Olympics

What event in the Olympics are you looking forward to the most? Why?
Who will you watch it with?
What do you know about the Olympics?

Make sure to use proper spelling, capitalization and punctuation when responding.

secritary fired for speaking Spanish to "hysterical parent"

A secritary at a school in North Carolina was fired for speaking Spanish to a "hysterical parent" who was beside herself because her young son had been sodomized. Since she was hired as a bilingual secritary, she was acting as a translator for the Spanish speaking parent. The principal then fired her for breaching their school districts' policy of only speaking in English.

I'm sorry, how is helping the kids? Who came up with this policy? If you were the principal wouldn't you be more concerned with the fact that one of your students was abused? What happened to teaching kids to be tolerant of other people's differences (such as languages) and teaching them to proud of these differences?

http://education.change.org/blog/view/school_secretary_fired_for_translating_for_concerned_parents

SNow!!! :)

So on Wednesday, at school, we were going to have our Dad's Day celebration. It starts at 7:30 and ends around 8:30 so that dads can attend and still get to work on time. Then we just begin our school at the usual time. With all this snow that we are suspose to be getting, the admin decided to push Dad's Day back 2 weeks.... (2 weeks!) All I can say is we better be getting some snow!

Math Olympics

One school in New Jersey had their 4th grade student body compete in the math olympics. They began by marching with a "torch" into the gym. Then they played 20 different math games which includeded, "Guesstimation Station," "KerPlunk," "Number Line Hopscotch," "Continent Hopping," and "Name that Numbers."
What a fun way to teach the kids a little about the olympics and math sense. This is a way to make math fun and accessable to all students which will hopefully reduce the math anxiety that some students have.

http://www.northjersey.com/community/events/83517037_The__name_of_the_game__is_math_.html

Qualities of a Good Teacher

Bill and Melinda Gates have donated $45 million into a 2 year research project that will study what effective teachers do/ what best practices are. The study will research 3,700 teachers across the US using "videotapes, surveys, and student assessments" to compile a list of qualities of good teachers.



At the end of the article, the author included a list of, "10 qualities of a great teacher: (1) has a sense of humor; (2) is intuitive; (3) knows the subject matter; (4) listens well; (5) is articulate; (6) has an obsessive/compulsive side; (7) can be subversive; (8) is arrogant enough to be fearless; (9) has a performer’s instincts; (10) is a real taskmaster."



What qualities do you think make a good teacher?



http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/02/03/20starkey_ep.h29.html?tkn=NOMC%2FftpboQaBg6bw4JxVeqJ4G%2FG7L4b8YFE

Abstinence Only Education - Does it work?

In 2 of my feeds, there was an article on abstinence - so it must be ground breaking. According to the version of the article that I read, they used 662 African American middle school students and sent some to a weekend-long abstience only program. They were also paid $20 for their time.
The results: "...only about a third of the students who participated in a weekend abstinence-only class started having sex within the next 24 months, compared with about half who were randomly assigned instead to general health information classes, or classes teaching only safer sex. Among those assigned to comprehensive sex-education classes, covering both abstinence and safer sex, about 42 percent began having sex." This is the first abstience-only study that has seen these positive results.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/education/03abstinence.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

I think that this is great. I 'm glad that these kids decided to wait a while before having sex. However, I feel that part of their decision to pay attention during the workshop was the influence of the $20 that they were given to participate. And once they started becoming "sexually active" did they use birth control?
I understand that some religions (such as mine) are proponents of abstience-only. However, what happens once they do start having sex? Aren't they at higher risk for pregnancy and STDs?

Brain Rules

On Edutopia, there has been a lot of talk about brain research and it affects teachers and their teaching styles. This has prompted me to go grab my mom's copy of Brain Rules by John Medina. She had encouraged me to read it this summer, but I didn't have enough time between all my activities. So, no time like the present! Has anyone seen the article that started this all?