Now I’ve officially heard it all! On his recess at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Cincinnati, the 6-year-old first grader was playing Power Rangers according to his parents, and allegedly raised his hands in a bow and arrow manner and pretended to shoot one of his friends. He was immediately suspended after the October 29th incident.
“I didn’t really understand,” his mother, Martha Miele told WLWT. “I had him on the phone for a good amount of time so he could really explain to me what he was trying to tell me.”
“Does this really need to be a three-day suspension under the circumstances that he was playing and he’s 6 years old?” she asked.
He son’s suspension will end on November 3rd. He is scheduled to return to first grade on November 4th.
“I can’t stop him from pretending to be a super hero,” his mother said. “I can’t stop him from playing ninja turtles. I can’t stop him from doing these things and I don’t think it would be healthy to do so.”
The president’s proposal will offer the first two years of community college for free. The president will formally announce the details of this plan in his upcoming State of The Union Address later this month.
After two weeks of student protests and a fierce backlash across Colorado and beyond, the Jefferson County School Board backed away from a proposal to teach students the “benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” while avoiding lessons that condoned “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
So far, so good. The students and staff did a masterful job leading a peaceful protest against the proposed alterations and even shut two high schools down with a sickout last week. This paragraph ends, however, with a rather chilling sentence:
But the board did vote 3-to-2 to reorganize its curriculum-review committee to include students, teachers and board-appointed community members.
Which is then followed by the hammer blow:
The Jefferson County schools superintendent, Dan McMinimee, who suggested the compromise, said it represented the “middle ground” in a fevered debate that pitted the board’s three conservative members against students, parents, the teachers’ union and other critics who opposed the effort to steer lessons toward the “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.”
You see, the dispute has not been solved. The Superintendent and the conservatives have merely made their viewpoint a position that needs to be debated and taken seriously as an opening gambit in a larger attack on public school curricula. The other side, which includes students, educators and parents, now has to come up with a counter-argument for a discussion that doesn’t have a counter-argument. Cutting out events you don’t like or that don’t satisfy your agenda is not how history should be taught. There is no “middle ground” when it comes to school boards injecting politics into what’s taught in the classroom.
Even worse, the school board made this decision originally without the input of teachers, who should be the first ones consulted on any change to the curriculum, and the larger community, which clearly opposes the board’s agenda.
There is a larger issue at work here that’s operating under the radar of many citizens. There has been a heady debate over the past 10 to 15 years in education about whether the curriculum should focus more on teaching students skills or academic content. The Common Core Curriculum Standards and the Advanced Placement curriculum that’s the basis of the Colorado argument, have sided demonstrably on the side of skills. The reasoning is that if students are taught how to conduct research, write coherent essays, solve equations and theorems, and apply experimental designs to scientific problems, then they will be able to use those skills for any educational endeavor. After all, the argument goes, middle and high school teachers are not training historians or mathematicians or research scientists.
I beg, humbly, to differ.
I’m a content guy. I can teach anyone how to structure an essay or to read a historical document and apply step-by-step analyses that will render a deeper understanding of its message, and the over 3,000 students, now adults, who have been in my classroom over the past 30 years can attest to my abilities and their growth. But if you don’t have the knowledge, the “conceptual capital,” as my former Rutgers University Graduate School Professor Wayne Hoy used to say at every turn, then you got…nothing. I am training budding historians because students need to see how history is written and debated and for that they need a detailed body of evidence, facts, conjecture and sources that will allow them to debate, judge, interpret and synthesize what they’ve learned. THEN, they can write an essay with a specific and relevant thesis and support their assertions with solid historical evidence. The same goes for every academic discipline. Unfortunately, the trend is towards skills at the expense of content.
A colleague and I wrote the new Advanced Placement United States History curriculum this past summer and I am now teaching my school’s two section of that AP class. The College Board, which administers the AP program, has done a fine job re-imagining much of the new course. It’s broken down into historical themes and focuses on the requisites skills that historians need to use to decipher the meaning of the past. There are content outlines that divide U.S. History into nine historical periods and tests that use documents and sources as the basis for evaluation and assessment.
At an AP seminar my colleague attended last spring, though, the leader could not adequately answer the question of what content knowledge the students would need to master in order to score well on the AP test. The best he could say was that students would need to know the usual facts. I think if you put 20 history educators in a room they could give you a rough outline of what the usual facts are, but this is the AP. They should be more specific. And the reason they can’t be more specific is that the skills have won.
