Here’s another entry for my List of Reasons Why I’m Justifiably Pissed About the Lack Of Time Machines: the Blue Man Group started an elementary school. And if you know anything about elementary school, then you’ll be up on the pertinent info regarding age restrictions for enrolled students. I was eligible in, like, 1980 to attend the Blue School’s kindergarten. So you see why I need a damn time machine.
The school itself sounds amazing, and I really want a do-over so I can attend. But possibly more wonderful than the school is the reason for starting it up in the first place. The founding members of the Blue Man Group– Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, Chris Wink—started their oddball performance group as “sort of a support group for people whose creativity had been all but squeezed out of them by education,” says Wink. “At one point, we asked, What if there was a school you didn’t have to recover from, that didn’t make you question the idea of being creative?”
image credit: NY Post
The Blue Man philosophy plus the Blue Man Group bank accounts added to the appearance of Blue Man Progeny equaled the formation of The Blue School. It’s a private school in Manhattan, so it’s not cheap. But it’s imaginative, has a good soul, AND it’s an accredited school. I’m happy and am thinking good thoughts for the kiddos who get to go. I hope they understand there will be nary a sympathetic ear should they ever bitch about their elementary education.
Further Reading and Viewing:
Jane Hart over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has compiled some great lists for e-learning tools. The lists are geared more toward educators, but I think a decent majority of the items are relevant for students as well, especially grad students who spend their days walking that line between penniless student and underpaid educator.
Is it better to be rejected by a college outright, or to receive a letter of deferment? Oooh, hard to say. On the one hand, you haven’t been denied entry to Shangri-La (yet), but you haven’t been asked to make yourself at home, either. And there’s the matter of being in limbo and not knowing where you’ll be going, which makes planning everything else in your life irritatingly difficult.
Allen Grove has some exemplary advice for any prospective college student currently trying to find their way in the Land of Deferment Limbo. Keep your chin up—you’re bound to get in somewhere because you applied to more than one school, right?
Arne Duncan is the new education guy. In my reading up on him, he sounded neither super great nor overtly evil. He seemed a little in the middle. Every damn news article was sure to mention the basketball thing (he played professional basketball in Australia for a while after college, and these days plays pick-up games with Obama), and the CEO of Chicago Public Schools thing (always adding that his is the third-largest district in the U.S.).
Duncan is big on teacher accountability and on shutting down schools that aren’t getting the job done. He supports the facets of NCLB that aim to improve teacher and school accountability and the gathering of data that show how well the students are learning/being taught. I’m with him—for the most part—on that stuff. I’m also in agreement with Mr. Duncan that the NCLB act is too rigid and that one single set of rules doesn’t work well for every school in the country. Duncan wants to improve schools, but he sees that the NCLB—as it’s written now—isn’t conducive to that end.
It makes me happy that the new Secretary of Education was pissed about the NCLB act way back in 2003. If that weren’t enough to make me a believer, two blog posts I read about him tipped the scales for me. I’m only going to link to one, because I’m not (wo)man enough to deal with finding a burning cross on my front lawn should I anger this particular blogger. You can look for the post yourself; just Google these two magic phrasings: “Education Secretary Arne Duncan” and “Exposing Liberal Lies.” It’ll come right up. Good luck. I saw no light at the end of the tunnel while excavating the blog so I turned back.
The blogger in question, who also wrote an entire post about the erroneousness of global warming, dislikes Duncan because he spoke out in support of creating a gay, lesbian, bi and transgender-friendly high school. Duncan felt that these students needed some extra support, especially in light of the fact that teens dealing with sexuality questions and issues have disproportionately large numbers of drop-outs, homeless and runaways.
Knowing that Arne Duncan put his neck out there to support kids who are unpopular at school, at home, and with most of the religious right in this country made me want to sit in his corner. Only someone who was truly interested in the welfare and education of students in his district would support something that would make him popular only with the kids in question. It was ballsy and kind, which I will always support.
