Karen Schweitzer has a guest post up at Learn Me Good, one of my favorite education blogs. The post is a list of 25 Edu Blogs Worth Reading, and Educated Nation is included, which is lovely. Lovelier still is having a new list of education blogs to peruse (because I can’t seem to get enough).

As far as Learn Me Good goes, if you haven’t read John Pearson’s book or blog (they share the same title), I highly recommend both. You have to respect a guy who can write with such hilarity about his first year of teaching; how does one find humor in any trial by fire, especially one’s own?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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This week’s Teaching Carnival is hosted by AcademHack. The theme is The Future of Education and is worth a thorough perusal. The most intriguing string of thoughts were Jim Moulton’s post about technology in education and what he observed on a recent trip as to India’s attitudes toward education (they are not effing around), and the follow-up comment Rajagopal Yadavalli made as someone who grew up in India, went to the U.S. for university, and is now living back in India. The differences between the two countries vis-á-vis how the students are taught and how they ultimately learn to learn are fascinating.

From Jim Moulton’s post at The Future of Ed Blog:

I did not see technology playing a widespread role in Indian private schools. Any success they have in producing academically strong students must, therefore, come from someplace else. Sure, some of it is simply a game of numbers – with enough people you will have some succeed to high levels. But as I became more aware of “how things worked” in these schools, I came to believe that the following things make a difference:

>>…hard work. Period. Show up, listen, engage, do the work. Including half a day on Saturday.

>>…discipline and organization, as in, “don’t question authority – just do the assignments.” As a result work gets done. By all. And if one does not want to do the work, that 1.2 billion population figure assures someone waiting to take any seat vacated. This discipline was clear in the teacher ranks as well, as they stood when I entered the room, and would stand to answer any question I might put to them during the workshop.

>>…parents’ willingness to sacrifice material comfort to provide the best education they can afford for their children. The vast majority of Indian families do not live beyond their means.

>>…internalization of guilt by the children. Their academic success is a responsibility to their family, and it must be met. Sadly, this guilt was negatively reflected in the several accounts I read of young people taking their lives following release of major exam results.

>>…education as an industry. School, the right school, is heavily marketed as the key to happiness and success. Learning is heavily marketed, and the marketing works. With 1.2 billion people, one is constantly confronted by what it means to not have education. I have to think that a desire to not be part of the endless stream of unskilled citizenry makes it easy for the marketing to stick…

As I return from my trip, I am reminded that there is no digital solution to a fundamentally human challenge, and education is just that. Opportunities to learn must be available, but for the opportunity to translate into accomplishment at any level the individual must want it, the family must want it, and the culture as a whole must want it. The value of the “product” must be clear to all.

From Rajagopal Yadavalli’s Comment:

Interesting analysis presented here on Indian education. As someone who was born and brought up in India, and then studied and lived in USA, and now is back in India.. I completely agree with Jim here.


The importance of education is cultural. The middle class has shown the way over the last 20 years and now more and more believe that success in academics is the key to material success.

… The pressure on the students to do well academically is also all pervasive. As they approach their high school it starts to peak and is at its worst when they attempt the various entrance tests that determine their acceptability into the professional undergraduate programs.


However, what I find missing in the overall process is the application of knowledge. I think today’s education should be more focused on ability to find the information, determine its accuracy and then the ability to apply it to solve everyday problems. I do not find this happening yet in the Indian schools. Most schools are still focused on learning by rote – where discipline can make it happen.


As an graduate student in US University, I was amazed at the knowledge of undergrad students and their ability to solve real life problems with their learning from class. The application of knowledge is not something that is taught at schools in India. This is where the American Universities score big and why they are still the most sought schools of learning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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At one time in the not-so-distant past, home-schooling was an option chosen mostly by parents who wanted their kids out of the mainstream education system for religious or moral reasons. As either a sign that parents these days are much more involved with their kids’ education, or that the education system in this country is so broken that parents feel they can do a better job of educating their kiddos than the schools can, more parents are choosing the home-school route.

The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007.

Some of the newer motivations parents have these days for wanting to home-school their kids are financial, increased family time, and “unschooling.” The unschoolers are the parents who want to move away from standardized curriculum and toward a non-traditional approach to teaching and learning.

