Monday, July 29, 2013



College Republicans Deemed Security Threat at Obama Speech

On Wednesday President Obama gave another speech on the economy at the University of Central Missouri. But apparently 10 college republicans wearing Tea Party t-shirts or other patriotic, Republican themed clothing were turned away from attending the event. The students who all held tickets to the event and had waited in line for 2 hours, were deemed a threat by security personnel at the front doors. Security made sure to explain it wasn't about their politics, but about the President's security. Really?!

The students had protested some of the President's policies on campus earlier in the day, but had put away their signs in order to attend the event. Security turned them away at the front doors of the recreation facility and told them to stay hundreds of yards away from the area.

"It just didn't make any sense," Courtney Scott, the State Treasurer of the College Republicans told The Fix. "A lot of us traveled several hours to watch the speech. We were very disappointed not to be able to attend."

According to The Fix:

    "The students' protest earlier in the day was a peaceful one, consisting of holding political speech signs and talking to passersby throughout the morning, Scott said. They were asked to protest at the "public speech area" on campus, not anywhere near the rec center. They were not allowed within eyesight or earshot of people who were waiting in line.

    The Mizzou Republicans were among about sixty protesters, half of whom were college students, who had voiced concern Wednesday over Obama's economic policies in the wake of the country's ongoing recession.

    Some of the signs called for capitalism, others illustrated discontent with Missouri's 16 percent unemployment rate among college student youth, and the increasing share of national debt students are saddled with year by year."

Hmmm. These kids really sound dangerous. Some 2,500 other people managed to get through security just fine, but the ones wearing Republican gear were turned away? Yeah, this seems a bit sketchy. Why is the President afraid of some college students disagreeing with his policy decisions? Maybe their impending graduation and the lack of jobs for them is making him worry about their approval?

SOURCE






The Cancer That College Has Become

If you are a regular reader of this column you have been alerted to the problems of the current college system in America and some of the sources of the problems. As a parent of two children who recently graduated from well-known universities, I am as guilty as anyone of falling into the trap of believing that a college degree ameliorates all future problems for a student. We learn that one could suffer eternal damnation without said degree. That is obviously not true. College has created a system to insulate itself from the outside world when it comes to decisions about your children. Buyer Beware.

There is no doubt that college has become a significant problem in America. Our leaders run around and talk about Armageddon for those who do not go on to college. This is partially because the existing school systems do not adequately prepare students either for a career without a college degree or for the educational rigors of a sophisticated college-level education. Additionally, there has been a proliferation of useless degrees that prepare students for a career after college that can only exist within the confines of a college campus. There is no sign at the door of these departments warning students that their predecessors did not get jobs in those fields, and their hopes are just as bleak. It is truly caveat emptor -- which interestingly the faculty would ferociously dispute for the private sector. At the same time the costs related to college have soared 1,000% over the past 30 years as analyzed by economist Tyler Cowen, far exceeding the inflation rate.

A multitude of reasons have been given for the problems with college, but one has not received enough focus. Once you send your bright shining child to college, they all of sudden become "adults" on their own. To varying degrees as parents you get information back, but your rights to information are strictly limited. It is as if colleges have created their own HIPAA (medical records) law. Ask - but we don't tell unless there is a release by your child.

We send our children to college to get educated and to facilitate that next step of growing up. Some of us have actually prepared them for the event. But they are not prepared to make all decisions. They can choose strawberry yogurt versus blueberry yogurt, but there are decisions that have deeper and more lasting resonance, yet they are on their own.

Not really; they have the aid of those charming people with nice titles and advanced degrees at the college of the student's choice. Can you think of a worse group of people to be advising your budding young adult? My friend, Dennis Prager, thinks anyone who went from high school to college to grad school to working/teaching at a college campus is yet a child. They have never left the educational womb. He is pretty close, but it is also the chickens guarding the hen house.

