A Curriculum Recommendation!

Longtime readers will know that I'm a pretty vocal critic of the LASER science kits that have been thrust upon the schools, so it's nice to be able to make a recommendation: Prime Curriculum, put together by an outfit out of Reardan, Washington. Simple, direct, focused, oriented towards agriculture, I've done a couple of them and have found that they fit into my 5th grade classroom just about perfectly.

They're not meant to be the primary bit of science curriculum, but I think they're a great add-on. Anyone else using them?

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Bombs Away!

Got the preliminary science scores back for my school.

The picture isn't good. They not only went down, they went in the tank in about the most spectacular way you can imagine.

Thing is, a friend in a different district got a peek at her results, too, and she was also waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. If it was just me, I'd eat the crap sandwich. If this is a statewide trend, though, there's going to be some impossible questions asked later this month when the statewide release rolls out.

Mark your calendars.

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Washington Education Week #3: Thanksgiving Turkeys Edition

The Race to the Top: With the lull between budget announcements and Legislative Assembly Days, most of the blog chatter this past week has been looking at how Washington State measures up in the federal Dash for the Cash Race to the Top grant program. The League of "Education" Voters has done a 6 part series on their blog that's worth your time to read; also with several blog posts that boil down to "Teachers suck, change everything" are the Partnership for Learning, here. And, just to clear out my RSS reader: Publicola.

I'm working on my own posts on each of the impacted areas, but one thing I do have to chuckle at is just how earnest some of the folks on the pro-RttT side are. "We have to allow the state to just take over failing schools!" they'll protest, without seeming to make the connection that we have laws regarding school boards and local control that are every bit as ingrained in the people of this state as dams and snowy mountain passes.

You can get an inkling of the fight if you go and look at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's School Report Cards. Using their metrics, the worst high schools in the state are in places like Toppenish, Walla Walla, Pasco, Aberdeen, Puyallup, and Coulee City--all represented by Republicans, all places where the community will revolt if you try to send in a bunch of "outsiders" from Olympia to run their schools. "It's for the kids!" needs to be overwhelmingly supported by the evidence to make school takeovers work, and I'm not convinced in the slightest that plan that the State Board of Education has in place gets us where the LEV and SFC want to go.

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Randy Dorn Cares for Children/Randy Dorn Hates All Children: The reaction to the recent proposal by Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn to delay the math and science graduation requirements is still bringing in a ton of reaction. Dorn tried to get out in front of the storm, and a hell of a storm it is: when papers like the Walla-Walla Union-Bulletin are saying that you "continue to undercut the effort to reform — and improve — education", you've got a publicity problem.

Personally, I think that the best, most sensible reaction came from Cliff Mass, a meteorologist of some note at the University of Washington. Keeping science and math as graduation requirements punishes the kids for the failures of adults to get the system right, whether it's the 20 different iterations of testing that we've had in the last decade or trying to define exactly what standards we want to hold them to. The failure of the kids is also the failure of the system, and right now we certainly don't have the system in place to get them all where we want them to be. This thread from the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession is also quite well written and on point. Check out Crosscut as well.

Also not really working in Dorn's favor: President Obama came out this week with a new initiative on expanding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. When the Department of Education is saying higher standards, and the President is saying higher standards, it's pretty clear that Dorn is going against the tide.

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The State Budget: Amber Gunn of the EFF stirred up a hornet's nest over on Crosscut when she echoed Sen. Zarelli's call for a special session to start cutting into the state budget right now. You've got some elected officials in the thread saying pretty incendiary things, and that's always fun!

(Personal aside: You don't hear anyone from any of the professional school organizations talking about a special session, because in a special session there's absolutely nothing good that could happen for schools.)

Publicola has a link to a video that Governor Gregoire put out talking about just how bad things are; consider it the anesthesia before the emergency appendectomy come January. The Capital Record also has the video and some pull-out quotes, here.

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"Merit" Pay in Action, and Inaction: The Superintendent of the Seattle Public Schools, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, met 4 of her 20 performance goals last year. That's a bad batting average, a really bad spelling test, and not exactly anything to write home about on the job.

That's also $5,280 more in her pocket, according to the Seattle Times.

The way that Goodloe-Johnson's contract is strucutred she can earn up to 10% on top of her base salary for meeting her 20 goals; that means that each goal met is worth $1,320. Under the goose/gander school of thought, if the state designed a plan to allow every teacher to earn up to 10% of their salary in incentives, the legislature would have to allocate about another $250,000,000 just to cover the costs.

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Other bits of note from the week:

• Joanne Jacobs on Why Arts Education Isn't a Luxury. The half-time art teacher in my district already knows that she's at risk of getting cut in the budget crunch to come; hopefully, I can use this to help mount a good defense.
  
  
• I love this and want to marry it.
  
  
• The United Faculty of Washington State has put together a great blog on higher education issues here in Washington; you can check it out here.
  
  
• People are flocking to community colleges, which isn't a surprise given high unemployment and a down economy.
  
  
• This commentary on what happens when school levies fail is important, particularly given the current state budget realities.
  
  
• When the teachers take over the schools.

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Jesus, People Suck

The saddest, most amazing thing I've seen in a while: The Stomachs of Dead Albatrosses.

(via)

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Science is Freaking Amazing

From the Chronicle of Higher Education ($):

It was a case of invention by necessity.

While in Europe researching the origins of a poem, Timothy L. Stinson, an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, became frustrated with the limited methods available for determining where the original text came from and when it was produced.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb," Mr. Stinson recalled. "Wait a minute, they're on animal skin. Why can't we look at DNA?"

