Diane's Discoveries

Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly

Here's a well thoughtout description of women competing in the world. Read the whole article by Deborah Tannen, an authority on the subject.

Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly

By Deborah Tannen

This isn't about Hillary. Well, okay, it is.

But it isn't only about her. It's also about every woman who has ever been underestimated, failed to get credit for work she did or been denied opportunities to do work at which she would have excelled.

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential primary victories in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island last week, Democratic voters continue to evaluate her abilities and her chances of winning in a general election -- and are confronting the double bind that women in authority, including Clinton, face: If they speak in ways expected of leaders, they're seen as too aggressive, but if they speak in ways expected of women, they're seen as less confident and competent than they really are.

Companies invite me to speak about my research on women and men at work because they want to make sure that they accurately assess everyone's abilities when deciding whom to promote. Just so, voters need to understand the double bind when deciding who deserves the ultimate promotion to presidential candidate....

Link: Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly - washingtonpost.com.

The Forgotten Man?

My local paper, the Oakland Tribune, carried this editorial today...the title is a little off but it still caught my attention. You will find it worthwhile reading the whole editorial (it's short).

Link: The forgotten lesson of the primaries.

"While everybody else is writing about the results of the New Hampshire primary, I can only follow my contrary nature and write about the forgotten man of American politics.

Because of a self-imposed Christmas truce, I have not written about him for several weeks. So much time has passed, I now find that I can barely remember his name. This strikes me as very good, although admittedly it could be a sign that my mind has closed down out of respect for my recent 60th birthday.

Of course, I could Google the name of the forgotten man using certain unflattering terms, but that would offend the sacred code of the columnist that requires research be limited to a few trips to convivial taverns.

Who is this forgotten man? As much as I remember, he lives in a big house in the nation's capital. It is painted white and has a rose garden. I believe the man who lives there holds the title of Confounder in Chief. He has a lot of power for a forgotten man, but that is why people want to forget him. Unfortunately, he is not yet an invisible man (give it a year or so).

Sure, I could find out the name of the forgotten man, but the truth is that nobody wants his name to be remembered. Everybody is profoundly sick of him. Even rabid radio talk show hosts seem to be pained when they have to speak his name, and speak it they must, presumably because of a pact they made with the devil. It goes to show that just because you are a blowhard doesn't mean you don't get sick of defending the indefensible."...

Read on...

A Little Humor About NCLB

Link: EduBlog Insights � Blog Archive � If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.

Did you see NCLB–The Football Version? Author Unknown

l. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don’t like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.

5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.

If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.

Another Excellent Teacher Lost

A respected science teacher fought to teach evolution in her classroom; she prevailed, but the stress was too much...she's retiring.

Evolution's Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom

By MICHAEL WINERIP

Published: June 28, 2006

OCCASIONALLY, an educational battle will dominate national headlines. More commonly, the battling goes on locally, behind closed doors, handled so discreetly that even a teacher working a few classrooms away might not know. This was the case for Pat New, 62, a respected, veteran middle school science teacher, who, a year ago, quietly stood up for her right to teach evolution in this rural northern Georgia community, and prevailed.

She would not discuss the conflict while still teaching, because Ms. New wouldn't let anything disrupt her classroom. But she has decided to retire, a year earlier than planned. "This evolution thing was a lot of stress," she said. And a few weeks ago, on the very last day of her 29-year career, at 3:15, when Lumpkin County Middle School had emptied for the summer, and she had taken down her longest poster from Room D11A — the 15-billion-year timeline ranging from the Big Bang to the evolution of man — she recounted one teacher's discreet battle.

Read the article at: Evolution's Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom - New York Times.

It's warm today!

Today is unseasonably warm...mid 70s in February! Even for Northern California that's unusual. In fact this whole winter has been warmer than usual with just a few days of frost on rooftops. The NY Times sent me this to read and I know you will also be interested. It's worth your time to read the whole article.

Link: Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him - New York Times.

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Personal responsibility needed when blogging

Amanda LaBonar wrote an article about "personal responsibility"; for the whole article: Marquette Tribune:: Online Edition:: Chit Chat.

Everything you post represents you. Sure Weblogs and wall messages can be controversial and funny, but at the same time can walk a thin line to inappropriate. A rant or venting session online could poorly reflect someone else's image along with your own. When you post anything you're displaying it for potentially the entire world - or at least school - to see. How do you want people to perceive you?

