Do You Want Your Child’s Band Teacher to be a Maths Genius?

August 16, 2012

Here is a good way of taking dedicated specialist teachers and ruining their careers without any good reason:

Charles Dolar, the high school band director at Wolfson High School, could lose his job — because he failed a math test.

Florida requires its teachers to pass the Florida Teacher Certification Exam to remain employed by schools. There are four different types of tests — General Knowledge, Professional Education, Educational Leadership and numerous subject exams, including math — and testing requirements vary by individual.

Dolar told WTLV that he had to take four parts of the exam, and passed all but math.

“I was devastated, I actually fell apart in the place, and they had to escort me out and everything because that was my whole life right there,” he said.

Although Dolar worked with a tutor, he still failed to pass the test a second time, but he’s not giving up and is going for a third.

It is shameful that this teacher is being put through this stressful and humiliating process. And for what?

Click on the link to read Only Closed-Minded Schools Block YouTube

Click on the link to read Does Getting Children to Pledge Allegiance Make them Patriotic

Click on the link to read Proof You Can Be Suspended for Anything

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If the Shoe Fits …

August 15, 2012

I am all for enforcing rules and protecting students from violent gangs, but suspending 100 kids on the first day of school is a recipe for disaster.

This sends the wrong message. The footwear may not be ideal, but the punishment is likely to cause even more harm:

The principal at Canton High School doesn’t know what caused the disconnect that led to students violating the uniform policy on the first day of school Wednesday.

Shirley Sanders said every year students and parents receive an information packet that includes the dress code policy. The packet is given out on registration days.

Some 100 students received in-school suspension for wearing neon-colored shoes, neon shoe strings and other “gang related” colors, Sanders said. Students were allowed to call their parents to bring them proper attire.

“That’s unusually high,” Sanders said of the number of violations. On Thursday, some students did the same thing but the number was “significantly lower.”

Canton High School has a dress code – in place for several years now – requiring students to wear navy shirts, khaki pants or skirts, and black or dark-colored shoes or white tennis shoes.

For the first offense, parents are notified and can bring an acceptable pair of shoes to school, and the student receives an in-school suspension for the day. The second offense brings two days of in-school suspension. The third offense requires a parent conference with the principal, and the fourth offense brings a three-day out-of-school suspension.

Click on the link to read Only Closed-Minded Schools Block YouTube

Click on the link to read Does Getting Children to Pledge Allegiance Make them Patriotic

Click on the link to read Proof You Can Be Suspended for Anything

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The Perfect Way to Start off a School Year

August 15, 2012

There is nothing better than a teacher flash mob to ease the apprehensions and anxieties of a first day at school. I love it when teachers stop playing the authority card and instead invest in connecting with their students through fun and positivity:

Teachers at Hancock High School in Mississippi went into the first day of the 2012-13 school year with what can only be described as an unconventional lesson plan.

Instead of the usual icebreaker sessions and syllabus distribution, the faculty gathered students in the gymnasium, where they performed a flash mob to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”

Click on the link to read Brilliant Clip of a Head Teacher Dancing

Click on the link to read Who Said Grammar Isn’t Important?

Click on the link to read Misplaced Lego is Often Found in the Strangest Places

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Lessons Learned From Maddy

August 15, 2012

So called “ethicist” and pro-euthanasia exponent Peter Singer made the following remark when asked whether or not children with severe disabilities should be afforded lesser rights:

“A lesser right to life I would say. Not a lesser right to avoid suffering or not have suffering inflicted on you … but in terms of a right to life, I think, yes it does make a difference.”

This argument is despicable and prevents our society from connecting with our most vulnerable. Parents who have raised a child with severe disabilities can attest to the profound impact their child has given them. Our society must be taught to love, respect and nurture our most vulnerable – not write them off!

Take the inspirational story that I wrote about yesterday, where a father completed a triathlon with his severely disabled daughter, Maddy.

Ask this wonderful father whether or not children with disabilities contribute to people and society. Ask him whether or not they are equals and deserve equal rights!

The quote from Peter Singer came from the following televised panel discussion. The quote appears at 16.20.

Click on the link to read Inspirational Dad Competes In Triathlon With Daughter Who Has Cerebral Palsy

Click on the link to read 20 Tips to Ensuring Your Kids Find You Embarrassing

Click on the link to read It’s Not Spying on Your Children, It’s Called Parenting

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Shops Should Stop Selling “Sexy” Clothes for Children

August 14, 2012

Target and other stores may try and avoid responsibility for stocking some very inappropriate children’s garments but they must accept their fair share of blame. Yes it’s true that in the end it is the parent that makes the decision to buy these clothes, but that doesn’t mean that these stores should get away with putting profits over integrity.

I commend parents that boycott shops for making this greedy choice:

AUSSIE parents have criticised Target Australia for selling “hooker-style” clothes to young girls.

