Philosophy Without A Home

You can also read and subscribe to my blog at my new home www.philosophywithoutahome.com/blog/ I had the occasion to clean out the storage space under the stairs today. No I didn't find Harry Potter's wand, but I found a poster I made for a project in grad school. Some quotes from interviews with professors, TA's, principals, and teachers along with some graphs from surveys I sent to parents. All right my poster was almost nothing but words. I'm sure I would get some Presentation Zen going if I were to do this today, but as I did this in 1999 we will have to let it go. If you clicked through and looked closely at the graphs you would find that the parents, teachers, and students all thought the integration of computers into the school was going just grand. It was very interesting that there was such a positive vibe, not just about computers, but the way they were being used. It wasn't like most of the teachers in the school knew what they

My honest opinion. It wasn’t the purpose of cyber-school founders to make money on the backs of children. It wasn’t the intent of cyber-school founders to suck money directly from the government teat. They really wanted to improve education. I don’t even think it is the purpose of most people who work at cyber-schools to put profits over people. These sort of things just happen despite the best of intentions. I read this article on K12.com today. It reminded me, I used to work for a subsidiary of Knowledge Universe Education, I have friends, who are good educators, that still do work for them. I also trained to work for K12 and Agora, also subsidiaries of Knowledge Universe Education. I didn’t finish the training. I tried but I ran into glitches and couldn't finish without help.  I found it ironic that the training materials emphasised the need for teachers to monitor students closely and how to spot trouble spots early. Then as I had difficulties figuring out

I was talking to a mentor the other day about my future prospects, oh and another miserable excuse for an interview. Honestly, I’m not very good at interviews. Anyway, the point I want to make concerns some of the advice she gave me. It seems that many districts expect a new administrative candidate to go through the Assistant Principal position first. It is possible to skip that step, but it will often make life difficult down the road. This doesn’t sound too bad. I would expect that a person be able to be an assistant first, but that is assuming that the assistant position is similar to the principal position just a jr. It isn’t. The job description in wikimedia lists a wide variety of duties. They are primarily responsible for scheduling student classes, ordering textbooks and supplies, and coordinating transportation, custodial, cafeteria, and other support services. They usually handle student discipline and attendance problems, social and recreational program

Image by dendari via Flickr I have moved my blog to my own website . I will continue to cross post here until I figure out how to run things smoothly over there. If you are subscribed here please subscribe there also so I know if it is working. Thanks     As a support person I often find myself with a class for a day, or a period, or even just a few minutes while the teacher is gone. I need something to keep the students occupied with something other than gossip. So when the question came up "Need games children can play without any material to improve mathematical skills for thousands of slum area's children." I paid attention. The first suggestions were games of NIM , which is a game played with stones. Any sort of counter will do and they don’t have to be uniform. Basically the game is played by making a pile of stones then picking up a number of stones in turn eventually forcing your opponent to pick up the last stone. Rules can i

I have moved my blog to my own website . I will continue to cross post here until I figure out how to run things smoothly over there. If you are subscribed here please subscribe there also so I know if it is working. Thanks At the moment until MAP testing is finished I am substituting and assisting as needed. These classrooms are generally quiet places. The teacher talks, the students write, then in the second half of the class students get to work some practice problems. I generally hope the lecture isn’t too long, I get bored pretty quickly. When the students are working I finally feel like I can be helpful. They raise their hands and I come over and answer questions. There’s no such thing as a quick answer from me however. I don’t lean over a student to correct mistakes. What I do is kneel down, read the problem carefully, then read their attempted solution. I try to find where they went off track. Then I ask questions. Why did you do this? What is happening here

I'd like to introduce you to my first guest blogger, Vanessa Van Petten, creator and of RadicalParenting.com and author. Vanessa wrote her first book at 17 " You're Grounded!: How to Stop Fighting and Make the Teenage Years Easier " She continues her mission to help teens and their parents understand each other with her second book. Reading Student’s Non-Verbal Cues By Vanessa Van Petten, creator of RadicalParenting.com and author of the parenting book, “ Do I Get My Allowance Before or After I’m Grounded ?” Teachers are often the great interpreters of the younger generations—always having to read, converse with and mentor their students. At RadicalParenting.com—a website for adults written by teens and kids to give them a secret view into the minds of teens and tweens we write about how important teachers are in young people’s lives. One of the most important aspects of this teacher-student relationships is reading non-verbal cues. In my book, Do I Get My

