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October 15, 2002
The Back Page
By Amy Poftak & Kristen Kennedy
Gleanings
Just Say No-To Testing
The demand for developing new statewide tests in time to meet legislative mandate may be the cause of several recent testing snafus, such as Nevada's 736 sophomores and juniors who had mistakenly been told they had failed the math portion of a state test, when, upon reevaluation, they had actually passed. While state boards of education and testing companies race to create student performance assessments, some students are refusing to cave in to testing demands. To wit: 30 percent of North Carolina students refused to give answers on a state writing test, scribbling "This doesn't matter, so I'm not taking it" across the top.
If You Build It, They Won't Come
According to preliminary results from the Children, Families, and the Internet study conducted by consulting firm Grunwald Associates, only 55 percent of students who say their school has a Web site have visited it. When asked why, kids complain that school Web sites either don't offer useful information or aren't maintained to include dynamic information. Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, added "schools have dramatically underestimated how difficult it would be to put timely information on the Web in a compelling fashion." Final results of the study are due in late 2002.
Students Give Teacher Net Use Poor Marks
There's a serious disconnect between Net-using students and educators, according to a recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The study, based on interviews of 136 middle and high school students from 36 different schools, revealed that while the majority of wired teens use the Internet to complete schoolwork, more often than not they do it outside school walls and without teacher direction.
Readers Debate Handhelds
Our August Trend Watch question asked readers if their school or district would consider handheld devices over laptop or desktop computers. Respondents to our online QuickPoll were split right down the middle. Some of the "yes" people, including three Catholic elementary schools in Northern Queens, N.Y., have already written grants for purchasing handheld computers. But others felt strongly that laptops are a wiser buy for schools: "For three times the price (or twice the price after networking your handheld), a laptop is going to deliver a thousand times the instructional opportunities," opined one respondent.
Hit List
Online
The Favorite Poem Project, brainchild of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, is powered by the belief in the singular physical experience of reading poetry aloud. To encourage a national appreciation of poetry that only a public reading can provide, the site offers step-by-step guidance on how to host a favorite poem event in your school or community. Teachers will also find lesson plans, suggestions for using poetry to teach other subjects, and information on summer poetry institutes. The best part: the site's rich video library of everyday people reading their favorite poems aloud. Check out John Ulrich, a student from South Boston, Mass., reading Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" and Mary McWhorter, an accounting manager from Stockton, Calif., on Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est."
Books
Shut down your computer, turn off your cell phone, and settle in with Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson's engaging homage to a teacher who changed the direction of his life. The setting is Medford, Mass., a working-class city near Boston where Edmundson and his fellow football-playing thugs roam the halls of Medford High School in the late 1960s. Enter philosophy teacher Frank Lears, a young, aloof, relentlessly questioning Harvard grad whose methods-putting desks in a circle and replacing textbooks with Freud, Camus, and Kesey-are unheard of in the school. Edmundson says he wrote the memoir, in part, "to give teachers who see their job as a combination of care and provocation a measure of encouragement at a time when many forces are trying to make them members of the service economy." Random House
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