The last 16 hours have seen a flurry of comments posted on the department store’s Facebook page from parents baulking about the department stores’ fashion range for this age group.

It all started after Port Macquarie mum, and primary school teacher Ana Amini posted that she was not prepared to shop at Target again because it was selling clothes that made young girls “look like tramps”.

“You have lost me as a customer when buying apparel for my daughter as I don’t want her thinking shorts up her backside are the norm or fashionable,” Ms Amini posted.

Unfortunately, Ms Amini’s original post has mysteriously disappeared from the Facebook page. It was replaced last night with a response from Target Australia, inviting all their customers to provide feedback on its childrenswear range.

“We know there is a huge diversity of opinion when it comes to children’s clothing which is why we believe in taking great care in ensuring that our range is both age appropriate and something that your kids will love.”

Click on the link to read Television and Body Image

Click on the link to read Our Children Must be Taught About Society’s Lie

Click on the link to read Most People Think This Woman is Fat

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Inspirational Dad Competes In Triathlon With Daughter Who Has Cerebral Palsy

August 14, 2012

What a fantastic story!

A Michigan man who participated in a local triathlon over the weekend has been called the “father of the century” by some because of the devotion he has shown for his child.

Rick van Beek of Byron Center, Mich., took part in the Sanford and Sun sprint triathlon this Saturday with his 13-year-old daughter, Madison, the Midland Daily News reports.

The teenager couldn’t take part in the event alone, so her heroic dad pulled and pushed her along with him, taking every stride and stroke together toward the finish line.

Maddy, as she is affectionately known, has cerebral palsy. The teen can neither walk nor talk, and her dad says he isn’t even sure that she can see.

But what van Beek does know is that Maddy loves the outdoors.

“She functions like a 3-month-old, and one of the very few things that we know she enjoys is being outside, being in the water, feeling the breeze in her hair and in her face,” van Beek, 39, told Midland Daily News.

So, in 2008, van Beek — then terribly out of shape and a heavy smoker — decided he would start training for outdoor races.

 In his blog, van Beek admits that getting into shape was initially extremely difficult.

However, he was determined to live a healthier life for Maddy and to share the fruits of that labor with her.

“I run for and with my daughter,” he wrote in 2010.

Click on the link to read Lessons Learned From Maddy

Click on the link to read 20 Tips to Ensuring Your Kids Find You Embarrassing

Click on the link to read It’s Not Spying on Your Children, It’s Called Parenting

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Does Getting Children to Pledge Allegiance Make them Patriotic

August 14, 2012

 

I have no problem with a law that makes it mandatory for schools to set time for pledging allegiance but does it really work? My school recites the Australian National Anthem every week and for every gathering and assembly. I often wonder whether this practice has any affect on the students that sing it:

The Nebraska Board of Education on Friday unanimously voted to approve a rule change that will make it mandatory for the state’s public schools to set aside time daily for the Pledge of Allegiance.

The change in question applies to Rule 10, which governs all Nebraska schools and districts. Failure to comply with the new requirement could put districts at risk of losing their accreditation and therefore state funds, the Sioux City Journal reports.

Students will not be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance under the new rule, as they will have the option of standing or sitting quietly, provided they respect peers who do participate. However, schools will be required to allocate time for the Pledge.

According to the Sioux City Journal, state board candidate Bob Van Valkenburg proposed an amendment Friday that would require flags be present in every classroom, and that all students stand during the recitation of the pledge even if they elect not to join in. Van Valkenburg also championed requiring students who do not recite the pledge to write a 50-word essay on what it means to be an American.

50 word essay? Sounds like a punishment to me.

Click on the link to read Kids Don’t Need Gold Stars

Click on the link to read Only Closed-Minded Schools Block YouTube

Click on the link to read Experts Push for Kids to Start Driving at 12

Click on the link to read Kids as Young as 3 are Getting Tutors

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Top 10 Apps for Nurturing the Creativity in Kids

August 14, 2012

Below, expert David Andrews has listed a selection of his top 10 apps for creativity:

iMovie: add video, photos, music and sound effects and trim the length of any clip. You can create trailers with immersive graphics and original scores, build polished projects with themes, record and edit soundtracks.

Creative Book Builder: add paragraphs, images, videos, audio recording and links. You can also add page breaks with chapters, change font and preview in iBooks.

GarageBand: turns your iPad into a collection of touch instruments and a full-featured recording studio. Play pianos, organs, guitars, drums and basses, which sound and play like their counterparts, but let you do things you could never do on a real instrument.

Strip Designer: create comic strips using photos from your photo album. Select one of many page templates and insert photos, add balloons with words and add additional symbols to spice up a story.

Explain Everything: easy-to-use design tool that lets you annotate, animate and narrate explanations and presentations. Create interactive lessons, activities, assessments and tutorials.

Skitch: use shapes, arrows, sketches and text annotation on photos, screenshots, maps and web
pages then share them.

