From https://www.yahoo.com/?fr=yset_chr_syc_hp, sourced from NPR.org

Should Teachers Ask Students To Check Their Devices At The Classroom Door?

 Tania Lombrozo drew attention to research showing that students using laptops and other digital devices in the college classroom are less likely to perform as well as students not using them. It isn’t just that using the devices to multitask during lecture — searching the web, posting on Facebook and Instagram, texting, etc. — may hurt your performance. It turns out that students around you who see you multitasking show an even more marked drop-off in how well they do. There’s nothing surprising in this. It’s true, as Tania notices, that students are likely to underestimate the deleterious effects that indulging in digital distractions may have on their performance …

Read more

The article is at http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/09/488214332/the-best-schools-in-the-world-do-this-why-dont-we and is titled

Tip #7 for newbies, and others whose districts’ testing regimes are spinning out of control: Work on cultivating resilience in your students. Work relentlessly on resilience. In particular, make sure students understand that despite the crazy amount of time their classroom may be spending on testing, test scores remain only a very small part of who they are and what they may have to contribute to their world.

Eduhonesty: Phenomena that cannot be precisely quantified may nonetheless dramatically affect human lives. We cannot accurately measure post-traumatic stress disorder, but we acknowledge this disorder exists. We cannot measure the stress created by intensive testing, especially inappropriate, intensive testing, but we know this stress exists. When the girl in the front row breaks down crying during the test, and wails to her teacher, “I can’t understand this!” that stress cloaks the classroom, and may set off other tears elsewhere.

Do we know how our students are feeling as a result of our recent barrage of testing? Do we know how appropriate the new PARCC test’s content is for the majority of our students? Given the extraordinarily high failure rate on PARCC, that question should be asked and answered. That question ought to have been answered before so many students were required to take the test.

Are our students benefiting from all this testing, and if so how? How much testing actually results in useful, new results? Who else benefits from testing? The people who sell the test are certainly benefiting. New Jersey estimates that the cost of implementing the new PARCC standardized tests in New Jersey public schools might cost more than $100,000,000 dollars after four years. The state spent around $22,000,000 in 2015.^[1] And that $22,000,000 only bought one of multiple tests students are taking today.

[1] Kelly Heyboer, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, The Star-Leupdated March 22, 2015 at 11:37 AM.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/09/colleges-across-country-give-new-perks-to-illegal-immigrant-students.html

A new fall semester is about to begin. And while American college students struggle to pay for their higher education and long to be the fortunate recipients of college scholarships, illegal immigrants find their path lined with institutionalized supports, loads of scholarship money — and a healthy dose of “go get ’em kid,” as they break U.S. law.

Just this May, former Secretary of Homeland Security and current University of California president Janet Napolitano announced a three-year commitment to support illegal UC students university-wide.

“We are committed to continuing a path forward for undocumented students at the University of California,” Napolitano said in a website message. “This funding will further strengthen the university’s undocumented student initiative, and help ensure that these students receive the support and resources they need to succeed.”

The article continues if readers want to visit the above website. Fox News goes on to protest this use of taxpayer and college funds.

As a former bilingual teacher, I’d like to weigh in on this issue. We are not talking about a bunch of young people who just arrived here from Mexico or Guatemala. For one thing, few recent newcomers have the English necessary to tackle college.  We are mostly talking about children who grew up in the U.S. educational system. In some cases, these children arrived here as babies. They may have no memory of their countries of origin.

These are the kids without social security numbers who may nonetheless have attended U.S. elementary, middle and high schools. They may have been among the best students in their schools. These would-be college students are likely to come from poor families.

I know their parents. I’ve been calling those parents for years, finding them in factories, restaurants and cleaning jobs. Sometimes I can’t find them because they are out working in fields or yards. These parents don’t have that social security number, either, but somehow they  find work. They work hard, too. Many of them have two jobs.

Readers, please explain this situation to people if you agree with me. These kids ought to get help with college. This is the only country many of them know. America will be better if we help these kids to fulfill their potential. Some of our best and brightest students are following parents into factory or yard work for lack of a social security number. We can do better by the kids who have been raised here and who have fought to achieve academic excellence.