Indeed, in the age before paper was widely available and affordable, the written word was recorded on the hides of sheep, goats, and cattle. Shortly after Mr. Stinson had his epiphany, he began putting his idea into practice. Working with his brother, a biologist who has performed DNA extraction and analysis, Mr. Stinson is developing a method of using DNA to determine when and where medieval manuscripts were written. The approach will significantly improve the accuracy of the standard identification process, which typically relies on analysis of the author's handwriting and dialect — approaches that are "notoriously unreliable," Mr. Stinson says.

The old history can quickly become the new history, and that's just a neat thing to see.

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Engineering and Title IX--The NEA Gives an Opinion

I talked a few months ago about how some were hoping to expand the proportionality principles of Title IX to academic subjects like math and engineering. It worked to create a generation of female athletes, the argument goes, so why not to create a generation of female mathematics all-stars?

I don't see the sucess potential. Programs that introduce girls to the sciences and make them want to enter the STEM fields I have no problem with, but were Title IX to be applied to the academics the same way it has been to the athletics (e.g., "60% of your students overall are female, so your engineering students should be 60% female as well"), I think it would be a step back.

The NEA gave the issue their nod of support in the May 2008 NEA Today magazine. This isn't surprising for an organization that has made diversity one of their keystone issues, but I'm not sure they thought the argument all the way through.

For perspective from the other side, this website is comprehensive.

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STEM Week Continues

Out of Texas comes a possible model for how to train science and math teachers, both to improve practice and to increase the number that choose to go into the classroom. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Many high-school chemistry students would probably love a teacher like Robert A. Gonzales.

During a class at James Bowie High School here last month, he asked his students to figure out the alignment of atoms within different molecules — using marshmallows. Put the tiny, white sweets, representing different atoms, on toothpicks, he suggested, and build a little model that shows the shape when charged atoms repel each other.

The students got busy, giggling. They were stumped on one molecule, ammonia. Mr. Gonzales, who majored in chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, demonstrated the right configuration by balancing on one leg, his arms spread to either side, head cocked down. The students laughed some more — and listened.

Mr. Gonzales credits their attention, and his creative approach that attracts it, to the preparation he received from an acclaimed, unusual program at Austin called UTeach. Congress and the National Academy of Sciences have singled out UTeach in recent years as a promising model to help fill a national shortage of qualified schoolteachers in science and mathematics. The program has doubled the annual number of Austin's bachelor's-degree recipients certified to teach those subjects in secondary schools.

Now UTeach has a chance to go national. Last month a foundation backed by ExxonMobil announced that the UTeach model had so much promise that the group would make grants of $2.4-million each to 12 other universities to copy it.

It sounds like a good idea.

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There's Science, then there's SCIENCE!

The Ig Nobel Awards (motto: Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK!) are sort of like the Razzies for science, highlighting the more interesting studies that have occured in the past year. Recent winners include the gay bomb, research into how sheets wrinkle, and an exploration of whether rats can tell the difference between someone speaking Japanese backwards and someone speaking Dutch backwards.

Really.

This could be a fun hook for a science class, or just for your own personal amusement.

Enjoy!

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Why you gotta LASER hate, yo?

The post title works better if your pronounce LASER as "laysah".

The Good Ladies Across The Hall (GLATHs) wound up their first LASER kit recently, on solids and liquids. It looked like neat stuff, the little bit that I watched the kids were active and engaged, and the lessons seemed straightforward.

Sadly, I won't get to join in on the fun until 2009. Maybe.

What my district is still hearing from LASER is that you absolutely must have the training on the kit before you can teach it to your kids. Each kit requires three days of training, but the training seems to be scheduled incredibly haphazardly, and as a result I have a good shot of getting fully trained in solids and liquids by this time next year, at which point I'm supposed to teach the Weather kit. Which I haven't had any training in.

I get the point that LASER is trying to make--many teachers aren't comfortable teaching science, and their focus on the process is commendable. In practice, though, their insistence on training is absolutely killing the cohesion of the curriculum in my building; half of first grade will do one activity, half will do another, and the twain shant meet until 2010. At the earliest.

So the GLATHs will be doing their thing, I'll be doing mine. That's not such a bad thing, being as we're first grade, but if you were a 5th grade teacher who had to give the science WASL and you heard that the 4th graders were doing two different curriculum, what would your reaction be?

I'm trying to move the district in one of two directions:

1) Hire a full-time science coach. They might not even be a coach, per se; they could teach science at the elementary level, the same way that we have an art teacher or a music teacher. If you're worried about teacher prep time, don't make it a prep; instead, have the teacher be in the room at the same time so that you have two adults to monitor and guide.

As a classroom teacher, I'd love it! If I didn't have to set up before and clean up afterwords, it would be a lot easier to work science into the day. Let me focus on my strengths, math and reading, and put someone else in a position to teach to their strength, science, and I think you'd see some incredible things happen.

2) Maybe having a full time science teacher is over the top. The trouble with LASER, then, is the fact that we can't get any training in a timely manner. If we trained the trainer and put them on a 40-day extended contract to teach the kits over the summer, you could easily get the majority of the staff up to speed and ready to go when the year started. For those who didn't want to give up time during the summer, they could go to the trainings during the year. In that case it would be on them to write sub plans, and they would be the ones teaching the old curriculum, but that's their choice.

The Governor has put aside a lot of money for LASER and we've drunk the Kool-Aid; I just hope we can figure out the way to make it work best.

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