Tutorservice Daily News forAugust 3rd
- Mary Louise Rasmuson, Alaska Philanthropist, Dies –
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A philanthropist whose family foundation has awarded more than $200 million in grants to nonprofit Alaska organizations has died at the age of 101, foundation officials said Tuesday.
Mary Louise Milligan Rasmuson died Monday at her Anchorage home, Rasmuson Foundation spokeswoman Cassandra Stalzer said.
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More on Education: Alaska
- Celebrity: Little Suri Cruise Enrolling At $40K Private School – The daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is reportedly going to enroll at Avenues, an entirely new K-12 private (for profit) school being opened this fall in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC (right near the High Line, if you want to impress your friends).
All this via the NY Post: Suri Cruise to attend new Chelsea school
Determined not to get anything done this afternoon like I am? Well, the Atlantic Wire has more, including a virtual tour and ideas for a reality series.
Vanity Fair notes that classes include Spanish or Mandarin immersion, and an outdoor terrace for lunchtime. - Technology: Back To School Drones – One of the new things you may see during the upcoming school year are drones — the unmanned aerial vehicles that have long been used overseas and by the military.
Some of the uses that are being tried in schools around the nation: *Dropoff and pickup supervision *Lunch / recess supervision *Menu announcements *Truancy sweeps *Test proctoring *Patrolling the senior parking lot *Finding lost kids and schoolbuses off school grounds *Field trip supervision
For more on domestic uses of drones, check out this NPR story from Larry Abramson. - Media: Website Collects Ridiculous Textbook Excerpts – I got this from Lori Crouch at EWA. She got it from some guy at the Chronicle.
It's called "Thanks, Textbooks: A COLLECTION OF THE WORLD'S FINEST ACADEMIC WRITING. (UPDATED EVERY MONDAY)."
Basically, ridiculous word problems, images, and captions from textbook land. You can find it here.
Just think: Some publishing company got paid to sell this to a school. And some teacher probably got paid to come up with the copy.
- Thompson: Does Common Core Have It Backwards? – Because I want so badly for Common Core to work, I was intensely looking forward to Susan Headden’s, "Getting Complicated with Text," in The Quick & the Ed. She presents a layperson’s view of professional development for teaching to their rigorous stands.
With Common Core, writes Headden, “Quality will now trump quantity.” Teachers need help in asking higher order questions. We also need to discuss with each other, as they did in Headden’s workshop, whether a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt is too union friendly, so we can better guide our students’ debates. We need to share insights about how much background information should we provide before students wrestle with the text. We must trash out the question of how much time do we let students struggle with complex sentences before we help them out. And, we need to debate the time we spend on assignments based on students’ opinions.
But, Headden’s group, “left with the overarching message that mastering text complexity is the secret to reading success,” and that is dead wrong. The key to teaching anything for mastery is understanding the human complexity within our kids. The logic underlaying that conclusion was even worse. Teachers were told that “the problem with questions based on experience is that they exclude students who haven’t had those experiences. 'Text … is the great equalizer.'”
Even if the assessment experts who conducted the professional development have never stepped foot in the inner city, they should know that the opposite applies in high-challenge schools. Our path to success is building on the students’ strengths, based on their real-life learning. The kids can eventually excel with “business plans, legal briefs … and other ‘informational’ texts,” as long as we patiently give them the emotional support they need. Headden seems to admire Common Core, however, because it takes the all-important decisions about the people side of instruction away from teachers, who know their students, and gives it to the assessment experts.- JT(@drjohnthompson) via.