The Blog of Ms. Mercer

I will not be able to participate on a daily basis, or anything close to that as the school year winds down, but I did want to take some time to reflect on some of my online conversations, since there are some interesting and complex discussions underway…

It started with Clay Burrell’s post, Muhammad Ali: A D- Student? Or an F- School? | Beyond School and Ira Socol’s SpeEdChange: Not getting to Universal Design where I not only commented, but started a post thread myself, What do they need? posts which Ira has participated in. This started with two posts, one of which got a lot of comments, and one that had just a handful. It was important that I not just be saying “me too” (Muhammad Ali was unappreciated) or “me not too” (writing instruction and skills are important). I try to add some analysis that looked at it from a different tack. The back and forth that Ira and I are having through a series of posts (SpeEdChange: Changing Education?) and comments on them shows how a conversation can build with comments, and response posts. It’s also nice to see how this prompts other comments.

Next up was a post/comment/post conversation that I didn’t participate in, but enjoyed seeing. Dan Meyer put up a post about a lesson, which led to a regular commenter, Jason Dyer, asking other commentors to leave off their lessons suggestions, and giving feedback. Dan, who is not known as Mr. Diplomat in blog circles, shows how he keeps (and builds) his audience, with this post, dy/dan » Blog Archive » Jason Dyer Isn’t Human, where he praises Jason’s work in the comment section.

This is not the first time Dan has done something like this. He has a very open attitude towards his comment section, which I think it is how he gets a high number of comments on his posts. Whole separate conversations have taken place in his comment section. I’ve even “pimped” events, etc. of my own there, and it’s all good. This has been instructive to me (even though I don’t get near the number of comments).

Now, one task was to comment with someone who you disagree with. I did that not on a blog, but in the forum section of Classroom 2.0 Finding the Right Tool for Student Work - Feedback where someone wants to take a teacher to task for what they are calling a blog. The only problem I saw with this, is that it appeared that the person never asked her opinion.

Feel free to leave your advice, or other comments to me in the box at the bottom ;-).

Continuing the discussion about what (poor) African American kids need (but this could apply to any kid in the “have-not” group), I started with this video from Bloggingheads.tv where Debra Dickerson (Mother Jones) shares that she wants to have schools in the black community become so good that whites want to go there.

I think this would be a great an laudable achievement, but I want us all to think about what the best known successful school in African American neighborhoods are, and what they are like. In case you forgot, here is a tape of the KIPP academies from You Tube:

YouTube - KIPP Academy video (part 1 of 2)

I want you to think, would middle class parents of any race want their children to go there? I think the answer would be heck no! “All that chanting, and call and response, what are you preparing my kid to go into the military or something?” is how most college educated parents would view this. This is the same point where the whole discussion started a year ago, when I started writing “What DO they need?” It all started with an article in the Portland Oregonian about inner-city schools in Portland where middle/upper-middle class parents were opting for private and alternative schools because they didn’t want their children doing school work to teach decoding (which many had already learned by kindergarten). Look at how early those differences start. It’s kindergarten, and these kids are already behind.

Ira Socal continues the interesting back and forth we have going on this subject with the post Changing Education, where he start with this quote:

“It didn’t take me very long after I started teaching to become aware (nobody at [Teachers College] ever helped me to become aware) that there were plenty of students who could learn, but not necessarily what I wanted them to learn and how I wanted them to learn it, that there were cultural differences that I didn’t understand but needed to and then figure out what to do with those new understandings–not a simple matter in the 19th century schoolroom.”

Ira continues with that theme. The strange thing for me, is that even though many of these methods fail to teach, most people (even those who fail the system) come away with one lesson from the experience, which is this is what school should be like.  As I’ve said before, one of the bits of wisdom from my credentialing program was that we tend to teach as we were taught because that’s what we know, even when we learn different methods for delivery of instruction (sorry Ira, it’s a convenient term). I think this also informs how many parents make their “buying” decisions in education. They have a vision of education, from tv/media, from and from their experiences, and they think that is what school is.

What’s to be done? I don’t think there are any magic bullets, but I have some ideas in the next post.

Clay Burrell has a very popular post that has generated a huge number of comments at Muhammad Ali: A D- Student? Or an F- School? | Beyond School

And teachers - English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms - ask yourself, in this age of user-created video and audio, if it makes any sense to keep giving the Muhammed Ali’s of our classrooms a D- because they can’t write well, when they can speak well enough to be honored, like Ali was, at Harvard and Oxford. The English teacher in me is uncomfortable with this question, but the history teacher in me thinks it’s justified: Writing is no longer supreme since the Digital Revolution. It’s now on equal footing with Speaking and Graphic Communication. Isn’t it?