Videoscribe: create animated videos that replicate the stop-motion capture style of drawings that’s so popular on commercials.

SonicPics: turns your images into a custom slideshow movie. Add voiceover narrating your image as you swipe through them.

Brushes: features advanced colour pickets, several realistic brushes, multiple layers, extreme zooming and a simple interface. Records all your actions when painting.

I Can Animate: capture frames using the in build camera, displays onion skinning, undo support, preview whole projects and then add to an iMovie project for a really polished movie.

Click on the link to read The Top 50 Best Apps for Children
Click on the link to read The Cell Phone will be the New Pencil Case

Click on the link to read There is Still Some Love for the Forgotten Class Whiteboard

 

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Maths is a Very Poorly Taught Subject

August 13, 2012

Out of all the subjects offered in Primary school, maths strikes me as easily the worst taught. This is for two main reasons:

1. Teachers are almost uniformly from arts and humanities backgrounds rather than maths and science backgrounds. It is staggering to compare those that went down the humanities path in late high school or in their first degree compared to those that have completed major maths units.

2. Maths is often taught in a boring, unimaginative way. Mindless worksheets and excessive reliance on rote knowledge and algorithms are the standard fare in a typical maths classroom.

What many students seem to lose from maths is the practical nature of the subject. We need maths to do the most basic activities in our lives; from counting change, organising our bedroom furniture, telling time, following a map and cooking a meal. This message does not get through to children sick to death of yet another worksheet.

It is the practical reality of maths that provides this truly underrated subject with enourmous scope for creativity. Just take a lesson I invented called “Mission Impossible Maths“, for example.

But as much as I can try to refocus educators about maths, the future looks dire. Policy makers who have invented the killer punch to authentic learning, commonly referred to as standardised testing, are more interested in grades on a formalised test than they are practical knowledge, problem solving and inquiry.

That’s why they continue to push the rote line:

A campaign group promoting maths has attacked plans to overhaul maths teaching in primary schools in England as “undeliverable”.

In a letter to the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, National Numeracy says the draft curriculum is “overloaded” and relies too much on rote learning.

The curriculum, due to come into force in 2014, expects children to know up to the 12-times table by the age of nine.

A government spokesman responded: “It is high time rigour is restored.”

National Numeracy says the plans are “seriously flawed” because they rely too much on rote learning.

The group says that rather than raising standards the new curriculum could in practice prevent pupils from developing a strong underlying understanding of mathematics or from having the confidence to apply mathematical theory to everyday problems.

Click on the link to read The Obstacle Course that is Teaching Maths

Click on the link to read Girls and Maths

Click on the link to read Putting Your Children to Sleep With Math

 

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The Pros and Cons of iPads in the Classroom

August 13, 2012

Teacher and blogger David Andrews charts reasons for and against introducing i-Pads into the classroom.

In my mind these were the pros:

• Ease and speed of use and accessibility: The touch interface and app system on the iPad makes it easy to access learning tools. On a laptop you have to open the lid, turn it on, wait for it to load, log in to your account and then wait for the operating system to load.
• Audio visual (AV) tools: The iPad has extremely easy access to AV tools (camera, video and voice recorder) which can be used creatively across countless number of apps. The laptop does have built-in cameras and microphones but they are so much more difficult to use and could require an additional piece of hardware to be connected and installed.
• Books: iPads are great for reading. iBooks allow the user to annotate, highlight and look up the meaning of words.
• Creativity: The in-built AV tools means that the iPad has endless possibilities to be used creatively in any subject in the school curriculum, it just need imagination. For example there are apps for drawing, editing photos, creating movies, ebooks, animations and photo stories, composing music, writing graphical novels and other useful creative apps. In addition, many of these apps have the option to publish work to larger audiences online, increasing the incentive for the children to produce quality pieces of work. The laptop doesn’t have the same efficiency and ease of use that the iPad has and the touch interface just makes it more fun and interactive.

And here are the cons:

• Adobe’s Flash and Javascript: One of the biggest criticisms of the iPad is its inability to work with Adobe Flash and Javascript. A lot of content in schools is dominated by Flash. Despite this, it could be argued that the iPad easily makes up for this restriction with a huge selection of apps.
• Multitasking: A drawback with the iPads is the fact that multiple ‘windows’ or files cannot be kept open, side-by-side unlike on computers, although there are apps that allow multiple pages to be open side by side.
• Word processing: The iPad is quite limited as a device that you would use regularly to word process on. I much prefer to type lengthy documents on my computer, where I can switch quickly between browser, word processing and email. Despite this I still use the iPad regularly for light writing such as emails and Twitter.

Click on the link to read The Top 50 Best Apps for Children
Click on the link to read How do you Assess a Student Who Knows More Than You Do?

Click on the link to read There is Still Some Love for the Forgotten Class Whiteboard

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