Rainbow Marginalization

Well this is just wrong and much to Eugenic/Prussian/Status quo for my liking. I'm too appalled to even give commentary so just read it and weep. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/california-tells-high-school-color-coded-ids-based-140944053.html

Happy teaching moments the school may have frowned upon

A few things many schools would frown upon that were GREAT!!!

1. Mixing cornstarch and water to make a liquid and wait no a solid... to teach matter. Yes the desks were powdery white was was the floor. Yes students didn't stay in their respective "centers" and yeah it was loud. But it was fun and they learned!

2. Donut fractions. Donuts are banned in schools now, but after students didn't grasp that 1/2 = 2/4, offering 1/2, 2/4, or 2/2 of a donut, those kids learned!

3. Poetry slam - allowing students to compose poetry and not nitpicking for poems like "my cat is fat he wears a hat" and claiming that is inferior over "raindrops pitter patter like tears of a fatherless child. Each student presented a poem, we had a "American Idol" style voting panel, coffee and tea, cookies, a presentation 3 leg stool, and the whole cafe feel... it rocked.

4. Pretending to choose a career, major, car, home, etc to see how expensive life can be, and trying to budget for it. Sure it wasn't as standards based as some may like, but I had some of my "worst" at risk students actually whine and complain when the bell rang, they were having so much fun. And GASP they were allowed to use their "banned" cell phones as calculators.... against all school rules!

I am Sparta!

Prussia studied the city-state of Sparta. Why?

First, a little about Sparta, a city-state which was basically a war-mongering nation in what is now Greece. Everything centered around the military.

Spartans were essentially sorted into castes; Spartiates (receiving all rights), Mothakes (non-Spartan men treated as Spartans), Perioikoi (freed men), and Helots (state-owned slaves and enslaved non-Spartan residents).

Helots had violent uprisings often, so the Spartiates and especially Perioikoi were trained in warfare to squash Helot dissenters. A secret police existed to kill Helots to keep them under control. The only way for a Spartan man to achieve high rank in society was to become a secret police, those able to kill for the state were the only ones "worthy" of distinction and rights.

The Helots' lives were quite under the control of the government. The government could call upon them at any time to serve at war. Additionally, they did not own land but rather rented it and had to obtain government permission to move.

Spartan government practiced infanticide, a eugenic principle, where every newborn was inspected for its worthiness and exterminated if deemed inferior or unnecessary.

The secret police were rather intertwined with the agoge, Sparta's educational system, which took boys from the home at age 7 to train them for battle, making them state-owned until death.

The agoge, in addition to its focus on militarism, promoted conformity and the importance of the state over an individual's desires, wants, interests. Loyalty was to be to the school, not the boy's family.

Prussian education used some of Sparta's agoge philosophies in that Prussian education was to train a military state which placed honor of State and King above self and family.

However Prussia educated all its citizens and had a special school for the elite and the education modeled after Sparta was for the approximately 94% of Prussians (I have yet to find the social stratification percentages for Sparta), the non elite inferiors that needed to be "managed"... this is reminiscent of the management of Sparta's Helots. Both promoted compulsory education and total state obedience.

How did Prussian Education become, well, American? And how are Spartan and Prussian ideals still evident in our educational systems today? Well, that is for another post.

A Dewey quote I love, well, rather hate but it is so blatant as to the status quo's intention in society and in education that I am happy to have found it.

“Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.” - John Dewey, signer of the Humanist Manifesto, 1896

psychologists ruling over our kids

Ok. I am all against teen suicide, have witnessed depression and other mental disorders, bla bla. They are indeed a tragedy. BUT is it the place of schools to assess students in order to diagnose them with mental illness and suggest treatment?

Sure it is, I guess....I mean, then we can all have drugged up mindless robots. Perfect!

Disclaimer: I'm exhausted today so it is another cut and paste day. Sigh. Perhaps I'll return and actually write something up. But also in my defense, my works-5%-of-the-time laptop, which has all my research, is stored away and I don't feel like battling it for research and my own write-ups.

John Taylor Gatto, in The Underground History of American Education (my favorite book! My mentor!) said....

In 1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed, "It is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world." A year later, the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts

and,

the home altogether too often is unintelligent or neglectful in the handling of children, and not infrequently it has abdicated entirely and has turned over to the public school the whole matter of the training and education of the young.”

ok this post is dying on the vine. But my point here is....

http://www.teenscreentruth.com/ A test to test children for psychological disorders, available in a school near you! And the executive director is, gasp, a Columbia graduate and follower of "bioethics" which, from my research, is science's way of validating and trying to resurrect the eugenics movement. "The TeenScreen Program is an extremely controversial mental health screening program developed by Columbia University’s Child Psychiatry Research Department. Their goal is to screen every school-aged child before graduation for suicide and "mental disorders" using a computer survey and then recommending those that are considered at risk for "treatment."

The "creator" of the exam, David Shaffer, has been a consultant to "big pharma" companies such as Hoffman La rouch, Wyeth, Glaxo Smith Kline, and Pfizer. And gasp, he too attended Columbia.

