Number 2 Pencil

Next, on CourtTV - Naked Children Caught on Tape!

Parents, get your naked little vandals under control!

Have you ever had the dream where you're at school....naked? Three 10-year-old boys in Bryan County did go to a school naked and it was all caught on tape. KTEN's Chelsea Hover got the scoop on the Durant Middle School break-in....that has a strange twist, and severe penalties.

Three elementary school students managed to wiggle under a fence and find an unlocked door at Durant Middle School the day after school got out for Christmas break. If you watch the video link, you'll see some of the surveillance tape recorded by the school's cameras...

Once inside, they stayed...for five hours! At first they try to shield their faces from the cameras but eventually they let loose. The video shows them running down the halls, entering classrooms, trying on football pads and helmets, getting in lockers, and even eating a snack in the cafeteria! At one point, two of the boys stripped down and ran down the hallways naked, even though they seemed to be aware of the cameras.

Of all the places I would have chosen, as a kid, to break into and run wild, "school" would not have been one of them. And as funny as this story seems, the $4000 worth of damage they caused by whacking the newly-refinished gym floor with baseball bats may not seem hilarious to restitution-paying parents.

Dancing and eating for free

Yet another argument for having, as Dave and I plan to, a really small wedding:

As Tovah Choudhury leafs through an album of photos from her wedding last summer, she recalls the friends and relatives at her reception streaming onto the dance floor of Atlanta's InterContinental Hotel -- all familiar faces. Then she comes to the image of a blonde in a sundress and a gray-haired man in a tuxedo and remembers how they danced and the woman laughed and whispered into the man's ear.

And who might they be? Ms. Choudhury hasn't the faintest idea. The pair were wedding crashers -- the bane of a bride's parents, who traditionally foot the bills for the reception and aren't in the mood to subsidize freeloaders. But Ms. Choudhury sees it another way: "I was kind of proud our wedding was such a happening place" that it attracted uninvited guests, she says -- hence the photo of the phonies that now has a place in her wedding album.

Large, unguarded social gatherings have tempted the uninvited for centuries. But, like it or loathe it, the practice of freeloading at nuptial celebrations seems to be on the increase, thanks, at least in part, to "Wedding Crashers," the Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn comedy that hit movie theaters in July.

I'm with the Farker who planned to have attack dogs in attendence at his reception, with each invited guest having brought a dirty sock for the dog to sniff and keep on file.

Raising money by doffing their clothes

Go ahead and take those clothes off, Timmy. It's for a good cause:

TEVENSON, Wash. -- A high school fund raiser in Stevenson is raising more than just money. The student calendar is raising some eyebrows. Nestled between the Tylenol and wrap bags at the local supermarket is one of Stevenson's fastest selling products.

"Some of the pictures in there are pretty explicit," one mom said.

It's the Stevenson High School boys' calendar, a fund raiser for the senior's drug-and-alcohol-free, end-of-the-school-year party. "We've gotten a big mix of feedback. The majority of it has been positive. People think it's hilarious, it's funny and it's cool," Mr. December, Jon Medler, said. Most of the boys in the calendar have been friends since they were in kindergarten. Last year they came up with the idea for the calendar, then they put it together with the help of one of their moms.

"They're good kids. They all have good grades. They do a lot of community projects," Mr. May's mom, Robin Aman, said. The students had 200 of the calendars printed, and at $15 a piece, almost every single one of them has been sold.

It's hard to tell how "explicit" any of the photos actually are. For all the controversy, the comments of the naysayers get little coverage (pun intended) in the article.

Please, you don't have to tell me - I know

I appreciate that my readership seems to have wandered back - I figured I lost everyone after my bouts of no-bloggage this winter.

But I still have to say that it sucks, on the day that I first got back to the gym after the Christmas gluttony, to see that I am once again upgraded to a "large mammal" in the TTLB Ecosystem.

Can't they rephrase that?

Update: Unbelievable. Now Trader Joe's is carrying Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzels. And Pecan Caramel Chocolate Pretzels. Is everyone against me?

All the psychometrics you need

Chett at ReformK12 just pointed me to a nifty online list of psychometric resources - The Statistics Resources for the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. I'd recommend the books on IRT, except that I haven't read them - I'm old school and rely on the classic Hambleton & Swaminathan IRT bible. I actually rely on a lot of "bibles" that aren't listed here, like Educational Measurement and Psychometric Theory. A tad ironic that I mainly read these old books, since I'm the book review editor for a measurement journal, but oh well.