We already stunt too much potential. Kids without numbers know that they cannot be nurses without that critical 9-digit number. They study medical billing instead. They know they can’t be teachers without that number. They take jobs in private preschools instead. They give what they are allowed to give, often not nearly as much as they might be able to give if we provided them a college education and path to citizenship.

Eduhonesty: Well, so much for tips for teachers today. Newbies might go back to last August in my feed if they are looking for tips. Last year’s August and September tips were especially geared to new teachers.

I had to take a day off from tips today, though, after I read this article. The text is inflammatory but, more importantly, the content slants the truth. The parents of these children are not living off the system. Without a social security number, they cannot. They are working. Sometimes they are working sixteen hours a day in low-wage, physically demanding jobs in the hot sun. They are taking tassels off corn. They are harvesting melons. They are putting small parts into other small parts while standing on their feet all day in backrooms without air-conditioning, hoping someday to get a job “on the floor” where the temperatures run in the seventies instead of the eighties or nineties.

When we don’t allow these children access to U.S. colleges, we condemn them to taking tassels off corn and working in backrooms. I’d like to suggest that America needs to be bigger than that. Do we want to create a class of indentured servants? Is that who we are?

A modern version of indentured servitude will be the de facto result of not allowing the children of illegal immigrants access to higher education.

Tip #6 for teachers working in academically-disadvantaged districts: Write down the fun parts of your school experience. What did you like most? What kept you after school? Start advocating for those activities during meetings and in committee work.

Take the lead if you can find the time. Maybe you will have to be the one to organize the trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. Maybe you will have to start the Latin Dance Club. Other schools’ debate coaches can help you learn to coach debate. But however you can do it, fight to get fun into your school.

We have to deemphasize testing.

My last year, I gave PARCC^TM tests, ACCESS^TM tests, AIMSWEB^TM tests, MAP^TM tests, mandatory East Coast unit tests, and weekly obligatory quizzes, not to mention extra tests and quizzes needed to raise grades since the administration had decided that 100% of grades should be based on assessments.

All these assessments were administered throughout the school year to give the state, district leaders, school administrators and teachers feedback on how students were progressing toward meeting academic expectations. With these lost days of testing, my school was able to provide quick information to the state showing that students were making academic progress. But I spent over one-fifth of my classroom hours testing that year, a ridiculous loss of instructional time by any measure. My students also had an extremely rough year. I may have created a few future drop-outs. I hope not, but the kids at the bottom of the testing pool were having little fun that year.

Ever-increasing testing ironically hits our lowest-scoring kids the hardest. Academically successful districts don’t have to give extra tests to show higher scores. Those districts don’t have to present new data regularly to the state. Their administrators do not need to travel from classroom to classroom asking students to please, please take upcoming state tests seriously. Those administrators can do the traditional job of a school administrator instead. They can work on school spirit rather than school scores. They can expand the breadth of academic offerings within their districts, rather than telling electives’ teachers to focus instruction around math and English for annual state test. They can visit clubs to listen to speakers and watch dances.

They can focus on kids instead of numbers.

In schools where administrators are chasing higher digits, though, the hallways can become grim. Are your administrators are too busy to worry about spirit? If so, Tip #6 says step into the gap. Be the life of the party. Plan the dance with your colleagues. Get the crepe paper up there.

Eduhonesty: School dances have kept more would-be drop-outs in school than mandatory extra math practice ever will.

Tip #5 — for all teachers: If you get a chance to join the Curriculum Committee, leap on it. Speak up. Speak often. Tell everyone what you think your students will need to learn next year. In the worst-case scenario, the wrong curriculum can hijack your classroom. Fight back!

Eduhonesty: Channeling Eeyore out here. Welcome back to the Blog of Gloom and Doom, where the glass not only may be half-empty, but is sometimes laying in shards all over the classroom floor. I want to get those pieces in the wastebasket before any students get hurt.

