5 posts tagged “links”
Couple of good articles in today's NYT...
David Levin, who co-founded KIPP nearly 15 years ago and is now the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York, said he would fully cooperate with the union, but had no details of how and when contract negotiations would begin. He pointed out that KIPP Academy, a Bronx middle school, has had a union since its inception, because it grew out of an existing public school.
As for complaints about overwork, Mr. Levin said: “Just because the school is available to kids at all times, that doesn’t mean that each and every staff member has to be available at all times. We’ve been able to successfully work that out.”
Ms. Bonifacio said that 15 of the 22 teachers at KIPP Amp had signed cards saying they wanted a union; charter schools in New York generally must grant union recognition once workers show majority support.
Last summer, rival groups of educators circulated competing educational manifestos. One, which included some former leaders of Teach for America, espoused a get-tough policy based partly on pressing teachers and administrators to dramatically improve student achievement. Another faction argued that schools alone could not close America’s racial acheivement gap and urged new investments in school-based social programs to help poor students learn. Mr. Duncan was the only big city superintendent to sign both manifestoes.
In the hearing, Mr. Duncan warmly endorsed Teach for America and its founder, Wendy Kopp, as well as the larger movement of social entrepreneurs seeking to improve public education through tactics like founding charter schools and seeking to end teacher tenure. He called himself a “big supporter” of charter schools. But he warned that only thoroughly qualified educators should be allowed to open charter schools, which receive public money but enjoy less governmental oversight than traditional public schools.
For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheater known by its number, 26-100.
Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism.
But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change.
The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
“We’re not questioning your heart,” he told his players. “But there are teams that play with heart and sometimes lose. We don’t want to do that. We need to play with heart, and we need to execute and make smart decisions.”
With that, they gathered in a huddle for their signature chant, each with a hand raised toward the middle.
Goodman said, “One, two, three. ...”
“Hard work,” they yelled.
Goodman: “Four, five, six. ...”
“Together,” they yelled.
And they were soon out in the crisp January night for the bus ride home, still No. 1 in the nation.
Here are some of my favorite news stories, blog posts, and other interesting links of the week. Previous links of the week here. You can find all of my links here.
Jake's a smart guy, worked hard all four years on an interdisciplinary American Studies/ Sociology/ Econ degree he designed more or less himself. He can tell you a lot about the changing face of the American worker, and how film has reflected, driven, and (re)created our (mis)understandings of the American proletariat. Kid can turn a phrase, read and think, and play Beirut pretty well.
Norman acknowledged the imagery's Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey.
"We're not living in the (19)40's," he said. "Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears -- he looks just like Curious George."
As of 2006, there were eight hundred million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.
Michael Pollan writes that the food business once lamented what it called the problem of the “fixed stomach”—it appeared that demand for food, unlike other products, was inelastic, the amount fixed by the dimensions of the stomach itself, the variety constrained by tradition and habit. In the past few decades, however, American and European stomachs have become as elastic as balloons, and, with the newly prosperous Chinese and Indians switching to Western diets, much of the rest of the world is following suit. “Today, Mexicans drink more Coca-Cola than milk,” Patel reports. Roberts tells us that in India “obesity is now growing faster than either the government or traditional culture can respond,” and the demand for gastric bypasses is soaring.
Driven by our bottomless stomachs, Roberts argues, the modern economy has reduced food to a “commodity” like any other, which must be generated in ever greater units at an ever lower cost, year by year, like sneakers or DVDs. But food isn’t like sneakers or DVDs. If we max out our credit cards buying Nikes, we can simply push them to the back of a closet. By contrast, our insatiable demand for food must be worn on our bodies, often in the form of diabetes as well as obesity. Overeating makes us miserable, and ill, but medical advances mean that it takes a long time to kill us, so we keep on eating. Roberts, whose impulse to connect everything up is both his strength and his weakness, concludes, grandly, that “food is fundamentally not an economic phenomenon.” On the contrary, food has always been an economic phenomenon, but in its current form it is one struggling to meet our uncurbed appetites. What we are witnessing is not the end of food but a market on the brink of failure. Those bearing the brunt are, as in Malthus’s day, the people at the bottom.
Three links about teaching in America:
And the first black president is... Warren Harding? Bonus: What if Bush were black?
Ben Guest has a silent classroom...
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Mississippi Teacher Corps (host) Updated: Dec 16, 2009
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Mississippi Teacher Corps Updated: Oct 9, 2009
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