How effective is No Child Left Behind? Not very.
In fact, it harms our kids instead of helping them. How?
Here’s a letter from a parent who’s also a teacher with 21 years’ experience which explains the problems perfectly: Letter about Re-Authorization of NCLB.
Yesterday I was in G’ville to sign my contract for the next year. It’s a startling experience to look around you and realize that you’re probably among the five oldest in the room. Most of the new teachers are just that — fresh out of school, with student teaching only a few weeks behind them.
Sitting there, looking at the young faces all around me, I quickly did the math and realized I could have easily been their high school teacher.
It’s not the first time it happened. I once walked into the teachers’ room in Lipnica to see a former student sitting there. We chatted a little, and it turned out she no longer just a former student but also a current colleague.
I expect, if I’d stayed in Lipnica long enough, I’d be teaching former students’ kids.
All of this to say, I’m feeling my age this morning. Not feeling old, simply feeling my age.
Few things in life are more of a milestone for a child than to learn how to use the toilet. There’s tons of advice about when and how to begin. “Most children show signs of readiness to begin using the toilet as toddlers, usually between 18 months and 3 years of age,” writes one site. It continues,
These signs include staying dry for at least 2 hours at a time, having regular bowel movements, being able to follow simple instructions, being uncomfortable with dirty diapers and wanting them to be changed, asking to use the potty chair, or asking to wear regular underwear. You should also be able to tell when your child is about to urinate or have a bowel movement by his facial expressions, posture or by what he says. If your child has begun to tell you about having a dirty diaper you should praise him for telling you and encourage him to tell you in advance next time.
Well, L can’t communicate yet, and in fact she’s just learned how to sit up on her own. That doesn’t mean she can’t use a potty chair already. How do we know? Because she’s successfully used the chair several times.
Is this real “potty training”? I do indeed think so — we’re giving her an alternative to dirty diapers from an early age, and we’re showing her how “grownups” do it.
The key is knowing when she usually relieves herself. BMs are the easiest, because she announces it clearly and well in advance. But at least two times, we’ve sat her on the potty chair after eating when she wasn’t showing any signs, and within a few moments, she made use of the chair.
Our hope is that this will make “real” potty training more manageable. We’ll see in a few months…
Last Monday we took L to her first swimming lesson. Granted, most of it was for us parents — teaching us how to hold our children, how to roll over with them into a back float, etc.
L loves water. She splashes like mad when taking a bath, so it seemed fair to expect her to like swimming. And she did. Sort of. It got old relatively quickly, but she valiantly survived to the end of the thirty-minute lesson.
Yesterday, we finally took her swimming in our apartment complex pool, complete with the floating crab the grandparents brought:
In reality, L really didn’t like the crab that much. Or at least she tired of it quickly. Being tossed about was much more fun, I suppose.
She enjoyed it, but she seemed happier while drying off.
When I was growing up in southwest Virginia, I would occasionally see advertisements for relatively nearby Grandfather Mountain. They were local productions, and looked it — something someone had filmed with a high-end video camera, then added a voice-over.
I was really unimpressed.
Yesterday, twenty-some years after seeing those ads, I visited Grandfather Mountain.
The key attraction at GM is its “world-famous” mile-high swinging bridge. Just to make that clear — the bridge itself is not suspended with a mile of empty space below it. The actual height of the bridge is probably about sixty feet. However, it is on a mountain with an elevation above 5,280 feet. Certainly, no one expects a literally mile-high bridge, but I was thinking it’d be a bit higher than sixty or so feet. Then again, I never looked closely at the TV spots.
The morning light in the second bedroom of our apartment is absolutely marvelous.
K has often talked about getting The Girl dressed up for some nice portraits.
Last weekend, she did just that.
L’s been able to lie on her stomach and hold up her head from some time now. Recently, she learned that her arms can help her in the endeavor.
It’s the first step to crawling, no pun intended. At least we hope. We’re a little worried that she might want to skip crawling since she’s already “standing” and “walking” all the time. Why? Well, there’s all the hype about the importance of crawling, like this:
There have been some studies that indicate that late walkers score better later in life on academic achievement tests. It is hypothesized that because of the use of alternating sides of the body (e.g., right arm and left leg, then vica versa), there is increase communication between the two sides of the brain thus enhancing learning. (The Mentor Mom)
On the other hand:
There are many perfectly normal, well-coordinated children who bypass the crawling stage to move onto other modes of locomotion. Two of our own children, Robert and Erin, had very short crawling stages. Robert (now a partner in the Sears Family Pediatric practice) scooted on his bottom with one leg straight out and the other leg bent under him. Our daughter, Erin, stopped crawling at nine months and “walked” on her knees. (Parenting.com, via the Way Back Machine)
It’s just one of the many “do I really need to worry about this?” parenting issues…
Almost all of the kids in the program in which I teach have one thing in common: a hatred of reading. If I have them read a couple of paragraphs (say, 200 words total), they immediately begin complaining about how long that is.
“Man, that’s too long!” is a common refrain in the classroom.