The shift to the Common Core is resulting in curricular changes that can cause actual harm in academically-disadvantaged districts, as desperate administrators flail about in attempts to improve scores. As I noted before, more and more often, teachers are given a script to follow, a script that may not match their students. They are told to stay on the group track even when the group track does not seem to benefit some, most or even all of their students.

Why does this happen? Multiple forces are in play, especially the perceived need to review all material expected to be found on the PARCC, Smarter Balanced or other annual, spring state test, the Godzillas among the many tests tearing up America’s classrooms. While schools that are doing well in the test game can afford to relax and schedule museum trips, schools that are failing to hit targets may become almost wholly focused on that Godzilla, bringing all their guns and students to bear on that one target.

“Data” has become another potent force driving academic homogeneity. If all classes take the same test, then all teachers and students can be evaluated using the same yardstick. That sounds perfectly rational on the surface, but can result in special education and bilingual students wasting days of school time taking tests they cannot even read. Students are sometimes fed into the testing system as if they were interchangeable parts – despite the fact that we have year after year of evidence documenting that this assumption has been becoming steadily less true over time.

In a class with student achievement scores that differ by six or more grade-years – such classes are common nowadays — teachers should not be giving all students exactly the same quizzes and tests at the same time. Those identical assessments are likely to bore the kids at the top, while they demolish the confidence of the kids at the bottom. Kids in the middle usually do best, but in worst-case scenarios, where the kids and the Common Core remain years apart, even the kids in the middle may be unable to gain a foothold on the academics coming at them.

A good teacher matches instruction to students; Drew who cannot read must be taught differently than Sadie who reads above grade level. When government leaders and school administrators demand districts prepare all students for identical tests, many students are cheated out of instruction and remediation they need to succeed. Administrators can demand that I teach seventh grade Common Core standards, but when a student has entered my classroom at a second-grade, academic level, that student cannot learn those standards without many, many hours of remediation. The time I spend instructing that student on standards five full years above his or her understanding will not only be wasted but will carry a potent opportunity cost, the time lost for essential instruction in third and fourth grade mathematics.

Please, readers, if you work in that scripted school, if you have the opportunity, stand up for remediation time — real remediation time. Get your students’ remediation requirements out front and center. Help curriculum planners to estimate time realistically. You may be unable to fulfill this mission as your district tries to hit every standard that might be on the state test, but sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes our voices are heard.

They are never heard when we do not speak.

Are you a new teacher? If so, those theoretical characters in books are about to be replaced with living human beings, teachers, students and administrators who are living in a time when “the terrible tyranny of the majority,” to quote Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, is creating and fostering a mounting onslaught of standardized testing and government intervention with the best of intentions, but little understanding of the myriad unintended consequences I have seen unfolding as a result.

If you are lucky, you left school and landed in a district that has been mostly passing or even walloping state tests. In those districts, the landscape has not shifted under teachers with the same titanic force that is being felt in urban and academically-struggling districts. Where the students are not defined as broken, the administration does not have to doggedly attempt to fix everything and everyone. They can still teach drama for the sake of drama and orchestra for the love of music. They can hold spirit assemblies that sacrifice academic minutes, and sign off on field trips that add breadth and breath to education.

But maybe you got the first job that many teachers find, that position in an urban school with a high turnover rate. Where are the jobs? What districts have high vacancy rates? Those districts where resources are scarce and/or working conditions are challenging. Maybe you are stacking up falling tiles from your ceiling in a corner somewhere, while you buy supplies for all your students and borrow an overhead projector from your stepmother-in-law. Poor districts often lack flashy technology and supplies, unless they have lucked into grant money.

Wherever you are, you likely are about to run the gauntlet of our time, as you attempt to please students, parents, colleagues, administrators, Charlotte Danielson or whoever designed your system of evaluation, the greater public and even state and federal governments. You will succeed and you will fail. Nobody can keep the whole crowd happy. You will have to be resilient.

Eduhonesty: Well, I guess this is what happens when the Blog of Occasional Gloom and Doom attempts to write tips for new teachers. I ought to add, “And then the Zombie Apocalypse will wreck your field trip to the forest preserve!”