The director, Leslie Mcguire, has said, ""Getting the kids to buy in is such an essential thing because for the most part, you're distributing the consent forms to the kids to bring home to their parents and bring them back. So you have to get their buy in, you have to get them interested in it." When asked about "incentives", McGuire replied: "Hollywood Video coupons, you get that regardless. Even if the form says no, you still get the reward."

BRIBING our children into big pharma's hands, and mindless control (indoctrination perhaps) with promise of a nifty coupon. YES. This is real.

Just say no to drugs

My article on the teacher shortage is slow going.

# districts contacted this week: 61

# responded: 2 (one with info, one will get back to me)

# districts that send you that "mailer daemon" kickback email no matter what: 6. Including one I've worked for. Weird.

Anyways.... in the meantime PLEASE READ MY OTHER BLOG ARTICLES! :) many thanks!

15 Things Students Want the Nation (And What They Get)

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-nielsen/15-things-students_b_984177.html?ref=tw I have the list and my cynical yet honest rebuttal, citing what they get instead. Time to make change!!!!

1. I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that. Those in power claim the tests assess critical thinking and that if a teacher effectively teaches the 132-some standards per subject, per year, built upon the prior teacher's effectiveness in the building blocks for this year, and preps students for exams, that they will learn to think critically. Real critical thinking like 21st century skills, Montessori, homeschool methods are treated as garbage, probably because they cannot be prescribed.
2. I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.-Sure, a teacher that calls her students by their gang names, K-Dogg and all and not their birth name will indeed retain her job. But a teacher who pats a child on the back in sympathy because her father just passed will get sued for sexual exploitation. And teachers cannot play "hip" music or speak of anything the students might have interest in because it is NOT STANDARDS BASED.
3. Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking. - So, let's implement a Reading First 100% prescriptive/scripted curriculum in our most failing of at risk schools. Perhaps the top 100 schools in the nation, since they have API scores near 1000, can fudge a little and read novels and do projects and service learning and out of the box, out of the book lessons.
4. Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class. - But if you treat your 100% poverty level classroom to enough pizza once a month to take slices home, and give them a small "winter" gift, you get fired. I mean, we're not here to care about the kids or anything.
5. Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams. Of course, the scripted curriculum and test driven culture is droll and just makes gangs, selling drugs, and dropping out even more enticing (because if this is preparation for the real world as the teachers keep saying, who wants that?). As long as your dream fits into what your test scores tell us about you, and what your neighborhood and economics label you to be, great!
6. Even if you don't want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship. But remember, the only good teachers are those who went to a teacher college, passed their tests, and received their credential in the subject they teach. The more years they've taught are 100% directly correlated to their greatness.
7. Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting. Enjoy trying this in districts with antiquated technology, one tech guru covering multiple schools, and a small window of time to actually use the stuff. Or you may get lucky and find a district with all the (very over-priced) new tech goodies but they gather dust because a)no one receives training b) no one is around to fix them when they have issues c) when do you implement them with all this stuff to teach? And remember, no social media allowed, no cell phones allowed, no movies, no tv, no music other than classical, no texting, no you tube allowed in the classroom! All but the district approved websites will be allowable content for the classroom.
8. You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling. But don't EVER give students advice, pat them on the back to feel better, counsel them away from the view of every single person, or contact them outside of school to see how they're doing. Don't mention any religion, or any of your own experiences, stories, feelings. That is best left to... well, no one, but if they want to talk, refer them to the one counselor that works at five different schools. Surely they will be a priority case.
9. Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that. Heck, everyone is a winner and you don't want to marginalize a student so praise everyone for everything.
10. Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to. Not only must you be the parent, friend, mentor, pastor, idol, teacher, social service provider of each child, but now let's cut teaching jobs and increase class size. 50 kids to a class worked in the la-la days of the 1800s, right? And studies prove that test scores don't increase when class sizes decrease. And those tests are gold, folks. They paint a very detailed photo of every child. Contrary to popular belief, they're not a snapshot of a fraction of knowledge. Nope. So send in the clowns, I mean children, a per-class fifty is really nifty.
11. Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music. Well, ok, maybe offer them only to the top students with 4.0 gpa, who have passed the exit exam, aced the SAT, been the great-score anomaly on the state assessment, Threaten the failing and most disengaged students that if they fail one more thing, the only class keeping them in school (fin hands on electives) will be replaced with drill and kill test prep. Then ask why they hate school so much and lack motivation. When enough complain they don't get interesting electives, explain that due to budget cuts, the arts programs have been cut, and with declining test scores, students need to take more core classes.
12. Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations. And then throw out anything they say because what do students know? They're NOT the education experts. Did they attend 6 years of college learning pedagogy and educational philosophy? I think not.
13. You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate. Refer to # 7 please. Heck, even try and police kids outside of school via social networking if you can.
14. You need to love a student before you can teach a student. But treat them like automaton.
15. We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don't help us to learn what's important to us. What? These tests are important, they test the standards, essential knowledge for adulthood! But recall, the holocaust isn't a standard so it is not taught and neither are current events, as who needs to know about that? And besides, experts decided what the standards are, thus what is important and assessed. Don't doubt their expertise please.