|
New
Book
Traditional and Alternative Certification in the
United States
(in press)
|
 |
|
From the introduction
Over
the past 8 years, states have created separate and
unequal standards for candidates in alternative
certification programs. For example, for
alternatively-certified candidates in New Hampshire,
the amount of preparation in the teaching field has
disintegrated to 6 hours, a requirement attainable
in a typical freshman’s first semester of college.
Meanwhile, students at The University of New
Hampshire seeking traditional certification must
major in English (40 hours of course work), take an
additional 32 hours of graduate study in education,
and spend an entire year in a school, teaching under
the supervision of a veteran teacher.
Capitalizing on the opportunity to build economies
of scale with little financial risk, corporations
have seized upon the changing definition of teacher
certification by bringing a tough-minded,
competitive, market orientation to a field that
previously had been a university-based, largely
humanitarian enterprise. A business called I-Teach
Texas recently churned out more than 1,400 new
teachers through an Internet-based program which
requires no observation or teaching in schools.
During the same period, the University of Texas at
Austin prepared 142 new teachers, or approximately
10% the number produced by I-Teach.
|
|
| |
 |
|
 |
|
| Photo:
Sledding hill in late summer, Ottawa Hills, Ohio |
|
"Virtue lies
not in the fear of gods, nor in the timid
shunning of pleasure; it lies in the harmonious
operation of our senses and faculties guided by
reason." Lucretius
|
|
| Books |
|
|
Articles |
|
Presentations |
|
 |
|
|
From chapter 2, Teacher's Guide to
Multisensory Learning
Because rewards and punishments are
meted out according to the average
number of students performing at a basic
level on multiple-choice tests, the
distance between social, technological,
and ethical problems of the real world
and the school curricula seems greater
than ever. Test scores may determine not
only a school’s level of funding, but
also a teacher’s salary, the graduation
status of students, and the future of
the school as an ongoing enterprise. By
their nature, end-of-year assessments
measure students’ ability to recall and
manipulate abstract knowledge. Most
teachers feel an immense pressure to
cover precisely the material that is
expected to show up on the exam, no more
and no less.
Yet, preparing students for higher test
scores by subverting genuine learning is
illogical. A student who has fun while
he is learning and actually remembers
the new information for longer than six
seconds is likely to perform better on
tests than a student who hates class and
remembers nothing after the bell rings.
Perhaps it is a vestige of those
humorless schoolmasters of the 19th
century, epitomized by Mr. Gradgrind in
Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, that many
Americans think learning must involve
drudgery and angst. In the real world,
learning can be challenging at times,
certainly, but learning can also
exhilarate and inspire. |
|
|
More books |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
"Reading & happiness," from
May 2009 KAPPAN
The average time an Americanteenager
spends reading has shrunk every year
since 1976 and now sits at an
all-time low of six minutes and 36
seconds per day. In 1976, 86% of
high school seniors reported reading
a book or magazine at least once per
week. By 2004, the percentage of
seniors who claimed to read at least
once per week had dropped 19 points
to 67%. The last time that
Americans spent more time reading
than playing video games and surfing
the Internet was 1996. Since 1996,
time spent reading
books has declined slightly while
time spent playing video games and
surfing the Internet has risen 400%.
Although
web sites host vast repositories of
free books online, research
indicates that teens use the
Internet for social networking,
shopping, music downloading, and
image searches. Reading novels
online isn’t even on the radar
screen (p. 686).
|
|
|
More
articles |
|
|
|
 |
|
From "Sensorizing
reading." American Reading Forum.
Sanibel, Florida, 2008.
Today, multisensory devices are in
use in a variety of professions.
Police officers use video and
portable digital assistants to
record evidence at the scene of a
crime; doctors probe a patient’s
internal organs with tiny cameras;
economists ponder possible outcomes
of fiscal policies through
sophisticated computer simulations;
lawyers utilize massive databases to
uncover nuances of judicial
decisions. In contrast, most
teachers use no tools, save a piece
of chalk or an overhead
transparency, and their students are
expected to remain sedentary and
quiet for seven or eight consecutive
hours.
Classroom activities should move
back and forth between experience
and language....To engage students
and teach them something of value, a
teacher needs new tools that utilize
multisensory and sometimes
simultaneous stimuli.
|
|
|
More
presentations |
|
|
| |
|
