While the effectiveness of Colorado Student Assessment Program and the mandatory ACT testing of all Colorado Juniors is debatable, the use of teachers during school hours to proctor these exams is a true waste of taxpayer money. To pay me my teacher's salary (after 30 years of teaching) for proctoring is ridiculous considering that proctoring can be done by well trained pongids for a lot less money. Colorado taxpayers, you should be complaining about this LOUD and LONG. This is a total waste of your money, and is done only for convenience.
I walk around for three hours a day for four days and get paid incredibly well for it, but I really should not. Parents need to hear this, and should demand that teachers on teacher's pay should be spent teaching or planning. This is a black hole for tax money, badly concieved and badly spent.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
What Century Are We In?
Take someone from 1850 and drop them in a modern hospital, they will be lost. Drop them in a modern airport, they will be confounded. Drop them in a modern garage, they will be discombobulated. There are little similarities for these folks between 1850 And 2009, until they walk into a modern school. Desks, books, chalkboard... hell yes, they'll recognize it as a classroom. Is this what we want for our children?
Even worse, walk through the hallways of a modern school and you'll see posted on door after door: NO CELLS PHONES/ NO iPODS. Go into the library and half the internet sites are blocked. What are we doing to ourselves? Union Square Ventures has recently put out a list of what future trends schools can expect, and teachers were compared to the bank tellers of the 1970's, and newspapermen of the present. New research is showing that Internet blocking/filtering is actually detrimental to student learning!
If we continue to shut out phone technology and block the internet we might as well be considered obsolete. Schools must teach appropriate use of the internet, not block it. We must teach appropriate use of cell phones, not ban them. No wonder students see us as fossils, we are as lithified as any trilobite. They are technology natives and we are the immigrants. But we remain ignorant immigrants, keeping to our own ways and languages while our children turn away from us. Teach appropriate use, gather our students' technologies up into our collective arms and embrace this networked magic before it replaces us.
Even worse, walk through the hallways of a modern school and you'll see posted on door after door: NO CELLS PHONES/ NO iPODS. Go into the library and half the internet sites are blocked. What are we doing to ourselves? Union Square Ventures has recently put out a list of what future trends schools can expect, and teachers were compared to the bank tellers of the 1970's, and newspapermen of the present. New research is showing that Internet blocking/filtering is actually detrimental to student learning!
If we continue to shut out phone technology and block the internet we might as well be considered obsolete. Schools must teach appropriate use of the internet, not block it. We must teach appropriate use of cell phones, not ban them. No wonder students see us as fossils, we are as lithified as any trilobite. They are technology natives and we are the immigrants. But we remain ignorant immigrants, keeping to our own ways and languages while our children turn away from us. Teach appropriate use, gather our students' technologies up into our collective arms and embrace this networked magic before it replaces us.
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