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By Any Other Name

A new primary school (oops) has opened in Sheffield, England.

The reason I put "oops" in that sentence is that they are not going to use the term "school," because it is too negative. Parents, for instance, have negative associations with the word "school." Instead it will be called "a place of learning."

The Plain English Campaign has called this "ridiculous." THEY, at least, don't mince words.

Among other things the head teacher expressed, ""There are no whistles or bells or locked doors. We wanted to de-institutionalise the place and bring the school closer to real life."

Well, I'm glad there are no locked doors, but the rest sounds frighteningly like some things that were tried in the US in the 1970's such as open classrooms where students got to choose whether to go to lecture or to a section of the course that was taking a test or to sit in on a different section of the class that was having a movie that day and so on. The goal, of course, should be to make people feel happy and empowered, right? After all, won't students be more motivated to learn if they have more choice and more control - makes sense, right?

Um . . . no . . . it was an unprecedented disaster.

(Side-note: A local high school recently seemed like the Winchester Mystery House when they discovered a classroom that no one knew about and that had no doors and windows. You see, this school had started as one of these open school with no walls between classrooms. Once it was realized the open plan was a fiasco, walls were put in, thus creating closed classrooms - one of which obviously became a little TOO closed - and a return to normal "school"ing. I'm guessing those who did the remodel were graduates of the open plan . . . but . . . I digress . . .)

It seems the paramount concern in society these days in so many areas of life is that we don't want anyone traumatized by "negative associations." I just hope our world survives these days of political correctness, warm-fuzzies, and false self-esteem (if my children come home with one more trophy, medal or certificate I'll scream!), and I hope that IF we do survive there will remain at least a modicum of intelligence and knowledge in the human race.

A school by any other name had better still be a school.

Questionable

Either the students in this school are phenomenal geniuses at physics or the person in charge of putting statements on this sign is phenomenally inept with punctuation.

- image taken from "Say What?!: Curious Signs I Have Known"

Newsworthy!!

This is my Math 20 class on the news!

I mentioned this in an earlier post entitled "Newsworthy??" (titled thus with question marks since I had no idea what the story was going to be when they came into my classroom with news cameras!).

The story is newsworthy! It has to do with budget cuts in higher education and the impact that is going to have on students and colleges in California. As they show my classroom they talk about how full it is - trying to illustrate how impacted classes are already. This is nothing! They should have been there on day one when nearly all of the 68 enrolled students and nearlly all of the 60 students on the wait list showed up in this room, which has seats for 80 people. It was standing room only! Students were coming up to me begging me to let them in, because they needed this class THIS semester. I added as many students as I could but had to turn many, many students away. Those that were turned away are now a semester behind (or yet another additional semester behind) on their math requirements, and they may get turned away next semester too. This is where things stand now, but this news report explains how much worse things will likely get, so it is newsworthy, impacting many lives.

That is the reason I've chosen to post, but I also thought it was kind of cool to let you see me (if ever so briefly) in my natural habitat. :-)

Grammar "Police" Humor

I was going to blog at length about how everything teaching and study related in my life all came crashing in on the same week and how I'm sitting here blogging as I try to prioritize where to begin today (things along the lines of: "Do I first study for my own midterm or grade the one I just gave my students?"), but then I decided I (and probably you as well) could much better benefit from a LAUGH.

Does other peoples' improper use of grammar drive you crazy?

Are you a member of the grammar police?

Whether you are "grammatically correct" or not, you'll probably find The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks funny. Click on the title to be redirected to some grammatical humor.

Have a "good" day (and I "really" mean that)!

Quote for Thought (6)

"Most people would rather die than think: many do."

-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Fawnix Werks!

I'm not sure if the teachers at this school do a lot of texting or if they are proponents of simplified spelling . . .

. . . but I'm hoping that a teacher will not give credit to a student who spells "night" the way it is spelled in front of the school. On the other hand it seems hypocritical for a teacher at this school NOT to do so.

I guess I don't have to worry about it since my kids don't attend this school, but the sign (or should I write "sine") certainly caught my attention as I was driving past!

No Rocket to the Moon

When I was in kindergarten there was a bulletin board with a moon on it. Students who knew all their letters got a rocket to the moon with their name on it put up on the bulletin board. I guess I was a bit dyslexic in kindergarten. I knew all my letters, but I could never keep "m" and "w" straight. When the teacher would show the flashcards and one of those would come up I would always guess - must have been a poor guesser too!


I never got my rocket to the moon. :-(


I never had any dyslexia problems after that . . .

. . . until now.

Check out the symbols that are used daily in my math class. We use them so often I can now no longer write a three. I'm never sure which way it goes, and when I have to write an epsilon (the mirror image of 3), I end up writing a three instead!


Oh well, no rocket for the moon for me, I guess!

Hero Nomination

After class tonight I happened to walk out to the parking lot with a fellow student, and he shared with me something that happened in his class today.

He teaches in another town, one that has a reputation for crime, gang activity and families living in difficult and dysfunctional situations. In his class are many students who are especially low-achieving and have been dealt a pretty raw deal in life. One of his students had seen her father shot earlier this year.