And since it’s not enough to support a gutsy nice guy just because he wants to alter the NCLB act and is not well-loved by people who don’t believe in hard science, I also needed this to tip the scales completely in his favor: Steven D. Levitt from Freakonomics had wonderful things to say about his firsthand experience with Arne Duncan:
Freakonomics readers will remember Arne as the hero of our chapter on teacher cheating. He was head of the Chicago Public Schools when Brian Jacob and I were investigating how teachers and administrators were doctoring standardized test sheets.
With seemingly nothing to gain and much to lose, Arne embraced our results, even allowing us to do audit testing to confirm our hypotheses. Eventually, a handful of teachers were fired.
Since then, I’ve interacted with Arne a few times, and in a variety of settings. I always walk away dazzled. He is smart as hell and his commitment to the kids is remarkable. If you wanted to start from scratch and build a public servant, Arne would be the end product.
While I understand the need every parent has—on a weird, biological level—to do as much for their child as is feasible in order that said kid’s life path can be as smooth and highly elevated as is everly possible, I have never been able to be anywhere near fine with the insane pressure and bizarre hoop-jumping some parents put their kids through.
Succeeding in life is super great, don’t get me wrong. Going to college for the sake of the education and the life experience is not something that can be duplicated. I’m pro-success and pro-college, absolutely. But I really (a whole damn lot) can’t fathom how working your ass off from preschool on through grad school to be in the top 5% of your cohort for any and all school and extra-curricular activities is either necessary or healthy. Plus, it can’t be all that fun.
Is it peculiar and freakish that I lump “success” and “happy” in the same pile? Perhaps. I love my kiddos, and I really do believe the high-pressure helicopter parents love their kiddos, too. We have different ways of showing it, however. I have some grandparental units who showed their love for me, for the first 25 years of my life, in ways similar to the hyper parents of today; they wished me every success, including unfounded dreams of sending me off to medical school because that’s what they had done and that’s where all of their friends’ grandkids were obediently marching off to (like cranky little lemmings, I might add).
My grandparents’ way was to coddle, protect, pressure and prepare me for the future until I was incapable of getting their lecturely tones out of my head. For the most part I’ve let it all go and have moved past the self-doubt and the second-guessing and the perfectionist tendencies I harbor. I put a lot less pressure on myself and I don’t intend ever to crush the souls of my own progeny, turning them into miserable beings, incapable of happiness or contentment. (It’s conceivable that I haven’t moved on entirely.)
My way is to support my kids and the choices they make, and to make sure they have a rich, well-rounded education, both in the classroom and at home. My main goal is to have happy kids. I honestly don’t care where or if they go to college, and whether they go right after high school or never. That sounds incredibly slackerly of me, I realize, but there it is.
The older I get (I just turned 35) the more I realize how hard it is to be a content and beatific adult. I’m happy, but only after letting go and unclenching a little. I’m fine with giving my kids an education (one where they are not expected to kick everyone else’s ass) and following their lead as to where they want to go in life. In this day and age, that’s a pretty revolutionary statement. I’m supposing people will respond with, “That crazy b**ch is going to let her kids do what they want with their lives!”
Anyway, this spew was brought on by Eduwonkette’s guest blogger, Hilary Levey. She’s a PhD candidate at Princeton, and wrote her dissertation on the whole high-pressure parent phenomenon, specifically the credentials those parents expect, want, and need their kids to acquire and achieve. The post is basically a summary of her dissertation, “Playing to Win: Childhood, Competition, and Credentials Bottlenecks.”
It’s a great article, and in it Levey does such an excellent job of explaining what the motivation is behind these insanely gung-ho parents, that I was able to open my mind up a smidgen more and maybe, a teensy bit, see the parents’ point. However, as much as I’d love to read the actual dissertation and all of her research (because her papers and her research sound fascinating), I think it would either enrage me or curl me into a ball that I wouldn’t want to come out of for a few days.
I realize it’s perhaps a little odd to be writing for an education blog and to be so cranky about uber-achieving parents and their offspring. I’m not against education in the slightest; I love education and I can’t get enough of learning in any form. Education is one of the greatest achievements of mankind, right up there with Ziploc bags, libraries, matches, wet wipes, cell phones and duct tape. But I’m just not on board with turning education (in all its forms) into a crazy competition where only the highest-scoring student has succeeded and everyone else has failed.
