Yo Mista!

Before I take off for Iceland this week and check out their penis museum (no seriously, check this out), I have to recommend you read The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch.  This book provides an excellent history of the education system in the United States and offers some critical analysis on the new direction reform is taking. Honestly, reading this book was an eye-opener at times: I have seriously begun to question some of the people and things Teach for America supports (Joel Klein for one).  Anyone in the trenches of teaching can appreciate this book's critique of teacher accountability and high stakes testing movements. Ravitch herself admits that she was once on the testing and accountability bandwagon; she then explains why she changed her mind and why she hopes it's not too late for others to do so either. It's a book for both sides of the debate to read.   If you're even interested somewhat in education, get this book....

I know I'm supposed to be on hiatus, but a lot of people have been asking me my opinion on Bloomberg's recently announced Young Men's Initiative (read about it in the New York Times here ). In-depth detail on the initiative and their goals can be found here . To summarize, the program has approximately $130 million to use in a variety of ways to help reduce the " disparities slowing the advancement of black and Latino young men." This targeted strategy wiill include establishing new fatherhood classes, mentoring and literacy services , opening job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes, retraining probation officers to help those who have been incarcerated from repeating criminal offenses, and finally, assessing schools based on black and Latino students' academic progress. Overall, I'm very excited that we're finally not taking a "one size fits all" strategy to fix education.  In my two years of teaching thus far, I probably...

August has to be my favorite month of the summer: it's not too hot, there's always a nice breeze, and fall-time television is right around the corner. And by fall-time television, I'm talking about the upcoming sixth season of Dexter . What am I going to do when this show ends?   What makes August even more significant is that it kicks off "back-to-school" season. I can almost smell it in the air. It reminds of me of carrying around a school supply list at Wal-Mart while my mom pushed a shopping cart full of one-subject notebooks, folders, pens, #2 pencils, markers and of course, a new lunch box that indicated to the world what cartoon I was into at the time. Cowabunga, dude.   In September, I'll start my third year of teaching high school mathematics at a transfer high school serving over-age, under-credited youth. From now until I return to the classroom, I'm going to maximize "me" time. I'm talking Christian Bale in American Psycho styl...

Around this time last year, I remember getting excited about the upcoming school year. I was starting my second year as a teacher: I was hungry to implement ideas I'd thought about over the summer. I was eager to consider taking a different approach with certain topics. I was excited. I'm excited for next year as well, but I'm also a little uneasy: in the last four nights, I've had the same dream, twice. I rarely dream, so dreaming the exact same thing twice is a new experience. In my dream, I was back in the classroom during my third year, but things were very different. I was finding it hard to enjoy being in the classroom because my school's administration was making life difficult for me. Some of them were minor things, some of them were major things that really bothered me. From what I recall, I was no longer allowed to teach my personal finance course. Why? Because the kids don't really "need" this course on paper. Why would kids need to le...

New York School test scores are in folks, click here to check out the results via the New York Times. Before you start examining the data, please note that this data summarizes the performance of nearly one million students. Of which, 66% are classified as poor (see top of page). The ethnic breakout is as follows: 14% White, 15% Asian, 31% Black, and 40% Hispanic. Pretty generic, but I guess that's the best we're going to get here. I want to first write specifically about the test my class took, the Integrated Algebra Regents Exam. From the data provided, it seems our students scored pretty miserably with a 58% passing rate (compared to about an 80% passing rate for the rest of New York State). Only 7% of students who took the exam scored high enough to master the material ("advanced" column), which is also the lowest mastery level on any exam available. Don't worry kids, this is like golf. Lowest score wins. We win! The final column ("Prev. Standard...

Check out this informative infographic via focus.com. You'll have to click on the graphic to view it enlarged. Not that most educators needed to see this, I think a lot of us are actually pretty exhausted of making the argument for college. What I find most compelling though about this graphic is the lifetime earnings category in the first graph. Does it truely pay to pay though, as in, is paying for further education now with loans worth the salary in the long term? Stay tuned, in twenty years from now I'll ask my friends with doctoral degrees how it's worked or not worked out for them.

Check out this interesting op-ed in the New York Times about the recent reform movement for schools in the United States. A well-written piece teachers and non-teachers should read. Go ahead, click the link. It's Monday, work sucks, you're still wondering where the weekend went and you have nothing better to do in your cubicle anyway. Unless you're unemployed, then all I can say is, well done.