My Boarding School Blog
Archive for the 'info' Category
05 18th, 2008 Gadgets for cheating
It wasn’t so long ago when cheating was something you’d at least lower your voice while discussing. There was a taboo, a sense of shame associated with it. Not so today. With cheating splashed all over YouTube, there’s definitely a “C’mon, everybody’s doing it” attitude to it and students are responding to the call with great enthusiasm and skill.
Using innocent looking gadgets such as cellphones, ipods and even soda bottles, students are finding more clever ways to deceive their teachers and cheat on their exams. Using a cell phone to text answers to friends has become popular, even in schools that don’t allow phones. Many teens have learned how to conceal the fact that they’re texting in class. An iPod provides another handy way to cheat. The teacher would find it hard to know that the students are listening to their own self-recorded audio file about the topic of test they are taking.
Schools have banned the use of of these gadgets in classrooms but it doesn’t seem to deter students from doing so.
read comments (0)05 17th, 2008 Violence in L.A high school
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A fight at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campuswide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police officers in riot gear.
The melee, which students said was between rival black and Hispanic gangs and started around noon on Friday, forced the authorities to shut down the school, Locke High, and keep students in their classrooms. After restoring order, they rounded up those involved and separated them, holding Hispanic students in the gymnasium and black students in another room.
Four people were arrested, three students for fighting and one nonstudent on suspicion of possessing a knife, said Susan Cox, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district.
Several students were injured and treated at the scene, officials said.
A music teacher, Reggie Smith, told The Los Angeles Times that it was a chaotic scene and difficult to distinguish between those fighting and those trying to avoid the mayhem.
“The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids,” Mr. Smith said. “Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”
Victor Wong, an 18-year-old senior, told The Times that the brawl grew out of a fight two days earlier between two graffiti gangs. He said Hispanic students who were friends of his asked him to participate in a fight planned for Friday that was to pit 10 Hispanic students against 10 black students.
Read the full story here.
05 16th, 2008 The better teachers for children at-risk
We Have Charts and Graphs. The data is unequivocal: in 1998-1999, 24,000 new teachers have entered teaching through alternative certification routes; in total, nationwide, since about 1985, about 125,000 individuals have been added alternatively. Unlike graduates of traditional routes, these individuals share characteristics that make them a superior choice to teach all children, especially children at risk. They already have degrees, are more likely to have work experience outside professional education; they tend to be older than traditional graduates, they are more likely to be people of color and more are likely to be male. This research is not new; findings like these have held consistent for the last fifteen years and can be verified in scholarly journals and refereed articles from many sources.
Read the full story here.
05 15th, 2008 Standard curriculum is not enough
If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
05 14th, 2008 What is a public school curriculum?
The curriculum is an authoritative prescription for the course of study of a school or system of schools. In their traditional form, such prescriptions set out the content to be covered at a grade level or in a course or sequences of courses, along with recommended or prescribed methods of teaching. In their contemporary form such prescriptions have been re-presented as national and state standards, outlining outcomes to be achieved by schools without prescribing the specific bodies of content to be covered or methods of teaching to be used.
However, most scholars who evaluate these curricula do not believe that direct the work of schools in significant ways. Curricula-as-documents are more often than not developed after the fact, and are based on existing practices of teachers or a simple listing of the content of textbooks being used. Further, many teachers are not familiar with the curriculum their district has mandated.