Sorry if this post lacks cheer. Honestly, my students and classes have mostly been joys for me, and in some districts, you won’t even catch a whiff of those zombies. You might walk in the door and discover supplies, a budget for more supplies and all the help you could ever need. I hope so.

But if you just started in Detroit or Flint, if you just started in that rural county where the mining industry has been collapsing, or if you are in a school that has been losing the No Child Left Behind Game for a decade and more, then I have a tip for today for you:

Tip #4: You MUST differentiate.

If this tip seems silly to you, I understand. But districts threatened by lower test scores sometimes script out the curriculum in fine detail. I lived through a year in which all students in my school were required to receive exactly the same math tests and quizzes, whether they were in special education, bilingual programs or regular classes. More and more often, you will be given a script to follow, a script that may not match your students.

A few years ago, I discussed this with a colleague who said, “I just make my own plans and ignore that stuff.” She was getting great results and administrators left her alone. You might luck into similar, smart administrators who will let you deviate from the script as long as you can prove your choices are working.

But if you are told to stay on the group track and the group track does not seem to benefit some, most or even all of your students, then you will have to rescue your kids. Be prepared to do morning, lunch and afternoon tutoring. I added week-end tutoring and I will strongly recommend readers try this. Meet students in a local McDonalds or Taco Bell or anyplace with a cheap breakfast and acceptable coffee/tea/caffeine. My usual time was 10:00 AM on Saturdays.

Buy the kids breakfast if you can. You can feed your students for a couple of dollars apiece at Taco Bell. O.K., I admit that nutritionists reading this post are cringing right now, but kids on the fence may get up to go to tutoring if you toss breakfast into the deal, and most teachers can’t afford to buy restaurant fruit plates for everyone. The majority of your kids would rather have that breakfast burrito anyway.

Then prepare to differentiate. Teach adding to Sadie, multiplication to Drew, and the order of operations to Katrina. Teach your kids the NEXT thing they need to know. You are the only one who can do this. You are the one grading the homework and listening to individual students.

Administration may try to get you to prepare everyone for identical tests all year. If you do that, you cheat your students. Some students will be far from academically ready for that test’s content, while others will have understood the same content years ago,

Your job as a teacher is to meet your students academically where they live. “You got what you got,” as a presenter said to me long ago in a professional development seminar. In these times of all-inclusive classes, that may mean you have six or more years difference in understanding of subject matter within a single class.

Forget the theory where the theory does not seem to be working for you. Try to at least sideswipe all the administrative demands, but don’t get trapped by those demands. Teach your kids in a rational order. Don’t throw algebra at them until they understand their exponents. Don’t bypass the elements of a plot if students’ quizzes show they are fuzzy on plot elements just because plot “ended” and metaphors “start” this week.

Teach smart. Teach kids what they need to know. That requires differentiating. whether you receive support for your efforts or not.

(Readers, please pass this on. I cannot remember reading this useful bit of advice in any of the many blog posts and articles I regularly read.)

I reread my last post and realized I ought to emphasize one point: Don’t plan a fun activity for after the test, especially one that can be done independently. That test that will be placed in a child’s cumulative folder, that test that will follow a child through the rest of his or her academic career? A seven-year-old, ten-year-old or even fifteen-year old may rocket through the test to get to the fun activity. Kids don’t have perspective. They will bolt down dinner to get to the chocolate cake.

An academic puzzle should work well, but art projects need to be avoided. Free time needs to be avoided. These rewards for finishing are too tempting. You don’t want kids socializing after the test anyway; you want to keep the room quiet.

Even when everyone is done, you will benefit from a calming activity. Some kids become highly stressed, tense and/or excited by tests. These kids should receive a version of quiet time after they finish exams, a time to slow down and decompress.

I want to do the classroom tips for August. Readers liked last August’s tips, and many teachers who are getting started can use advice from someone who worked in “disadvantaged” classrooms through the years. Education courses seldom provide much help in finding one’s footing in urban and financially-hungry districts. Courses teach aspiring teachers how to make spiffy lesson plans in a time when those teachers may not even be allowed to make lesson plans because all the plans have been scripted in advance by curriculum committees who are matching lessons to the Common Core, rather than actual student learning levels.

