcoming Students, Setting Up Your Classroom, Meeting Parents, and More
Lessons & Activities
1. Fun Activities Get the School Year Off to a Good Start!These activities help you get to know students and their strengths.
2. Fresh Ideas for Opening DayFive lesson plans help get the year off to a great start.
3. Best of the IcebreakersTen creative, teacher-tested ideas help you start the school year strong.
4. Student Learning-Strengths InventoryStart the school year with an online inventory to determine students' learning strengths and intelligences.
5. Works4Me: Starting SchoolTeacher-submitted tips for welcoming new students, learning their names, and getting to know them. Plus activity ideas you can start now and build upon throughout the school year.
6. Activites for Student-Created RulesEight activities help students set their own classroom rules.
New to Your School
7. 30 Questions to Ask During the First Days of SchoolMake your life as a teacher easier by learning school procedures early on.
8. Advice for New Special Education TeachersA veteran special education teacher offers advice to new teachers for surviving the first few months of school.
9. 33 Ways to Start the First Year Off RightA little planning before school begins can pay big dividends throughout the school year. This checklist will help you plan for the months ahead.
Setting Up Your Learning Environment
10.Order in the Classroom!Practical tips and tools to get your classroom in order.
11. Determine Classroom Procedures Before School StartsUse this checklist to set your classroom climate.
12. Teachers Start Your Engines20 classroom management strategies give your year a great start.
13. Establishing Classroom RulesTen activities help you set the right tone for the rest of your school year.
14.Teacher's Back-to-School Supply List27 things you do not want to forget.
Reaching Out to Parents & the Community
15. Increase Parent Involvement With First Day of School ActivitiesDevelop a first day program that gets the whole community involved.
16. Creating a Professional ImageAdvice for first-year teachers on cultivating a professional image that will strengthen your work with students, other teachers and parents.
But Wait There's More!
17. Planning for Your First Day at SchoolOn the first day of school, the secret to success is in the planning, not the pedagogy.
18. 13 Ways to Beat the First-Day JittersSome steps to take before school begins.
19. Maximizing the Opening of the School DayHow to establish the right rapport and get started on the right foot.
20. Back-to-School Survival KitIngredients for teacher and student "survival kits" provide a welcome start to the new year.
http://www.nea.org/lessons/backtoschool.html
Lesson Ideas, Welcoming Students, Setting Up Your Classroom, Meeting Parents, and More
Lessons & Activities
1. Fun Activities Get the School Year Off to a Good Start!These activities help you get to know students and their strengths.
2. Fresh Ideas for Opening DayFive lesson plans help get the year off to a great start.
3. Best of the IcebreakersTen creative, teacher-tested ideas help you start the school year strong.
4. Student Learning-Strengths InventoryStart the school year with an online inventory to determine students' learning strengths and intelligences.
5. Works4Me: Starting SchoolTeacher-submitted tips for welcoming new students, learning their names, and getting to know them. Plus activity ideas you can start now and build upon throughout the school year.
6. Activites for Student-Created RulesEight activities help students set their own classroom rules.
New to Your School
7. 30 Questions to Ask During the First Days of SchoolMake your life as a teacher easier by learning school procedures early on.
8. Advice for New Special Education TeachersA veteran special education teacher offers advice to new teachers for surviving the first few months of school.
9. 33 Ways to Start the First Year Off RightA little planning before school begins can pay big dividends throughout the school year. This checklist will help you plan for the months ahead.
Setting Up Your Learning Environment
10.Order in the Classroom!Practical tips and tools to get your classroom in order.
11. Determine Classroom Procedures Before School StartsUse this checklist to set your classroom climate.
12. Teachers Start Your Engines20 classroom management strategies give your year a great start.
13. Establishing Classroom RulesTen activities help you set the right tone for the rest of your school year.
14.Teacher's Back-to-School Supply List27 things you do not want to forget.
Reaching Out to Parents & the Community
15. Increase Parent Involvement With First Day of School ActivitiesDevelop a first day program that gets the whole community involved.
16. Creating a Professional ImageAdvice for first-year teachers on cultivating a professional image that will strengthen your work with students, other teachers and parents.
But Wait There's More!
17. Planning for Your First Day at SchoolOn the first day of school, the secret to success is in the planning, not the pedagogy.
