Welcome to Teachers At Risk
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Feb
27
Calculators are making students dumber
Filed Under "At-risk" students, The Way I See It | Leave a Comment
Kathy at Creating Passionate Users asked the question “Are our tools making us dumber”. I wanted to scream YES THEY ARE. YES THEY ARE. YES THEY ARE. Kathy’s graph says it all.(I love her graphs)
Calculators are making students dumber. How do I know this? Recently, one of my grade nine students was using her calculator to calculate 3 x 6. That’s not the first time nor the first student that did that kind of thing. I had to restrain myself from ripping my calculator (she borrowed my calculator, because she had forgotten hers) out of her hands. Talk about adding insult to injury. I told her, ” Don’t you know you loose brain cells everytime you use your calculator to do simple math. Don’t you know that if you don’t use your math brain cells you’ll loose them. (I have a video called Inside The Teenage Brain from PBS that says if you don’t use specific brain cells, you’ll lose them. Honest, here’s the link.)
Last summer when I taught grade ten math at Camp I Can, I showed the kids how to do long division the old fashioned way, without a calculator. They were amazed. It was as if I had taught them a magic trick using chalk and a blackboard. They kept asking for more questions. It’s amazing to see how pleased they were that they could do math the old fashioned way. They were having fun doing long division- go figure. I gave them my brain cell speech too.
I really don’t know why kids use calculators for simple math. I guess maybe an elementary teacher could tell me. Now I’m a special education teacher, and I know all about short term memory and all that. But why could they learn to do long division in Camp I Can in grade 10 and not in earlier grades. It may be that they just have gaps in their knowledge. At-risk kids can have a few attendance issues. They skip a class or two or 89 of them.
Feb
26
Are you apathetic? Are you unmotivated? Are you bored? Good!!! Read this.
Filed Under Behaviour Management, Engaging Assignments and Activities for Students | 1 Comment
Feeling tired, listless, apathetic, unmotivated and not interested in school? I thought as much. Well, help is on the way. Since I am a special education specialist, I have shelves of resource books all giving advice on how students can deal with boredom, but… they’re all too boring. So, I thought I’d ask the www for some advice about dealing with boredom in school and then pass it along you.Yahoo! Answers advises:
- face it school is a boring place……. just try to pay attention and dont zone out……i’m 13…… i kow these things…..(I’maFruit)
-That’s easy. Get a pice of paper out and draw your worst enimey in their underwear OR you can listen to your teacher talk about stuff that don’t make any sence to you at all.(but that’s no fun now is it)Me i like to make my owne songs.Or make my own fashion. (Starr)
-Things are only boring when you are doing something that you don’t see a value in. When you’re forced to do something that you’d rather not do. The trick is this – ONLY do things that have a purpose. I’ll tell you though, school has a GREAT purpose for you. Learning to read, do math, how to interact with people, how to get yourself to do what your boss (teacher) is asking you to do all these skills will make you a MUCH happier person as you grow. Get in there (school) and don’t allow your time to get away without you getting those skills – and getting them BETTER than anyone else! You are getting FOR FREE what people in other places have to pay a forune for. Take full advantage of it!!! Then go out into the world when you get older and take over!!! But only if you’ve picked up the needed skills…..(teran_realtor)
If you actually listen to what the teacher is talking about, and you participate and raise your hand with answers, you will become more interested what you are learning. I get really bored in my geograpyh and history classes, but I try to participate and enjoy what I’m learning. We go to school to get an education, so that when we are older we will be smart and have a good job.
You don’t want to be working at Burger King when your 45 do you? That’s why we go to school, so we can be able to get a job when we are older that pays a lot of money. (Joseph)
You know what, I think I’m going to ask my students to share their strategies for dealing with boredom at school. That can be their blog entry for this week.
PS. I just reread the suggestions above, and I think there’s advice in there for me too-although I can’t draw.
Feb
22
I came across the this article in the Educational GuardianOne of the main thrusts of the government’s Skills for Life strategy is “embedding” the basic skills of literacy and numeracy. The concept of embedding is that students on other courses, usually but not exclusively vocational courses in colleges, can be helped to improve their literacy and numeracy skills as part of their course, rather than separately.
