Letters from Lisa

A homeowners association in a Colorado town is fining a woman $25 a day until she removes her Christmas wreath, which is shaped like a peace sign.

Apparently a wreath shaped like a peace sign is not a decoration meant to inspire spirituality and seasonal goodwill, but a symbol of Satan and a message of no support for our troops. I don’t really understand how that is supposed to work - maybe if we wish for the war to end, we’ll be depriving them of jobs? Give me a break.
But what got my attention about this story was actually this:

Kearns [the president of the homeowners association] ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn’t say anything. Kearns fired all five committee members.

Get that homeowners association some midterm elections!

On the town’s homepage: The town of Pagosa Springs “WHOLLY SUPPORTS THEIR PEACE SIGN DISPLAY AND ALSO WISHES FOR PEACE ON EARTH.”

Then there was this letter in one of their local newspapers:

Give Peace a….?

Mark Shapiro

The Loma Linda Homeowners Assoc. is absolutely right. The support of peace should really be punishable by death, not just fines. Peace is a troublesome and overrated concept. As we all know, only war can solve our problems and allow society to evolve into a loving Christain nation. War not only brings prosperity and helps the environment through population control but it provides a wonderful foundation for raising a family. I know that when my children were born the very first thought I had was I hope they support war and oppose peace. And maybe someday, god willing, they willl rise to the stature of the Loma Linda Homeowners Assoc. Board!

Couldn’t have said it better.

UPDATE: The homeowners association has backed off, calling the debacle a “misunderstanding”.

All this warmth and fuzziness and improved holiday spirit… Doesn’t this make you want to run out and buy a peace sign-shaped wreath?

“Tweens are fast becoming the new teens” from yahoo.com

On one hand, we are delaying adulthood longer. On the other, we’re becoming teenagers faster. Two developmental trends that seem to be at odds.

It’s been a while since I write parts 1 and 2 of this series, so I apologize for the anticlimatic-ness of this Part 3. On the other hand, several things happened during that intervening time that reinforced and strengthened the argument that I’m making, so I’m not really all THAT sorry.

The first thing that happened was that I attended a curriculum mapping conference for three days. The basic principle behind curriculum mapping is that in order to provide kids with a seamless, consistent quality education that actually addresses and reinforces all the content and skills that they need to prepare them for life, we must document what we do with them in the classroom so that everyone has a common language for talking about instruction and content throughout a child’s career. A child shouldn’t have to inform her 7th grade teacher that she’s already read The Giver in 6th grade, or break it to her 11th grade chemistry teacher that her 9th grade physical science teacher never really got into the periodic table. Kids also shouldn’t have to switch their methods of note-taking or their standards for editing to please different teachers at different grade levels. Teachers need to meet about these things, figure out what we’re asking kids to do, when we’re asking them to do it, how often we’re asking them to do it, and whether that is satisfying their needs in that area. And this is all particularly crucial, the founders of the mapping method say, because of the frighteningly little amount of time we actually have with them in the classroom.

This article, which quotes many of the ideas of the leader of the conference, sums up many of the things I was actually thinking about, in terms of changing the way that schools operate. The statistic at the beginning is what drew my attention at the conference - that the United States has the shortest school day of any industrialized nation. I don’t agree with all of the recommendations in the article, but I do think it has some very interesting ideas.

Just yesterday I received the New York Times magazine section and found this article about what it will really take to help poor and minority students succeed. Much of the article was about charter schools, and the ways that they could help their students which were out of the reach of average public schools.

First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.

There it is - in black and white. In order for kids to really get what they need out of school, they need more time. You can’t cram everything on Earth into a few hours of instruction every day. Especially if kids are behind. A kid who needs to learn 4 years worth of material needs to be given the time to actually experience and practice that material.

In a previous post, I asked, “What are the implications for kids whose development does not fit the natural timetable of the mainstream educational system?” Now we’re starting to run into that scenario. It applies to kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and to second language learners to some extent, but much more so to kids with disabilities. In the majority of cases, kids attend school based on a yearly system where they’re grouped with kids of the same age - unless they’ve been skipped a grade or held back. If they are significantly outside the typical developmental range, they are put in some other program in the building or sent to another school entirely. (In cases where there are entire schools of children outside the typical range, as in inner city neighborhoods, the schools just slog along at the pace they already are.) If they’re taken to be within the developmental range, they stay with the group and spend the school year doing a standardized curriculum that is supposed to be appropriate for their age and that will prepare them for what they are going to study next year.

There are several problems with this. One is that kids are rushed along through a curriculum that is too fast for them so that they can be “ready” for next year - which consists of exactly the same process of rushing along so that they won’t fall behind for NEXT year. The ostensible goal is for them to be ready for college, but colleges across the United States are starting to complain that they are receiving kids who aren’t particularly ready for anything, who need tons of remedial work, and who don’t have many student habits or skills and simply feel entitled to be there because they’re paying. Drive-by learning clearly doesn’t work. We need to make sure that kids have mastered what they’re studying, not just that they’ve been exposed to it.

