What-What?! Week of February 1st

This week has been good, but busy; Peter worked a bunch of overtime, plus had to drive up to Seattle yesterday, so he's spent a good deal of time not home.  I was contacted by the local Girl Scouts coordinator, and now Saffron and I are RSVP'd for the first troop meeting later this month.  I'm excited to start getting Saffron involved in some real activities; I know that the time I spent in 4-H had a lot to do with my interests and competencies growing up.

News: How Regulation Leads To Low Literacy Among Teachers, Then Students via Forbes

I kind of hate citing Forbes, as I find that the articles tend to be written from a perspective that's a bit sideways of reality, but sometimes there are still good points.  This author is discussing the fact that teachers (K-12) who graduate from conventional education programs tend to score low on literacy and English tests.  I've taken some education classes, and to be honest, this surprises me little.  It has been my experience that education teachers tend to coddle students by giving them extended deadlines (even after they've been extended already!), subjective rather than objective projects, and very lenient grading.  My business school education was quite different. (Though not all education and business schools are the same).

Further, one of the issues I keep wondering about teaching and the teaching credential programs is whether it gives people too few options.  If teachers instead had a bachelor's degree in something else, then the option of leaving teaching if it doesn't suit them becomes much easier.  Granted, this country already has huge problems with teachers leaving the profession, but I think that making it more difficult to leave the profession is just poor policy.  While I don't object to teacher credentialing, I wonder if it's too strict in some ways; one thing that I like about California is that, in order to become a substitute teacher, you only need to pass a test, get fingerprinted, and background checked.  Washington state requires a full teaching degree and credential in order to substitute teach.  With all my experience in teaching in afterschool programs, I've been interested in teaching as a profession.  However, now that we're living in Washington, I have given up on it; the expense and time to get a full teaching credential is prohibitive to someone interested in testing the waters.    Why would I go to school for two years and spend all that money for a credential that is only good for doing one thing, especially one thing I'm not sold on, that also tends to be stressful and low paying?  How many other people, who may be good teachers, get shut out because of the credentialing process?

Shopping: Shoes of Prey

Shoes of Prey is a company that makes custom shoes.  Their online interface for designing shoes is really fun to play with, even if you don't actually go through with buying the shoes.  I ran into this company through work, and then spent a bunch of time designing shoes.  I haven't bought any, because they are expensive... but maybe someday.

What-What?! Week of October 5th

It is October, oh my goodness.  My daughter's birthday is at the end of the month, as well as Halloween.  I gotta get out my cutting mat and sew Saffron's dress, paint Corey's robot box costume, and figure out what I need for Ozzy's Buzz Lightyear costume (because that kid is Buzz Lightyear).  I need to start on that stuff soon, because I'm scheduled to start a new job on the 13th.  After that, I expect my free time is going to be more limited.  But money will be good, and I can put it on my resume.

News: Does a Five-Year-Old Need to Learn How to Code? via BBC News

The push to teach young children computer programming really irritates me.  This is because the fundamental skills used in programming are things children should be learning anyway; planning, logical thinking, attention to detail, and working with the abstract.  It's not special to programming.  Those skills can be learned through mathematics and language arts.  It's cool to say "oh, we're teaching children how to program computers, because we're so modern", it's superfluous.  Math and language arts is a much more direct way to teach those skills.  It's also cheaper, easier to apply to a variety of things, and has a much larger body of work backing up the methods used to teach it.  Now, I've taught computer programming to elementary school kids, and it went okay.  The kids were happy to mess around with computers, they did have a degree of understanding about it, but I still hold to my point -- spending more time on math would have had a better effect, especially over the long run.

For older kids, say from sixth grade on, I could see the value in teaching computer programming as the application of logical thinking skills.  Not as job preparation.  I'm not going to comment on whether or not learning a programming language is useful.  Languages rise and fall as technology changes, but the fundamental skills stay the same.  After you learn one language, it's vastly easier to learn another.  The thinking behind it doesn't change, and the value of being able to plan, think logically and be detail oriented doesn't change.

The Duck Song

I have to apologize for this.  This song will get stuck in your head.  You will wake up in the middle of the night humming it.  It's not that I hate you or anything... but it's so darn catchy.  There are at least two follow up songs, but really, you only need to listen to this one.  It will haunt you enough by itself.  Sorry guys, the duck made me do it. D:

What-What?! Week of July 20th

This week has been pretty long.  I went to work on Sunday, working "security" at a soccer game in Seattle (the Sounders versus the... Timbers, I think?).   It was a pretty easy job, but I'm not sure that the pay is worth the drive to Seattle.  I also worked in the shipping department at a local bread plant, which was... amusing.  It is a very physical job, but the pay is good.  When I worked there, I was the only girl, and easily the shortest person.  I got to work on all the "short person" specials, until we ran out of small stacks of bread.  Then I got to do the big stacks, which are about 7 feet high; the biggest set of stacks I sorted out was around 1800 packages of bread.  Those stacks were huge.  It took some ingenuity to manhandle them around the warehouse.

Hm.  Neighbors.

In other news, local apartment complexes keep having fires.  Two apartment buildings just burnt down in Renton, while the apartment complex up the street from us had a two alarm fire early this morning.  A week and a half ago, an apartment complex in North Everett had a fire.  The entire time I lived in Hollister, none of the apartment buildings had fires.  So what is going on here?

News:  A Middle School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About the No Child Left Behind via The New Yorker

At ten pages, this is a pretty long read, but well worth the insight into what actually happens at schools, especially schools that deal with low income and ESL students.  The parts where teachers and administrators were bullied especially rings true after seeing how certain admin treated afterschool staff, and certain members of their own staff.

I understand why many of these teachers felt that standardized testing just got in the way of more important things; in my experiences, the issues that children face outside of school are even more important than those faced in school.  Children without a stable home, food to eat, parents that are supportive, or just simply a lack of supervision have a much harder time excelling in school.  I've tutored kids that have these issues.  The most heartbreaking situation I've seen was a little first grader who had been removed from her parent's care, and was living in between her two aunt's houses.  She never knew where she was going home to, or what adult was going to pick her up.  The entire time that I tutored her, she made very little academic progress.  It was pretty obvious that the upheaval in her home life overshadowed everything else, and that the best she could do at that time was just survive the day.  My boss and I did as much as we could for her, but she was falling behind.  She was only in first grade.

Basically, this.

When your job relies on other people passing tests, suddenly there's a lot of pressure to do whatever necessary that entails you keep your job.  My first tutoring job was like this.  The students took a grade-level evaluation at the beginning and the end of the school year, and whether the company maintained its contract with the local school board depended upon these children making academic progress.  The fact that I had children who went from failing to passing grades meant nothing in relation to whether or not I (or anyone at my site) would have a job the next year.  My boss and us staff did everything we could without cheating; we took kids aside in small groups to do the testing, they had as much time as possible, they had help in clarifying anything confusing, and so on.  Even with plenty of time, there were kids that randomly pushed buttons, just to get the test done.  This, of course, negates the entire use of testing at all... but their scores were still measured and counted.  Some of the kids made progress, while others stayed the same.

It is frustrating to work with children everyday, all school year, only to have that effort and investment seemingly amount to so little every time test scores are published.  I don't think what these people did was right, but I'm not going to pretend that I don't understand where they're coming from.

(imgs via myeverettnews.com, mrsfilas.blogspot.com)