9-21-14 Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL:

The Best Resources Sharing The Best Practices For Fruitful Classroom Discussions

© 2013 AFS-USA Intercultural Programs, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio Facilitating fruitful classroom discussions can be a challenge for the best of teachers, and I thought I’d begin a related “Best” list and invite readers to contribute additional resources. Here’s a start: MT Check out this resource to help students join in conversations! #TeachingInNC pic.twitter.com/pfngvIQhLp @e_wiggy #CCSS #stuv

3 by Larry Ferlazzo / 11min 

World-Wide Climate Change Demonstrations Today – Here Are Related Resources

© 2009 Takver, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio Demonstrations are happening around the world today prior to the upcoming UN Climate Summit. Here are some articles about what’s going on: Thousands March for Climate Change is from NBC News. Climate change summit: Thousands join global protests is from The BBC. Thousands march in NYC, around globe over climate is from The Associated Press. I’m addin

2 by Larry Ferlazzo / 1min hide  //  save

Video: Earth Observations From The International Space Station

I’m adding this video to The Best Images Taken In Space:

8 by Larry Ferlazzo / 55min 

Columbus Day Is In Three Weeks – Here Are Related Resources

© 2005 Brent Moore, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio Columbus Day is October 11th in the United States. You might be interested in The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus, which includes a wide variety of materials, including ones critical of him.

6 by Larry Ferlazzo / 2h

“Can a Computer Replace Your Doctor?” Or Your Teacher?

Can a Computer Replace Your Doctor? is an article in today’s New York Times. It’s another health-care related article that can easily be applied to education. I’m adding it to The Best Articles Highlighting Parallel Critiques Of Increasing School & Health Care “Efficiency.” Here’s an excerpt:

3 by Larry Ferlazzo / 0min 

“‘The Marshmallow Test’: An Interview With Walter Mischel”

‘The Marshmallow Test’: An Interview With Walter Mischel is my latest post at Education Week Teacher. I interview Walter Mischel, the creator of the famous Marshmallow Test to measure self-control and its long-term effects. Here are some excerpts: I’m adding it to The Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control.

5 by Larry Ferlazzo / 47min 

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Week… 9-20-14 …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EF

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL LARRY FERLAZZO’S WEBSITES OF THE WEEKIngenious Idea & Video: “The Dancing Traffic Light”6 by Larry Ferlazzo / 43min Infographic: “Inside the Brain of a Struggling Reader”Here’s an intriguing infographic: See the original infographic at http://www.scilearn.com/blog.12 by Larry Ferlazzo / 43min YESTERDAYThis Week’s “Round-

1 by mike simpson / 10h 

9-21-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.:

Sunday reads.

. Watch the People’s Climate Change march live on Democracy Now! Karen Lewis on MSNBC this morning.  You can’t feed a family with the G.D.P. Georgia legislator who wants to stop black people from voting is a StudentsFirst favorite. Test-based accountability is a failure. September 18, 2014: Mayor Emanuel announced today that the city will honor President Barack Obama by not naming a Chicago Publi

1 by Fred Klonsky / 5min 

Darwin’s Mr. P would like some ukes for his kids.

About a year ago my friend, attorney and musician Matt Farmer wrote a piece for Huffington Post about Darwin Elementary School’s music teacher, Joe Panganiban. He is known as Mr. P. Darwin is my neighborhood school, three blocks away. One of my daughters, now grown up with kids of her own, went to Darwin. Although Logan Square is a quickly gentrifying neighborhood, Darwin’s student population is

8 by Fred Klonsky / 2h 

9-20-14 Fred All Week Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.: Fred All Week Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacherSwiffers. My days as a custodian.I just finished reading Ben’s Reader article about the janitorial scandal at CPS. It seems that to cut costs and make more profit, Aramark took away mops from custodians and gave them Swiffers. Mop

1 by mike simpson / 10h 

9-21-14 Schools Matter All Week

Schools Matter:

Paying Off Time on the Lazy River with Lives on the Corporate Treadmill

The New York Times has a piece today about the latest in the recreational arms race at the second and third tier colleges that are educating the next generation of America's corporate drones.  It's called the Lazy River, which allows students to totally relax between fraternity/sorority parties and football weekends.Meanwhile over at the VA and the homeless shelter, the online colleges are aggress

2 by Jim Horn / 33min 

9-20-14 Schools Matter All Week

Schools Matter:  Schools Matter All WeekAndre Agassi's New Passion: Corporate WelfareAndre Agassi is touring the country checking out the 27 charter schools he has built with real estate tycoon, Bobby Turner. Agassi says its all worth the effort to make his millions from taxpayer dollars just to see children so "engaged in learning," as they are below in the East Nashville Rocketship cha

1 by mike simpson / 10h 

40 + A request in the form of a very different diary by teacherken

40:

40

byteacherkenFollow

 
 
• 14 Comments / 14 New

A number with meaning today.