I also would be remiss if I did not mention the IRT software packages BILOG and *cough*my-advisor-created-this*cough* MULTILOG. Even I can't claim they're easy to use - unless you're fluent in FORTRAN, and a frightening percentage of psychometricians are - but I see them get a lot of use in testing organizations.

Giving it the "new" college try

College admission officers just want the balloons, videotapes, and toddler photos to stop:

Forget transcripts and neatly completed paperwork when it comes to prestigious schools or state college programs that are difficult to get into. One student wrapped his University of Notre Dame application in a leprechaun made of balloons. Another sent Indiana University photographs of herself as a toddler in a crimson cheerleading skirt to show a lifelong passion for all things Hoosier. Others include resumes, videotaped pleas for acceptance and newspaper clippings of high school highlights.

Most of the frills are unwanted, but college admissions officials report a surge of them in this year's applications. More than 50,000 will reach Indiana colleges and universities this year, many arriving before the year ends Saturday...

More extreme efforts could backfire. Just ask Notre Dame recruiters about the leprechaun balloons and the hundreds of unnecessary resumes, digital-video discs and homemade brochures they open in a year. "Is that a good way to get our attention? No," said Daniel Saracino, who runs Notre Dame's undergraduate admissions office. "You realize there must be something wrong with this applicant, because he's trying to wow us with something we don't need. The best way to get our attention is with an application that's compelling."

One admission officer notes his favorite example, "the student who not only sent everything about himself, but included details about his siblings, apparently to show he was from 'good stock'." I don't think that matters in college - not even for the agriculture majors.

The busy kids

It seems a bit odd to see "standout" students with full schedules complaining about too much homework:

...when Norton, Mass., Middle School officials eliminated two study halls each week, three seventh-grade girls decided they had had enough. erryn Camara, Lynsey Kearns and Audra Schlehuber gathered more than 150 signatures on a petition to restore the study halls, which were scaled back to fulfill state requirements on classroom time..."I know two classes a week doesn't seem like a lot, but a lot of kids are staying up until midnight on their homework," Kearns said. "We don't have enough time to get it all done."

Complaints about homework are a time-honored tradition, but today's protests may be more than idle grumbling. With teachers and schools under increasing pressure to cover more topics and raise standardized test scores, even young students at many suburban schools are saddled with a heavy load of nightly assignments, teachers and parents say.

The complaints seem to be about the loss of family time together, with students complaining that all the time from dinner to 10 pm is homework. But what about before dinner?

Parents have greeted the trend with a resounding chorus of complaints, saying the hours spent on homework are detracting from normal family life. Students are sacrificing sleep to finish work sheets and projects -- and robbing families of what little relaxation time together they have, they say.

The three Norton seventh-graders -- bright, articulate girls described by their principal as standout students -- bounce from activity to activity after school, then study for about two hours each evening, more if they have a test or a project due the next day. "As soon as I finish dinner, I have to start my homework," said Kearns, who goes to basketball practice and theater classes after school. "That takes me till about 10 p.m., and I go right to bed. What ever happened to relaxing?"

Ah. I see (emphasis mine). Spending a couple hours a day on basketball and theater class - that, they understand. That time spent away from family is apparently fine with everyone, and only the time spent on homework is sticking in the parental craws. This seems odd, and I wonder how many parents out there would be willing to tell their younger kids to pick just one activity, and leave the rest of the time for schoolwork.

School principal fears Christmas

Okay...um, er - what?

Some parents are scratching their heads after school administrators insisted students call a Christmas tree a "magical tree," the color red was removed from green and red elf hats, and songs from "Jesus Christ Superstar," were pulled from a winter concerts.

"I can see a religious holiday being offensive to those who don’t celebrate it," said Dale Fingar, whose sixth-grade son brought home 10 red and green elf hats Monday and requested she replace the red fabric with white. "But red and green hats? Come on."

Handfuls of parents said they were upset with the administration’s handling of "a couple" of complaints from parents who were offended by Christian religious themes in the middle school’s holiday programming. Sixth-graders were scheduled to perform portions of several songs from the musical "Jesus Christ Superstar," in the holiday concert today. Last week, Middle School Principal Joanne Senier-LaBarre wrote parents a letter explaining those songs had been cut from the performance.

