Saturday, February 28, 2009

Future Plans

The other day, a student of mine showed up at break time. She had come to retrieve a key that she had left behind. She stayed for a few minutes to chat. Well, actually, she doesn't really chat so much as she just talks constantly. This is okay because she is charming. I don't remember how we ended up on the topic of our final wishes, but she said, "When I die I'm going to be cremated, and I want my sister to put my ashes right in front of the tv." Amused by this idea, I asked what shows she would like to have on the television. She looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question possible, and said, "It doesn't matter. I'm dead. I can't be picky." True enough.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Academy Awards Semi-Live Blog

5:00: I’m already noticing that this is the year of the glamorous updo for hair.
5:05: We see Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. Sarah Jessica Parker is wearing a dress that I’m afraid she is too old for. It is too prommy. She looks like Glinda the good witch.
5:06: Miley Cyrus needs some lessons in how to walk like a lady. And she didn’t get the message about the elegant updo, either.
5:25: Marissa Tomei may have the gown of the night, which is saying a lot because there are some stunning gowns. Metallic colors seem to be in: silvers, golds, even bronzes.
5:30: Show starts right on time!
5:35: Hugh Jackman looks great. He’s doing a pretty funny low budget version of all the films. And Anne Hathaway can sing. The audience even gave Jackman a standing ovation. Perhaps they didn’t know that he could sing.
5:45: I’m enjoying the interesting way they’re doing supporting actress. 5 past supporting actress award winners each give a speech about one of the nominated actresses. Penelope Cruz , looking lovely in her 60 year old vintage gown, wins.
5:47: PJ calls and says, “Was it a cruel joke to have Goldie Hawn do the presentation for Benjamin Button?” First commercial break and we have the line of the evening.
5:55: Tina Fey and Steve Martin present original and adapted script awards: Milk and Slumdog.
6:00: Jennifer Anniston is presenting. Is Oscar classy enough to not show Brad and Angelina? Unfortunately, Oscar is.
6:05: Wall-E wins for best animated feature. This is about the only 2008 movie I’ve seen, so I’m happy.
6:07: Oh, they just showed Brad and Angelina. But how clever. They were enjoying a quip by Jack Black, the co-presenter.
6:10: They just gave an award for animated short, but really, do you care who won? Didn’t think so.
6:10-6:30: Some technical awards given out. I make some soup and eat it. My mother calls. Milk, The Duchess, and Benjamin Button give them. So far, no clear winners popping up.
6:30: Ben Stiller and Natalie Portman are giving the cinematography awards. Ben Stiller is dressed as Joaquin Phoenix. He’s pretty funny, but not as funny as Sean Penn was doing the same thing at yesterday’s Independent Spirit Awards.
And the Oscar goes to: Slumdog.
6:45: A homage to marijuana use.
6:55: Hugh Jackman declares that the musical is back, which begins a huge musical number complete with kickline and Beyonce.
7:00: and for the last half hour we have been paying the price of having so few interruptions earlier in the show. I’m getting a lot done.
7:03: An hour after the last major award (writing) was given, we now get to supporting actor. Of course, this just brings us closer and closer to Jerry Lewis’s big moment, and I’m really in no hurry for that. Nope, no hurry at all.
7:10: Heath Ledger wins, of course, joining Peter Finch as the only posthumous winners of acting Oscars. And I understand that if you had bet $40 on that win in Vegas, you’d now be collecting $1.
7:15: In honor of Marin and my so-called obsession with teeth, I won’t mention what I’m watching right now. Man on a Wire wins the Documentary Award. I really want to see that one. It’s about the guy who tightrope walked the Twin Towers. But one of the nominees! I can't stop thinking about it.
7:27: Benjamin Button wins the Visual Effects award.
7:30: Sound Oscars to The Dark Knight and Slumdog. The Button/Slumdog split continues. Another Oscar to Slumdog. It’s pulling ahead.
7:45: Jerry Lewis time. Umm….I think I need to go check on something important.
7:46: Standing O for Jerry Lewis. Easy, easy crowd.
7:47: Lovely acceptance speech. Short and classy. Okay, now I want to give him a standing ovation for that. But then I remember any one of his unfunny movies and I get over it.
7:55: Score Oscar. Zac Efron again? This is the third time I’ve seen him tonight. It’s as if Disney owns ABC. Oh, Slumdog wins again. I sure hope I like that movie when I finally see it.
7:57: Now they’re doing the song nominees now. I am officially not paying attention to this category tonight because Bruce Springsteen was snubbed. However, there's a dance piece from Slumdog that looks a lot like an assembly at my middle school.
8:10: Dead people montage. I’m guessing academy award winner Heath Ledger gets the biggest applause. By the way, Queen Latifah is singing the beautiful “I’ll Be Seeing You.” She looks good in a lovely blue dress, too.
8:15: I take it back. Paul Newman got the biggest applause.
8:20: Reese Witherspoon looks good. The dress, a blue sparly one, is kind of so-so. What? They’re giving Director before Actor and Actress? I don’t think they usually do it that way. Slumdog Millionaire. Will the streak continue to Best Picture?
8:27: Actresses! Three of the former winners did a great job talking about the nominated actresses they were match with. Sophia Loren messed up a bit. We can blame language and age for that one. Nicole Kidman, though? How hard can it be to make a paragraph about an actress sound real? Especially when you yourself are a good actress? Anyway, the lovely and talented Kate Winslet won and I’m happy. She gave a nice acceptance speech.
8:37: Actors! Let’s see who messes up from this group. Michael Douglas—nice job on Frank Langella. Robert DeNiro—fair job on Sean Penn. He is funny, but it’s clear he’s reading a prompter. Adrian Brody—reading from a prompter. I hope he’s not going to kiss Richard Jenkins if he wins. Anthony Hopkins takes on Brad Pitt. Not such a good job. Brad Pitt’s pretty cute waiting to hear. Sir Ben Kingsley takes on Mickey Rourke. I can’t tell you if it was any good because I’m sitting here praying that is Rourke wins, he won’t mention his damn dead dog again.
Sean Penn won! Sweet shot of his wife crying. He’s pretty charming.
8:52: Stephen Spielberg hands the Best Picture award to Slumdog Millionaire. No surprise at this point. History, I suspect, will show that America, surfing on a wave of good feeling from their historic Presidential election, chose a feel-good movie that wasn’t in fact, the best film. But since I’ve seen none of them, I can’t really talk.
8:55: Hugh Jackman, who was a charming host, signs off, and 5 minutes early! Oh, wait, no. Twenty-five minutes late.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