Image via Wikipedia I was reading this article , specifically the comments. The author felt that google stuck it to Apple and Microsoft, hence the title, “Larry Paige Just Made Apple and Microsoft Look Like Fools”. The comments however were mostly the exact opposite. Many of the commenters specifically mentioned that Google paid three times the price for three times the patents, or that Motorola, the company Google bought, has a less than stellar reputation lately, not to mention the fact that they are losing money. They point out that Google is probably annoying the other hardware manufacturers that build phones with their Android operating system. I think they are all missing the point. The commenters also point out that Google probably did this for protection from patent lawsuits brought about by Apple. This is the point, but not as the commenters see it. The consensus opinion seems to be that Google will use the patents they bought to hit back at Apple or create their own phones

Tax Increment Financing - TIF is a method to use future gains in taxes to finance current improvements (which theoretically will create the conditions for those future gains). definition from wikipedia as of Aug. 13, 2011. School tax increases in Chicago - Homeowners are being asked to pay, on average, an extra $84 in annual property taxes to help plug Chicago Public Schools' $712 million budget deficit. From Chicago Tribune “ City school tax hike greeted with frustration ” The undereducated American workforce - The United States has been underproducing college-educated workers for decades. The undersupply of postsecondary-educated workers has led to both inefficiency and inequity. from Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce TIF’s are great, except what they do is pull money that would have gone into the general fund for a city and reserve it for a specific area. this sounds great, but what it really does in the end is short change education. Hence t

Have you walked on over to the Bill and Melinda Gates sponsored Measure of Effective Teaching Project ? This is where Gates tries to answer the question: "How can effective teaching be identified and developed?" Some would argue that this should have been the first and main thrust of his education efforts. For without the answer to the first half of this question school reform is doomed to failure. Others might say that the answer is and always will be "it depends". Some of my highlights and comments about the MET Project Preliminary Findings Policy Brief . Our goal is to help build fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and feedback to help teachers improve and administrators make better personnel decisions. From the MET Project Preliminary Findings Policy Brief For this report, we have studied student achievement gains on the state test and the supplemental tests in grades 4 through 8 for five MET districts. (The comment I have is

In education accountability seems to be requiring students to take standardized tests and if the students do not meet the required scores the school is punished. This is supposed to mirror the free market. In the free market if a company makes a bad product losing consumers and eventually going out of business is the punishment. This is the story of my first riding mower. I spent the winter researching quality, price, and size of riding mower for my yard. What I ended up with was a piece of junk that I had to take to the mechanic at least once a year from 2006 to 2009, when they finally replaced the lower part of the engine. It was the next summer I was contacted about a class action lawsuit. The suit was settled just this year (2011) I received a $21 check in the mail and a one-year extension of my manufacturers warranty. I wrote Kohler (engine manufacturer) and told them my tale of woe and asked how I could make a claim on the warranty. Well, it turns out that though my engi

A a middle school teacher I loved the last three minutes of this video. "oh no say parents, oh yes say adolescents " "We shouldn't belittle.... ' "instead of letting them sit passively in class..." "they will be bursting with a desire to learn..."

I started reading this blog post - well watching the videos and I didn't get through the first one before I had something to say. Lessons for teaching: Good teaching then becomes the ability to give students time to slow think, but to be there when they need help. More importantly we need to understand our subject well enough so that when students come up to us with half formed ideas we need to recognize the path that they are traveling on so that we can guide them further along the right path - not our path. Well right path isn’t necessarily the right term because sometimes the wrong path is more important to travel first. Sometimes students come up to me with questions and my best response is not an answer, but a question. Why did you do this? What were you thinking when you did this? What did you want to happen? Why don’t you and Joe work together I think you two are working on similar ideas?

Image via Wikipedia This guy Joe borrows my truck everyday to tow his boat to the lake. He never offers to pay for gas or maintenance on the truck. Once he even drove the truck into a ditch. He walked away and left it there. The next day he came over to borrow the truck and got mad that it wasn't back in my driveway ready to tow his boat. He went to the mechanic and borrowed the truck from there before it was finished being fixed. Then he demanded the mechanic upgrade the tires and rims and add a bit of chrome. Bills have been tough lately. I can't afford to keep filling the truck with gas everyday so Joe can drive to the lake. Actually, he has the truck all the time and only returns it so I can fill the tank. I thought about not filling the tank, or even trading in the truck for a smaller car, but Joe threatened to let my neighbor take rides on his boat instead of me. (not that I've had the time or money to take a ride on the boat in years). I tried to find a second job