Each person at the school has a financial motivation to uphold the good name of the campus. If kids are drinking themselves into a stupor, they don't want to become known just as a party school unless that brings in more applicants and more dollars. If young women are being sexually accosted, the college is not playing up how frequently that occurs. The federal government requires colleges to do a study each year of the incidents related to students. It is as easy to find at a given college as is the detailed list of charges are before you enter a hospital. Unfortunately, it is even less helpful.

The bottom line is that we parents send significant dollars to these colleges and they have no accountability to us. If our kid is a boozer, they don't have to tell us. If they quit school, they don't have to tell us. If our kid is now a Selfhood and Social Interaction major, they don't have to tell us. Just send us money - those many thousands of dollars.

Worse yet these young adults are being advised to encumber themselves with huge debts that will restrict their financial future. Does anyone at these colleges tell them not to do it? Do the kids really understand what having $50,000, $100, 000 or more of college debt means to them? Is there a major in the finance department - Advising Students on College Debt? You better not bet on that.

There is no doubt that colleges in the country add something positive other than college sports. But they are operating a scam that the Boys in Jersey would have loved to have thought of. These colleges are not as bad as people who prey on seniors citizens with phony financial programs, but at least the seniors can have their adult children intercede without a special dispensation and a secret password.

If that phony baloney board Elizabeth Warren set up (you know the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) really wanted to do something, they would set up standards to protect students from being gouged by universities and protected from taking on ridiculous levels of debt. That is a trillion-dollar problem where people are being sold pipe dreams. Let us all live to see that happen. God knows we parents have no say.

SOURCE





A realistic teacher talks

Getting quiet for teaching was job one. I'd separate inveterate chatters, then I'd move the worst offenders to the front groups, and then, if one of them still didn't shut up, I'd pull the desk forward all the way to a wall (with the kid in it). The rest of the class would snicker at the talker -at, not with.

"It's not like I'm going to pay attention to you up here. I'll just go to sleep," one of them said, defiantly.

"You say that as if it were a bad thing."

He or she often did go to sleep, which gave me some quiet from that corner, anyway. Otherwise, I wrote a referral. I also wrote referrals when they called me a f***ing [noun of your choice, profane or not], a sh**ty f**ing boring teacher (boring! I ask you), when they threw things, when they got up and wandered around the room refusing to sit, when they texted in open view and refused to give over the phone, when they left the room without permission, when they howled I HAVE TO PISS at the top of their voices (usually one at a time), and so on-all during the time that I was trying to teach the lesson "up front". Once I released them for work it got easier, as I wasn't trying to maintain order and some notion of what I'd been doing before the last interruption, but rather walking around the room helping students and telling others to shut up.

As bad as I make it sound, every senior teacher I worked with was astonished at how well I did, given the pressure; all the previous teachers stuck with all algebra all the time had routinely lost control of the classes and had supervisors posted. Administrators didn't approve of my approach, alas; since my kids were mostly Hispanic, my referrals were, too. So I was caught between an administration who would really rather I'd have flailed ineffectually than kick kids out for order, and the bulk of my students, who opined frequently that I should boot students more often and earlier.

The beginning of the way back up that year began in second period when I'd thrown out the third kid of the day, and Kiley said "Could you toss out Elijah, while you're at it?" and much of the class laughed. Elijah stood up and said "Yeah, send me, too! I don't want to be here! Let me go!"

I tend to stay pretty focused on teaching; rarely do I give A Talk. Today, I have no idea why I made an exception.

"Why don't you want to be here, again?"

"Because I hate math? F***ing duh."

"What is it you think I want?"

"You want me to shut up."

"Well, yeah. But why?"

"So you can teach!"

"Why?"

"Because it's your job!"

"Because I want everyone to pass this class." And to this day, I thank all that's holy that I caught the class's sudden silence and realized that my remark had an impact.

"Maybe I need to make that clearer. I want every single person in here to pass algebra and move onto geometry. Remind me again, how many people have taken algebra more than once?" Almost everyone in the class raised a hand, including Elijah.