No Child Left Behind, Part 2

Why teachers (and others in education) hate NCLB:

When No Child Left Behind became law, it was decided that it needed “accountability.” I have come to hate that word. In this case, that meant that each state had to develop a test. Then they had to develop a level that was “meeting standards.” And, of course, if your school does not meet standards there has to be a punishment. If you know any teachers, you may have heard them say, “My school is a P.I. school.” This means that they are under many threats because their school didn’t meet their adequate yearly progress (AYP). At first, it involves horrible amounts of paperwork, but in the end, the state can take over the school. Here is what this all means:

1. We lose about 5 days of school due to testing. At some schools, hours and hours are lost teaching kids testing skills before the test. Teachers have to take down any posters in the class that have information that might help students. My favorite is that I have to cover up my giant periodic table and hand out the official test periodic tables to students. Administrators then have to go room to room checking to make sure that nothing is left hanging that might help a student.
2. The test is multiple choice. Although multiple choice questions can be well written and test some deep thinking, these are not those kinds of questions. In fact, what is tested most are the most basic facts. These are easier to test and easier to teach, but not what most of us got into teaching to do.
3. However, some of the questions are good ones, and I’d love to discuss them with colleagues so that we can improve our teaching each year. I can’t, because we sign an affidavit, which says we will discuss the questions with no one.
4. A school can exhaust staff and students preparing for the test, get great scores, and then fail because one sub-population didn’t meet their AYP, even though all the rest did.
5. The tests are very stressful for younger kids. Many schools make sure they’re stressful for older kids by threatening to put them into remedial classes for low scores. I know a teacher who had to rebubble a second grade student’s test form because the child’s tears ruined the form.
6. Does your school have a large population of new immigrants? Not to worry! They have two whole years to learn English well enough to be judged against all other students. How would that work for you in a new country?
7. Many middle schools have disposed of all elective classes. This, when kids are at an age where they are trying to learn who they are and what they like. Electives have always given kids a chance to shine when they don’t do so academically. The thinking is that kids who have trouble with reading and math need to spend more time with those subjects, instead of spending time in classes that interest them in which reading and math are used for a reason.
8. It is not unusual these days to hear about a district deciding to close down schools to save money or because of declining enrollment. Then the decision about which schools to close down is made and (surprise) the P.I. schools just happen to be the ones that close down. The students don’t disappear, but the threats to take over the school does, and schools leave the neighborhoods where kids most need help.
9. Our state is in a financial crisis. The tests cost a fortune. And it’s not just the tests. Districts have paid for programs that are supposed to raise these scores and they have administration positions that never existed before that involve crunching data and suggesting new expensive ways to raise scores. Meanwhile, my biggest class size has gone from 32 last year to 38 this year.
10. We get scores and we are encouraged (actually commanded) to look at them and plan ways to raise our scores. However, we can’t compare our students this year to the same students the year before because an 8th grade test is not calibrated to a 7th grade test. We can’t compare state to state because standards and tests are different. We can compare school to school in the same state, but:
11. This is what I know from looking at test scores: if your school is in an area with people with lots of education and money, then your school will have high scores. It has nothing to do with the quality of teaching or if it is a “good school.” But this is so consistently true that if I were a real estate agent, I would throw out all statistics about home prices, income levels, crime, etc. and just look up school test scores to determine where the “good neighborhoods” are.