18. 13 Ways to Beat the First-Day JittersSome steps to take before school begins.
19. Maximizing the Opening of the School DayHow to establish the right rapport and get started on the right foot.
20. Back-to-School Survival KitIngredients for teacher and student "survival kits" provide a welcome start to the new year.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Scholastic burden
From: Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/28/health/he-capsule28
By Jeannine Stein
A study in Philadelphia finds that overweight children have lower scores in certain tests and are less inclined to join sports.
OVERWEIGHT kids are at risk for a host of health complications, including elevated cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure. They also may do more poorly in school.
When grade point averages were compared among 566 middle school students in a suburb of Philadelphia, overweight students came in at about half a grade point lower than normal-weight kids.
The study, published in the July issue of the journal Obesity, also found that overweight students had lower reading comprehension scores on a nationally standardized test, ranking in the 66th percentile; normal-weight kids ranked in the 75th percentile. Heavier kids were also five times more likely to have six or more detentions than their normal-weight peers, had more school absences and lower physical fitness test scores, and were less inclined to participate on athletic teams – 37% compared with 75% of normal-weight students.
Stuart Shore, a doctoral candidate in kinesiology at Temple University in Philadelphia, and lead author of the study, speculates that overweight kids who have low self-esteem might be less inclined to attend school and may not relate well with their teachers.
Related Articles
Danger lurking within them Mar 26, 2007
15 minutes to fight childhood obesity Mar 26, 2007
Danger lurking within them Mar 26, 2007
15 minutes to fight childhood obesity Mar 26, 2007
Sleep less and weigh more? Nov 26, 2007
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/28/health/he-capsule28
By Jeannine Stein
A study in Philadelphia finds that overweight children have lower scores in certain tests and are less inclined to join sports.
OVERWEIGHT kids are at risk for a host of health complications, including elevated cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure. They also may do more poorly in school.
When grade point averages were compared among 566 middle school students in a suburb of Philadelphia, overweight students came in at about half a grade point lower than normal-weight kids.
The study, published in the July issue of the journal Obesity, also found that overweight students had lower reading comprehension scores on a nationally standardized test, ranking in the 66th percentile; normal-weight kids ranked in the 75th percentile. Heavier kids were also five times more likely to have six or more detentions than their normal-weight peers, had more school absences and lower physical fitness test scores, and were less inclined to participate on athletic teams – 37% compared with 75% of normal-weight students.
Stuart Shore, a doctoral candidate in kinesiology at Temple University in Philadelphia, and lead author of the study, speculates that overweight kids who have low self-esteem might be less inclined to attend school and may not relate well with their teachers.
Related Articles
Danger lurking within them Mar 26, 2007
15 minutes to fight childhood obesity Mar 26, 2007
Danger lurking within them Mar 26, 2007
15 minutes to fight childhood obesity Mar 26, 2007
Sleep less and weigh more? Nov 26, 2007
Space exploration comes to the classroom
From: Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/28/space-exploration-comes-to-the-classroom/
By Roger Fillion
Hoping to spur more youngsters to seek a career in space exploration, Lockheed Martin Corp. is launching an online program for students and teachers to learn about NASA's mission to the moon and Mars.
The program, dubbed Orion's Path, is an interactive lesson. It's delivered via a company that provides Web-based education programs about space science, SpaceClass Inc. in Boulder.
Orion is the name of the spacecraft that Lockheed is designing and building to ferry astronauts to the moon, and later to Mars.
Lockheed engineers are helping design the vehicle at the company's Waterton Canyon campus in Jefferson County.
The Orion's Path program consists of 41 short installments of a minute or two on the SpaceClass Web site. It's aimed at middle school students. Teachers would use the program as part of their curriculum.
The installments cover such topics as how the moon was formed, spacesuits and the moon's environment.
"There's a NASA astronaut talking about why the heck we should go to the moon," said Beth McNight, the president of SpaceClass.
She said the segments "are rich with material (students) have to learn anyway," including gravity, the solar system and the planets.
The Orion spacecraft is featured in video segments. Students also can learn about the other space vehicles astronauts will use to get to the moon, and experts discuss topics such as spacesuits.
Students would take quizzes about the material and log on to "virtual labs" that focus on subjects such as how astronauts can make water on the moon.
To get the word out, Lockheed invited about 20 Colorado teachers to participate in a hands-on workshop Monday to learn about the program.
