A recent case of mistaking biology for pornography has hit education. It’s not the first time folks have gotten worked up about exposing the children to unwholesomeness. When I saw this I recalled an interesting moments in my classroom that I had recently. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’m not anywhere close to writing these updates on a weekly basis, I’m not going to label them that way for this year. I’m instead going to concentrate on writing for you my dear readers, when I can, and let the posts fall where they may.

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My family life is still…complicated, but I am still working and I feel the need to try to write about what I’m doing in the classroom. I hope that it will prove interesting and intriguing to you too.

I have moved to fifth grade (from sixth). The change is slight in some ways, but big in others. Because this class is generally at a pretty good level academically, the difference there is not big. Emotionally they are, on the whole, less “mature” than the sixth graders. I’ve brought a lot of what I’ve done with sixth graders down to fifth grade, but not everything, and not all at once. As an example I’m having them write notes on the history and science lessons, but I’ve held off have them do the full end of chapter packets with independent work activities (of their choice). I also haven’t had them do end of unit “projects” of their choice (plays, comics, etc.) I will eventually get to that, but I’m taking it slow for all of our sakes. Here’s what we’re doing: Read the rest of this entry »

For reasons that are not making sense to me, and a lot of other union members, NEA President Lilly Ekelsen Garcia has decided that NOW is the time and we must endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. This has led to a lot of head scratching, and “what the hecks?” from members who are up on the doings at NEA because at the last Representative Assembly (NEA RA) a measure was passed saying that there would be no early endorsement from the RA. I won’t go into the justification that NEA leadership is offering to defend this move. It does not matter if they can do it under the by-laws. This is a member organization, they need to have the members along with this. Here (hopefully briefly) is why I think this is a bad idea:

1. It’s too soon. This is over one year out from the presidential vote. If Hillary’s campaign is about to implode from lack of funding, she needs to learn how to run a campaign more frugally, since she got herself in the pickle last time too. She’s got the money, she’s got name recognition and standing, and primary season, although getting pushed back, isn’t until next year.
2. In addition, there may be another viable candidate entering the race, Vice President Joe Biden. SEIU is holding off endorsements for just this reason. We should too.
3. Speaking of viable, given the rapidly changing dynamics of national presidential races, and this one in particular, it’s too soon to call that one. One super-well-financed candidate has dropped out on the GOP side so all the Super-PAC money in the world doesn’t seem to be buying love, or votes, this time around.
4. NEA leadership is out ahead of the members and has not done enough to bring them along on this. That is POOR leadership. CTA has been talking about being member driven, and going to an organizing model. This isn’t that. This will hurt that effort.
5. Bringing me to the upcoming Friedrichs suit, in which CTA may have to convince members to actively sign up, and depending on how it’s done, pay due to us. This will not help that effort. At all. It will also hurt if we lose agency fee altogether (although none of that goes for campaigns like this). We will need to be in an aggressive posture on developing membership. Having NEA leadership do something that many perceive is a back-door work around to stay in with the pols in Washington (I, by the way, do not see it in such crass terms) will make the job those of us working at the local level have to do.

I have not thrown my support to either candidate at this point, so I don’t have a fish to fry about that. I’m concerned about process, I’m concerned about the institution. If you are a member and you are too, drop a note to CTA leadership, and your NEA Board member.

Sorry for the lack of posting. My family issues continue, but I’ve been doing a lot of planning (don’t worry, I got unit credit for it 😉 and felt the need to share this observation. I’m working with a Pearson text that’s part of a supplemental adoption for English and Language Arts. This text has some good points, and bad.

An example of good: based on research by Allington, they focus on providing students with text at their lexile level for independent reading, while providing the controversial “text at grade level complexity” (better known as Reading Standard 10) through the text shared at class level. But there is something that while seemingly small, got me thinking. Bear with my nit-picking.

The first lessons are about Reading Standard 2 to determine the theme of a story. When teaching what a theme is, the teacher is instructed to direct students that “a theme applies to universal ideas about people…” to which I say, whose universe is this? The themes being explored in the unit given are about the changes that happen as human children grow up. That’s not an area of glaring discrepancies, since although concepts of childhood and how one goes from childhood to adulthood has huge variety among the cultures found on Earth, whatever the timeline, people go from some form of childhood to adulthood. Childhood may end at 4 or 14, but we all pretty much “grow up” and our lives change. Let’s look at a couple common themes in literature and see how some of the really big themes are not really “universal”.

Family is paramount and one often has to subvert their own needs to fulfill these obligations

Variants of this theme can be found in western literature, but those are mostly in prior centuries, and this theme would be very dated as to be laughable and would need to be about a specific sub-culture for a modern piece of work. On the other hand, this is a very normal idea and theme in some non-western cultures. Let’s look at the opposite case with this theme.

Pursuit of personal fulfillment is good thing

I’ve been worried from the beginning about the implied notion that “Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development” in fiction (or poetry, etc.) was a relatively straightforward, foundational sort of process or skill. It just isn’t how literature works. Also, “theme” is just left hanging relatively undefined. Is Pearson’s definition correct? Who knows? It isn’t in the CC glossary. The Common Core ELA is simply underspecified. It is unfinished. It is rushed hackwork.