October 23, 2008
Is there any way that this can end well?
Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college.
A test to “help prepare” students? Really?
October 22, 2008
All sailors know the great story of the white whale, and everyone who’s faced him has either died or been traumatized. So no one would really care if, after Ahab’s incident, he just gave up like all the others. I feel that that could possibly be another reason why he’s risking everything: because he doesn’t want to be like all the others. After all, how awesome would it be to be known as the man who battled Moby Dick and lived? And then have enough courage to go back and search for him again? We all speak about Ahab’s thirst for revenge, but (I could be totally off here) could it be a search for fame as well?
Chapter 108 was when Ahab had the carpenter make his new leg. It was interesting because for what seems like the first time someone ( the carpenter) voices how crazy they think Ahab really is. I’m surprised that throughout the book no other characters have noticed or disagreed with Ahab’s decisions. Ahab’s obsession with the white whale is evident again in chapter 109 because Ahab initially refuses to go into shore to fix the leaking oil casks. He no longer cares about the profits of whaling or their vessel, he only cares about finding the white whale.
Ahab is completely off the wall. Even after FEDALLAH, his own little devil man, prophecy’s his death he is still completely undeterred from his quest. True, it won’t be Moby Dick himself, but it will be the ropes, which only exist in a potentially harmful whale on the ship itself. Any sane person would get off as fast as they possibly could.
All he has to do to further his survival is to not go after this dangerous animal. He clearly does not care about his own life or any of his shipmates lives. He himself is his worst enemy. He will cause his own demise i predict.
October 20, 2008
October 15, 2008
October 6, 2008
The Portal is up and running now. I figured it’d never happen–logging in last year was nearly impossible, there was next to no functionality, and the whole thing was slower than institutional change. A few weeks ago, though, we were told that all teachers had to be fully Portalized by October 1st. And now, with just a few minor glitches (I can name a couple of colleagues who still can’t log in, which seems to be a problem that needs to be dealt with), we’re up and running.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
Of course, the local press is fawning over the Portal. Here’s Colin Gustafson’s lede in his article on the Portal for the Greenwich Time:
The days of the “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse may be numbered in Greenwich.
It’s probably not true, of course. There are plenty of reasons why students still won’t do their homework, and plenty of reasons why their parents will continue to get them out of it. It’s pretty much a high-tech version of the homework-monitoring sheets we give to students who are having trouble staying afloat–the week’s homework is written on a sheet that is signed by the student’s teacher, indicating that the assignments on the sheet are the ones the teacher actually assigned, and then the student shows the sheet to his or her parents.
My issue, of course, isn’t whether it’s a good thing for parents to know what their students are up to in school, or even what their homework assignments are. What interests me is the discussion that’s come up in pretty much every office at my high school, which focuses on the question of how we’re going to teach responsibility if our students no longer have to write their homework assignments down in their planners.
Really? This is the big question about the Portal? Whether we’re damaging our students’ potential to be productive citizens by not forcing them to take out their student planners, write down a few words, and put them away before they can start drawing all over them again?
I’m a member of our school’s Technology Working Group (TWiG), which might as well be called the Portal Support Committee. I’m the English department’s de-facto go-to guy on this thing, which is a thing I don’t entirely believe in.
I’m not anti-Portal per se. I love the idea of having a central online space for communication, file storage, research resources, etc. This is why I use the Web 2.0 tools that I do–Google (search, email, document storage, RSS aggregator, calendar), Delicious (bookmarks), and Flickr (photo sharing). Oh, and Facebook (everything else). But using those tools–and encouraging my students to use them as well–only points out the limitations of our very expensive Portal, and makes me a little nervous when I read cheerleading articles like Mr. Gustafson’s.
The big problem with the Portal is a very big problem indeed–it’s a top-down imposition of District authority on both students and teachers. The teacher problem is easy to see–we were told we had to start using the Portal on October 1st, whether we liked the Portal or not, whether it fit with our educational philosophies or not. That’s it.
But the effect on the students is going to be a lot more powerful. It’s not just that it eliminates the need for students to write down homework assignments–that’s nothing. That’s a smokescreen. What the Portal does is directly contradict Constructivist philosophy and pedagogy, which is the same philosophy and pedagogy that the CAPT test is based on. Yep, that same CAPT that is a graduation requirement for all Connecticut high school students, and the same CAPT that we’re getting hammered on because our scores have fallen somewhat.
Or, to quote Cypher in The Portal Matrix:
I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
I’ve been reading more and more about constructivism, though my study is far from complete (there’s plenty of meaning yet to be made). To me, though, there are certain pieces of classroom-ready technology that support constructivist learning–RSS aggregators, for example–and plenty that don’t. I am saddened to report that our Portal falls into the latter category.
It doesn’t encourage two-way communication to make meaning. Yes, students now have school email accounts, but how many students check them? Leaving aside my inability to imagine a 17-year-old getting excited about something called “ePals,” I’d be willing to bet that only a few students would consider email to be their primary, secondary, or even tertiary mode of communication. Email is what grownups use. High school students use Facebook and SMS. Much more interactive. Much faster. Instead the Portal is more top-down communication, like the teacher who lectures and “gives notes”–it assumes that there is a person who possesses knowledge (in this case, what the assignment is) and several people who are competing to show that they have mastered that knowledge (in this case, what the assignment is). I wish I could post an open link to my teacher home page on the Portal (it’s password-protected, alas)–you’d see that the only RSS feed we can currently get comes from the–wait for it–Greenwich Time. I can’t even set up my Honors Am Lit I class page to display feeds from my own students’ blogs on Moby-Dick. Teacher-to-student communication, maybe, but certainly not student-to-student. And under “Professional Learning” we have links to our staff development registration system and the Paul Potts video. I’d think someone out there might want to, say, provide a capability for teachers to, like, share what they do in their classrooms. Like some way for professionals to learn how to be even more professional.
It isn’t flexible. Constructivism is less about demonstrating mastery of memorized facts than the ability to think flexibly about how acquired experience and information can be used to engage with new circumstances. The District’s technology focus has so far seemed to be on data collection and display–the best part of the Portal for me as a teacher is that it provides one login and password for all of our data services. We can get to students’ attendance records, grades, state test scores, and previously recommended academic interventions. This is useful, especially for those of us who have trouble remembering our District-assigned passwords.
But I have yet to have my requests to be able to add, as mentioned previously, student-generated RSS feeds to my class pages, taken. I can’t have the latest Delicious bookmarks added by my students show up on our class pages. I’m not sure what sort of talking-to I might receive if I were to put a note on my class pages on the Portal telling anyone who wants to know what’s going on in my classes just to come here.
We have some District-wide staff development coming up this Friday. The District has selected “Checking for Understanding” and “Making Connections” as our year-long goals, which, I fear, might lead to several District-targeted wedgies in State educational locker rooms. In all seriousness, these are things that need to be addressed, but they need to be addressed intelligently. Last year, we had an all-day lecture (with a couple of too-short break-out sessions) about Differentiated Instruction. The building resounded with complaints about intelligence insulted and time wasted. Friday’s session has to be better. I’m looking forward to listening for a while, then being That Guy–asking questions, finding out how, exactly, this speaker’s research, which “focuses on specific strategies that classroom teachers and schools can implement in the areas of curriculum, instruction, and assessment which lead to improvement in student learning,” will help me. Hopefully he’s not going to recite lesson plans or tell me to do a Do Now. I want to know how this guy’s strategies will help my students–from 300 to 212 to 500–seek deeper understanding of the material they are studying.