NASA's Orion project manager, Mark Geyer, said his agency hopes to excite the imaginations of kids.
Lockheed expects to do more teacher presentations about the new program in the Houston area - where much of the Orion work is being done - as well as possibly in Washington, D.C., where NASA is headquartered.
Orion's Path
What: New online program for middle school students and teachers to learn about NASA's program to send astronauts to the moon and Mars.
Sponsor: Lockheed Martin, which is designing and building the Orion spacecraft for use in the NASA missions.
Details: Program offers 41 brief online installments on different topics, as well as quizzes and "virtual science labs."
Goal: Get more young people to seek a career in space exploration.
Web site: spaceclass.org
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/28/space-exploration-comes-to-the-classroom/
By Roger Fillion
Hoping to spur more youngsters to seek a career in space exploration, Lockheed Martin Corp. is launching an online program for students and teachers to learn about NASA's mission to the moon and Mars.
The program, dubbed Orion's Path, is an interactive lesson. It's delivered via a company that provides Web-based education programs about space science, SpaceClass Inc. in Boulder.
Orion is the name of the spacecraft that Lockheed is designing and building to ferry astronauts to the moon, and later to Mars.
Lockheed engineers are helping design the vehicle at the company's Waterton Canyon campus in Jefferson County.
The Orion's Path program consists of 41 short installments of a minute or two on the SpaceClass Web site. It's aimed at middle school students. Teachers would use the program as part of their curriculum.
The installments cover such topics as how the moon was formed, spacesuits and the moon's environment.
"There's a NASA astronaut talking about why the heck we should go to the moon," said Beth McNight, the president of SpaceClass.
She said the segments "are rich with material (students) have to learn anyway," including gravity, the solar system and the planets.
The Orion spacecraft is featured in video segments. Students also can learn about the other space vehicles astronauts will use to get to the moon, and experts discuss topics such as spacesuits.
Students would take quizzes about the material and log on to "virtual labs" that focus on subjects such as how astronauts can make water on the moon.
To get the word out, Lockheed invited about 20 Colorado teachers to participate in a hands-on workshop Monday to learn about the program.
NASA's Orion project manager, Mark Geyer, said his agency hopes to excite the imaginations of kids.
Lockheed expects to do more teacher presentations about the new program in the Houston area - where much of the Orion work is being done - as well as possibly in Washington, D.C., where NASA is headquartered.
Orion's Path
What: New online program for middle school students and teachers to learn about NASA's program to send astronauts to the moon and Mars.
Sponsor: Lockheed Martin, which is designing and building the Orion spacecraft for use in the NASA missions.
Details: Program offers 41 brief online installments on different topics, as well as quizzes and "virtual science labs."
Goal: Get more young people to seek a career in space exploration.
Web site: spaceclass.org
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Parents' homework: Find perfect teacher for kids
From: Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/content/education/chi-teacher-lobbying_bd27jul27,0,1309892.story?track=rss
By Lisa Black and Jo Napolitano
Tomi Hall did what she could to lobby for the best teachers for her two children, making her case this spring in letters to the principal.
Then all she could do was wait for news of their classroom assignments—and it's been excruciating.
The Aurora mom knows her efforts carry no guarantees. One year her son didn't get the teacher Hall had hoped for, and he struggled for months with one whose relaxed style came across to him as uncaring.
"Granted, I know it's just kindergarten," said Hall, 39. "But ... a teacher can make or break you."
In the next few weeks, many families will rip open notification letters or trek to school to see class lists posted on the front door. For parents accustomed to directing nearly every aspect of their child's early learning it can be difficult to have little voice in teacher selection—a decision they view as critical. Some spend hours crafting the perfect letter or meet with the principal to make an argument.
Principals, meanwhile, struggle to create balanced classrooms while juggling individual requests. They say they want input but find it increasingly necessary to discourage parents from asking for a specific teacher. Administrators don't want the selection process to be a popularity contest—in part because what makes a teacher popular may have nothing to do with a particular child's educational needs.
"I'm bright enough to realize parents talk at soccer fields and baseball fields, but you have to realize your experience with Teacher A may be very different than someone else's [experience with] Teacher A," said Scott Meek, a new principal at Northbrook Junior High School who is making classroom assignments this summer for 600 students with the help of an office display board.