It was a Saturday then, today it is a Sunday.

It was late afternoon, September 21, 1974.  

I was at the Bryn Mawr train station, heading into Philadelphia for a friend's party.

I knew her slightly, she walked past me without acknowledging me so I called after her.

She came back and we chatted.  She was coming from visiting her sister at prep school heading home - into Philadelphia on one line, out on another.  But our train was late so she missed her connection.  Since I was early for the party and she had almost an hour to wait I invited her for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.

And so began our remarkable journey together, one that exceed well over half my life and more than 2/3 of hers.

40 years.

There was a period of time when our relationship was long distance - after that first year, when she took time off between high school and college to seriously study ballet, she spent four years at Harvard followed by three at Oxford, while I remained in the Philadelphia area.  The time we had together was precious, not to be wasted in petty arguments.

But then we were again in the same city, and finally had to begin the hard work of adjusting to the reality of another person.  That was the first rough patch, but surely not the last.

We finally got married on December 29, 1985, after more than 11 years together.  She had only been 17 when we began the relationship, and had never been on a date. Me?  I was 28 with more failed relationships than I care to remember or recount.  

Yet somehow we were quickly drawn to one another, strongly enough that the relationship survived the not infrequent periods of difficulty between us.

There were periods in those early years where we each saw other people, briefly, without serious involvement, but just enough to realize that we knew the person with whom we wanted to be.

A request in the form of a very different diary

I often devote a diary to the writing of another person because I think it worthy of the attention of this community.  In doing so, to entice the reader I offer quotes. Only once before have I done so without quoting a single word from the piece to which I want to direct the reader. Today I will The work will be words of someone to whose columns I often point people - Charles M. Blow of The New Yo

2 by rss@dailykos.com ... / 4h

9-21-14 With A Brooklyn Accent: Educational Malpractice and the Tragedy of America's Teachers

With A Brooklyn Accent:

Educational Malpractice and the Tragedy of America's Teachers

Someday, though I don't exactly know when or how, there will be a full account of the tragedy of America's teachers being forced to commit educational malpractice and deciding between keeping the jobs they need to feed their families and jeopardizing the educational well being and emotional health of the children they teach.Based on the messages and emails I have received daily since the founding

31 by Mark Naison / 2h 

9-20-14 With A Brooklyn Accent: Love Letters to the BATS

With A Brooklyn Accent:A Short History of Anti-Immigrant Movements in the USThe first wave of anti-immigrant hysteria in the US took place before the Civil War and was directed at Irish Catholic immigrants. It led to the formation of the No Nothing Party and also sparked mob attacks on Catholic institutions in many northern citiesThe second wave of anti- immigrant hysteria took place after the Civ

1 by mike simpson / 9h 

9-21-14 Curmudgucation - Running a Business with No Employees

CURMUDGUCATION:

How Much College Remediation Is Really Needed?

When reformsters want to beat the College Ready drum, they get out the sticks of college remediation statistics. Tons, mountains, endless chains of entering freshmen must be remediated, they declare. Clearly, high schools are turning out defective products. Something Must Be Done. Otherwise we will continue to fall behind Estonia and be conquered by Finland or Vikings, or something.I've talked abo

15 by Peter Greene / 31min 

Running a Business with No Employees

This week New York magazine profiled a new type of business, and while it has nothing to do with teaching, it's a business model that those of us who work in the ed biz should pay attention to.Modern business leaders in America face what seems to them to be a dreadful problem-- employees who want to be paid. Earlier this week, I was involved in a bloggy exchange with Neerav Kingsland, and both he

21 by Peter Greene / 1h 

9-20-14 Curmudgucation Week

CURMUDGUCATION:Curmudgucation WeekEdPost Dials It Back, Still WhiffsOver the last forty-eight hours, the rapid responders from Education Post ran into a rapid response of their own. They decided to go after Carol Burris, and while various bloggers called them on their response out in the bloggosphere, Burris and many other responders descended upon the comments section, particularly for the post b

1 by mike simpson / 9h 

empathyeducates – The Euphemism of Spanking (Hint: It’s Actually Assault)

empathyeducates – The Euphemism of Spanking (Hint: It’s Actually Assault):

The Euphemism of Spanking (Hint: It’s Actually Assault)

Illustration Copyright Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis/AP Images
By Chocolate, Pomp, And Circumstance | Originally Published at Chocolate, Pomp, and Circumstances . September 14, 2014

Imagine: You’re at work. You’re scrolling through Facebook or playing Candy Crush instead of paying attention to your conference call – your boss comes into your office, tells you, quite angrily, that you are in trouble, and starts to hit you with a branch from a tree.