We do that at our high school. We’re supposed to embed literacy in all our subjects. We”ve been told it’s not just the job of the English teachers to teach literacy. It’s everyone’s job.
Sometimes embedding can seem like “basic skills by stealth”, as often the student doesn’t realise what is happening. All they are aware of is that there seems to be a bit of a focus on their grammar, or spelling, or their basic maths.
I teach “basic skills by stealth”. I place student’s work up on the walls and I hope when they’re not listening to me and just looking around at the walls they see all the graphic organizers and posters and accidentally review or relearn whatever is there. I really believe that, especially since my students are mostly strong visual learners and weak auditory learners. (I know this because I had them complete a learning styles inventory). So when I blah blah blah they look around the room and see what we’ve covered in class.
It’s important to be clear that embedding basic skills isn’t the same as using the interests of someone who wants to improve basic skills as the focus for teac as been well documented by Tom Sticht and others in the US. However, the effectiveness of embedding basic skills in vocational courses doesn’t appear to be underpinned with a great deal of authoritative research. By authoritative, I mean an objective research study that compares the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching basic skills to adults and which uses matched samples.
When I read this part, I’m reminded of John’s comment to my earlier post about Leadership Experiences. He wrote
I hope that leaders encourage the use of evidence-based practices and provide guidance in assessing empirically whether educational interventions are improving students’ outcomes on trustworthy measures of important academic and social development.
Now, I know that the article talks about adult learners, and teenagers aren’t adults but I don’t remember being told about any research that backs up the contention that embedding literacy across the curriculum works for teenagers. I may have been told that. I just don’t remember. Thanks to John, I realize that I should make a point of remembering to ask those questions and devote my time and energy to something if it passes John’s test. As a teacher of at-risk kids, I admit I’m looking for anything that looks like it help my students. I never thought about it before, but I guess I’m willing to try anything on faith alone. I really don’t know what to think of that.
Feb
20
The Glass May Be Half Empty After All- But So What!
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Special Education, The Way I See It | 2 Comments
When I came across the following article, I just had to read it. After all I’m on the Student Success Team at our school, and I teach and support at-risk kids all day long.Halfway to Destination 2010, kids struggling
Given special support since third grade, program’s students show the obstacles confronting schools
As third-graders at some of the Twin Cities’ poorest schools, they were singled out for special academic help, connected to community programs, given free computers and told they would receive up to $10,000 if they stayed in school to graduate.
I though great- special academic help, connected to community programs, given free computers and $10 000 when they graduate. Those are all the things that I would like to be able to give to the at-risk students I teach. With all that support they’d to succeed. What are they talking about “struggling”. Then I continued to read
But five years down the road, halfway through their journey, students in the Minneapolis Foundation’s Destination 2010 initiative were struggling with attendance and discipline problems and not doing appreciably better on standardized tests than a comparison group of their peers, recently released data show.
Oh no. Don’t tell me that. I work with these at-risk kids everyday. I can’ t be told that what I do doesn’t make a difference. My students do tell me that I make a difference. Appreciable difference-what the heck does that mean? I’m discouraged but continue to read
Foundation officials caution against reading too much into the test results, given that several scores were missing and the sample size was small.
OK, that’s encouraging. Maybe the test results aren’t valid. Maybe the same couldn’t be said for my school. After all that’s there, I’m here. Conditions aren’t necessarily the same. Maybe…. Why did I have to come across this article, especially after the tough week I’ve had. I do believe that our greatest challenges teach us a lesson. What’s my lesson here? I though about it for a while as I poked around on the net. Suddenly this quotation by Tom Krause appeared
“Courage is the discovery that you may not win, and trying when you know you can lose.”
I thought for a minute. Courage. That’s it. That’s my lesson. I needed to be courageous. I need to have courage and not dis-courage. I need to continue to support and advocate for my students all the while knowing there’s a good chance some may not stay in school and graduate. Every year some of my students graduate, and every year some of my students drop out. I need to change the way I look at that half-full glass and say, “This glass may be half empty after all, but so what!”
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