"The philosophy of the middle school is one of acceptance for cultural and religious diversity. The study of Jesus Christ, Superstar was approached from a strictly musical perspective," Senier-LaBarre wrote. "However, in retrospect, we understand that some members of our school family are uncomfortable with what they feel is a musical work that has religious ties. After much discussion, we have decided not to include the rock opera in our performance," the letter continued.

I fail to see how respecting religious diversity requires that we remove references to a religious holiday. This isn't respecting religion, but denying it. One parent makes a very good point:

Paul Danehy was perturbed yesterday morning after leaving his third-grader’s holiday concert at Memorial School. Instead of "We Wish you a Merry Christmas," the students sang, "We Wish you a Swinging Holiday"...He said he was "sent into orbit" after learning students were encouraged to call a Christmas tree a magical tree.

"I know what a menorah is," Danehy said. "I’m not calling it a candleholder."

This story is so over the top that I'm wondering if it's for real.

Just one word - plastics

*Sigh.*

I can't say that I know what it feels like to have a "special" child, but I know what it's like to have a "special" cat. Pippin is very sweet and loving and fun, but, bless his heart, he's not the brightest light in the chandelier.

This morning he tried to get at the wrapper from a small piece of cheese - he's obsessed with chewing on plastic and thin cords - and I put it out of his reach, so I thought, on the counter.

Next thing I know he's upstairs with me, huge dreadlocks of drool hanging from his mouth, with a trail of thick saliva from the counter downstairs to the bathroom upstairs. Oh yeah, he ate the plastic, and it's irritating his digestive system, as plastic tends to do. I called the vet, who wondered why Pippin ignored the tasty cheese and ate the plastic instead.

Doc, that would be because he's special.

Good thing I can work from home on my laptop.

*Sigh.*

Update: Of course he's fine now. I'm just the one who's freaked out.

A free ride, but not for everyone

Jay Tea at Wizbang! notes that Massachusetts is in a bit of a pickle when it comes financial aid and illegal immigrants:

Massachusetts...[gives]...free schooling to children up through high school, and admit them to colleges without restraint. They also offer college scholarships to students who score the best on the MCAS test, the state-wide assessment exams all students have to take.

That policy -- a truly laudable one -- ran into a problem recently, when Lt. Governor Kerry Murphy Healey attended a high school ceremony and personally handed out certificates to 148 seniors recognizing their achievements and offering them the scholarships. The complication was that four of those students are illegal aliens -- and federal law forbids granting any financial aid to illegal aliens...

What caused this little embarassment is simple. Massachusetts schools are forbidden from inquiring about students' immigration status (the polite way of saying "are you here legally or illegally?"), and the officials who process the scholarships simply couldn't ask -- they just picked the top scorers and passed them along.

Critiquing the tests

Jay Mathews reviews Gerald Bracey's new book, Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered:

As a popular writer and speaker, with regular columns in two monthly education magazines, the Phi Delta Kappan and Principal Leadership, and acidic annual reports on the condition of public education, Bracey has been exposing statistics abuse for years. But I have never seen him put together all that he knows as well as he has in this book...

Here is a good example of the Bracey passion for clarity. He is addressing the difficult concept of correlation, a key to many misunderstandings of educational statistics and to most bad education stories, including some written by me:

"We can correlate any two variables. Whether or not the resulting correlation makes sense is another question. Before everyone started wearing jeans, the Dow Jones stock market index correlated with skirt length. Shorter skirts were associated with good economic times and a rising market. Longer skirts were correlated with recessions. To the best of my knowledge, no one suggested raising hemlines as a means to boost the stock market. Similarly, there is a correlation between arm length and shirtsleeve length. Given ONLY a correlation coefficient, though, it makes as much sense to think that increasing sleeve length will make arms grow longer as it does to think that longer arms will mean longer sleeves. In this case other information could be adduced to assist in determining which way the causal relationship would operate"...

Bracey is a prolific and aggressive critic of No Child Left Behind and the rising use of standardized tests to assess schools and students, but he is too careful an analyst to embrace the most popular alternatives to testing without also giving them the third degree. One favorite of the anti-testing movement, portfolios (samples of student work), is seen by Bracey has just another idea with problems. So you have a nice big portfolio envelope, Bracey says. What do you put in it? "Typical work or the best work?" Bracey asks. "Who decides what is best? Teacher or student?" What do you do, he asks, when teachers disagree about the quality of the work?

All excellent points. Sounds like a good read to me.

His best suggestion is adding courses in what he calls "consumer-oriented probability and statistics" to our curriculums.