Taken from a friends facebook notes I promise I only ask once a year..... by Joe Kvidera on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 5:53pm As most of you know, I work at Turning Point, McHenry County’s only comprehensive domestic violence agency and shelter. Coming up on August 12th & 13th, we’re holding our huge annual fundraiser “Take a Stand for Tuning Point.” It’s a massive event that involves our local radio station Star 105.5, a couple dozen local businesses and service groups, over 100 volunteers and hundreds and hundreds of donors. It’s always a little awe-inspiring to see all the people turn out and pitch in. It’s like the last minutes of “It’s a Wonderful Life” where all the friends and neighbors pitch in with a dollar, or some change- whatever they can spare- to make sure the old Building and Loan survives.  This will be the sixth year we’ve done this event and it never fails to amaze me. People come by to tell us thank you for what Turning Point has done

Image by Getty Images via @daylife This post has been in my brain since I sat and read the Supreme Court decisions concerning desegregation of education during our school law class. This will be my last post on this blog, but please do follow my growth on my personal blog . Just the other day I was listening to the radio (NPR I think but I can't seem to find the recording) and someone was talking about Cuba and segregation. The general gist of the show went like this: In an effort to be equal Cuba banished race in all census forms. Except that ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away. Instead of the free and open society Castro envisioned what he actually got was rampant De Facto discrimination. The speaker went on further to suggest that in the U.S. we had De Jure discrimination. In the U.S. the people had real facts, words, and deeds to fight against and thus the struggle for Civil Rights was born. In Cuba accusations of racism are easily deflected with a shrug of the s

Image via Wikipedia A Cross post from my JHU/ISTE blog .  Are public schools doing enough or are they trying to do too much? In the case of Hendrick Hudson School District v. Rowley A lower court noted that: “she performs better than the average child in her class and is advancing easily from grade to grade,” but “the she understands considerably less of what goes on in class than she could if she were not deaf” and thus “is not learning as much, or performing as well academically, as she would without her handicap,” ( Russo , 6th edition p. 1002) Thus they decided she was not receiving a “free appropriate public education,” ( Russo , p. 1002) The supreme court reversed the ruling stating, “if personalized instruction is being provided with sufficient supportive services to permit the child to benefit from the instruction, and the other items on the definitional checklist are satisfied, the child is receiving a “free appropriate public education” as defined by the Ac

Image via Wikipedia Here is a great activity for a classroom.  It’s accessible to every student in the class, it can quickly and easily be modified to be more difficult, it leads to dozens of different questions for further exploration. Now the question is what standards does this problem meet? Obviously, it can meet the need for subtraction in a second grade classroom and easily be modified for use with decimals and fractions for older grades. But what about some higher ordered thinking. (If you don’t think about this then the activity is simply practice in a frilly dress) Moving to the next blog post we can see some very interesting questions on Algebra. So now this interesting activity moves from being a lesson practicing the skill of subtraction to an open ended question on creating and proving Algebraic equations. Then someone goes and suggests using n-gons instead of squares and finding the properties of such a system. Suddenly, we can see that this simple activity is

The other night I had a dream. I dreamt that I had died and gone to heaven. I realized immediately I didn't belong. I asked God what I had done to to deserve such an exception. God responded, "Your children will grow up to be better people than you are, they will be a success where you were a failure, they will avoid the mistakes you made, and make better choices. They will realize the dreams you have and that will be only the beginning.” “So I make it to heaven because I was a good parent?” “No, you are here because you children will be lonely without you. Now, go back and be the type of parent you wish you were.”

Image via Wikipedia I overheard someone say they thought it was amazing that teachers would give up a Saturday to go to a home grown professional development. I don’t think so. I thought, cool free conference, free breakfast, and free lunch. Having never been to an unconference I wasn’t sure what to expect. My wife asked me if I wasn’t going to dress a bit better as I was walking out the door. I would have looked pretty silly in a suit and tie . After the free breakfast, (courtesy of Lenovo I think) we all got together in the auditorium to create the schedule. If you want to lead something or learn something put the idea on a piece of paper and put the paper on the big board, the only requirement is if you create the session you must show up. I didn’t create a session, it kind of caught me by surprise (why I don’t know). With the schedule made we were off. My first session was the future of the book. When will publishers get the idea that the e-book needs t