Another problem, particularly for kids with learning issues, is that a child struggling with basic skills falls further and further behind his peers with each passing year, yet is continually expected to work up to their level (and under No Child Left Behind, the school is penalized if he doesn’t). This often leads to absurd practices and hoops to jump through. Last year, for example, I had to give the New York State 4th grade reading test to kids who were reading at a 2nd grade level. I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how it is useful to assess kids reading at a 2nd grade level with a 4th grade level test. All it shows me is that the kids aren’t reading at a 4th grade level, which I of course already know. This sort of thing goes on all the time. Just recently New York City announced that it was going to be adding testing at additional grade levels in science, since so many kids performed poorly on the 4th and 8th grade tests given last year. So here we have the solution to poor scores on testing…. more testing. The theory seems to be that if you test kids more often, teachers will be more diligent about teaching them so that they’ll do better. Otherwise, you know, we all sit around and watch Spongebob.

It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that a child who has taken four years of schooling to learn to read at a 2nd grade level probably won’t make 3 years’ worth of progress in a single school year and catch up to be on grade level, just like that. Kids just aren’t allowed to be on their own timetable. My first year of teaching, I worked with a child who was just learning to speak at age 5. He said his first word right at the end of the school year. His curriculum for the year? To learn his way around the school building, to go to the bathroom on his own, to play a game with interactive turns, and to label objects with their names using picture communication symbols. I don’t think it’s selling him short to admit that he isn’t going to be doing academics at the same level as his age-matched peers. His parents were told he would never speak at all, and he defied those expectations - but at his own pace. What most kids accomplish in the first year of their lives, he took five years to accomplish. And that’s fine. But it doesn’t fit in well with our idea that kids all develop at the same pace.

And neither do adults. Once people leave the school system, their lives take them in all sorts of directions. People go to work, they go to college, they go to film school, they go to Australia on vacation, they go into the army. Some people get married when they’re 20, others when they’re 30 or 40 or 50, others never. People are staying in school longer, moving out of their parents’ homes later, and trying out 4 or 5 careers rather than sticking with just one. I went to graduate school right out of college while I was working full time and took 4 years to finish my degree. Especially when I first started, I was one of the youngest students in my classes. Many of my peers there were in their 40s and 50s. Many of them had already had one career, or two. It was so liberating to see that. Learning is something that happens throughout your life, and school should be available to you anytime, not just when you’re young.

I was very anxious in my early 20s and thought that there was some prescribed path that I had to follow, and that if I didn’t stay apace with it, I would fall behind and somehow lose out on adult life. It seems awfully silly now. I had thought that adult life was like school, with its grade levels and end-of-year tests and lock-step moving folks along with people of the exact same age. Now I find that whole idea ridiculous. No one would ever dare to suggest that all people of age 41 should be learning the same thing at the same time in the same room, all because they happen to be 41. As adults, we select the learning experiences that fit us. We decide if we’re beginner, intermediate, or advanced. We decide if we need Level 1 or Level 5. And we don’t necessarily take classes that last a full year or semester. We do conferences, workshops, seminars, or 2 week retreats. Or we just read books and talk about them with others who are studying the same thing. We customize our experiences, and take as much time as we need.

I stopped playing the piano for 1o years and then came back to it. It took me five hours to learn how to do a simple knit stitch. It’s taken me three years and I still don’t know how to run for distance on a consistent basis. That doesn’t mean that my opportunity to learn those things has passed. There’s no deadline for them. There shouldn’t be a deadline on learning any skill or subject. We shouldn’t give kids the message that they have a small window of time in which to learn something, and then that’s it. Last year I did a unit with my kids about the Middle Ages. I don’t want them to think that they’re “done” studying the Middle Ages. Some people spend their entire lives studying the Middle Ages.

This is not to say that kids should study whatever they want, whenever they want. Schools do have a job to prioritize and organize curricula based on developmental readiness. Just speaking about kids developing at a “typical pace”, there are critical periods for learning, after which it’s much more difficult to become proficient. But we don’t necessarily take these into account. We teach some subjects (foreign language) too late and others too early. Some even feel that we are seeing more kids labeled with learning disabilities today because we push reading, writing and handwriting proficiency at too young an age, when many kids are not developmentally ready. Which is another symptom of the time crunch in education, cramming in advanced skills at younger and younger ages. And what you get is more and more kids left behind.

to be continued…

Apparently we do.
Or if we don’t exactly need you, at least we want to read about you:

The Beatle News Blog

Editor’s note: I don’t even remember the last time I did an installment of this interview series… so enjoy!

