Saturday, September 10, 2011
Scared people
It seems so many people live in fear, even in america. People do not respond to a friendly smile. People who refuse to look at others walking by.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Father figure
Audrey Hepburn said that she lacked a father figure. She said she suffered from that throughout her life until her death. It seems Jane Fonda is the same story. Her parents were very remote. She worked very very hard throughout her childhood just to please her dad.
Refuse to learn
Many young students are forced to learn or they have been bribed to study. when they get to high school they really don't want to do anything. they know the teachers can't really do anything about it.
this is currently an issue for me and I think I need to help them to mature. I need to let them know that studying is their job and there is no need for me to force. gradually, they will turn into adults instead of staying as children in the attitude.
this is currently an issue for me and I think I need to help them to mature. I need to let them know that studying is their job and there is no need for me to force. gradually, they will turn into adults instead of staying as children in the attitude.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Teachers want the freedom to teach
The greatest teacher incentive: The freedom to teach
By Vicki Davis, Published: July 19
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts (including Washington, DC), On Leadership convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system — with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, teacher and education blogger from Georgia Vicki Davis, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
“The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test,” said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who’s a friend of mine in Georgia. “I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world,” she said, “but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the ‘high stakes’ standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching.”
My friend is just one of the many dedicated teachers who are losing hope in a system that has lost its way.
In our rush to make teachers accountable, we have made them accountable for the wrong things. We are pushing them to turn kids into memorizing automatons who remember a lot of facts only to forget them right after the test. These tests are not the products of educational research. In fact, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, “remembering” is considered lower-order thinking. It doesn’t even require understanding.
In the video “No Future Left Behind,” made by students at Suffern Middle School in New Jersey, there’s a memorable line: “You can’t create my future with the tools of your past.” They’re right. We’re using a 20th-century measuring stick to measure a 21st-century learner. No wonder businesses are yelling that education is getting worse: We’re using the wrong stick. Students should graduate with portfolios of work ready for a world that will value them on their ability to create. Take for example a student I know from Evansville, Indiana, who finally fell in love with learning during his senior-year project. Using a netbook purchased with curriculum funds, he engaged in stop-motion animation using Legos. His school attendance went up, his grades went up, and he is now graduating and going on to college.
We need to define what it means to be a well-educated person in the 21st century and then support our schools to move toward that vision. And the greatest incentive we can give teachers to improve learning is to let them start focusing on teaching.
What we need in our schools are teacherpreneurs like they have in Finland, where the “teachers choose their own textbooks and customize their lesson plans.” Reginald Garrard, who left his Camilla, Georgia, teaching job after 33 years says, “My biggest complaint was the trend towards cookie-cutter teaching. The fact that we were expected to be on the same page at the same time in the same way. Your creativity is being stymied with the pressure to pass the test.”
Schools should have the ability to personalize learning through technology. Scripts may make a bad teacher palatable, but they make a good teacher (and her students) miserable. Filling out a worksheet is not learning. Students need interactions with teachers and with each other, not with a piece of paper.
I’m reminded of an autistic child in Austria on one of our projects who became fully communicative the first time he was allowed to video himself, unleashing his ability to contribute. That’s not to say it’s just about technology, though. Putting computers in the hands of kids doesn’t make them any smarter than if they rubbed Einstein’s head. It is how the technology is used—by interacting—that improves learning. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other, and yet most schools close the book on social learning.
In my own experience, managing the Flat Classroom Projects, the hardest schools to collaborate with are those in China and most U.S. public schools: They both block everything and have inflexible systems that don’t allow innovation. Many U.S. teachers don’t even have the authority to upgrade their web browser or fix a printer. And these schools that have very little technology often still ban bringing devices from home that could mitigate the situation.
As Mike Soskil, a fifth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania says, the main charge for educators should be to “just teach well, and let the chips fall where they may”—whether that’s getting creative about using technology or having the autonomy to customize lesson plans.
Every day teachers across this country are asked to act in ways that cause students to lose their love of learning, and drop-out rates are skyrocketing. Doctors take an oath to “do no harm”; and yet with education, we’ve created a scenario where we’re asking teachers to do harm because we’re missing the big picture as a nation.