When I have them read something to me aloud, it becomes clear fairly quickly why they’re not fans of reading: they’re not very good at it. They stumble on very basic words, and don’t recognize words they themselves use every day. And like most activities, the only way to improve reading is to practice — to do it. But many of the kids in the program come from demographics — low education and low income — in which reading is not particularly popular, probably for the very same reason.
And so for them, the dilemma of the 21st century is intensified: how do we teachers, in a world of video games, YouTube, and music videos successfully encourage reading?
It seems that Europe is now importing what it exported, namely Christianity. But this is often a different kind of Christianity:
The “Amens!” flew like popcorn in hot oil as 120 Christian worshipers clapped and danced and praised Jesus as if He’d just walked into the room. In a country where about 2 percent of the population attend church regularly and many churches draw barely enough worshipers to fill a single pew, the Sunday morning service at this old mission hall was one rocking celebration.
In the middle of all the keyboards, drums and hallelujahs, Stendor Johansen, a blond Danish sea captain built like a 180-pound ice cube, sang along and danced, as he said, like a Dane — without moving. (washingtonpost.com)
A more emotional religion than the methodical Lutheranism Denmark would have exported, to be sure.
Yet what’s most interesting about the article is not the fact that missionaries are going to Europe. That’s old news — I often saw Evangelical missionaries in Poland trying to convert Poles from Catholicism to Christianity. (Yes, I know — but that’s how they see it.) The interesting thing is where the missionaries are coming from.
The International Christian Community (ICC) is one of about 150 churches in Denmark that are run by foreigners, many from Africa, Asia and Latin America, part of a growing trend of preachers from developing nations coming to Western Europe to set up new churches or to try to reinvigorate old ones.
World Christianity today is in an odd stage of development. Evangelicalism, that distinctly American version of Christianity, has been on fire throughout the world. America has been sending out Evangelical missionaries, especially to countries that have large Catholic populations, and now, it seems, these missionaries are going to Europe — full circle.
I wonder if they’re bringing disease back with them, though…
When learning Polish, for some reason I had the hardest time initially using the formal voice of address. English-only speakers might not know what I’m talking about, even though the formal/intimate distinction existed in English for hundreds of years.
In French, it’s a question of “Vous” and “tu.” “Vous” would be “you all” — second person plural — and is used in all formal occasions; “tu” is informal, and used with intimate friends or family. In German, it’s “sie” and “du”.
This is why Martin Burber’s wonderful book Ich und Du is translated I and Thou and not I and You.
In English, it used to be “you” and “thou,” with “thou” being the more intimate. Because most of us are exposed to “thou” exclusively through liturgical language, we get the sense that it’s incredibly formal. In fact, it’s the opposite.
In Polish, there are two options. The first is the common use of “Pan” or “Pani” — literally, “lord/master” or “lady/mistress.”
The older, now-obsolete form is to use “Wy” — “you all.” It’s still used in the mountainous southern region, and K in fact speaks to her grandmothers this way. “Co robicie ostatnio?” “What have you been doing lately?”
Out of this came an amusing verb: dwoic. While this is related to the word “dwa” (two), it’s not, strictly speaking, “double” (which is “podwoic”). Instead, a better explanation would be “to use the second person plural.” In that case, one might ask another, “why are you [dwoic] me?” meaning, “Why are you using the formal voice with me?”
The second method, and the one used now, is to use “Pan” and “Pani.” To be polite, a shop attendant, for example, doesn’t ask, “Do you need help?” Literally, he asks, “Does the lady need help?”
The problem for me was not so much remembering the odd construction but learning when to make the switch from “Pan” or “Pani” to “you.” I called people “you” when I should have used “Pan/Pani” more times than I care to recall. And there really are no guidelines — it depends, somewhat, on the person.
I got to thinking about all of this due to an article by Charles Bremner. It begins,
Here is one of those stories that are difficult to convey to people who speak only English. President Sarkozy’s government has annoyed the “progressive” sections of the teaching establishment with an order that school pupils must address their teachers with the formal vous rather than the familiar second person singular tu. Teachers are advised to use the respectful vous to Lyc�e teenagers in their classes.
While I could never imagine students in Poland referring to teachers in the second person, I could also never imagine teachers using the formal third person with teachers.
The piece goes on to discuss how world leaders refer to each other — tu/du or vous/sie?
Angela Merkel dropped German formality enough to call him “Lieber (Dear) Nicolas” but stuck to the formal “sie” not the familiar “du”. Sarkozy’s matey reply jarred on old-fashioned ears. “Ch�re Angela… J’ai confiance en toi.” (In older English I trust thee not you). Lib�ration joked that Franco-German harmony was still lacking. “They are going to have to start by agreeing whether they use tu or vous,” it said. (Charles Bremner piece)
While the article doesn’t mention George Bush, it seems safe to assume that, like Gordon Brown, his dependence on interpretors will solve the tu/Vous problem. But considering the little back rub he once gave Merkel, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that Bush would opt for “tu” over “Vous.”