So how does that relate back to Jefferson County, Colorado, or any other mischief-making school board that wants to create more patriotic children who avoid conflicts and always respect authority (remember, we’re talking teenagers here)? According to the article above, the AP has warned Jefferson County not to alter the curriculum because if they did then they can’t call it Advanced Placement, but in the end, that won’t matter. Why? Because now the content can be subtly manipulated to reflect anyone’s agenda. When content and facts matter less, what people are actually taught can be chopped, rearranged or simply dropped while skills are used to fill the void. That’s the danger, and as a nation, we have embarked on a new educational paradigm that will result in the striking contradiction of students practicing more, but learning less.
The Common Core makes the same skills-based assumption, and for me, that’s a far more dangerous problem than the time lost for testing or the fear of the federal government injecting itself into state education standards. I cannot abide the thought of a generation schooled on how to perform tasks, but taught less content with which to provide context or relevance. We need to create analytical thinkers who know a specific body of knowledge. Then we can teach skills.
Roosevelt High School senior Jabre White was doing what so many of us were taught to do, respectfully addressing authority figures, when his teacher responded in one of the least respectful, and most dehumanizing, ways of all.
In a recent interview with The Des Moines Register, White says that, when he politely told his economics teacher Shawn McCurtain “Yes, sir,” the latter corrected him, insisting he “say ‘Yes, master.’”
White stood up for himself, replying, “Who the f— are you talking to? You’re nobody’s master, and this is not the slave days. If you thought it was funny, it’s not.” When he later reported the incident to Roosevelt High School’s white Vice Principal Joseph Blazevich, White claims that Blazevitch “didn’t seem surprised about what the teacher said.” Instead, White says, Blazevich “was more interested in about what I said. He was upset that I dropped the f-bomb.”
After White’s mother asked Blazevich to investigate the incident, however, he did say that it was “terrible” and “shameful,” and claimed that “the instructor was very remorseful.” Nevertheless, it is unclear whether McCurtain has been punished for the way he treated one of his African American students — though he did call White’s mother to apologize for the remark. According to a district spokesperson, McCurtain is still employed by the school district.
If nothing else, the past week has shown that those on the left can be just as short-sighted and ill-advised as those on any other part of the political spectrum. That the forum for these misdeeds is the university make the issues that much more compelling.
I’ve been waging a somewhat lonely campaign to remind my senior students that college is not the place to look for job training. Oh, they might find it there, but too many of them chose the schools that they did because “they could get a good job” if they went there. Far be it from me to argue that there’s no financial reward for going to a university, and a good one at that. My point is that too many young people go off to higher education with dollar signs in their heads. My job is to remind them that they are, in fact, going to a place where the people in charge are experts in their fields and will be asking their students to complete academic work that demands rigor, attention to detail and actual academic skills. As with anything related to young people, they’ll eventually learn the lesson.
It’s too bad, though, that the universities are the ones who have gone soft. This graduation season has seen Brandeis, Rutgers and Smith cave in like an abandoned mine in the face of student protests over who would speak at graduation ceremonies. Other universities chose speakers purposely to avoid controversy. This is terrible. I understand that the students are paying for their education and believe that they should have some control over who ushers them into the working world. But to disqualify the head of the International Monetary Fund or former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misses the point of a liberal education. There people have something valuable to say. They’ve been through some of the pivotal events of the century. They’re powerful women, for heaven’s sake. They deserve to be heard. Shame on the universities who gave in.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, along comes another new concept on the campuses called “trigger warnings.” No, these have nothing to do with guns, but, rather, are a device to let students know that what they are about to read, hear, see or study might offend one or more of their sensibilities. An example:
The most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide).
I can certainly understand giving students a warning for graphic violence or scenes of genocide or rape, but there is something to be said for surprise or initial reactions or confusion or disbelief when you read or hear something jarring for the first time. That’s part of learning and being aware of one’s own reactions in social or academic situations. And how does one adequately write a policy that covers every eventuality? Didn’t colleges try to do that in the 90s with speech codes? Those didn’t work out so well. I can’t see this working out well either.
Students want to be safe, but learning is not always safe. It’s supposed to be challenging, upsetting, rewarding, fun and, yes, life-altering. Blocking graduation speakers and warning students about some content but not other content is a recipe for intolerance. That’s not right.
A very unfortunate situation, but think of how bad things could have been if a machine gun was used instead of a knife.
Nineteen students and an adult were injured Wednesday morning at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, where police said a student armed with two knives began stabbing people just as the school day was about to start.