When empowered in my own classroom to follow research-based best practices in lieu of testing, I have fallen in love with teaching again. This is what I want for every student and teacher in the country I love: freedom. Freedom to teach, and freedom to make learning come alive for a generation that I am afraid will one day accuse us of educational malpractice.
Vicki Davis is a full-time teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is also a leading educational blogger, with a focus on improving learning for all students—starting with the teacher in the classroom. She tweets @coolcatteacher and is coauthor of Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds (January 2012) with Julie Lindsay from Beijing, China.
By Vicki Davis, Published: July 19
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts (including Washington, DC), On Leadership convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system — with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, teacher and education blogger from Georgia Vicki Davis, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
“The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test,” said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who’s a friend of mine in Georgia. “I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world,” she said, “but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the ‘high stakes’ standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching.”
My friend is just one of the many dedicated teachers who are losing hope in a system that has lost its way.
In our rush to make teachers accountable, we have made them accountable for the wrong things. We are pushing them to turn kids into memorizing automatons who remember a lot of facts only to forget them right after the test. These tests are not the products of educational research. In fact, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, “remembering” is considered lower-order thinking. It doesn’t even require understanding.
In the video “No Future Left Behind,” made by students at Suffern Middle School in New Jersey, there’s a memorable line: “You can’t create my future with the tools of your past.” They’re right. We’re using a 20th-century measuring stick to measure a 21st-century learner. No wonder businesses are yelling that education is getting worse: We’re using the wrong stick. Students should graduate with portfolios of work ready for a world that will value them on their ability to create. Take for example a student I know from Evansville, Indiana, who finally fell in love with learning during his senior-year project. Using a netbook purchased with curriculum funds, he engaged in stop-motion animation using Legos. His school attendance went up, his grades went up, and he is now graduating and going on to college.
We need to define what it means to be a well-educated person in the 21st century and then support our schools to move toward that vision. And the greatest incentive we can give teachers to improve learning is to let them start focusing on teaching.
What we need in our schools are teacherpreneurs like they have in Finland, where the “teachers choose their own textbooks and customize their lesson plans.” Reginald Garrard, who left his Camilla, Georgia, teaching job after 33 years says, “My biggest complaint was the trend towards cookie-cutter teaching. The fact that we were expected to be on the same page at the same time in the same way. Your creativity is being stymied with the pressure to pass the test.”
Schools should have the ability to personalize learning through technology. Scripts may make a bad teacher palatable, but they make a good teacher (and her students) miserable. Filling out a worksheet is not learning. Students need interactions with teachers and with each other, not with a piece of paper.
I’m reminded of an autistic child in Austria on one of our projects who became fully communicative the first time he was allowed to video himself, unleashing his ability to contribute. That’s not to say it’s just about technology, though. Putting computers in the hands of kids doesn’t make them any smarter than if they rubbed Einstein’s head. It is how the technology is used—by interacting—that improves learning. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other, and yet most schools close the book on social learning.
In my own experience, managing the Flat Classroom Projects, the hardest schools to collaborate with are those in China and most U.S. public schools: They both block everything and have inflexible systems that don’t allow innovation. Many U.S. teachers don’t even have the authority to upgrade their web browser or fix a printer. And these schools that have very little technology often still ban bringing devices from home that could mitigate the situation.
As Mike Soskil, a fifth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania says, the main charge for educators should be to “just teach well, and let the chips fall where they may”—whether that’s getting creative about using technology or having the autonomy to customize lesson plans.
Every day teachers across this country are asked to act in ways that cause students to lose their love of learning, and drop-out rates are skyrocketing. Doctors take an oath to “do no harm”; and yet with education, we’ve created a scenario where we’re asking teachers to do harm because we’re missing the big picture as a nation.
When empowered in my own classroom to follow research-based best practices in lieu of testing, I have fallen in love with teaching again. This is what I want for every student and teacher in the country I love: freedom. Freedom to teach, and freedom to make learning come alive for a generation that I am afraid will one day accuse us of educational malpractice.
Vicki Davis is a full-time teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is also a leading educational blogger, with a focus on improving learning for all students—starting with the teacher in the classroom. She tweets @coolcatteacher and is coauthor of Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds (January 2012) with Julie Lindsay from Beijing, China.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Education
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
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“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”
“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
Advertisement
“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”
“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”
Monday, January 3, 2011
colonoscopy
My schedule was 10:20 am 1/3/2011.