This sounds absolutely insane because you know that this would never happen, and if it did, that you could sue your boss to smithereens for a charge called “assault”.

At this point, I’m going to assume most have heard about the Adrian Peterson spanking case.

He was briefly jailed for “spanking” his son until he bled, leaving scars – and yet many still think that this is an okay practice if “done correctly.”

Why is it that, so many people, when confronted that something within their worldview is unhealthy, uncouth, and unfit in this modern world, shut down and begin a long line of excuses and defenses?

Why on earth would anyone condone the beating of anyone, especially a child, for any reason?

Allow me to break down all of the reasons spanking is wrong and should be called and thought of as assault.

Legally:

When someone hits another person, it is assault. Whether I’m at a bar and I have a disagreement with a stranger, or if I am home and have a disagreement with my husband, or if I beat my neighbor’s kid, me hitting and/or beating them because I do not like what they said or did is assault, and is poor self-control on my part. These assaults are also illegal, and I could be charged with a crime.

The fact that it is legal in any capacity to hit your children when you are mad at them harkens back to master/slave relations. Slave owners could legally beat their slaves (whether this meant with a belt, their hands, or whatever else they saw fit) because slaves were not seen as people under the law. They were seen as property and had no rights. Do we really want to relate our children to slaves? This black woman sure as hell doesn’t.

Philosophically:

“I was beat/spanked/paddled and I turned out fine! See?” I would argue that you did not turn out fine, you turned into someone who thinks it is okay to hit a defenseless child when they do something wrong because you have power over someone smaller than you.

Not to mention, what does this actually teach kids? It teaches kids that they can and should physically hit others when others do something that they empathyeducates – The Euphemism of Spanking (Hint: It’s Actually Assault):

10 Arguments Black People Need To Stop Making That Support Racism

By Tiffanie Drayton | Originally Published at Clutch Magazine. September 2, 2014 It makes sense that White people use completely illogical arguments to derail conversations about racism, because the current racial hierarchy reinforces White dominance and “White privilege”– so they benefit from it. What makes absolutely no […]

100+ by empathy / 10h 

NYC Educator: Rolling With the Punches in an Age of Educational Deformity

NYC Educator: Rolling With the Punches in an Age of Educational Deformity:

Rolling With the Punches in an Age of Educational Deformity

For those teachers who think that there once was a golden past of teaching before the era education deformity, let me assure you, you are right.  I had the privilege to teach for a full ten years before the deformity struck.  While things still seemed good, we tightened our belts and I took five years off to raise some kids.  When I returned to work the landscape had turned barely recognizable.  My colleagues warned me, but they could not have prepared me.

The amazing thing about it all is that many of the people in the building were the same or similar to those whom I had left, students, teachers and administrators.  Good people.  

Yet, everything else was different.  Let me explain.

When I returned, I confronted Smart Boards and learned they had some advantages.  My students showed me how to use them.  They help visual learners and make learning multidimensional by adding pictures, films and audio clips.  Moreover, there's no nasty chalk dust to cough up. 

But, even the kids tell you the Boards are far from flawless.  The technology fails, projectors overheat and shut down, computers "glitch."   Students will also tell you that all too often the teacher talks while they copy board notes and so much is lost as the ears and eyes fall out of sync.  They neither hear well or understand the notes they write.  The best schools abroad seem to use minimal technology.

Another notable change I faced when I returned was a new obsession with data and "credit-recovery."  Faculty meetings turned into explanations of school report cards and the necessity of meeting guideposts, lest the school be closed.  In the NYC Educator: Rolling With the Punches in an Age of Educational Deformity:

Schooling in the Ownership Society: The Mis-Education Campaign of the Climate Change Deniers

Schooling in the Ownership Society: The Mis-Education Campaign of the Climate Change Deniers:

The Mis-Education Campaign of the Climate Change Deniers

Today’s big People’s Climate Marches in New York City and 150 countries around the world, mark a new stage in the fight to save the planet from what Naomi Klein calls"the raw terror of ecocide." One of the greatest challenges faced by the movement is taking on and countering one of the greatest propaganda and mis-education campaigns in history, underwritten by the biggest and most reactionary corporate defenders of unregulated global expansion of capital. Since school curriculum and education profiteers play a major role in this campaign (see Bill Bigelow's excellent piece on Scholastic Magazine's prettification of the coal industry), a good part of the responsibility for taking on this challenge falls on us educators.