He and I were discussing teaching as we walked, and in the middle of telling me about how he is approaching effective note-taking, he shared that he had been overcome today by a need to go deeper with his students as a group.

In the middle of class today he suddenly said, "Whatever you're doing right now, put it down. This is serious. I'm gonna go deep with you. I need your full attention up here. Do any of you play cards? Do any of you play domninoes?" When he got many "yes" responses, he asked, "What do you do when you get a really bad hand?"

The students were very honest with him. Some of the responses were:

"I give up."

"I get angry."

"I cheat."

"I quit."

He created a "web" on the board of the responses.

Then he looked at them and said:

"What do you do when you've been dealt a bad hand in life?"

Everyone got quiet.

He continued: "I know some of you wish you had a Dad. Others of you wish your mom and dad were together again. I know the situations many of you are in. I know what it is to have a hard life. One time my mom had no money and the cupboards were nearly bare. When she asked us what we wanted to eat, we said, 'Pancakes.' She didn't have any pancake mix, but she looked at what little was in the cupboard, and she made us pancakes out of whatever she could find, and you know what? They were the best pancakes we'd ever had."

Some of his students commented that maybe she had just been a really good cook. He responded that he didn't know about that, but that wasn't the point. She had looked in the cupboard, and, instead of looking at what wasn't there she figured out how to use what was there.

He then shifted the discussion back to games. He said, "You've given some comments about what you do when you get a bad hand at cards or dominoes. I play a lot of dominoes. If I get a bad hand, what I do is I start looking around. I look at what's out there. Instead of thinking of what I don't have, I look at what I do have and how it hooks in and how it can work together - that this connects here and then that will connect there and so on, and pretty soon I know how to play the hand, and I play the best I can."

He told me that by this time some of his students had begun crying and he began crying too. That must have been quite a sight because he is QUITE an imposing male presence (and I'm sure serves as a father figure to many of them).

He didn't share this to impress me. He shared this because his heart was overflowing after this had happened in his classroom today.

I know he's overloaded with work right now. Due to student population he was moved from 4th grade to 6th grade this year - all new curriculum to teach - VERY time consuming to prepare! He is going to school himself, working on a graduate degree at a campus more than an hour's commute from where he lives. He is concerned about teaching well, and he is concerned about his students' hearts.

He has no idea I have a blog nor that I am writing this, but I nominate sixth-grade teacher Eric C., a big man with a big heart, as a hero because in the midst of his own very busy life he is aware of other lives that need to be touched, and he reaches out and touches them. I can only imagine how different the lives of some of these students may turn out - differently than they could have turned out given their environment - because of his impact, care, and inspiration.

Kudos to you Eric!

Bee Buzz

So, are you one of those people who can't stand to see "Rite" in the name of a company or "lite" on food packaging, or are you one who spells "night" as "nite." Do you prefer "thru" to "through" or does it make you want to tear your hair out? Is "enuf" enough, and is "enough" too much?

With the advent of instant messaging, people are moving more and more towards simplified spelling - very simplified. Do you think "u" will eventually replace "you" or that "r" will replace "are?"

Are you aware such changes have taken place all along? Do you wish we could go back to "dialogue" rather than today's accepted "dialog?" Do you prefer "colour" or "color," "behaviour" or behavior," "shoppe" or "shop?"

There are those that advocate a total overhaul of spelling in the English language. Usually there is a spike in articles about this issue around the time of the National Spelling Bee. Here is what one had to say:

Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop if words such as "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" were spelled the way they sound. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.

When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?

Studies have been done that show that children in countries whose languages are more strictly phonetic learn to read faster than children learning English, yet so much meaning in words is in their roots, prefixes and suffixes. What would we lose and what would we gain in making sudden radical change? How would this impact individuals who already know how to read and write? Would all literature suddenly have to be republished with the new spelling (and at what cost)?

Yet we do now spell "doughnut" as "donut." "Centre" and "theatre" have reversed their final letters. In losing their u's, have "honour" and "labour" lost their "use" too, or are they still just as "useful?" Is anyone upset by the changes that have already taken place?

I, for one, am not ready for a spelling overhaul, but if you are all for it, you are in good company. Past proponents of this change include: Andrew Carnegie, John Dewey, Teddy Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain (and this was LONG before the advent of IM'ing!).

Wat du u theenk? Wae n bi posting ur comment.

Hav a gr8 day!

Great Question

My grad studies are now fully underway. I'm in my twentieth year of teaching, fourteenth at the college level, and it's been really strange to sit in the seat of the student and have someone hand ME a syllabus! It's pretty cool to see how other instructors run their classes and to see their quirks. (The price of books and the unavailability of student parking has not been fun, but it sure has given me opportunity to empathize with my own students.)

When I arrived home today from attending my night class, my 12-year old asked me, "Mom do you ever get confused and go up to the front and start teaching when you're supposed to be the student?"

I thought that was a pretty cool question!