Community Service

Is student grade- or financial-aid dependent community service, or teacher other-duties-as-assigned or condition-of-employment community service in any way voluntary much less the right thing to do? Exactly what are we teaching our students?

Quibbling? Oh no, not the White House.

President Obama, against the advice of a great many constitutional lawyers, has decided that firing missiles from U.S. drones onto human targets does not meet the definition of "hostilities" as intended by the War Powers Act of 1973. I wonder. If Cuba were to fire just one missile from a drone onto human targets in Miami, what would Mr. Obama call it, if not a hostile act?

Wisconsin and Public Employee Collective Bargaining

Full disclosure: I have never been a member of a union, yet I am acutely aware that I have benefited from their existence or the threat of unionization. I am also aware that the essence of unionism is collective bargaining, so I make little distinction below.

Elementary: Are public unions necessary? Doesn't seem so. Just peg their salaries and benefits to the local private sector, unionized and non-unionized. Have public unions become too powerful? Seems so--and too expensive, relative to the private sector. Will elected and non-elected public officials ("management") take advantage of public employees without benefit of collective bargaining? Not likely, especially if their salaries and benefits are also pegged to the private sector. Can jobs between the public and private sector be compared. Nope, not much. Yet our military, which is not unionized and links its pay scales to the civilian sector and its pay raises to a cost of living adjustment appears to consistently achieve its recruiting and retention goals. Few argue that our military is overcompensated. Caveat: the military benefits somewhat from the efforts of various federal employee unions.

Confucius Says

From Alvin Rabushka's Thoughtful Ideas blog quoting Confucius: “I do not instruct the uninterested; I do not help those who fail to try. If I mention one corner of a subject and the pupil does not deduce therefrom the other three, I drop him.” Chapter VII, Verse 8 (James R. Ware).

This is a fence that most teachers walk every day. Confucius set a high standard and I suspect he seldom, if ever, waived. Teachers care! But each has a point at which she or he is obligated to move on, to move past the student who just will not try. Policy makers and administrators know this and make similar decisions regarding employees and teachers, however, they are in denial when it comes to the classroom. Schools have limited resources. Trade-offs will be made. Accept it.

Standardized and Most Grade-determining Tests--the First and Last Word

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. --Albert Einstein--

Round and Round We Go

Every child a college graduate. On the surface it is a ridiculous goal and those of us who matriculated in the 1950s recognized it as such a long time ago. Did the goal-speakers really think that college graduates would expect to become plumbers, electricians, roofers, cosmetologists, mechanics, or thousands of other skilled and unskilled laborers? Or dd they plan that these jobs would be performed by disillusioned college dropouts? Maybe now that Harvard's Graduate School of Education concluded the obvious in a report released today, those who are ardently pushing the unqualified 70 percent into college will refocus their efforts (doubtful in the short run--schools are not very nimble). From the report:

Our current system places far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college after completing an academic program of study in high school. Yet as we’ve seen, only 30 percent of young adults successfully complete this preferred pathway, despite decades of efforts to raise the numbers. And too many of them graduate from college without a clear conception of the career they want to pursue, let alone a pathway for getting there.

We knew this in the 50s when high schools offered at least two tracks, the minority track being "college prep." Round and round we go.

You Gotta Love Sir Ken

Does he nail it? If so, now what?

Confucius on Responsibility for Learning

Over in Beyond School, by Clay Burrell (a wonderful read), warning that it may not be "politically correct", quotes Confucius from Analects 7.8:

 The Master said, “I will not enlighten a heart that is not already struggling to understand, nor will I provide the proper words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak. If I hold up one corner of a problem and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again.”

As teachers should we be held responsible for students learning the material, for students learning to learn, and for students wanting to learn? I side with Confucius and say none of the above. This is not to say that caring teachers should not offer interesting and engaging learning opportunities.

The crux of the question is, "should we be held responsible?". Apparently Confucius refused to 1) instruct students who could not or did not want to learn and 2) refused to accept responsibility for their not learning. We may covertly refuse to accept responsibility for these same students, however, we are contractually and increasingly culturally obligated to do whatever it takes to ensure that they learn the state-, district-, or school-directed curricular material and retain it at a certain percentage level at least until tested. And many of us are encouraged to and evaluated on our proficiency at instilling in our students the desire and ability to learn.