Then there are the long-term, more subtle results:
I have noticed improvements over the last seven years in students’ ability to perform simple math functions. But most of my 8th graders can’t use a calculator and most are afraid to come up with a way to test an idea and jump in and try it. They have been trained in simple calculations and facts, but creativity doesn’t get tested, so it is not being taught.

I have noticed improvements in the mechanics of writing. Spelling has improved, along with punctuation. But we’ve lost kids’ ability to express themselves in writing well. As an example, a student of mine, who is gifted in many ways, is applying for a special pre-college program at the high school. He has to write a three paragraph essay. This has totally thrown him. He only knows how to write a five paragraph essay. Before standards, almost all students in my school would be up to that task.

I work with a lot of newer, very hard-working teachers. Because of that, I become aware of their training, which will continue to affect kids long after NCLB is gone. I have to use another term I hate (due to overuse), but NCLB has taken away the empowerment that teachers used to have to make decisions in their own classrooms. After watching a lesson, I will ask a teacher what their goals were. Teachers who were trained before NCLB will say something like, “I wanted my students to understand differences among molecules because it will help them when we talk about global warming, which they are interested in. I wanted them to state their understanding because I have noticed that they have trouble speaking publicly.” Do you see what happened there? The teacher had given thought to why he was teaching the lesson and he knows his students’ interests and needs and incorporates them. Ask the same question of a post NCLB trained teacher, and you’ll get, “I’m going to teach molecules because that’s the next standard we’re covering.” It’s not that they care any less than the teachers from before. In fact, they probably know their students well, too, but they don’t feel that they have the power to make teaching decisions based on their students’ needs and interests.
By the way, I know that NCLB will go away soon, or at least undergo major revisions. This is why: It is mandated that, in 2014, all students will be proficient when tested. Let me repeat the funny part: ALL students will be proficient. You can look up your local school to see how many are proficient now: (http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2008/Viewreport.asp). At my school, for example, 31% of our students are not proficient in science. That group includes a lot of students who are fairly new to English and some who have learning disabilities. At a school in a neighboring lower income district, 77% are not proficient in science. In both cases, all kids will never be proficient. All kids can show growth; all kids can learn. But all kids are never going to be able to do well on a standardized test. Some have visual problems; some are new to English; some are late bloomers; some don’t care enough to try hard. That just isn’t realistic, and the fact that lawmakers made this decision strikes me as completely cynical. When they came up with this idea, they knew that it would never happen. Could they have predicted the pressure we would be under to make this unrealistic number happen? That administrators would be hired to make us set goals based on proficiency by 2014? Common sense has to come into play eventually.

And that is why I hate No Child Left Behind and the President who thought it was such a good idea.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

No Child Left Behind, Part 1

Education, like most professions, has its own language. But our use of acronyms and other abbreviations can get so ridiculous that we inadvertently leave parents out of the conversation (though sometimes I think it is on purpose). Imagine you are a parent and hear a teacher say the following: “In core, when responding to a prompt, your child writes with more confidence than the NWEA assessment would have you believe.” Now imagine that you are a parent who did not grow up speaking English. Do you ask the teachers to use words that you understand or do you just smile and nod because you are embarrassed that you don’t understand? After sitting through many such meetings, I have yet to see a parent ask a teacher to speak more plainly.

I have to laugh when our language moves so fast we leave our own colleagues out. When No Child Left Behind turned into NCLB, it took me a few minutes to catch on. It took me months, though, to realize that when administrators were suddenly talking about Nickelbee, they weren’t talking about a Charles Dickens novel, but were again talking about No Child Left Behind. I don’t know why these things morph so much. Is it because saying No Child Left Behind to a teacher is like showing garlic to a vampire? Or is it an educator’s way of letting everyone know that they are on top of the latest thinking?