"Yeah. Don't raise your hand, but I know at least ten students in here are taking it for the third time, including some people who get tossed out of class regularly. I don't kick kids out for fun. I kick them out because I need to teach everyone. I have kids who want to excel in algebra. I have kids who would like to get better at algebra. I have kids who simply would like to survive algebra, although many days they think that's a pipe dream. And I have kids who don't want to be here at all. I figure, I kick kids out from the last group, I'm meeting everyone's goals but mine." I actually get a couple laughs; they're listening.

"But make no mistake, that's my goal. I want everyone in here to pass." I looked at Elijah, who'd slipped back into his chair, his eyes fixed on me.

"You could tell me about your troubles, and I'll give you an ear, but here's a basic truth: there's not a single situation in your life that gets worse if you pass algebra. And there's a whole bunch of things that improve."

"I could get a work permit, for one thing," Eduardo muttered.

"Get back on the football team," said DeWayne.

"And now I know some of you are thinking sure, there's a catch. No. I didn't say I want you to like algebra. I didn't even say I want you to understand algebra, although I guarantee that trying will improve your understanding. I'm making a simple commitment: show up and try. You will get a passing grade. No catch."

The rest of second period, the toughest class, went so well that I decided to repeat that little speech for every class, and in every class, I got utter quiet. I don't say that all the problems were solved that day, but from that point on far more of the kids "had my back". Psychologically, their support made it much easier for me to develop a strategy to teach algebra in the face of these challenges.

Here's how I taught it, and here's how they did. I only failed 10 kids out of the final 90, or 11%. (Elijah had left. Eduardo got his permit, and DeWayne made it back onto the football team.) That's the highest failure rate I've ever had, but then it's the last time I taught algebra I. It's easier to work with kids in geometry and algebra II-they've got skin in the game, and graduation becomes a real objective as opposed to the remote possibility it presents to a sophomore taking algebra I for the third time.

The wise reader can infer much about my students and a great deal, although certainly not all, about my values and priorities as a teacher from that tale.

First, I mostly teach kids from the lower third to the middle of the cognitive ability spectrum, with a few outliers on each end. That's who takes algebra in high school. No more than 10% of my students in any year are capable of genuinely comprehending an actual formal math course in geometry or algebra (I or II). Another 30-50% of the rest are perfectly capable of understanding geometry, algebra and even more advanced topics in applied math, even if they couldn't really master a formal math course, but they'd have to try a lot harder and want it much more. About a quarter of my students each year are barely capable of learning basic algebra and geometry well enough to apply it in simple, rote situations. A much smaller number can't even manage that much.

For other teachers, the percentages are skewed heavily to the first and second categories; some of them don't even know there's a third and fourth category. A teacher covering precalc and honors algebra II/trig in high-income or Asian suburb, teaching mostly freshmen and sophomores, would have a much higher percentage of students who could master a formal course; their notion of "struggling kids" would be those who aren't working hard enough. But that's not my universe-and it's not the universe I signed up for, although I wouldn't mind visiting occasionally.

Until this year, my assignments weren't deliberate. I was just an unimportant teacher who schools didn't care about losing. In fact, the following year at that same school the administration assigned Algebra II/Trig classes to a teacher who was not qualified to teach the subject while I, who was qualified, was given the lower level Algebra II classes. The administration knew full well about the distinction, which necessitated a "your teacher is not highly qualified" letter to some 90 kids, but that teacher was more valuable than than I was, and so it goes. I'm not bitter, and I'm not marking time until I get "better" kids. I'm doing exactly what I want to do. But every teaching decision I make must be considered in light of my students' cognitive abilities and, related to that ability, their motivation.

Second, I am a teacher who doesn't overvalue any individual student at the expense of the class, which means I have no compunction about kicking kids out for the day. You run into these teachers philosophically opposed to removing kids from class; how can these students learn if they aren't in class, they bleat. These teachers never seem to worry about how all the other kids learn with a disruptive hellion wreaking havoc because, they strongly hint (or outright assert), the right curriculum and caring teachers would eliminate the need to disrupt.