As a parent interested in education, I tend to come across a lot of parenting and education blogs. There exists a solid contingent of parenting blogs by dads who have opted to stay home with the kids and do the home-schooling themselves. It’s like modern-day Sensitive Dad DIY stuff. And you know those dads win at any playground they go to; not only do they care enough about their kids’ well-being to opt out of the rat race, they also want to be in charge of the big learning project and do it all themselves.

As long as kids are being educated and have access to frequent social interactions with other kids, I don’t really care where their schooling takes place. I, myself, have nowhere near the level of patience required for staying home all day and teaching my kids what they need to know to survive. I can barely handle the weekly play dates my children have with their friends. The parents who are comfortable being home all day with kids AND who can spend hours every day teaching them have my utmost respect.

Since home-schooling will clearly never be an option for my family, I will always need to be involved with my kids’ schools and their policies on the two issues that would tempt me to jump ship and teach my kids myself: teaching to the test and recess reduction. Thus far, my daughter’s elementary school and my son’s preschool are maintaining a safe distance from my Limit Fence on those two issues.

Should recess time be reduced or should I catch a whiff of anyone teaching to the test, I’ll go from being a cooperative parent who helps out with classroom stuff and sympathizes with the teachers, to a cranky b**ch who takes her kids out of school everyday for their 20-minute “dentist appointment” so they can run laps around the block, and who oddly goes on a family vacation every spring and takes her kids out of school during NCLB standardized-testing week.

Home-Schooling Resources and Links of Note:

Getting Started and Homeschooling Basics
Alltop Homeschooling
Why Homeschool
Pass the Torch: Homeschool Tips and Advice
American Homeschool Association Resource Links
Homeschool.com’s Top 100 Educational Web Sites of 2008
Home Schooling Links
LD Online: Homeschooling
NY Times: The Anti-Schoolers
NY Times: There Are Benefits in Homeschooling
1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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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.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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I totally do. I know that Mr. Obama was NOT named after the structures military personnel sleep in. Too bad for me, I had (had, until yesterday) my effing word processing program (Microsoft Word, if anyone’s keeping score) in its default auto-correct setting. I’ve always had it set there because it probably came set like that when I bought my MacBook. It has never been a problem until now.

Last week, I wrote a post the day after Election Day about our President-elect, Barack Obama. Right now, the red squiggly underlines are alerting me to the fact that Microsoft Word doesn’t think I spelled “Barrack” correctly; my computer, in all its infinite wisdom, thinks “Barack” is my misspelling of “Barrack.” *sigh*

So, unbeknownst to me, last week I typed in “Barack” and it was immediately corrected to “Barrack.” A good rule of thumb when writing an education blog is to avoid egregious misspellings. I’m just saying.

My husband gets full credit for reading the Obama post yesterday and giving me a heart attack when he said, “Um, hey, [he was trying to be gentle] did you know you misspelled Barack in that Obama post?” I said some bad words about mothers and stuff and dove for my laptop.

After fixing the error and recovering from my panic, I turned off the auto-fix thingy on Word. To avoid looking like a dumbass, I would highly suggest everyone else doing the same for the next four years or so.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Week 161 of The Carnival of Education is up today over yonder at The Education Wonks–many amazing writings on and about education from the EduSphere. Sam Jackson hosted #160 last week. That boy is off at Yale—how does he have time to host a blog carnival? He probably needs a nap.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It may not be the best time of year to bring this up. It’s conceivable that it’s the worst time: any and all students (college or otherwise) are completely burnt out; winter is cold and therefore miserable and expensive; the school year started way back in the fall and summer vacation is still so very far away; everyone is exhausted and cranky and has too much work to do in too little time and there is no end in sight. If you’re heading for a breakdown or a moment of clarity, this is the time of year when it will come.

So pointing out an excellent blog post about college and whether or not it really matters could certainly upend a few apple carts. Whatever. I upended my own apple cart (at this exact time of year, oddly enough) during a particularly intense discussion with a good friend of mine about the meaning of life (duh, what else would it have been about?). I suddenly saw with perfect clarity (I’d just had a double espresso) that life is short and it was imperative that I postpone my studies for spring and summer quarters while I worked, saved money, traveled around Europe, and then moved to Seattle. It was entirely necessary, I’m telling you.

Of Course College Matters
I started right back up with my formal education in the fall. I’m a school junkie, and it never once occurred to me that college might not be a necessary part of my life. I come from a pretty educated family, and I crave learning on a cellular level. I never considered NOT attending college. Which made reading that blog even more mind-blowing for a girl like me. What do you mean?! College might not matter? Of course college matters! Choosing to opt out of higher education would be like deciding to not breathe. Who would choose the no-oxygen way of life? Not me, pal.