He asks parents to focus their input on the student and his or her learning style and trust the school to make the right match.
Some students also recognize that certain teachers bring out the best in them.
"I need one of those strict kinds of teachers," said Hall's daughter Tori, 12, who is entering 7th grade. "When I get a not-so-strict teacher, I think they don't really care about me. I really don't want a bad teacher. I'll get lower grades."
When Chaya Fish, 30, of West Rogers Park taught at a private school in New York, she said, it was obvious who the "in" teachers were. She said she automatically joined them after the principal's son landed in her classroom.
"It was ridiculous," said Fish. "The other teacher was probably better than me. It was how you dressed, how you talked" that often determined parental favor.
Teachers said the most vocal parents often get their way so that all parties involved can avoid a difficult school year. But educators warn that parents who get what they wish for may be sorry afterward.
"A lot of times when people orchestrate who they think their child is best suited for, they find they made a mistake," said Mark Friedman, superintendent for Libertyville Elementary School District 70.
"I have many parents say later, 'I don't know why I did this. It isn't working out this year.' "
Friedman said he assures parents their comments will be considered but never guarantees a specific teacher.
In fact, he tells them that if they do request a teacher and later regret that choice, "you have no one to blame but yourself."
Some parents said they've learned their lesson about trying to guess which teacher would be best.
Jamie Thompson said she was initially concerned when her daughter was assigned to a strict 1st-grade teacher. She was aware other parents had lobbied for a different person, who had a more casual style.
"At the end, it turned out that the other class was asking, 'Why isn't my child learning that?' " said Thompson, 36, of Arlington Heights. "That's why I don't want to interfere too much."
Yet parents have different reasons for requesting classes, and some have nothing to do with the teacher, said Michelle Van Every, 36, of Deerfield.
She and other mothers once requested that their children not be placed in a classroom with a specific boy—not because of him, but to avoid his mother, who had created problems in the past, she said.
"We didn't want to cross paths with her," said Van Every, who added that the school complied with their request. "We didn't want to have to volunteer with her at a class party."
Each district follows its own procedure for teacher selection. Some begin as early as April or May, officials said. Many ask parents to complete a form about their child's strengths and weaknesses.
Typically, teachers have some say in the process by deciding early on which students should be separated or kept together, on the basis of academics, personalities and learning styles. The principal draws up the final class lists, often after meeting with parents or reviewing special requests, officials said.
Many school districts wait until the last minute to announce class assignments, usually about two weeks before the start of school. That's because they have come to expect a flood of phone calls within hours from parents who beg or demand to switch teachers.
Other schools handle it differently. At Sawyer Elementary School on Chicago's Southwest Side, the fall class assignments are handed out with the last report card the previous spring, said teacher Maureen "Moe" Forte.
Forte said she is aware of colleagues and members of the Local School Council who have asked that their children be moved from one class into another.
"It's not fair," Forte said. "I was very upset that one of the LSC parents moved her daughter to my classroom. . . . The parent just felt my personality fit better with her child. And it's not a personality contest."
Denita Ricci of Lake Villa said she knows parents who request certain classes but tries to stay out of the process. Her son, Mason Wubs, 12, hopes to be placed in the same class as his best friend, easing the transition to 7th grade at a new school.
"I trust the school's judgment," she said, though she secretly hopes Mason will share a class with his friend. "I think they need to learn to deal with people who are different than them, just like an employer."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/content/education/chi-teacher-lobbying_bd27jul27,0,1309892.story?track=rss
By Lisa Black and Jo Napolitano
Tomi Hall did what she could to lobby for the best teachers for her two children, making her case this spring in letters to the principal.
Then all she could do was wait for news of their classroom assignments—and it's been excruciating.
The Aurora mom knows her efforts carry no guarantees. One year her son didn't get the teacher Hall had hoped for, and he struggled for months with one whose relaxed style came across to him as uncaring.
"Granted, I know it's just kindergarten," said Hall, 39. "But ... a teacher can make or break you."
In the next few weeks, many families will rip open notification letters or trek to school to see class lists posted on the front door. For parents accustomed to directing nearly every aspect of their child's early learning it can be difficult to have little voice in teacher selection—a decision they view as critical. Some spend hours crafting the perfect letter or meet with the principal to make an argument.
