John Edwards unveiled his education plan today.
From scratch, he wants to create a new university that will prepare one thousand teachers and offer advice on best practices to other schools of education. He uses Arthur Levine’s love letter to ed schools as justification.
The present rate of attrition will mean that this school will produce 500 teachers who stay more than five years in a tough district. That means that Philly will get five to seven of these folks — hooray.
So I’m teaching this morning — another glorious day at West Philly High — and a kid asks me if I can get to myspace on my computer. I think he assumed that I had a broadband card (I didn’t) because the School District has blocked myspace.com.
It turns out he was using myspace as a file server, as a way of keeping files (including those for my class) and was now unable to download the paper. I think the smart folks downtown and most adults see these “social networks” as counter to the academic mission but here was a kid using it appropriately only to be unable to access his work.
Good article in the Globe today describing the written part of the SAT. These ‘grafs are money:
Les Perelman, director of MIT’s writing program, disagrees. He became so frustrated by what he believed were formulaic essays that freshmen were turning in after the SAT essay was introduced that he conducted an experiment: He trained three high school students, who had taken the SAT once already, to insert some factual errors, use big words, and ignore logical thought on the SAT essay, and each received a near-perfect score.
“They’ve learned to write paragraph essays where they don’t care whether the facts are correct,” Perelman said. “We have to spend a year in freshman composition deprogramming them.”
Bunin and other College Board officials contend that Perelman’s findings are inconclusive, since he only worked with a few students. But they acknowledge that factual accuracy was not crucial in the scoring.
“What the essay portion is about is a student’s ability to express himself in writing,” Bunin said. “This is not a research paper.”
I can’t think of another context where content would be irrelevant to one’s writing.