I’ve been thinking a lot about NCLB lately. Before I rip it apart, I have to say that I understand why it came about. When I became a teacher in 1992, nine years before NCLB, I was handed a huge binder full of Xeroxed lessons from different places. There were so many lessons that I couldn’t possibly get through half of them in a year. There were no standards for what the average 8th grade student in our district should learn. There was not even a list of lessons they should definitely do. There was not a list of what all kids in the state should know, just a framework with ideas about what was appropriate to learn at different levels. There were national science standards, but those were more about big ideas without grade levels.

People in education weren’t being insane or lazy. The thinking was this: kids learn best when they are interested in what they are doing. To give kids a lifelong interest in science, don’t worry about teaching them simple facts. Instead, work on projects that get them excited and interested. They’ll learn science that way. And they did.

On the other hand, this way of learning science could not be standardized easily and could not be tested easily on a multiple choice test. Furthermore, I could not assure a high school science teachers that yes, all students in 8th grade in our district will come to you having learned this or that. This let a lot of bad teachers slip through the cracks. It is understandable, then, that a lot of people thought that standards, where every kid in the state is supposed to learn the same thing, were a good idea. It is also understandable that science teachers, who probably knew best what interested and challenged their students, were less than thrilled to be given a list of mostly uninteresting things to teach.

This was not all bad. I remember going to my first statewide conference after standards were written. It was kind of exhilarating to go into a room full of other 8th grade science teachers where every single one of us had the exact same problem: how do we make density interesting to 8th graders. Around the same time, the internet became a tool we all started using, so teachers were sharing their lessons and speaking the same language.
I and others have worked hard to still make science exciting and interested. At our school, we build hot air balloons to help understand density and we make ice cream to help understand phase changes. And, to make our chemistry unit more interesting, we are about to start a unit on global warming. It can be done with a lot of work.

Why do I join all (and I do mean all) of my colleagues in hating NCLB, then? That’ll be in part 2.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage

I am at war and the mission is not accomplished. My house is populated by mice. Their weapon of mass destruction is their large birthrate.

You would think that my years and years of overseeing dissections would make dealing with mice easy, but such is not the case. In fact, my science teaching has actually worked against me. When I first noticed a mouse in the house several months ago, I didn't think much of it. My science background told me that we share our world with many different living things, so if a little mouse wants to run across my living room and then back out through a crack every once in awhile, then it could go right ahead. My science background seems to have taught me less about what mice might do when they meet mice of the opposite sex. I blame cartoons for this. They show mice occupying homes, running from cats, and borrowing thimbles and such for furniture. They seem like nice little fellows.  Not once have I seen mating mice in a cartoon. So, life went on with the science teacher thinking that she was sharing a house with a bachelor mouse.

As time passed, I started to be aware that there were probably more mice than the one little guy. Signs of them started to appear in my bedroom, and I would hear noises coming from the dogs' food bowls when both dogs were on my lap in another room. It came to me (slowly--way too slowly) that I needed to get rid of these mice. The dogs were no help. I have actually seen them lazily watch the living room mouse run across the room. The pets had a pet of their own.  I started my internet search for ways to rid myself of the mice.

I read about how inhumane the various traps were, and declaring myself the St. Francis of the mouse world, I decided that humane traps were the way to go. I bought little traps that don't hurt the mice at all. The mice go in and the door closes, safely trapping the mouse.  Then my plan was to walk them to our local creek and wish them well.

I planted the traps and Madeline, one of my dogs, would wait for me to leave the room, grab a trap in her mouth, and run excitedly around the house. I would chase her and retrieve the trap, and she would do it all over again. Go figure. I finally found places to put them that Madeline couldn't get to, but the mice were too smart to go in.

Then I found two things that convinced me I had to go to war. I found some mouse droppings on my bed, and, horror of all horrors, they had eaten a Scharffen berger chocolate bar that I had on a shelf in my closet. It was time to stop being polite and start getting real. 


There's a lot of help available on the internet.  All seem to agree that the old-fashioned traps are cruel because they sometimes semi-kill the little rodents.  Many sites suggest the sticky papers.  They are somehow supposed to be less cruel.  I'm not sure how ethical it is to have a living thing with awareness spend its last few hours stuck to a board.  Does it starve to death or die of fear?  I couldn't use poison because I was afraid of the dogs getting into it.  How odd we are that one mammal is adored and needs to be protected from what is used to kill another.  I bought some of the sticky traps that are inside of boxes (so that you don't have to look at the horrible suffering), but the mice just walked around them, laughing.

