Research & Rescue

If Restaurants Were Like the Education System « Education Stormfront

Interesting post over at Education Stormfront today.

Imagine an alternate reality.  In this world there is only one kind of restaurant.  Each looks different from the outside but inside they are pretty much identical.  They are run by the government as a service because everyone needs to eat.  In fact attendance is mandatory until you become an adult.  The government provides buses that come around early in the morning and pick everyone up and take them to their restaurant.  Now keep in mind the patrons don’t actually get to choose which restaurant to go to.

Upon arriving at the restaurant...

Original continues here: educationstormfront.wordpress.com

Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant]

Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Sometimes I dislike Seth's posts but this one's spot on.

The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

This piece is rather lengthy but Henry Giroux really hits the nail on the head. Thanks to Barb Wold of Democracy for New Mexico for sharing it on Facebook

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society.

Read the rest at www.truth-out.org

Are You Illiterate If You Don’t Know How to Program?

Interesting short piece from Big Think:

In November 2009, nine researchers from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab were among the eleven authors of a paper* that espoused the value of programming as an essential skill for all.  For those who cannot program in the 21st century, they declared solemnly, “It’s as if they can ‘read’ but not ‘write.’” Is it true: will we be lost without the ability to create code?

via bigthink.com

Book owners have smarter kids

If I have a vice or addiction, it's books. My parents were the same when I was growing up. Most of the clutter in our house was books or magazines or journals. I got my first library card at the age of 3 or 4. Now I have 4-legged children and I even find them occasionally perusing the bookshelves (at home - going to the library would involve a car ride). I firmly believe that there are different variants of "intelligence" and some of the cleverest people I know didn't even finish college - but many returned in their later adult years (and I think as better students for having the life experiences they had before). But I do gravitate to well-read people both IRL and in my social media circles.

I retweeted a post by Chris Merle the other day (and subsequently heard the story on NPR) that the rise of use of the internet has cause us to lose focus and not be able to concentrate on tasks because of the way we hop around between hyperlinks and multitask. If I recall correctly, the term used was lack of deep reading. I have been considering buying an iPad and the Apple salesperson pointed out that I could use the Kindle Reader on it and dump my Kindle. I told him that I preferred to read on my Kindle because of the eInk but another selling point for me is precisely because I CAN'T surf on my Kindle and I am better able to concentrate on what I'm reading.

I'm curious about friends who spend a lot of time in social media and whether they have less books in the house and/or do they or their children read less than when they were younger themselves?

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling

via www.salon.com

2010 Senior Class Post-It Prank

Hop on over to Top Culture and check out their photos from a Class of 2010 senior prank done entirely with Post-It notes. I don't know if kids get punished for their senior pranks - this one seems really pretty harmless - but an apt response, if needed, would be to make them restack the notes into pads again :-)

via topcultured.com

Federal Judge Rules Against Religious Right Charter School

In a major defeat for the Religious Right, a federal court in Idaho has ruled that public charter schools have no constitutional right to use the Bible as part of their curriculum.

U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge held Monday that state education officials, not the Nampa Classical Academy, get to set the curriculum for public schools in the state. And state officials, Lodge continued, were right to exclude religious texts from the classroom out of respect for the separation of church and state.

Read the whole article at blog.au.org

Who ya gonna call? NY Public Library uses improv to fight budget cuts

I would wager that if more public libraries pulled stunts like this, more kids would hang out there - maybe adults, too.

To the mountaintop, indeed

Jesus wept.

This is the second time in a week that I have seen a public figure invoke of the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the purposes of furthering a right-wing agenda that would have simply horrified the man. it certainly horrifies me. The first time I noticed this sort of statement was in the Anderson Cooper interview Tom Horne about the recent Arizona banning of ethnic studies classes. He maintains that we should have, essentially, social studies but that they should not be taught by members of that ethnicity to members of that ethnicity. He fails to realize that in order to specialize enough to even teach the subject, those teachers would ideally have received college degrees in that subject. He also fails to realize that there is no prerequisite of being, say, Asian American to take Asian American studies and there never was. While trying to argue that we don't have a problem if we don't separate coursework on separate cultures, Horne points out that he was on the Mall at Martin Luther King Jr's I Have a Dream speech. Perhaps he was there but he certainly missed the point.

And then there's Glenn Beck (hat tip Barb Wold of Democracy for New Mexico for the video pointer):

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Glenn to the Mountaintop
www.colbertnation.com
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Imagine Beck's lunatic rantings had Martin Luther King Jr. said the following today, instead of in 1967:

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolution

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; [Audience:] (Yes) the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

From Martin Luther King Speeches - Beyond Vietnam - MLK Online

Would Tom Horne let this man teach in the Tucson Consolidated District? Not likely. More likely, both he and Glenn Beck would have been calling him a communist and many in the right wing did in the 60s. 

Calling into their context the "I Have a Dream" speech from 1963 and tossing aside everything MLK said over the next 5 years is reminiscent of their use of Leviticus to suppress the human rights of gay people, while thumbing their nose at same book's call to embrace the strangers in our land. Perhaps if these people had taken a few ethnic studies courses, they would have a little better grasp of history.

AZ students protest ethnic studies ban

I'm neither Native American nor Hispanic and I don't live in Arizona - but I was fortunate enough to take at least a few different ethnic studies courses when I was still in Michigan. I firmly believe that understanding different cultures makes us a better society. Furthermore, I don't believe that you can just one multicultural course and be done with it, as some proponents of the AZ ban suggest. There is a wealth of wonderful literature from many ethnic communities from which students could benefit and there is absolutely no reason for this ban except to deny students information from those diverse perspectives. What a shame to perpetuate ignorance out of fear of the different.