Murrysville Police Chief Thomas Seefeld said a call about “something critical going on at the high school” was put out by a school resource officer shortly before 7:15 a.m., and police arrived to find a “chaotic scene” with multiple victims in a first-floor hallway, including a security guard with a stomach wound. He said the suspect had already been subdued by the combined efforts of an assistant principal and the school resource officer, who is also a Murrysville police officer.
Seven patients between the ages of 15 and 17 were taken to Forbes Hospital in Monroeville, along with the injured adult. Two of the students were in critical but stable condition, said Dr. Mark Rubino, the hospital’s chief medical officer.
Five other patients were taken to UPMC East, also in Monroeville. Four more went to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, and one each went to UPMC Presbyterian UPMC Mercy and Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.
The suspect, a 16-year-old sophomore, was taken to the Murrysville police station to be interviewed, then was driven by police to a hospital to be treated for an arm injury. His name has not been released yet
“The juvenile went down a hallway and was flashing two knives around and injured the people,” Seefeld said.
The stabbings happened in numerous classrooms throughout the building before classes had begun for the day, according to Dan Stevens, deputy emergency management coordinator for Westmoreland County public safety.
Not all 20 of the injured people were actually stabbed, Stevens said. Some of the injuries were described as cuts and scrapes.
Tchakamau Mahakoe is still not settled on which of the US universities she will attend. (OBSERVER FILE PHOTO)
TCHAKAMAU, the ambitious and brilliant schoolgirl the Jamaica Observer featured two years ago along with her brother for their academic achievements, has been accepted into 11 American universities, nine of which have offered her scholarships.
Her mother Kamau Mahakoe shared the news with the Observer yesterday, noting that she was proud of her daughter’s achievement.
“Clearly, l’m ecstatic. I feel really good for her because she has been focused from the start,” Kamau said of her 17-year-old daughter, who had been home-schooled before moving on to Immaculate Conception High School in St Andrew, and then the Hillel Academy on a scholarship.
“She has never lost sight of her goals… you don’t have to push her… she uses her initiative,” Kamau added. “I’m happy for her. Really happy.”
Among the 11 institutions in the US that have accepted the teen’s applications are Princeton, Duke, Yale, and Stanford universities and the University of Chicago.
The teen is still not clear on which she will be attending come August/September to pursue double majors in physics and biology. She wants to become an astronaut, her mother said.
The story of the first-generation Ghanian-American student accepted by all eight Ivy league schools is wonderful, but it also stirs up the tension between black Americans and recent African immigrants — especially when you describe him as “not a typical African-American kid.” That’s been the reaction to USA Today‘s profile on Kwasi Enin, a Long Island high schooler who got into the nation’s most competitive schools through hard work and, according to IvyWise CEO Katherine Cohen, being African (and being male). At one point the piece reads:
Being a first-generation American from Ghana also helps him stand out, Cohen says. “He’s not a typical African-American kid.”
“Not a typical African-American kid” is being read as an allusion to the lazy black American stereotype. The tension comes from the fact that some African immigrants buy into that stereotype, which gets turned into “Africans don’t like black people.” This has almost nothing to do with Enin, who is obviously a remarkable young man, and everything to do with how America perceives and portrays black Americans and African immigrants.
From elementary school through high school kids, have the word “college” drilled into their heads as if their own future depends on it. Teachers and principals are pressured to make their students’ grades resemble those of a Harvard Graduates. Parents try to get their kids involved in sports, after school activities, volunteer work, and even jobs to just increase their value towards colleges. The thing people seem to miss is that college is not a walk in the park. It is not meant for everyone and everyone is not meant for college.
Back when my parents attended college you had the choice of working instead of attending school, both of my parents worked for a bit then attended school. The woman who cuts my hair has never attended college and I can honestly say she seems no less happy or successful than my parents or anyone else I have met. I’ve put my hands in both the school and work corners, and neither of them have panned out at all and it makes me wonder. What is a teenager to do?
The idea of four more years of school straight after high school just didn’t sit well with me at all. I knew I was already burnt out from high school and college would be me running out of gas, hence, why I was reluctant to apply. But I didn’t know where else I was going to go. With an unhappy look on my face I started filling out applications and soon enough I began getting responses.
The first letter I received back was from Rutgers New Brunswick, Not even an afterthought to go to for college, but I just wanted to test the waters. I opened the letter and read the first line… “sorry but we cannot accept your application into Rutgers New Brunswick”.
I knew I wasn’t this outstanding student, but wow. That initial rejection hurt a lot more than I’d expected, even from a college I had no intention to go to. The next few letters were much more positive and by late December I had a handful of choices where I could get into that “college life” that movies seem to make so perfect, fun, and amazing. I decided to become a pioneer and attend William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. I stayed there for four months till I became absolutely sick of college and decided to try the road less traveled and work for a couple of years.