7 days before, I stopped eating nuts, seeds, tomato, grapes,corn, popcorn, and iron supplements. They will clog up the probe.
2 days before, I stopped all solid foods and colored drinks. I drank 7-up and water. It was fine. At 6 pm, I took 3 Dulcolax tablets. Went to bathroom after 9 hours.
The day before, I mixed Gravilyte powder and a small packet of lemonade into 4 liters. I kept it at about 45F and started drinking it at 4:30. I finished half after 2.5 hours. Not too bad. I took 4 Simethicone tablets right after that. After that, went to bath room 3 times and cleaned out most of stuff.
At 3 am, I started drinking the second half. I quit at 6:20 since my appointment is at 10:20 with 16 oz. leftover. Went to bathroom 3 more time.
Driven over and changed. After a few minutes, I was in. Nurses were very nice and provide heated blankets. I was cold with 97.4F. Sedated and ready.
The Dr was rough; he stuck the thing right into it without being careful. I was able to see the procedure on the screen. They found two polyps and took them down; I was told more info will follow. Found internal hemorrhoids also.
They did stomach check also, Gastritis and Hiatal hernia was found so I need to be careful.
1/06/2011. Dr. called and prescribed three antibiotics for PYLORI bacteria in stomach. I do not want to take medicine; googled articles also mentioned that some strands of pylori are resistant to antibiotics.
Searched for remedies: brocoli, brocoli sprouts, pinenut oil, virgin coconut oil. Apple Cider Vinegar(ACV). Some even say a little bit Pylori in tummy is good to regulate acidity. I started on brocoli three days ago, 1 oz. in the morning before any food.
4/11/2011. Few weeks after exam, there was more acid reflux than usual. It is all gone now. Did the checking process damage anything?
7 days before, I stopped eating nuts, seeds, tomato, grapes,corn, popcorn, and iron supplements. They will clog up the probe.
2 days before, I stopped all solid foods and colored drinks. I drank 7-up and water. It was fine. At 6 pm, I took 3 Dulcolax tablets. Went to bathroom after 9 hours.
The day before, I mixed Gravilyte powder and a small packet of lemonade into 4 liters. I kept it at about 45F and started drinking it at 4:30. I finished half after 2.5 hours. Not too bad. I took 4 Simethicone tablets right after that. After that, went to bath room 3 times and cleaned out most of stuff.
At 3 am, I started drinking the second half. I quit at 6:20 since my appointment is at 10:20 with 16 oz. leftover. Went to bathroom 3 more time.
Driven over and changed. After a few minutes, I was in. Nurses were very nice and provide heated blankets. I was cold with 97.4F. Sedated and ready.
The Dr was rough; he stuck the thing right into it without being careful. I was able to see the procedure on the screen. They found two polyps and took them down; I was told more info will follow. Found internal hemorrhoids also.
They did stomach check also, Gastritis and Hiatal hernia was found so I need to be careful.
1/06/2011. Dr. called and prescribed three antibiotics for PYLORI bacteria in stomach. I do not want to take medicine; googled articles also mentioned that some strands of pylori are resistant to antibiotics.
Searched for remedies: brocoli, brocoli sprouts, pinenut oil, virgin coconut oil. Apple Cider Vinegar(ACV). Some even say a little bit Pylori in tummy is good to regulate acidity. I started on brocoli three days ago, 1 oz. in the morning before any food.
4/11/2011. Few weeks after exam, there was more acid reflux than usual. It is all gone now. Did the checking process damage anything?
Thursday, September 16, 2010
AODAAC recovery gathering
Most of them were addicted to drugs or alcohol before. After rehab., they are all smokers. Still addicted to something. Sad.
Oxfordhouse.org - group homes for adults who pay rent.
counselingplus.com
Avery House - chrysalishouses.org
Journeys - 402 Hungerford Dr - 301-424-7961
Community Ministries of Rockville - CMRocks.org
Interfaith works - iworksmc.org
Oxfordhouse.org - group homes for adults who pay rent.
counselingplus.com
Avery House - chrysalishouses.org
Journeys - 402 Hungerford Dr - 301-424-7961
Community Ministries of Rockville - CMRocks.org
Interfaith works - iworksmc.org
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