I hate to say it, but a really important point was missed, which is that if Muhammad Ali was a D- student, his school was likely an F- place not because it didn’t value his excellent non-writing skills (he unique gift for using verbal language), but because they likely did not even bother trying to educate him. Maybe he had a learning disability, but the odds are at that time, in that place, and given his race, he received not just a second rate education but something even worse.

That quibble aside, Clay is making a good point about how we treat people who are great students and don’t do “school” well.

This point is also made here at SpeEdChange: Not getting to Universal Design

If these differing learners had real equal opportunity to succeed, life would get, at least in some ways, more difficult for those who do succeed via the traditional routes.

At first, I was thinking that universities are probably so selective for some good reasons, which you can watch about here:

Bloggingheads.tv - diavlogs

Megan McArdle and Daniel Drezner describe the ugly nature of academia and job hunting there because of oversupply of graduate level students.

There are other places for a graduate to go besides the university for employment (although, this discussion hits on the point that so many seem to think that academia should be where they end up).

But, then I heard this which made the case for universal design in universities better than anything so far…

Weekend America: A Man Among Bears which describes how Ben Kilham’s work on black bears does not get the respect it deserves because even though he has a genius level IQ (probably based on a WISC non-verbal test), dyslexia keeps him from reading beyond the third grade level, and out of graduate programs.

But, Clay’s post did get me thinking about the subject of class and race, and other things that inform how we educate kids where I teach, so I’m going to explore that in some upcoming posts, looking at some ideas like…

1. Since Rev. Wright brought it up, do black students learn differently?
2. What counts more when parents decide on what an acceptable education is for their child, race or class? Is the best “black” education something that college educated parents would want for their kids regardless of race?
3. It’s not just a digital divide sometimes; what do we have kids do in class and on computers in poor neighborhoods.

Got the message below as a comment on my blog. I know I’m becoming a bit of a conference wh*re, with plans to go to NECC, DEN National Institute, SCUSD Summer Institute, FETC*CUE, but I’m wondering what attracted this group to me, since they are having Newt Gingrich and some Ed Sector folks there (maybe they thought I was “flirting” with EduWonk when I criticized him?)

Hi Ms. Mercer,

I just wanted to make sure that you were invited to our education “Blogger Summit”. We hope you can make it and feel free to share this invitation with any other bloggers in the area that might be interested. The invitation is attached below.

Alex
ED In ‘08 Blogger Summit

——————————–

Strong American Schools is excited to announce the ED in ‘08 Blogger Summit. Conference details are as follows:

May 14th - 15th
Palomar Hotel, Washington DC
Registration is Free!

An opening reception is scheduled on the evening of Wednesday, May 14th. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served before the screening of a new documentary film on education, Two Million Minutes. A Q&A session with the filmmakers is set to follow.

Then join us for an all-day conference on May 15th. Nowhere else will you have an opportunity to meet and network with fellow education bloggers, participate in panels, attend workshops, and help tackle some tough questions on the state of education in America.

Space is limited, so be sure to RSVP today!

Register at http://edin08.com/bloggersummit/

I’ve been slow posting this here in the hurly burly that has been my life lately, but here is an excellently received interview with my husband. Due to my pig-headedness, he is not “Mr. Mercer” (I made him keep his “maiden name” when we wed 21 years ago), but is Mr. Terry Preston.

I am not at all objective about Terry talking because the first thing I noticed about him was his voice when we met about 25 years ago (it was like a waterfall of honey to my ears). But, according to others who were listening, he has lots of great things to share about getting a walk to school program going, and how to deal with obstacles to said programs. Lots of great organizing lessons there (some that can be applied to implementing tech in schools). So, here’s Terry…

EarthCast08: Alice’s Restaurant

Recently I shared the situation at my school, which is set to lose 6 out of 22 teachers (actually 6 out of 17 classroom teachers) in Pink slips, we don’t need no freakin’ pink slips… @ In Practice

I wish I could say my trip to a district budget sub-committee meeting helped, but my folks who read the tea leaves say that Kinder 20-1 and 9th grade class-size reduction is going to be abandoned by the district. The news from the Capitol is even worse,

The Latest From Capitol Alert - Capitol Alert - The Sacramento Bee - Budget misspeak

The budget deficit could actually be much higher than Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested last week, his aides said today.