I don't post anything I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone, from my parents to potential employers, viewing. If I publicly wrote inappropriate and crude comments about students and teachers, I wouldn't be proud of demonstrating that embarrassing level of immaturity. Also, if I took pictures of a night out I might post a few images. However, if a few were a little crazy and my guy friends were wearing thongs I might hang on to the images to use as future blackmail (just kidding of course), but I would not share them with all of cyberspace.

We complain about free speech being taken away, but we are giving away our privacy without a second thought.

I'm not bowing to the administration or running scared that something I might post will get me more then a slap on the wrist. I'm being realistic. These posts reflect you, and you never know who is looking at them.

We can't just point at the administration and scream foul play without also examining and owning up to our own personal responsibility.

Fostering Potential

Here are more sage comments from Anne Davis: EduBlog Insights : EduBlog Insights.

Fostering the potential

The comments on Blogging 101: Weblogs in schools make me hope more educators will get their students blogging and open that blogging up to the public so that it begins to be perceived as a powerful medium for thinking and learning. We have a long way to go in educating not only the public but some of our fellow educators, as well. I would rather develop a powerful medium for thinking than produce a polished product any day. That's the heart of writing/blogging.

There is great potential in the power of blogging and commenting. All this is not about creating a perfect product. It's about the process and improvement and giving ownershop to students of their work. It's about making them accountable and having high expectations. Writing does not just crystalize into fluent sentences, well-organized content, and perfectly punctuated pieces. Writing is hard work. It's not the teacher having control but doing all that is possible to do to guide the students to want to control and produce good writing. Writing is not trying to figure out and perfect every single piece you write. Good teachers stand by students during this process. They encourage, guide and help students discover and learn as they write. Students begin to recognize that their voice matters and will be heard. Caring readers recognize and respect that  the more students write the more they will improve their writing skills. It takes time. The process involves learning, the shaping and reshaping of ideas, and the think-rethink process that weblogs encourage. Writing/blogging really does benefit learning. We need to encourage, cheer our students on and work at releasing them from trying to write for us or for a grade, and yes even release them from always having a perfect product. All writers make mistakes. The goal is to give students a rich and diverse array of writing experience that will inspire them to want to write and improve that writing themselves.

Fostering potential is a heck of a lot better than demanding perfection. Learning to write requires much practice and everyone has a stake in each child's success. We need more models.

Go to Anne's blog for further comments.

A tale for what's happening today

Here's a brief background about a book worth reading, "When The Emperor Was Divine"; the New York Times article is most interesting One Family's Story of Persecution Resonates in the Post-9/11 World - New York Times.

DURING the six years Julie Otsuka was writing her novel, she knew one thing for certain: No one was going to read this book. It was her own mission or obsession or duty, a journey back into her family's past, and nothing could be more arrogant than to believe the outside world might care.

Ms. Otsuka grew up in California hearing the occasional reference to her grandfather's arrest on the day after Pearl Harbor, and of the internment the following year of her grandmother, uncle and mother. Sometime in the late 1980's, when that grandmother was moving out of her home in Berkeley, she revealed a hidden box of letters from her husband written during the war, mailed from one detention camp to another.

Those memories and letters fertilized Ms. Otsuka's imagination...In June 2001, she wrote the final pages of the novel she had titled, "When The Emperor Was Divine." Its destiny, she fully believed, was obscurity.

Yet here she stood on a summer morning at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, speaking to a room full of high school English teachers, teachers from Hawaii to Long Island, as well as Switzerland and El Salvador. At their seats, they...listened raptly, paging through copies of the book, which many already had tagged with Post-its.

Like the rest, Sousen Shamseddine Dobbs had read the novel before coming to the weeklong workshop. While she appreciated the precise language and somber tone, she had to wonder how her juniors in Dearborn, Mich., could possibly connect to a book about a Japanese-American family 60 years earlier.

Then, listening to the discussion around her, she had that eureka moment. This book was all about the world her students inhabited as part of the largest community of Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans in the nation. Ms. Dobbs's mother had been detained by immigration authorities for hours as she returned from a social dinner on the Canadian side of the border because, in a spasm of anxiety, or maybe just one of those "senior moments," she kept misspelling her middle name.

