Conversation: Is Parenthood a Barrier to Education?

This is anecdotal, I realize, but a summer class started this morning. Like most classes, the full roster in front of me did not correlate with a full classroom. Each first day, some students don't show up. There's been a nagging trend: most of the people who don't show up are women. In fact, almost all of the ones who didn't show up to my class this morning were women.

Obviously, being a woman doesn't necessarily mean that you're a mother, and being a mother doesn't necessarily mean that you're the only caregiver available for your child. Still, it seems that a lot of the students who disappear mid-way through the semester are also women, women who have often been struggling to find stable childcare.

Dev Ed in the News: Does Remediation Need Remediation?

Leticia Bustillos, a remedial education consultant, has a post over at Huffington Post about the problems with the way we talk about remedial and developmental courses. She suggests our conceptions of remedial education are too limiting, especially on a policy level:

Unfortunately, policymakers and their outdated definition of "remediation" stubbornly cling to a perception that does not fully account for the issue's complexity. Rather than asking the question, "What does it take to successfully serve students considered underprepared?" policymakers are more inclined to ask "What does it take to make remedial education programs most efficient?" In doing so, policies emerging from this imprudent focus do not make allowances for the "development" of students as learners and impose arbitrary timelines and restrictions for the mastery of knowledge.

Read the whole thing here. 

Do you agree with Bustillos? What would be the best way to remediate our discussion of remediation? 

Conversation: Remembering What It's Like to Be "Developmental"

This post has been cross-posted from Balancing Jane. 

I love to write, and I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school, I used to scribble stories on napkins. When I was in middle school, I kept hundreds of pages of angst-filled journals. In high school, I hid in the back of math class and wrote poems in the margins of my notebook (I still studied for math; don't yell at me, math teachers). Writing has always been something that I just do. Sometimes I get the urge to write and literally cannot sleep until I get up and do it. I've learned not to fight it.

But my students don't always feel that way. Some of them do. In fact, I am always blown away by at least one or two students every class who just clearly love writing and have a very clear talent for seeing the world through a creative and unique perspective. They are a joy to teach.

But so are the ones who hate writing, and there are a lot of them. See, I teach developmental writing, so my students have often been told (or have told themselves) that they "can't" write. They sometimes hide behind that "can't" to protect themselves from the sting of failure. If they don't believe they can do it, an F on a paper isn't a big deal. More often, though, that "can't" isn't just a shield; it's a block. It stands in the way of everything else they will do in my class.

I give them analogies, of course. I tell them that too many people treat writing as a one-shot thing. It's like they decided to try being basketball players without practicing, walked onto a court for the first time, picked up a ball, shot it from half court, missed, and said "Oh, I guess I can't play basketball."

Writing and Time: Summer Teaching and Scheduling

There are idyllic images of writing. Picture Hemingway leisurely strolling the streets of Pamplona or Thoreau overlooking Walden Pond.

 

Time is an inherent factor to the creative process. Things need to soak, to marinate, to become something. The ideal picture of creativity is often one with loose deadlines or perhaps none at all. 

That's not, however, the reality for our students, and it is even less so in the summer. 

Conversation: Flipping Out: Flipped Teaching Models

I mentioned in my review of Blackboard that it could be an excellent tool for developing a flipped classroom model, but I wanted to explore that idea a little further. Here's an infographic from Knewton that explains the concept and why it's getting so much attention in discussions about education.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Basically, in a flipped model, we record our lectures for students to watch at home at their own pace (and technology advancements in PowerPoint and Prezi make that pretty easy to do). This frees up the classroom time for more actively engaged learning and group work. 

What do you think of a flipped classroom model? What concerns do you have? Are there any concerns particular to developmental students, or could a flipped model be even more helpful for these students?

Tech in the Classroom: Blackboard

This is part of a series of reviews of websites, platforms, and social media sites. Some are useful for teachers in a SMART classroom (with a teacher-station computer, internet connection, and projector). Others lend themselves more to a lab where each student has her own computer. Hopefully these can help us communicate with our students, present information effectively, and encourage collaboration, feedback, and active participation. See our previous review of Wordpress, Facebook, PB Works, and Google Drive.

I know that not everyone shares my unbridled enthusiasm on this topic, but let me just get it out there: I love Blackboard!

It's true that the layout can be a little clunky, and the visual aesthetics sometimes aren't where I'd like them to be, but Blackboard is my go-to tech in the classroom tool. There are a lot of moving pieces to Blackboard, so it's really easy to create the level of functionality and usage that you want out of it. It could be simply a place to store documents for students to access, or it could essentially be the place where your students go for much of the course content, giving it the potential to be a tool for a flipped classroom model.

Conversation: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

If you're a writing teacher, perhaps you've been asked if your students write in "text-speak"; or you've been asked if texting has ruined student writing; or perhaps someone wants to know exactly how you get your students not to text in their papers.

The truth is, my students have no illusions or misunderstandings that texting is the same as formal writing. Yes, they may slip in a "u" or "thru" once in a while. They do this because they're moving fast and they make typos, just like we all do. When I point it out to them, they smile with embarrassment, apologize, and then they fix it. They are not choosing text-speak over formal academic writing; they are not resisting academic conventions because texting is "easier" or "more comfortable." Speaking for my own students, and from my own experience, none of the accusations of laziness, instant gratification culture, or language decline hold true.

So, when I recently watched this TED Talk by the linguist John McWhorter, I felt great relief, excitement, and an even deeper admiration for my students who are learning to communicate effectively with the exploding number of technologies and expectations.

Here's the talk. How do your students learn to navigate and/or violate genre expectations? What do you think about McWhorter's claims?


Txtng is killing language. JK!!!
John McWhorter

Assignment: The Professor & The Cell Phone

Background

In class, we first watch this YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hut3VRL5XRE

We have a discussion about what happened (a cell phone goes off in a lecture hall; the interrupted professor takes it, then slams it to the ground before continuing with his lecture), and students' responses. Several say that student deserved to have his phone destroyed. Some say the professor should have taken the phone, but not broken it. Others say the professor was out of line completely. It's usually a spirited debate.

Then, we get to the assignment.

Tech in the Classroom: Google Drive

This is part of a series of reviews of websites, platforms, and social media sites. Some are useful for teachers in a SMART classroom (with a teacher-station computer, internet connection, and projector). Others lend themselves more to a lab where each student has her own computer. Hopefully these can help us communicate with our students, present information effectively, and encourage collaboration, feedback, and active participation. See our previous review of Wordpress, Facebook, and PB Works.


Today, I'm reviewing features of Google Drive (formerly Google Docs).  Here's my Google Drive page:

Education News Link: Why Computers Can't Grade Writing

Doug Hesse's article in the Washington Post offers a quiz and an argument for why computers can't grade essays.

Here's an excerpt:

Any piece of writing is good or bad within at least five dimensions:

*how well it fits a given readership or audience;
*how well it achieves a given purpose;
*how much ambition it displays;
*how well it conforms to matters of fact and reasoning; and
*how well it matches formal conventions expected by its audience. 

...

No writing teacher can be a walking encyclopedia, but all must have a flexible broad knowledge and a keen ear for things missing or ringing not quite true.  They ask whether claims have evidence and whether reasoning is sound, then suggest ways to improve.

Of course, teachers must also judge how students handle conventions: matters of grammar, usage, punctuation, spelling, citation, formatting, and so on.  I list these features last, when many people assume they most occupy English teachers, but of course they’re vital.  My point is that so are the other dimensions.  The art of grading requires judging how all five together describe a student’s performance.