Schwarzenegger “misspoke” when he framed the 2008-09 budget deficit as a $10 billion problem, according to his communications director, Matt David. Instead, the governor intended to say the 2008-09 budget deficit could be $10 billion higher than the original estimate, for a total of $17.4 billion, David said.

The Republican governor is scheduled to release his revised budget proposal May 14, which should render all of the pre-estimates moot.

Some suspect the governor may be shooting high with his estimates to gain leverage in negotiations over revenue increases or a long-term budget reform plan. If more people believe the budget problem is severe, the governor has a better case to make. [I sure as heck hope so!]

So, after all of this, I’m sitting in the staff room today, and I must have looked pretty bad, because on of the teachers who has been pink-slipped asked how I was doing, and what was wrong. I didn’t have the heart to explain, cause it’s not my job on the line (at least not at this point), so I muttered something vague. I mean here she is, on a one year contract, no hope of a job next year, and she’s worrying about how I’m doing!

Least you think I only care about the adults, the bottom line is that all of this will not help students, and will likely make things worse. For more on how messed up our funding priorities are, check out Peter Schrag: California school funding: Inadequate by any measure - sacbee.com.

I’m testing out Google forms so I thought I’d create a questionnaire about my blog. Help me test Google forms and give me feedback on this blog:

or here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=p42QQMxBVvRECEANW5hhgaw&email=true

Sorry dear readers that I have not been writing about what I’ve been doing with students recently. A number of things have conspired against this. First, I’ve been administering state tests (I have a small group doing the modified assessment). My big project that I’m finishing up is the Revolutionary War Timeline project. That has slowed to a crawl for a couple of reasons. I haven’t met with some of the classes due to testing, my son’s field trip, a STAR testing rally at the school, etc.

Since this is my first VoiceThread project with students creating threads, this has not been a fast process. some things are slower than I’ve planned, but I and the students are picking up speed. Here is what we have so far.

Revolutionary Timeline Project | Fifth Grade Blog

It looks, and sounds a lot like I envisioned. So I’m pretty happy with it for a first project. More image variety would be nice. That will likely improve as I teach students how to find their own CC images. More quality mics would help speed up the recording and give students time to redo recordings.

On the primary front, I’m switching to using Must Do, May Do language for online assignments. I’m telling students they have to spend a minimum amount of time on Must Dos which are activities related to their unit themes. The May Dos are more general and at sites like PBS Kids and Starfall. This is part of my ongoing alignment with what happens in their classroom. I’ll be doing a short preso to teachers that is aimed primarily at the primary teachers to show them what they can do with a digital projector in the classroom.

Feedback from others, as always, is appreciated.

Looks like I’ll be attending the DEN Summer Institute at Silver Spring, MD. I’m probably one of the few to get STAR status at almost the same time (I’ve been slow to turn in my paperwork!).

Brian Crosby has been on a tear lately with a couple of fantastic posts on poverty in education. First up is Whose Problem Is Poverty? | In Practice where he builds on ASCD: Whose Problem is Poverty by R. Rothstein about how school reform is being used in lieu of an anti-poverty policy. That we are relying on schools to correct a range of ills without the social service infrastructure to support this effort. Improve their test scores, educate them, and then they will be able to get higher paying jobs. Meanwhile, we are not only ignoring very real social needs, and the social/developmental handicaps that poverty imposes, we aren’t funding schools well. So up next he has Learning Is Messy - Blog » Blog Archive » Build Schools Not Prisons! which discusses how when we invest well (in the social infrastructure) education can improve things. I still think that education policy alone can’t be the whole of your anti-poverty policy. You need health care, employment, and a system of education that lets drop-outs easily drop back in.

What happens with anti-poverty policy centered only on education, and that is all reform is testing based? Well you get behavior like this Death threats for test scores » Moving at the Speed of Creativity brought to us via Wes Fryer, courtesy of the Texas education establishment which seems to know no limits (or shame) in its pursuit of bigger, better test scores.

All this testing has another interesting wrinkle as we see from, SpeEdChange: Not getting to Universal Design (by way of Pat Hensly @ Diigo) where the writer questions whether education leaders really want universal design. Rightly noted is the point that NCLB is brought to us by many liberals (Ted Kennedy, local congressional representative George Miller). They may have intended to end the soft bigotry of low expectations, but instead they’ve created the de facto bigotry of having high expectations but not giving students any support to meet them. That’s not permission to fail, that’s ensuring it.

I remember hearing from a High School special education teacher this time last year lamenting that his principal was insisting that LH/LD students keep taking Algebra classes until they passed the High School Exit Exam which left the students without enough time to take their life skills transition classes. Which would be more useful to them in the long run?