My problem with the tips will be that I am simultaneously trying to write a book out here. Why am I writing a book? In part, because if I do not write this book soon, I may never write it. The years have rolled by and my indignation has faded, replaced by a stunned fascination, as I watch the Common Core unrolling around me. Tests created to go with the Core, such as the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, appear to have failed a frightening percentage of the students who took those tests.  Yet we continue to create and trumpet new, harder standards and tests, as if those standards and tests will themselves somehow solve the educational problems besieging America’s inner cities and other scholastically-challenged playing fields.

Exactly HOW these new, harder tests will cure America’s educational ills receives little or no discussion, probably because details of this “plan” have never been thought out. For one thing, detailed consideration might result in the realization that the educational leaps demanded require additional funding — a realization that our leaders have been ducking since No Child Left Behind attacked schools with a huge, unfunded mandate that unsurprisingly failed ignominiously Government leaders and educational administrators seem to have been on a “Field of Dreams” marathon. If we raise the bar, students won’t necessarily jump that bar. Our problems have reached levels that standards themselves can never address. The Common Core seems to me to be another No Child Left Behind — another attempt to find a simple solution to a set of complex problems, many of which have nothing to do with where we set bars. I can put the bar anywhere I like for Javier, but if he reached middle school unable to read, he won’t manage to jump that bar.

Unfortunately, we teachers are often our own worst enemies, as we adapt, adapt, adapt. New mandates come down from above and we make do. Teachers keep making do. Another test? Quick! Find me #2 pencils! Find me computers! After the first wave of horror, we begin developing our survival rules. Rule #15: Feed them the free Apple Jacks and make sure they have pencils and/or laptops for the test. Rule #34: Seize water bottles before they leave the room since the bottles make great squirt guns; Seize bottles with holes in the lid immediately. Rule #62: Never sit Jenny next to Marisol.

Well, I suppose I should give my tip for the day. I apologize to newbies who find this post lacking in cheer. I still love teaching. I still love the kids. In many districts, especially districts with money, teaching remains a creative and rewarding field, filled with happy moments and enthusiastic students.

But testing really has spiraled out of control, as newbies will discover.

So here is Tip #2: Lay in a supply of word searches and crossword puzzles. Look up http://www.discoveryeducation.com/free-puzzlemaker/ or other sites that allow you to create targeted puzzles. Start creating your post-test library of activities to use to keep students occupied and quiet after they have finished their latest test. You can also buy activities from Teachers Pay Teachers. Some activities at this site are free.

The toughest part of a test comes after students began finishing. Some kids will take the whole time period. Others will blast through that test in less than half a period sometimes.

You need work for after the test. You also need to spell out the rules for after the test. Tell students directly that they cannot talk. Make sure they have pencils for the “Bridge to Terabithia” crossword puzzle, and know exactly where that puzzle is located if you are not passing out the crossword yourself. Have a back-up wordsearch, too, or another puzzle of your choice. The idea is nobody runs out of work — nobody, nohow, never.

I suggest avoiding artsier projects like those in the picture above after tests unless your classroom functions exceptionally well independently. You are trying to avoid questions and interruptions. You also don’t want kids to rush through the test so they can cut construction paper and use the glitter glue.

Readers: Please do me a favor and pass these tips on to teachers who are gearing up for the new year. Or anyone else who you think might benefit from a post.

My bracelet says, “JUST BREATHE.” That’s today’s tip for teachers new and old. I suggest creating a meme for yourself that you can post in the classroom. Or buy yourself an affirmation bracelet.

Depending on what you teach (or not), you might want to talk about breathing with your classroom. Deep, abdominal breaths are calming. We can all use a dose of calm every so often.

Eduhonesty: I love affirmation bracelets. They make some bracelets with sayings etched inside, too. Short phrases act as reminders. They also define you. You will never be the worse for wearing a phrase like, “LOVE MY STUDENTS” on your sleeve.