Bill Moyers reports:

Slick public relations and advertising campaigns are underwritten to fool the public and smear the truthtellers. Foundations and think tanks have been created by industry just to create doubt and hammer away against the overwhelming evidence of climate disruption. Last year, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that between 2002 and 2010, via two right-wing groups, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, billionaires had given nearly $120 million to more than 100 anti-climate change groups. And the progressive Center for Media and Democracy revealed that a web of right-wing think tanks called the State Policy Network, affiliated with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and funded to the tune of $83 million by companies including Facebook, AT&T and Microsoft, was pushing a had right agenda that includes opposition to climate change rules and regulations.

A new study from two groups, Forecast the Facts Action and the

Schooling in the Ownership Society: The Mis-Education Campaign of the Climate Change Deniers:

Ms. Jablonski's Class Blog 9-20-14

Ms. Jablonski's Class Blog:

Strong Mayor Proposal for Sacramento: Debate on Monday

Students in periods 3 and 4, here is an opportunity for political participation credit by learning more about the controversial November ballot proposal backed by mayor Kevin Johnson to change city governance into what's commonly known as a "strong mayor" system. Details:The Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association will host a community forum/debate on Measure L, also known as the "St

by L. Jablonski / 4min 

Ms. Jablonski's Class Blog 9-13-14

Ms. Jablonski's Class Blog:Politics and the English LanguagePeriods 5 and 6 read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language this week.  The essay is an appropriate starting point for our study of government and politics because it focuses on language and writing, specifically how the modern decadence of our language is both a cause and effect of our corrupted thoughts.    Political language

2 by mike simpson / 8h 

Evening Saturday morning reflection on teaching

Evening Saturday morning reflection on teaching:

Evening Saturday morning reflection on teaching

byteacherkenFollow

 
 
• 9 Comments / 9 New

Yes I know my title is somewhat contradictory, but I had too much else that had to be done this morning in order to draft one of my periodic reflections upon what it means to be a teacher, so I offer it to those who might be interested as the sky around me has turned almost completely dark.

I have now had my students since Wednesday August 27, a total of 17 class days.  But since we are on an A Day / B Day schedule, I have had class with my A Day students 9 times, my B day students 8 times. A day students are almost all 9th graders, either in Gifted & Talented Government or AP US Government & Politics.  B Day kids all 12th graders in AP Econ.

When in their sits I can now call more than 90% of them by their correct names, and the ones I can't is because they rarely volunteer in class, so I may have to look at my seating chart, call on them, and thus get them involved and me learning their names.

I can recognize them all in the hallway, even the quiet ones, and can now call about half of them by name outside of class.

It is a start.

It is important.

Students want to feel that I am making an effort to get to know them.

But that is the easy part.

Follow me beyond the fold as I explain.

I call all my parents at the start of the year, and if they are not there, leave a message including my cell phone.  That actually means many of my students have my cell phone, which I do not mind.  They all have my school and personal emails, and the ability to contact me through the program we use for registering grades.

All that has become relevant in the past week or so.

I have had a number of students either with panic attacks, or fearing they could not do the work.  

I have had parents reach out to me on a number of issues, including one very sweet young lady Evening Saturday morning reflection on teaching:

solidaridad: Don't let Marshall Tuck rob California students of their own identities and dignity!

solidaridad: Don't let Marshall Tuck rob California students of their own identities and dignity!:

Don't let Marshall Tuck rob California students of their own identities and dignity!

All three of these individuals used their positions of power over school children of color to shut down Ethnic Studies Programs, close Heritage Language Programs, and shutter Dual Language Immersion Programs. In some cases they even banned influential books like Paulo Freire’sPedagogy of the Oppressed. Students have the right to learn about their own cultures, languages, and histories. What kind of individuals rob students of their own identities and dignity?

WEALTHY WHITE MALES LIKE MARSHALL TUCK KILLED ETHNIC STUDIES

http://j.mp/TUCK_FACTS 

http://j.mp/TUCK_FAIL 

http://j.mp/TUCK_TRUTH