LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Little Red and Her Ancestors

From the Telegraph:  Fairy tales have ancient origin
Popular fairy tales and folk stories are more ancient than was previously thought, according to research by biologists.

 

Thousands of Hours

From an interview with Rafe Esquith, author of Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire in the current issue of Teacher Magazine:

I think the absolute key is that learning, the education of a child, is a long process, and we are now in the middle of a fast food society. We want instant everything. We even have books now like Algebra Made Easy and Shakespeare Made Easy. But I want teachers and parents to remember that it’s not easy! To be good at anything—anything!—takes thousands and thousands of hours of patient study . . .

Read the rest here.

(I've been skeptical about Esquith because I think teaching Shakespeare to fourth graders--for which he is famous-- tends to be more about the teacher than about the kids, but after reading this piece I may have to change my mind about him.)

Online Course Program Expanding

From the New Mexico Independent:
Guv announces initiatives to improve high school graduation rate

By Trip Jennings 8/5/09 12:23 PM

The state will try to improve its student drop-out rate by expanding a program that employs online courses that help high school drop-outs win credits toward graduation, Gov. Bill Richardson announced Wednesday.

The expansion of IDEAL-NM (Innovative Digital Education And Learning) is meant to help the Public Education Department serve up to 10,000 students that need to make up credits to graduate, according to a press release issued Wednesday from the governor’s office.

The online courses will be provided where there is internet access. Students must go to their high schools to register.

The governor’s announcement comes a month or so after New Mexico’s graduation rates rose slightly in an annual national report that annually tracks how many students in each state graduate high school in four years, but not enough to move the Land of Enchantment from the bottom of national rankings.

More here.

Another Year, Another AYP Report

The 2009 New Mexico AYP reports were released yesterday.  Secretary Garcia tried to provide a balanced way of looking at the information, but of course most of the local news outlets took the usual "Schools Fail to Make the Grade" approach.  It's all very frustrating for those who work in the schools--tests that test (or even mis-test) only a tiny portion of what really matters, entire schools being labeled "failures" based on a fraction of what goes on in the school, "interventions" that no one really believes make a difference being forced on schools and teachers and students, and words like "rigor" and "data" being tossed around as if the words themselves have some kind of magical power.  It's hard to believe this mess is what some people call "reform." 

Lighter Backpacks

An editorial in today's LA Times discusses moves in California toward online textbooks.  Sooner or later this has to happen.  Any bets on how long before the huge 11th grade anthology is a thing of the past?  

CliffsNotes for the 21st Century

Here's a piece from the NY Times about the proliferation of web sites students can find to "help" them with their studies.  The focus is on college students, but high school students must surely be using them too.

Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Click Here

In the old days, college students might turn to classmates for help during all-night cram sessions before final exams. Now their study buddies are just as likely to be commercial Web sites with step-by-step solutions to textbook problems, copies of previous exams, reams of lecture notes, summaries of literary classics, and real-time help with physics, math and computer science problems.

Read the rest here.

A Manufactured Crisis?

From AP, via the Albuquerque Journal:

FACT CHECK: Are US students really that bad?

By LIBBY QUAID
AP Education Writer

America's moms and dads are getting a good scolding: Your kids are lagging behind students all around the world.

The White House says so, with concern bordering on alarm. So do institutions such as the Gates Foundation, citing performance tests, graduation rates and other benchmarks.

But don't measure for dunce caps just yet.

While they're not in first place, U.S. students generally hold their own on international tests. They spend more time in school than the Obama administration would have you believe. And their college graduation rates stack up better than reported.

More here.

More on Testing

A new study finds that high school exit exams may be having a negative impact on graduation rates. From Education Week:

Researchers found that, after 2004, when 10th graders took the exit exams for the first time, graduation rates across the four districts declined by 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points each year.

During the same time period, student achievement, as measured by other state tests that the students take in 11th grade, did not significantly improve.

The detrimental effects of the new policy were harder on girls in the bottom achievement quartile than on boys. Girls experienced a 19-percentage point drop in graduation rates after the California High School Exit Exam, or CAHSEE, was implemented, while the graduation rate for boys with similar academic profiles decreased by 12 percentage points over the same period.

Likewise, graduation rates among the poorest-performing black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students declined by 15 to 19 percentage points following the enactment of the exit-exam policy. The comparable graduation-rate drop for white students in the same achievement quartile was 1 percentage point.

Read the rest here.

Burn That Book

And Tango Makes Three, the picture book about a pair of male penguins who become parents, is at the top of this year's American Library Association list of most challenged books.  Also in the top ten:  Bless Me, Ultima and The Kite Runner.

21st Century Librarians

Lots of implications here for language arts teachers.  From the New York Times:

February 16, 2009

The Future of Reading

In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update

By MOTOKO RICH

It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!” Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.”

It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability — or lack thereof — of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.

Ms. Rosalia, 54, is part of a growing cadre of 21st-century multimedia specialists who help guide students through the digital ocean of information that confronts them on a daily basis. These new librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books.

Read the rest here.