Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Month: July 2011 (page 3 of 3)

I am a feminist

"Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

Under this definition of feminism, I am a feminist. I hope that many educators would count themselves as feminists under this definition. However, we still have many issues around gender equality in our education system which we need to fix.

When we spend unequal amounts of money on our sports teams, and promote the boys’ sports more than the girls’ sports, we send the message to our girls that what they do is unimportant.

When we call on the boys in our class more than the girls and encourage reflection and deeper thinking from the boys, we are implicitly telling the girls that what they think is unimportant.

When we hire disproportionally more male administrators in schools than female administrators, we tell girls that they aren’t supposed to be in charge. In BC, for example, female teachers outnumber male teachers by a 2 to 1 ratio, but are nearly evenly split at the administrative level. While this is changing, we have a long way to go. Can anyone tell me why female teachers make, on average, $4000 a year less than their male counterparts in British Columbia?

When our prescribed learning outcomes do not specifically talk about the role of media in defining gender for our society, there is little hope that we can counteract the effect of media. Fortunately, gender is discussed in our curriculum in British Columbia, all of 14 times.

It is critical that each of us who are educators, who are helping shape the role of gender in our society, publicly identify ourselves as feminists. We must actively work to break down the rigid gender roles our society defines, because one of the places change happens in our society is in education, and if the inequality between the genders persists, it will be at least partially because of our inaction.

I worked at a school that cheated

When I worked in NYC, in one of those small academies created in the old Chancellor’s district, I worked at a school which cheated in many different ways to improve our test scores.

  • Our principal would trade away his worst performing students to his friends’ schools in other parts of Brooklyn, thus improving his odds of raising his, I mean our school’s, test scores. I don’t know exactly what his friends got in return, but our principal got his $15,000 bonus three years in a row for raising test scores, and then he retired (in NYC, at the time, a Principal’s retirement income was based on his final 3 years of service).
     
  • We didn’t choose students based on test scores, that would be too obvious. Instead, our principal relied on average attendance and word-of-mouth about good programs from which to choose students. Our ninth grade class in my second year of teaching was the strongest class academically ever to attend my old school in NYC as a result. As soon as our principal retired, we got an influx of students from the poorer performing neighbourhood schools, along with a string of awful principals — one after the other.
     
  • When we needed three out of our four weakest students to pass the state Regent’s in math in order to avoid being classified as a failing school, each of whom was classified as a "Special Education" student, they all got readers for the exam (one of them also got a scribe). "Are you sure you want to pick B?"
     
  • We regularly "scrubbed" our test scores and any of them that were close to passing we reread until we had found creative ways to award them points so that they passed. No one got an almost passing score: not one single child. I thought it was common practice; I had no idea this was even frowned upon. When one of our students had forgotten to draw a line in her diagram, we all left the room and when we came back — mysteriously — we realized she hadn’t actually forgotten to draw the line — how lucky!
     
  • Every single question I was supposed to share with the students had to look like a Regent’s exam question. I was instructed to quiz the students using past exam paper questions, give them homework assignments involving past paper exam questions, and all of my exams were supposed to look like Regent’s exams in format. In the final two months before the exams, our students would see nothing but Regent’s style exam questions.
     
  • Our students never seemed to get suspended in September or October, but after whatever that magical date was in November when we got our allotment of Title I funds based on our average attendance, all of a sudden our worst performing students would get suspended in droves. Out of 34 kids in remedial math, six of them remained to take the Regents exam at the end of the year. The rest had dropped out of school. Not surprisingly, I had three out of six of my students pass, which is an amazing 50% pass rate!
     
  • Two years after I left the school, our newest principal (who started during my last year at the school) was fired (or asked to resign) after it was discovered she had modified test scores for students.

I feel bad about what happened at my school, but I was an rookie teacher in a foreign education system that made no sense to me. I did not have enough control in that school other than to do my best to provide my students with an enriching and relevant math curriculum.

The point is, when the stakes are high enough, people cheat. The recent problems that have been discovered in Atlanta are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a thousand other ways schools are cheating: they just haven’t been caught yet.

The Shapes of Stories

This is a fabulous video of Kurt Vonnegutt talking about the shapes of stories. Notice the different types of graphs he produces? This is a fairly mathematical procedure, and I love both the idea of embedding everyday variables on the axis, and of representing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the protagonist in the graph. I remember my 11th grade English teacher sharing with us the common graphs of Shakespeare’s trajedy and comedies in an effort to help us understand the two distinct genres.

 

 

Wouldn’t this be an interesting activity to do with your students?

6 years and 630 posts later

About 6 and a half years ago, I started a blog. The purpose of the blog was to provide updates for my family back home while my (new) wife and I were living abroad in London, England. At the time, Facebook was still a closed site for college students, and Myspace was too messy to share with my parents. I needed an electronic space to share pictures, thoughts, and stories from our lives.

As I was jumping into learning programming, and educational technology, I decided to switch from the free hosting offered by Blogspot to my own server. I first installed Movable Type, then WordPress, and finally settled on Drupal for my blog, learning each of the technologies as I transfered between them. My first choice of domains, "UnitOrganizer.com" was intended to be a place for teachers to share their ideas, in the form of unit plans. That never actually came together, and a couple of years later I switched to my own name for my domain.

During the past few years I’ve switched from blogging about my personal life, to blogging about my programming projects, to blogging as a form of eportfolio, to blogging about my interests in education almost exclusively. I’ve had more opportunities come to me than I can count through my blog including having the opportunity to write a textbook, be published in 3 different magazines, have a short series of articles in a newspaper, and to present at conferences all over the world.

I read through some of my earliest writing, and I can see a big difference between both the strength of my writing and the quality of the ideas behind the writing. My earliest writing on education is fairly naive sounding to me today. I wonder what I will think of my writing in 10 years.

To those of you considering a blog, I say go ahead and do it. The opportunity for reflection and personal growth have been tremendous.