Q: Thanks for sitting down with me. We haven’t done this in quite a long time.
A: Yes… there’s a reason for that.

Q: Oh come now. We haven’t always gotten along, but there’s no reason to hold a grudge about it. Besides, that’s all water under the bridge.
A: Don’t go quoting Simon and Garfunkel at me. You know I can’t resist that.

Q: I don’t know if I’d be admitting to that where other people can read it.
A: You’ll notice that I mentioned absolutely nothing about the hours I’ve been wasting looking up Weird Al Yankovic videos on YouTube. I guess I really am just white and nerdy.

Q: To abruptly change the subject, before you get that song stuck in my head, I just heard you playing on the piano. What was that?
A: Glad you asked. It’s for the elementary school musical. The kids are all under the impression that they’re going to be singing something, so I’m trying to come up with some songs.

Q: And you really think people are going to go for that?
A: Hey, nobody complained when I wrote the songs for last year’s show.

Q: Not to your face, no.
A: Can you at least phrase your disdain in the form of a question?

Q: Touch-y!
A: That’s not a question either. Who was your English teacher?

Q: Look, if you’re going to go all Bill O’Reilly on me, we’re going to end this right now.
A: You’re obviously one of the crazies out there. I shouldn’t be talking to you.

Q: It seems like just about everybody is “one of the crazies”, Mr. O’Reilly. Haven’t you seen Borat?
A: Yes… It’s one of those rare movies that will give you nightmares, but the nightmares will make you laugh.

Q: I heard you were laughing for hours after you saw it.
A: It was uncontrollable. I thought I was going to have to take something for it.

Q: Would you ever consider a trip to Kazakhstan?
A: Did you spell that right?

Q: I don’t know, I’m checking dictionary.com.
A: I’ll wait.

Q: YES!! Spelling victory dance!
A: That’s so sad. How do we know you didn’t edit this entry to make it look like you got it right the first time?

Q: For starters, if I had edited this, you wouldn’t be saying that to me.
A: Maybe it’s just a ploy to make it look more genuine and spontaneous.

Q: You know what would be spontaneous right now? If I took a scissor to that scarf you just finished knitting and scattered its fuzzy hand-dyed remnants all over the floor.
A: You wouldn’t dare. That scarf’s going to be on Good Morning America on November 15th.

Q: Seriously?
A: Well, I was filmed knitting it. We’ll see if I make the broadcast.

Q: Does that mean you’re a celebrity now?
A: What do you mean, “now”?

Q: Well, that’s deluded.
A: Thanks.

Hear that sound? It’s a collective sigh of relief. And I don’t even mean the closing of the election season (more or less… was the macaca-guy from Virginia elected or not?) but the long-overdue departure of Donald Rumsfeld.

Ironic thing is, if he’d been kicked out, say, a month ago, the election might not have swung towards the Democrats nearly as much.

Anyway - Feeling patriotic today. I feel like I’ve actually got a shot at living under a government that represents me or, at the very least, thinks before it bombs. Thanks, everyone.

The third graders and I are deep into our unit about space, and the biggest hit so far has been the “build your own planet and launch it into our solar system” model:

Planet 10

This website actually has two parts - you can examine a computer graphics model of the Solar System (not exactly to scale, but you get relative differences in size and distance from the Sun) and zoom in to different planets, and then you can go over to the “build a world” section and make up the “tenth planet” to add to the mix. You control its speed of rotation, tilt towards or away from the Sun, atmospheric and surface composition, presence or absence of bacteria and plants and animals (and aliens), and so on. It was a very simple way to demonstrate to the kids that there are many complex factors at work in the solar system, and that if any one of them were by chance different, we would have gotten an entirely different result.

I showed this site to a group yesterday, and it was fascinating - they were absolutely determined at first to create a planet that would support life. (The simulation warns you if your planet is experiencing too many seasonal variations or extremes in temperature, or if there are poisonous or explosive gases in the atmosphere, or is in the path of another planet or crossing an asteroid belt.) After an early attempt in which our lakes and rivers boiled off due to our too-close orbit around the Sun, we did a few relatively successful planets. Then I said, “All right guys, your next challenge is to create the most doomed, unsuccessful planet you can. Make it crash and burn!”

The kids got it to work, but ironically, I have tried this several times at home and I have not gotten a planet to explode yet.

Other time-wasting, procrastinative websites about science:
Build Your Own Star

Phases of the Moon:

Virtual Lab Index

edited to add: Here’s the best one I’ve found yet: Black Holes: Gravity’s Relentless Pull - This interactive website simulates the journey towards two known black holes and has a great section of information and virtual experiments to try. The kids and I will be spending some time with this one… when we’re done making our planets, of course!