I ask these teachers, politely, do you have kids with tracking bracelets and/or probation officers? Do you have students who have fathered two kids while wearing that tracking bracelet, or gave birth to one? Do you have students who have been suspended or expelled for putting other students in the hospital, or for having a knife in their backpack? Do you have students who routinely tell you to f*** off and don't bother me? Do you have all of these students plus twelve more who have just enough motivation that, given no distractions, would be able to learn some math but with a distraction will readily jump over to the side telling you to f*** off? And with all that, are you math teachers trying to help students with a four-year range in skills figure out second year algebra? Because otherwise, you can go sing your smug little songs of no student left behind to someone with kids who really shouldn't be kicked out of the classroom. Okay, maybe not politely.

Come back the next day or even the same day, hat in hand, and no harm, no foul. I don't only act like it didn't happen, I have completely forgotten it happened. But get out of my class if you won't shut up or can't consider the day a success unless you've sucked in three other kids with your distractions.

The biggest pressure on teachers like me these days is the huge pushback they get from administration, district, and state/federal education agencies when they try to maintain an orderly classroom. And charter schools' ability to a) have none of these kids to start with and b) kick moderately ill-behaved kids back to public school when they act out can't be overstated as factor in their "success".

That's a shame. Because invariably, the bulk of my unmotivated rabble-rousers realize that I really mean it about that whole "passing" thing, if they would just shut up and give the class a shot. And so they do.

Next, I am a teacher who explains. I don't mean lecture; my explanations always take the form of a semi-Socratic discussion, leading the kids through a process. But when I start to talk, the conversation has a direction and that directed conversation, to me, is the heart of teaching.

And as I began to develop, I realized that teaching is not synonymous with explaining. Still. It's my go-to skill, it's what I do best, it's a big part of my success with low ability students, and it's why I prioritize getting my students to shut up while I'm teaching up front.

Next, the story reveals that I adopt my students' values and goals, rather than insist they adopt mine. The kids were shocked into silence when they realize that my most heartfelt goal was to pass everyone in the class.

I learned a key lesson I still use every time I meet a new class, and make it clear I want to help them achieve their goals, which usually involve surviving the class. I do not understand why so many teachers set out objectives based on the assumption that they will successfully re-align their students' value systems.

And in a related revelation, you can see how I frame my task. In his TED talk, Dan Meyer asks the audience to imagine:

"you really loved something.and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you really liked.and the person hated it. By way of introduction, that is the exact same state in which I spent every working day of the last six years. I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it but is forced by law to buy it."

All math teachers can relate to this statement; it's clever, funny, and does a good job of introducing the fundamental dilemma of high school math teachers: most kids hate math and are required to take it. Many dedicated math teachers would not only relate, but agree with Dan's framing of his task as a sales job, regardless of their teaching ideology. When I say I disagree, it's not because Meyer is wrong but because we approach our jobs in fundamentally different ways. I don't love math, and I'm not selling a product.

And those math teachers mostly would agree with me. Teaching math, for us, isn't about creating mathematicians. It's only occasionally about working with kids who want to be engineers, doctors, or architects. Mostly, it's about giving kids enough math skills to pass a college placement test so they won't end up spending a fortune on remedial math classes and never get any further-or at least enough skills so they'll pass a remedial math class and move on. Or giving kids enough math so they look at a trade school placement test and think, "Hey, I can do this." Or just giving kids the will to pass the class and keep them out of mindless credit recovery in alternative institutions, letting them feel part of the educational system, not a failure who couldn't cut it at normal high school.

Finally, though, the story indicates that I am acutely aware of all my students' motivations, that not all my students just want to pass. I have bright kids in almost every class, I have highly motivated kids, I have kids with specific objectives, most of whom want to learn as much as they can. I never forget them, and if I can't dedicate my entire teaching agenda to meeting their goals, it's only because I owe allegiance to all my students. I never stop looking for better ways to give these kids what they need while still ensuring I meet my overall responsibility. Many other teachers say these kids should come first. I always worry they might be right. But as I said above, I do not overvalue any individual kid over the needs of the entire class.

SOURCE


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