Principals, meanwhile, struggle to create balanced classrooms while juggling individual requests. They say they want input but find it increasingly necessary to discourage parents from asking for a specific teacher. Administrators don't want the selection process to be a popularity contest—in part because what makes a teacher popular may have nothing to do with a particular child's educational needs.
"I'm bright enough to realize parents talk at soccer fields and baseball fields, but you have to realize your experience with Teacher A may be very different than someone else's [experience with] Teacher A," said Scott Meek, a new principal at Northbrook Junior High School who is making classroom assignments this summer for 600 students with the help of an office display board.
He asks parents to focus their input on the student and his or her learning style and trust the school to make the right match.
Some students also recognize that certain teachers bring out the best in them.
"I need one of those strict kinds of teachers," said Hall's daughter Tori, 12, who is entering 7th grade. "When I get a not-so-strict teacher, I think they don't really care about me. I really don't want a bad teacher. I'll get lower grades."
When Chaya Fish, 30, of West Rogers Park taught at a private school in New York, she said, it was obvious who the "in" teachers were. She said she automatically joined them after the principal's son landed in her classroom.
"It was ridiculous," said Fish. "The other teacher was probably better than me. It was how you dressed, how you talked" that often determined parental favor.
Teachers said the most vocal parents often get their way so that all parties involved can avoid a difficult school year. But educators warn that parents who get what they wish for may be sorry afterward.
"A lot of times when people orchestrate who they think their child is best suited for, they find they made a mistake," said Mark Friedman, superintendent for Libertyville Elementary School District 70.
"I have many parents say later, 'I don't know why I did this. It isn't working out this year.' "
Friedman said he assures parents their comments will be considered but never guarantees a specific teacher.
In fact, he tells them that if they do request a teacher and later regret that choice, "you have no one to blame but yourself."
Some parents said they've learned their lesson about trying to guess which teacher would be best.
Jamie Thompson said she was initially concerned when her daughter was assigned to a strict 1st-grade teacher. She was aware other parents had lobbied for a different person, who had a more casual style.
"At the end, it turned out that the other class was asking, 'Why isn't my child learning that?' " said Thompson, 36, of Arlington Heights. "That's why I don't want to interfere too much."
Yet parents have different reasons for requesting classes, and some have nothing to do with the teacher, said Michelle Van Every, 36, of Deerfield.
She and other mothers once requested that their children not be placed in a classroom with a specific boy—not because of him, but to avoid his mother, who had created problems in the past, she said.
"We didn't want to cross paths with her," said Van Every, who added that the school complied with their request. "We didn't want to have to volunteer with her at a class party."
Each district follows its own procedure for teacher selection. Some begin as early as April or May, officials said. Many ask parents to complete a form about their child's strengths and weaknesses.
Typically, teachers have some say in the process by deciding early on which students should be separated or kept together, on the basis of academics, personalities and learning styles. The principal draws up the final class lists, often after meeting with parents or reviewing special requests, officials said.
Many school districts wait until the last minute to announce class assignments, usually about two weeks before the start of school. That's because they have come to expect a flood of phone calls within hours from parents who beg or demand to switch teachers.
Other schools handle it differently. At Sawyer Elementary School on Chicago's Southwest Side, the fall class assignments are handed out with the last report card the previous spring, said teacher Maureen "Moe" Forte.
Forte said she is aware of colleagues and members of the Local School Council who have asked that their children be moved from one class into another.
"It's not fair," Forte said. "I was very upset that one of the LSC parents moved her daughter to my classroom. . . . The parent just felt my personality fit better with her child. And it's not a personality contest."
Denita Ricci of Lake Villa said she knows parents who request certain classes but tries to stay out of the process. Her son, Mason Wubs, 12, hopes to be placed in the same class as his best friend, easing the transition to 7th grade at a new school.
"I trust the school's judgment," she said, though she secretly hopes Mason will share a class with his friend. "I think they need to learn to deal with people who are different than them, just like an employer."
Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
From: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By MOTOKO RICH
BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.
Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.
A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.
Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
Setting Expectations
Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.
Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.
According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)
“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”
Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.
It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
What’s Best for Nadia?
Deborah Konyk always believed it was essential for Nadia and her 8-year-old sister, Yashca, to read books. She regularly read aloud to the girls and took them to library story hours.
“Reading opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to cultures, to worlds, to people,” Ms. Konyk said.
