Public Lyceum

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Thinking of bringing this back...

Or moving to another blogging platform.

Who has the time?

But I want to make more time to write.

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Rigor de Rigueur

Rigor:

It is de rigueur.

Just parking this over here for my fellow educators.

The powers that be love to throw this around like so many words whose meaning has been sapped from years of abuse. As I mentally prepare for the coming year I must fortify my constitution against the blatant misuse of the English language that the corprocratic ladder-climbers and power-wielders use as a crude bludgeon. It can be soul-sucking when as the year grinds on you come up against people who just don't get it. But those of us who love to teach, who happily look upon the classroom as a lifelong laboratory of knowledge and joyful growth and not as a rung in the corporatized ladder to positions of administrative promotion know better. It is those who have stepped out of the classroom (or perhaps never really set foot in one), who bandy about this babbling bastardization of our means of communication.

"Sound and fury signifying nothing...." - Shakespeare always puts it best. The bard exemplifies the power of language, the power of words weighted with significance. Not the flaccid empty bag of a buzzword, but the fully-loaded linguistic luggage bursting at the zippers with meaning.

So, my fellow educators, I implore you: do not strive to """infuse rigor""" into your lessons. Just write good lessons. Lessons that challenge. Lessons that inspire. Lessons brilliantly designed to not only impart knowledge, but to rewire synapses, create and foster new ways of thinking. Inundate a student with facts she may pass a test; challenge a student to think critically, she’ll become a thinking adult -- something our democracy lacks and sorely needs.  

Do not find yourself limited and beaten by the buzzwordy battering of bureaucratic butchers. Transcend their limited scope. Laugh knowingly and inwardly when they ask if you are adding enough rigor. No, my dear teacher, you are adding more than that. You are adding nothing less than the ingredients for a lifelong love of learning. You are helping to cultivate the raw materials for the foundation of a monument to self-worth and the betterment of humanity. Fear not the rigor mortis that is de rigeuer. No. Embrace and refocus the joyful elucidating ray of creative energy.  Less rigor, more vigor!

Have a great year!

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“It’s for the children...”

I have found that the field of education is littered with those who would feather their own nest and say it's "for the children." But here's the thing: those who feel the need to point out the rightful and just purpose of our vocation are overstating the obvious to obscure the truth. Every thing we do is for the children. The job wouldn't exist without them. What are you really up to?

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“ Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.” - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

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Do not be discouraged as you struggle to restore common sense and rationality to education policy. The corporate reformers have money and the political power that money buys, but it has no popular ...

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Students Create Art Answering the Question "How Do You Feel About Standardized Tests?"

Drawing and Painting students in grades 10-12 were asked to create art about how they FEEL about standardized tests. I gave the students some old scantron sheets and offered drawing and painting...

More proof that people with visionary talent can take the awful and ugly and make it sublimely beautiful...

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Kalief Browder, 1993–2015 - The New Yorker

The twenty-two-year-old, who endured three years on Rikers Island without a trial, committed suicide on Saturday.

Horrible horrible horrible. Our country has a serious problem. We may see the problem more clearly in the Bronx, but this problem is everywhere. Call it racism, call it poverty, call it greed, call it man’s inhumanity to man... it all applies.

Every day you try to bring hope, joy, love into the education of these children. Every day you fight the to alleviate the Sisyphean struggle many children face in the NYC education system. This could be anybody.

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A Dear John (Oliver) Letter: How He Broke My Heart Over Standardized Testing - Education Post

Dear John, We need to talk. I love you on HBO, I loved you on “The Daily Show,” I even loved you on “Community.” Is

Ms Korkes, as a teacher who works with "our most vulnerable kids" I am deeply confused by your assertion that a reliance on standardized testing benefits them. I see firsthand, on a daily basis, how education -- true, joyful, meaningful education -- is destroyed by policy that you support. So much rides on the high stakes testing in inner city schools that there is literally no time for anything else. Art, music, critical thought have been replaced by monotonous "drill and kill" methods. Students sleepwalk through the day as teachers struggle to make a curriculum meaningful. Students with severe disabilities struggle to pass a test that is absurdly inappropriate for them. They then emerge from this factory having passed high school, but completely ill-prepared for college and the real world. They are alienated from the system and the true gap is never closed. The charter schools who appear to be so successful are simply factories that have gamed the system. They spend countless hours and money on strategies to "pass the test". If your precious "achievement gap" is closed, it is only through elaborate smoke and mirrors.

I know this because I am a special education teacher in a high school in the South Bronx. I know this because I have the opportunity to teach one Intro to Philosophy elective that is some lucky students' one chance of the day to engage in useful critical thinking that isn't geared toward passing some over-emphasized achievement test. I see the students begin to realize what learning can be like. I see their love of education flower, at least for one 45 minute period a day. Then it's back to the grind. Pass Pearson's regents. Memorize memorize memorize. Rinse. Repeat.

I wonder: have you seen any of this firsthand? Have you seen how a true educational experience and a respect for multiple intelligences and various modes of learning have been virtually destroyed in inner city classrooms? Have you seen people like my colleagues who struggle in a sysiphisian manner to eek even the smallest amount of relevance and hope into our children's education? Have you seen the dedicated professions who truly LOVE opening new doors of perception in our students' lives?

Judging by your position, I doubt it.

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John Oliver is amazing. Thank you for this beautiful takedown of standardized testing and the vile mercenaries who profit from it. (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k)

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The emperor’s new grades

tl;dr:  Essentially, Cuomo, in a rare moment of rhetorical clarity, articulated the heart of his education policy: It is, to use his words, “meaningless to the students.”

When Andrew Cuomo said that the state test results don’t count for kids he unwittingly articulated the myriad fallacies of his teacher evaluation system.

“The grades are meaningless to the students,” Cuomo said in a brief press gaggle following an Association for a Better New York breakfast event in New York City.

Andy, in effect, pulled the curtain down, pointed at the man behind it, and then said, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

But now that the cat that has never been out of the bag is now out, about and talking, how does Mr. Cuomo expect these results to have at least a modicum of reliability?

Students are being stressed to the max over tests that *are meaningless*.... as a student, this is the point where I would start answering these ridiculous prompts by describing the plot of my favorite video game or youtube channel. “Oh, this is *meaningless*, and that teacher has been driving me crazy? Look at all the _____ I give”.... and he then completes the thought by giving literal blanks.

Essentially, Cuomo, in a rare moment of rhetorical clarity, articulated the heart of his education policy: It is, to use his words, “meaningless to the students.”

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So many of the reasons why I became a teacher are articulated in this wordless short. For myself and others...

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Wow Arne. “Folks” in the disability community would rather have their kids assessed by realistic and appropriate measures…

“Folks in the civil rights community, folks in the disability community, they want their kids assessed. They want to know if they are making progress or growth,” Duncan said.

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Hold your head high.

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The Purpose of Education

Education if done right should teach a student how to maximize his or her individuality within the constraints of his/her chosen society.

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Welcome back to all the NYC DOE teachers who went back to work today! #YouAllRock

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Oh God, Teacher Arranged Desks In Giant Circle

OVERLAND PARK, KS—Appearing stunned and unsettled as they entered her classroom Wednesday, students from Ms. Frederickson’s fourth-period social studies class were reportedly overcome with panic 

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