Ms. Dobbs decided then and there to add "Emperor" to the fall syllabus. "When it was right in my face, I suddenly realized how applicable it was," she said later. "It's a cautionary tale for what's happening today."

...Julie Otsuka's...book has provoked a multitude of similar responses since it was published in September 2002. While "Emperor" received some luminous reviews - Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times praised its "mesmerizing power" - many books sink like rocks despite comparable plaudits. What has happened with "Emperor" is what no one in publishing or education can predict: the way an accomplished work of art, though set in the past, captures something essential about the present day.

In the America that was altered on Sept. 11, a nation struggling not to perceive its Arab and Muslim citizens as enemies within, "Emperor" has become a startlingly popular text...

...Published by coincidence around the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, "Emperor" offered an unplanned analogy to a period of investigation, interrogation, suspicion and deportation of Arabs and Muslims in the United States. But its relevance did not end there.

Educators Expected to Teach Social Skills?

By way of Anne Davis I have discovered Ewan McIntosh's blog "Edublog", and this interesting post: edublogs: Shock horror: "Staff are expected to teach social skills".

You will enjoy reading this blog from Scotland.

Shock horror: "Staff are expected to teach social skills"

The BBC report, once again, on the apparently desparate situation in England regarding pupil behaviour. This time, for a change, it's not the teachers' fault but that of the parents. "Bad parents 'should be punished'" is the headline for a piece in which representatives from the Professional Association of Teachers claims that school is only a "glorified creche".

"Peter Morris, a teacher from Bishop Gore Comprehensive School in Swansea, spoke of "pupils fighting in the classroom, throwing computer monitors around the room". I've never seen that in a class of bloggers. They're far too interested in the task they are creating.

Anne Nuckley then told the conference in Buxton, Derbyshire: "Poor parenting fosters lack of respect and no manners.

"No wonder then that, having no guidelines, children enter education with limited knowledge about appropriate behaviour.

"Staff in education are expected to teach social skills which should have been learnt at home."

But is this not also the point of education in schools? We're not just teachers of French, of German or of Mathematics. We are there to show and teach social skills that (can you believe it?!) parents may not have taught themselves.

And in the classroom...
But I have seen success in pupils who are never 'meant' to succeed. One of the best strategies has been using ICT creatively in the classroom. I've seen apparently poor classes grasp film-making tasks, writing and speaking vasts amounts of foreign language, working as a team to get the task finished and also demonstrating communication skills in technology that would be the envy of most teachers.

I am now coming round to the way of thinking that blogs produced by pupils may provide an ideal opportunity to teach social skills. In fact, it is an ideal way to do it. Students are able to learn the netiquette necessary to read and write blogs successfully in no time at all. Let's take a look at those skills:

1. In a post, don't inflame negative emotions in others, or no-one will comment and post back;
2. In a comment, justify your opinion with something concrete;
3. Sending private emails can be one way to communicate, but it's a bit like whispering behind someone's back. Say the comment publicly in the blog and then everyone can share your work.
4. When you are writing, be clear, use language people understand, don't use obscene language (people who do use it in their blogs use it for occasional effect, and when they overuse it it's just "too much" - it loses its effect)
5. Don't bombard a page with comments or your own posts without having read other comments and taken them into account.

Are the skills in this inexhaustive list not the exact ones that Anne Nuckley is proposing teachers should not have to teach? If so, then the Professional Association of Teachers is, in my opinion at least, looking a little less than professional.

Introducing Blogging to Students

Just a tiny glimpse into one teacher's experience into introducing blogging; read how he handled the introduction at: blog of proximal development » Blog Archive » Adopted Voices.

I went home thinking that the first day of blogging … well - the introduction to blogging - was not as successful as I’d hoped it would be. Here I was trying to do something new, to get away from the traditional approach to writing and literacy, and my students seemed to cling tenaciously to the old ways. Why? Why were they asking all these questions? Wasn’t it exciting to find out that you’re getting your own blog, that you’ll have more freedom as a writer?

And then it hit me - we do this to them. They are asking these questions because this is what we do to kids - we train them to ask these questions. We make learning feel like deadlines and paragraphs and constant evaluation. In fact, most teachers think that kids who ask these questions are conscientious and diligent. This is the standard that we ourselves set and they learn it very well. They learn to follow our rules.