Peabloggy

For the past several days, I have been listening to professors from universities in the European Union and the United States discuss issues of race, ethnicity and migration in our respective cultural settings. It has been fascinating to see the paradigms we all bring to the table, and the ways in which these ways of thinking interact. In particular, it has been interesting to consider the loaded terms we use to describe these issues, and how our definitions conflict.

Yesterday, several Dutch professors explained the term “black schools” as it is used here in the Netherlands. The term does not refer to schools who primarily serve students of a dark skin color. Rather, it is used to describe schools that are performing poorly and that frequently educate students of Moroccan or Turkish origin (the two most prominent immigrant groups in the Netherlands).

Dutch professors also explained how a person is defined as “Dutch.” For people in the Netherlands, someone is Dutch only when BOTH of their parents were born in the Netherlands. Contrast that to US policy that allows some first-generation immigrants to become citizens.

The way we name things and people has a powerful impact on the way we think about and treat them, both at the policy and personal level. Much of what I’ve heard here has me thinking about the way these labels affect students in public schools, in particular.

- Rachel Bowers

Previous: Coming Soon: Blogging from Utrecht, Netherlands

What qualifies someone to be president? Historically, its seems to be a combination of Military Career, MBA or JD plus prior political experience. Add some winning charm, charisma, a bit of machismo and you’re in. I realize that not everyone is completely dissatisfied with our current president to the degree which I am, but my opinion of the value placed on a Harvard MBA has taken a severe beating in the last seven years. Not that I blame the Ivy Leagues for the personal shortcomings of the students they graduate (my older brother recently graduated from grad school at Harvard). I am simply questioning the notion that a knowledge of business and economic machinations, or our country’s legal and governmental system are, in and of themselves, accurate predictors of whether someone is qualified to be president.

For the record: Hillary Clinton has her B.A from Wellesley and her J.D. from Yale. Barack Obama has his B.A. from Columbia University and his J.D. from Harvard. John McCain graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis (894 of 899 in his class…for the record).

While I believe that all three have qualifications to act effectively as president, to varying degrees, I want to know when we will have a president who lists an M.Ed or Ed.D. on their vitae? Various researchers have estimated that the average teacher makes between 1000 and 1500 decisions a day that take into account dozens of complex variables. Excellent teachers have to be familiar with the intricacies of all the different cultural variables present within their classrooms, and how those variables affect teacher-student interaction, student-student interaction, and the most effective teaching strategies to employ to attain the desired goals for each student. Teachers need to be able to manage all the skills and personalities of the students in their room as well as those of other teachers and administrators. Teachers have to learn to accomplish a lot with relatively little in the way of resources, support, or cooperation. Teachers have to evolve a complex set of legal and diplomatic skills in dealing with different portions of the school-going population and their families.

This is the worst thinly veiled metaphor, ever. Can I stop now? Have I made a point?

A highly educated, very successful teacher with the right personality and perhaps some political experience is just as, if not a more viable presidential candidate than most (see Ross Perot and his %19 percent of the popular vote in 1992). Consider the remarkable percentage of work and decision making that presidents delegate to others anyway. How many decisions has our current administration made that the President seems to be completely unaware of? A superintendent or principal spend their entire day delegating work and reserving the decisions that are made public for themselves.

Most importantly, though, the quality that we admire most in our best teachers is a genuine sense of compassion and caring for each and every student. A teacher has to want every student to succeed by meeting their full potential. I need a lawyer who can protect my rights. I need an economist who can monitor and regulate our capitalist markets wisely. I need an army that is intelligently and effectively led. But more than any of those things, I want someone guided by a sincerity and compassion that informs their decisions; and the intelligence to delegate those other jobs based upon that larger understanding of striving for ideals both fair and just.

–Luke Webb

I recently saw the mockumentary Chalk, produced by Mike Akel. Perhaps best described as K-12’s version of The Office, this film prodded a few laughs out of me (especially the slang spelling bee), but left me wanting more, a lot more, out of the characters.  Despite my previous complaints about unrealistic education movies, I wanted to see a profound moment between student and teacher.  I wanted to hear the choirs of angels serenading the movie audience as an educator liberates his students from institutional oppression.  I wanted those classic montages in which students create a dazzling project or improve the neighborhood to the chorus of a catchy tune.