Everyone needs to unclench a little, step back, and see that their kids are amazing regardless of the credentials they may or may not hold. And to please realize that the winningest kid does not necessarily grow up to be the most successful or the happiest adult, and that the average kids don’t always turn out to be unsuccessful, miserable. low-income earning losers with no shot at kicking ass on the world because they screwed up that third-grade soccer championship.
Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.
This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.
My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.
A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.
I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.
I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.
My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.
ABC News reported that the public high schools in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have decided to give out “H” grades in lieu of a failing “F” grade. The “H” stands for “held,” and means the student has twelve weeks to do the work and fix the problem.
Yale University professor of psychology and child psychiatry, Alan Kazdin, makes an excellent point in his interview:
[Kazdin] believes that schools that veer away from giving children the grades they have earned – even when it’s a zero or an “F” – aren’t doing anyone any good.
“Children aren’t going to gain from ambiguous information regarding their grades,” said Kazdin.
“The fact is children are failing yet we don’t want to call it that,” said Kazdin. “It’s this whole notion that everyone’s a winner and everyone gets a trophy.”
Kazdin argues that children are perceptive enough that they will eventually realize they aren’t doing well in school whether teachers give them “F”s or not, and that hiding their true level of achievement will only confuse them further.
“The task is to change the reality, not the labeling of it,” he said.
Providing detailed feedback on what children can do to improve their grades is imperative, said Kazdin. While students may feel initially feel demoralized when they receive a failing grade, Kazdin said that by providing them with specific ways to improve their class standing they will eventually benefit from the traditional grading system.
Getting an “F” sends a pretty clear message to a kid that they are not getting it done, for whatever reason (learning issues, home issues, crappy school issues, etc.). Kids don’t need a bigger and brighter neon sign pointing out their academic inadequacies; they need a teacher or two to sit down with them and figure out what isn’t getting done, why it isn’t getting done, and how the kid can begin to dismantle the seemingly insurmountable mound of emotional and educational sh*t that has piled up in said kid’s life.
Someone help them fix it for god’s sake. And if they’re trying to flunk out on purpose, well, that’s too damn bad. They’re going to have to find a different school district ‘cause there will apparently be no flunking out of the Grand Rapids school district.
For any prospective college student (graduate student or undergrad) in the throes of the college application process, you might want to read this hilarious post by Tenured Radical, aka Claire B. Potter of Wesleyan University. It will give you insight into the application process from the letter-of-recommendation writer’s point of view, be they high school teachers or undergrad profs.
The post will help you to understand how much those educators do for their students. And the portion of the post where Tenured Radical goes off on the schools who will be receiving these applications and letters for their asinine, inelegant, time-sucking system is truthful, satisfying and effing humorous.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
If you enjoy demoralizing statistical reports and analyses, please be sure to read “Measuring Up 2008.” It’s the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education’s biennial report on how the U.S. is doing educationally and it will make you want to stick your head in the sand and just wait this one out.
I stopped reading after these two statistics nuggets: (a) college tuition has increased 439% since 1982-1984 (the median family income has only increased 147%); and (b) about half of American college students attending four-year colleges don’t complete their degrees in six years.
The good news is, someone cares enough about the problem to not only realize there is one, but to research the depth of the conundrum and to (hopefully) work out some solutions.
If you can do an interpretive dance illustrating your PhD research on “Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids,” I’ll give you fifty bucks.
I’m totally kidding, but Gonzo Scientist John Bohannon and the American Association for the Advancement of Science aren’t. They held the 2009 “Dance Your PhD” contest in November so science geeks (I use the term fondly and respectfully) the world over could win prizes for accurate, interesting and entertaining dance interpretations of their PhD research.
The four winners will have an article published and their dance will be choreographed and performed by dance professionals at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago.
You can view this year’s winners, runners-up and all the others here.
Below is the 2009 graduate student winner Sue Lynn Lau’s dance-y interpretation of her PhD “The role of vitamin D in Beta cell function.” My favorite dancer is the dude with the headlamp—he’s sunlight.