Ms. Konyk, who took a part-time job at a dollar store chain a year and a half ago, said she did not have much time to read books herself. There are few books in the house. But after Yashca was born, Ms. Konyk spent the baby’s nap time reading the Harry Potter novels to Nadia, and she regularly brought home new titles from the library.
Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.
Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”
In one scene the narrator, Aries, hitches a ride with some masked men and one of them pulls a knife on her. “Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes. “I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”
“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”
Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.
Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.
The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.
Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.
Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”
Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.
Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.
One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.
“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”
Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.
But This Is Reading Too
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.
“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”
Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”
The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.
Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.
Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.
“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”
A Lifelong Struggle
In the case of Hunter Gaudet, the Internet has helped him feel more comfortable with a new kind of reading. A varsity lacrosse player in Somers, Conn., Hunter has struggled most of his life to read. After learning he was dyslexic in the second grade, he was placed in special education classes and a tutor came to his home three hours a week. When he entered high school, he dropped the special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.
In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”
When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.
Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”
Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.
“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”
When he was in seventh grade, Hunter was one of 89 students who participated in a study comparing performance on traditional state reading tests with a specially designed Internet reading test. Hunter, who scored in the lowest 10 percent on the traditional test, spent 12 weeks learning how to use the Web for a science class before taking the Internet test. It was composed of three sets of directions asking the students to search for information online, determine which sites were reliable and explain their reasoning.
Hunter scored in the top quartile. In fact, about a third of the students in the study, led by Professor Leu, scored below average on traditional reading tests but did well on the Internet assessment.
The Testing Debate
To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.
But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy.
Now some literacy experts want the federal tests known as the nation’s report card to include a digital reading component. So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.
Mary Crovo of the National Assessment Governing Board, which creates policies for the national tests, said several members of a committee that sets guidelines for the reading tests believed large numbers of low-income and rural students might not have regular Internet access, rendering measurements of their online skills unfair.
Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught.
“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”
Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”
The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.
Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”
Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.
Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”
Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By MOTOKO RICH
BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.
Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.
A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.
Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
Setting Expectations
Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.
Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.
According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)
“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”
Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.
It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
What’s Best for Nadia?
Deborah Konyk always believed it was essential for Nadia and her 8-year-old sister, Yashca, to read books. She regularly read aloud to the girls and took them to library story hours.
“Reading opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to cultures, to worlds, to people,” Ms. Konyk said.
Ms. Konyk, who took a part-time job at a dollar store chain a year and a half ago, said she did not have much time to read books herself. There are few books in the house. But after Yashca was born, Ms. Konyk spent the baby’s nap time reading the Harry Potter novels to Nadia, and she regularly brought home new titles from the library.
Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.
Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”
In one scene the narrator, Aries, hitches a ride with some masked men and one of them pulls a knife on her. “Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes. “I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”
“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”
Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.
Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.
The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.
Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.
Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”
Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.
Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.
One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.
“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”
Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.
But This Is Reading Too
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.
“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”
Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”
The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.
Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.
Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.
“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”
A Lifelong Struggle
In the case of Hunter Gaudet, the Internet has helped him feel more comfortable with a new kind of reading. A varsity lacrosse player in Somers, Conn., Hunter has struggled most of his life to read. After learning he was dyslexic in the second grade, he was placed in special education classes and a tutor came to his home three hours a week. When he entered high school, he dropped the special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.
In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”
When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.
Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”
Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.
“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”
When he was in seventh grade, Hunter was one of 89 students who participated in a study comparing performance on traditional state reading tests with a specially designed Internet reading test. Hunter, who scored in the lowest 10 percent on the traditional test, spent 12 weeks learning how to use the Web for a science class before taking the Internet test. It was composed of three sets of directions asking the students to search for information online, determine which sites were reliable and explain their reasoning.
Hunter scored in the top quartile. In fact, about a third of the students in the study, led by Professor Leu, scored below average on traditional reading tests but did well on the Internet assessment.
The Testing Debate
To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.
But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy.
Now some literacy experts want the federal tests known as the nation’s report card to include a digital reading component. So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.
Mary Crovo of the National Assessment Governing Board, which creates policies for the national tests, said several members of a committee that sets guidelines for the reading tests believed large numbers of low-income and rural students might not have regular Internet access, rendering measurements of their online skills unfair.
Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught.
“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”
Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”
The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.
Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”
Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.
Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”
Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction again.
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