Instead, I got a pretty close rendering of the day-to-day reality of a new teacher with little support, no experience, and mediocre passion.  This description may not appeal to most audiences, but to the urban educator, this movie may resonate deeply.  Before I began teaching, I never realized that there will be bad days, no matter how well you teach or how much you planned or how effectively you connect with students.  I never considered the lifelessness that can skulk about the hallways of comprehensive high schools.  But I also agree with the assistant principal in Chalk when she says that it is those shared moments with students, however brief, that make teaching worthwhile.

–Katie Harris

I feel extremely lucky that last night I was able to attend the preview of a documentary film made by a former local tv news reporter about two current Vanderbilt Medical School students.  The film is called “Sons of Lwala.” The two students are Milton and Fred Ochieng’ who come from a small, remote village in Kenya named Lwala.  The documentary recounts the story of how the two brothers came to be at Vanderbilt and their struggle to build the first medical clinic in their home village.

There are so many remarkable facets of the film that I don’t want to give away because there are still a few opportunities to see the film locally and hopefully nationwide.  Let me just say that it is a great story about sacrifice, philanthropy, and dedication to ones community and family.  Milton, the older brother, was only able to come to the U.S. to attend college because the people of his village sold their cows, chickens, and anything else they could in order to buy him a plane ticket.  The reader should understand that it is not uncommon for students to leave Africa to get a college education; it is unusual for them to come back, and to take on the kinds of burdens in doing so that the Ochieng’ brothers have in order to change the unfortunate state of their home village and country.   The brothers lost both of their parents while at school in the U.S.

I implore everyone who has the chance to see the film to make the time and please go to the premiere at the Nashville Film Festival.  If you are not in the Nashville area, then you can go to www.lwalacommunityalliance.org and learn more about the brothers, their familly, and the clinic, as well as their continuing mission to construct clinics across Kenya and Africa.  Donate.  Tell all your friends. Consider what it is that you have sacrificed for your education or your profession.

–Luke Webb

I have posted about Facebook many times already, but I found an article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago that I couldn’t resist writing about. Young, savvy networkers everywhere are flustered by parents attempting to “friend” their children.

I have thought long and hard about my own Facebook site, especially as a teacher, and have consciously avoided posting anything I would not want future employers to see. I realize my profile is available to only those whom I allow to view it, but I’m paranoid, I admit. Just a few weeks ago, a group of middle school students went searching for my Facebook or Myspace profile!

Social networking sites like these appear to be making it more difficult to keep boundaries between public and private life, college friends and family members. Depending on your security features, others have access to view all of your friends, read conversations, and see pictures that others may have posted without your permission. As more and more authority figures join Facebook, creating an online identity becomes more and more complicated.

–Katie Harris

One of the major problems I’ve had with No Child Left Behind from the very beginning, before the law even had a chance to prove its inadequacies, was its reliance on numbers; numbers that could be manipulated with remarkable ease by administrators looking to mask their school’s shortcomings.

Case in point, when NCLB was instituted in Texas, while W. was governor there, principals disguised the number of daily student absences by reporting that chronically absent students had transferred to other schools or districts.  NCLB requires a daily attendance percentage in 90’s, and for schools in high poverty areas with high levels of transience and student turnover that number was a bad joke and nightmare all rolled up into one.  The principals did what they had to in order to survive.  I don’t blame them for that.  I also can’t fault NCLB for wanting to enforce what data shows to be a highly determinate factor in student success.  Both were, however, treating the symptoms and not the disease.

The New York Times website ran an excellent article today reporting on the ridiculous amount of manipulation that states do when compiling graduation rates.  One more example of how NCLB uses flowery language to fill stump speeches, while leaving real world implementation of those mandates up to politicians and administrators who will act with their own best interest in mind.

The solution?  Exactly what NCLB asks for.  Implementation of scientifically based teaching methods by highly qualified teachers.  I am writing this blog entry from an education library filled with thousands of ways, stated in theory and proven by practice, to motivate and involve students of every type and persuasion; and help them graduate with an education that prepares them for a competitive global job market.