And yet, the author’s daughter makes an excellent argument for not running right out and going to college. I adore school, I would be a student in a professional capacity if I could find someone schmucky enough to pay me for it. But I have no snappy comeback (let alone a well-stated argument) for this woman’s daughter. She makes a solid case for college not being necessary for everyone. Yes, future doctors should go. There are several careers that require degrees, certification, a large amount of information, etc.

Dorm Life – Only the Real Thing Will Do
And if you really want to have the full-on college experience, then only the real thing will do. I have fond memories of the vomit and urine-stained industrial carpeting that covered the floors of my dorm building; dorm life is dorm life, you cannot replicate it. Nor can you skip a few years and then decide to try dorm living. There is a miniscule window of time, between ages 17 and 19, when you’ll find it marginally acceptable to reside in a foul-smelling hall surrounded by constant noise and obnoxious people with entirely too much time on their hands who are away from home and parental supervision for the first time and feel an intense need to be always inebriated and to come up with newer and much improved ways of destroying each other and said dorm. It is conducive neither to sleep nor to the absorption of academic material. But it’s fun and, as I said, impossible to duplicate.

Self-Taught Renaissance Types
There are a lot of careers that people find themselves in which are in no way related to what they thought they wanted to be when they grew up. They may have needed a degree when first starting out as fresh college grads with minimal experience; sometimes having a degree, even if it’s in underwater basket-weaving, can get you in the door. It’s a good first step, but not always necessary. College might not be necessary for those renaissance-types. My dad is one of those bastards; he can teach himself anything so thoroughly that he can apply it practically (building stuff, fixing stuff, designing stuff) AND can recall ridiculously detailed tidbits from the random mechanical engineering text he read (and apparently memorized) 15 years ago because he found it compelling. Almost as interesting as the history of maritime law and the chemical properties of metals. He’s amazing. Anyone who feels comfortable teaching themselves what they need to know or is good at learning as they go would be an excellent college-skipping candidate. I am not one of those people. Someday I’ll be more with the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants and less with the craving-an OCD-set-of-instructions. I want to get the answer right, and because of that, not being thoroughly trained and educated scares the crap out of me. I’m working on it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College | University | Life

Yes, it’s another college ranking list, but this snarky / cheeky one really stands out. Radar Magazine Online recently put together a “semi-scientific guide to the most substandard schools in America.” Using a wide variety of sources, Radar took up the challenge of choosing which accredited 4-year colleges with physical campuses made the “dishonor roll.”

Worst Party School: (Tie) California State University-Chico; San Diego State University
Illustrious Alumni: Chico lays claim to good-time-guy novelist Raymond Carver (who graduated elsewhere) and bare-knuckled political consultant Ed Rollins, while SDSU graduated disgraced former CIA executive director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo and oft-disrobed former C-movie actress Raquel Welch.

Worst Trust-Fund-Baby College: Bennington College (VT)
Notable Course: “SHHH! The Social Construction of Silence,” a class focused on breaking down the classification of silence as an absence of sound and “establishing it as a presence.” Or, the class where you sleep off your hangover.

Worst Ivy League University: Cornell University (NY)
School Pride: “I haven’t overheard a single intellectual conversation in three years, unless it was between Indian or Asian students,” writes an architecture major on Students Review.

Worst Christian University: Liberty University (VA)
School Pride: “The mountains and all are beautiful. It’s right near the Wal-Mart too,” writes a student on Campus Dirt.

Worst of the Big Ten: Michigan State University (East Lansing)
It’s not surprising this hard-drinking football school hasn’t made it to the Rose Bowl since 1988: Much of its student body seems to be in jail. Over 1,000 students were arrested for drug and alcohol offenses last year, along with another 1,224 perps in the crime-ridden city.

Worst Military Academy: Virginia Military Institute
VMI excluded women from its ranks until the U.S. Supreme Court forced the academy to admit female cadets in 1996.

Worst Women’s College: Texas Woman’s University
Notable Course: Cultural Perspectives of Personal Appearance.

The Worst College in America: University of Bridgeport (CT)
Fun Fact: At orientation, all incoming students are given a “personal alarm locator” that will send swarms of campus policemen racing to their rescue whenever they press a panic button.

College | Humor | College Education