When I talked to Cameron, he told me about an episode of This American Life called "Building a Better Mousetrap."  The title is a metaphor, but they began with a story about actual mousetraps, in which an expert says that the old fashioned spring action mousetrap is in fact the better mousetrap.  So, off to the store I went and purchased eight mousetraps.

I set up four of them in various places.  I put little bits of cheese on them.  A day passed and nothing happened.  Then, I decided that it would be just desserts to lure them with Sharffen berger chocolate.  So I set the traps and went to work.  When I got home and went to check the traps, one of them was gone.  A quick look around told me that it wasn't really gone; it had caught a mouse and the quick spring action had made the trap flip over.  This meant that I had to turn over the trap to see what had happened.  Would the mouse be only half dead?  Would it be beheaded?  The truth is that it was a very clean kill and must have been an instant death.  I still found the whole thing made me kind of queasy, but I set a new trap in the same space.  This morning, as I was in that space between being awake and being asleep, I heard a snap.  The same spot had produced another clean kill.  This time, I didn't feel so queasy.  In fact, I felt like I had accomplished something.  And the scientist had to use logic to assume that where there are two mice, there were likely many more.  I set another trap, and this time, when I got home from work, the trap was still set, but the chocolate was gone.  

The war continues.  Survival of the fittest.  Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

This Post Brought to you by Campbell's

The other day, I got home from a long day at work, checked my phone messages, and heard the following: “Hi Vicki. I was wondering if you happened to be watching One Life to Live on the day that Dorian and David had oral s_x?”* Who was asking that strange and shocking question? Why, my very own mother. I called her back to tell her that I had never expected to get that message left on my phone and that I had indeed seen the scene she was talking about. There was nothing pornographic about it. It was played for laughs, though it was clear what was going on.

I had not planned to post about television so soon. I was afraid I might give any new readers the right idea about my television viewing habits.

I need to go on a reality show diet. I normally keep up with about two reality shows at a time. This steady diet is not necessarily good for me, but it gives me something to look forward to, and usually something that I can do other things to. Right now, I’m watching American Idol (which I love, even though I know I shouldn’t), and Top Chef. However, next week Survivor and The Amazing Race are both starting up. Gluttony! You’d think I’d have other things to worry about, and I do, but I am actually spending time thinking about the pros and cons of dropping Survivor. I don’t even want to hear if Project Runway is starting soon.

I watch a lot of television, but I can only do so because TiVo allows me to rush through commercials and redundancies. This is especially true for soap operas like One Life to Live. But if I’m rushing through the commercials on One Life to Live, then they don’t have a chance to make me want to buy anything. I suppose what happened last week was inevitable. One day, David (apparently finished with his dirty business with Dorian), dropped by Viki’s house to ask her advice about whether or not he should marry Dorian. When Viki asked David if he wanted coffee, he turned it down because he has become a Buddhist and he doesn’t ingest caffeine. So Viki opened the refrigerator and there were three bottles of V8. She offered him a glass, making sure to mention the brand name and say something nice about it. The whole scene was bizarre, and I did wonder if it was being done for laughs.

A day or two later, though, we’re in the same kitchen again, with Viki’s daughter, Jessica and her cousin Starr. They’re shooting the breeze about the usual things. Starr, still grieving over the death of her baby, was telling Jessica about her father’s kidnapping trial, and the story was making Jessica have flashbacks in which she was starting to remember that she had actually switched her own dead baby for Starr’s living one. In the midst of this, Starr wished for some chicken noodle soup, joking that no one could just magically whip some up. Jessica opened the cupboard door and showed a shelf full of cans of Healthy Request Soup, and just whipped some up. The last time we saw Jessica cooking in that kitchen, she was making something from scratch. She was adding an insecticide to it to kill her sister, however.

Clearly, we’re watching a new way of advertising, much like the American Idol Coca-Cola product placements. It’s smart, but I hope they get better at it. The V8 and the soup scenes were jarring (so to speak). One doesn’t picture the very wealthy characters on One Life to Live serving cans of soup or discussing brands. If they do get better at it, they have a potential gold mine. Since soap operas bring you all aspects of characters’ lives, almost every character has a kitchen. We see them eating and drinking quite often, so showing labels or even naming brands may start to seem normal. And when I see such a scene coming on, I can zip right through it with my TiVo.

*My mother actually said the words. I didn’t write them because I don’t want to deal with all the searches that might find their way to me. Didn’t want to disappoint anyone.