And this is the moment at which this polemic comes full circle.  Better results need better students need better teachers need better education requires money teachers/schools need more money government needs to give more money government spends money on fruitless tactics (a war maybe?) cuts budgets schools lose teachers/resources students get left behind graduation rates plummet to 60’s public demands better results government demands better results…

I have a headache

–Luke Webb

I had not truly pondered the lack of discussion on educational issues, particularly in the K-12 arena, in this year’s presidential debates until reading an opinion piece in the USAToday, in which the author admonishes the candidates for not addressing them.

For one thing, the war in Iraq, health care, and a possible recession seem to absorb all the candidates’ air time. In addition, I work in higher education, so I had taken note of a couple of connections between the presidential race and college. I saw a commercial, before the Tennessee primary, on behalf of one candidate suggesting that she/he would fight “predatory” loan companies. Regarding that same person, a news program aired a web video made by college students in favor of her/him. Though I do not recall any mention of K-12 education in such ads and programs.

Unfortunately, this election year, it seems the candidates are too focused on other, admittedly important, issues to discuss education as part of their campaigns. Interested voters will need to engage in independent research to discover how the hopefuls stand on that issue. In the candidates’ defense, I admit, I have not tuned-in to all 50 (or how ever many) debates. Perhaps, let us hope, education will make more headlines and sound-bytes closer to November.

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

Smoking. It can be a unifier or a divider. To a group of college students crowded around a campus “smoke pit,” “smokers’ gazebo,” “the ash tray,” or whatever other creative names those designated areas on campuses are affectionately called, smoking can unite strangers in a shared habit. For non-smokers going about their professional, residential, or otherwise educational business nearby, smoking stinks.

In addition to lung health concerns, environmental issues impose on smokers’ cloudy bliss. The green phenomenon sweeping the nation does not leave room for cigarette stubs in its gardens and ponds.

As one who has never smoked (no, not once, and I was a writing major!), I think all college campuses should be smoke-free. It’s easy for me to say, but East Tennessee State is going to give it a try. Beginning in August, the only “designated” puff zone at ETSU will be the one with a parking sticker on the back windshield.

Some people are going to need a lot of those little trees.

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

This is an exciting time for film buffs as the annual movie awards season is underway. With that in mind, I read an article in The Tennessean on-line about an educational program, the Wounded Marine Training Center for Careers in Media, through which injured military personnel attend a 10-week session equipping them for jobs in the film industry. This is not a degree program so much as it is an “apprenticeship.”

In the history class with Dr. Doyle last semester, my cohort studied the G.I. Bill, among other topics. I found the course material concerning the G.I. Bill particularly interesting, because my father, a World War II veteran, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees after the war thanks to this program. This led him into a career in higher education as a professor of economics at a community college until his retirement in 1997.

Although my dad studied economics and not film, the efforts of the Wounded Marine program should be applauded for helping today’s soldiers prepare for new careers after their service to our country.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MARINES_FILM_SCHOOL?SITE=TNNAT&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

EdWeek has a new series of blog posts on what they refer to as NCLB: Act II and they’re already going full steam. The primary blogger is a gentleman named Mark Walsh.

The first of the recent posts is called You’ve been YouTubed and describes the set of 4 questions devoted to K-12 education issues in the recent Democratic candidates’ debate. They’ve linked to video highlights from those questions, and the answers by the candidates.

Personally, I felt CNN embarrassed itself and the candidates by posting questions straight from YouTube. I couldn’t imagine Lincoln and Douglas ever agreeing to subject themselves to silly amateur skits instead of pre-written questions when they engaged in their famous debates in 1858. To me, it was tantamount to permitting participants to rollerskate through the forum in chicken suits while screaming questions at the potential future Presidents.

The second post reflects briefly on Secretary Spellings’ recent foray into the debate on testing.

EdWeek has become a useful source for links to, and opinion pieces on a variety of education-related issues. Take a look at the blog when you get a chance.

-Peter Beddow