When I started my job hunt, my greatest ally – at least told by everyone in this world – would be my résumé. My resume looked like a blank piece of paper with the name “Justin Emerson” on top and my contact information. Very impressive, I know. I cannot say I didn’t try to find a job in high school but I never seemed to think I’d be so desperate to find one.
When I left college, I knew I did not want to work some dead-end 9-5 that pays me mere change. I wanted something exotic and exciting. Bartender! It had this aura of excitement around it in my mind and was something where I could be social and enjoy my job at the same time. So off to a bartending school I went. I took the course, graduated, went to their job placement, and well…here I am writing about me trying to find a job.
A new approach was needed. While a minimum wage job totally cramps my style, it seemed more reasonable than an eighteen year old bartender. I went off filling out applications and searching Craigslist and the internet for jobs. This approach met little success coupled with mostly failure. Here is a short list of places I’ve worked at or applied to:
Toyota dealership
Tesla Motors
Apple
Gamestop
Nike
Converse
FootLocker
Kohl’s
CottonOn
H&M
PacSun
Olive Garden
Red Lobster
One word can sum up my job hunting: discouraging.
So, as you can see neither road has really worked for me. On that note I have applied and been accepted to Bergen County College where I plan to go and transfer to a four-year college soon after. I’m not happy or excited about going back to college, but like I asked in the first paragraph. What is a teenager to do?
High school is a place where you seem to live or die by the clique you are part of. Perhaps you’re the football star or the cheerleader captain, on the opposite end of the “popularity” spectrum are the band geeks or nerds. Each clique seems to(or at least attempt) define how you act, look, dress, where you hang out, who you hang out with, and who you should never end up with or as.
A rather disturbing trend that comes along with certain cliques are what makes other cliques “uncool” or “outsiders”. Yet what makes certain groups outsiders are just human characteristics; For someone who is original, an “outside-the-box thinker”, courageous, or passionate, it does not make them “different”, “weird”, or anything close to being an outsider”.
That is what Alexandra Robbins pushes for in her book – you should not be afraid to be different and that no clique can single handily defines who you are.
The key parts of her novel center around seven unique people who each belong to a different clique within their respected schools. You have Danielle who is labeled as a Loner, Eli is the Nerd who even his own mother attacks him for not being “normal,” Mark (referred to as Blue throughout the book) is the Gamer who is barely passing school, Joy is the New Girl who is attacked for being raised differently, and then there is Noah who is the Band Geek. Interestingly enough there is also Whitney who belongs to the popular clique,unwillingly, and Regan who is not even a student but a facility member at her school. Robbins follows the characters as they make their way through the school year with a twist half way into their year that none of them see coming.
This book is a great read if you have ever felt out-of-place in high school, misunderstood in class, bullied in the halls, or left alone in the cafeteria. Every story is unique in its own way and will leave you shocked, angry, happy, proud, or at times depressed.
More than 8,000 New York City school bus drivers and matrons went on strike over job protection this morning, leaving some 152,000 students, many disabled, trying to find other ways to get to school.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the strike started at 6 a.m. Wednesday. About 200 bus drivers and bus matrons were assembled on picket lines in the Queens section of the city.
‘The first days will be extremely chaotic,’ Walcott told 1010 WINS radio. ‘It hasn’t happened in New York City in over 33 years.’0ver 33 years’
The union did not immediately return calls and emails seeking comment.
Most of the city’s roughly 1.1 million public school students take public transportation or walk to school.
Those who rely on the buses include 54,000 special education students and others who live far from schools or transportation.
A father has been arrested on terror charges after threatening his child’s elementary school to test if they could deal with an armed intruder.
Ronald Miller, 44, was described as ‘aggressive and combative’ during the incident at Celina Elementary School, just outside Dallas.
He made his way inside the school’s main office and confronted staff after dropping off his child early on Wednesday morning.
According to CBSdfw, he pointed at members of staff and said ‘you’re dead’.
He then repeatedly asked panicked teachers what they would do if he had a gun and ‘a target inside the school’.
‘He asked questions such as what would you do if I had a gun and I had a target inside the school? Those questions would obviously be alarming,’ Patrol Sergeant Shea Scott of the Celina Police Department told myfoxdfw.com. ‘He was putting them on the spot and demanding quick responses.’
Miller was not armed and left the scene peacefully. He handed teachers a note telling the school district to call him if they were in need of security training.
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