Hey, he stole my idea! I always thought a statistics course would go over quite well in high school, if it were retitled to be, "Bulls**t Detection 101."

Putting music education to the test

The tweetles, trills, blats, waa-waas, and crashes of Florida's band students may soon be measurable via a standardized exam:

It won't resonate as loudly as the FCAT, but Florida schoolchildren could soon face a new test of how well they're learning music. The test is being developed by two statewide groups of music teachers who see it as a way of reinforcing the importance of music in a well-rounded education and measuring how well it is being taught around Florida.

"Music educators are accountable every time their students step up on the stage, but they felt they needed a more formal way (to measure their learning)," said Timothy Brophy, a University of Florida assistant professor of music education, in a telephone interview from Gainesville...

The first phase of the music tests could begin in fourth and eighth grades as soon as 2007 if all goes as planned. It will consist of a paper-and-pencil test in which pupils respond to a series of questions recorded on a compact disc, including musical passages.

Brophy said the next two phases of the testing program are expected to include actual musical performances that would be recorded and compared with a standard for the appropriate grade level.

Tests for music students in other parts of the country should be modified to conform to local standards and tastes. For example, band geeks in South Dakota should be tested on their awareness of just how seductive the saxophone can be.

Inputs vs. outputs

Reg Weaver, the head of the nation's largest teachers' union, rails against the current focus on "output":

On Monday, Weaver balked at focusing on students’ standardized test results. “In many instances they want us all to focus on outputs,” he said. “An output is nothing more than a test score, and as long as they get us focused on a test score, then they cause the public and many legislators not to deal with the inputs.”

“Inputs,” he said include not only class size and adequate funding but qualified and certified teachers, safe and orderly schools and state-of-the-art technology.

Is the public really not interested in inputs? Or have they had it with inputs, like state-of-the-art technology and fancy teaching programs, that might be pricey but haven't been shown to be related to those important outputs? I don't think any parent would not want a school to be more safe and orderly, but they might balk at laptops for all if the school still doesn't teach kids how to read.

Weaver [also] offered general advice. “We can begin to introduce legislation that talks about closing the loopholes,” he said and added that corporate tax relief totals billions of dollars in lost income in some states. “We can begin to make sure that Arkansas school districts have what they need... if these children are going to be able to be successful. And let me tell you that if in fact the achievement gaps that exist here are going to be closed, it is not going to be done with charter schools, and it is not going to be done with pay for performance.”

Why not? Certainly, merit pay for teachers who do well could certainly be considered an important "input." And if a parent decides to pull their kids out of the public system and enroll them in a charter school, my guess is they're thinking about a lot of inputs, like discipline and safety and class size and textbooks.

A confession by any other name...

You know, I'm all for teenagers having blogs and online journals, even when they're using their freedom of speech to criticize their schools, or say things that school administrators might not like.

But dude, if you're going to exercise your constitutionally-protected freedom of speech online, you'd best be able to deal with the legal consequences:

Blake Ranking was a Eustis High School senior and still aching from a horrible crash three days earlier when he posted those words on blurty.com, a site for Web logs.

"It was me who caused it. I turned the wheel. I turned the wheel that sent us off the road, into the concrete drain . . .," he wrote as his best friend, Jason Coker, 17, lay in a coma at Orlando Regional Medical Center. "How can I be fine when everyone else is so messed up?" Coker never awoke from the crash Oct. 3, 2004. He died Jan. 11.

Although Ranking later retracted his words -- deleting them from the blog and penning an explanation -- they came back to haunt him, forcing him Monday to plead guilty to DUI manslaughter.

Savoring the small victories

Special education teacher Chris Jetzer struggles with those who need the most help:

...the short, blue-eyed, blond-haired boy looks disappointed as he leaves his classmates to join Jetzer for math. The child sucks his index finger and twirls himself past a row of lockers as he walks down the hall...Despite the 7-year-old's cherubic appearance, he is a "flight risk," Jetzer says. The child has transferred out of two schools, threatened to kill people and started fires. The boy once told Jetzer he wanted to kick him in the groin, but in the next breath talked about chickens.

The child has severe learning disabilities in speech and language and also has an emotional behavioral disability. He is one of seven students Jetzer is responsible for as a first- and second-grade special education teacher at Jerstad-Agerholm Elementary in Racine.

Jetzer, 26, is in his first year in a challenging profession - one in which a third of teachers nationwide leave within the first five years. In Wisconsin, more than twice the number of special education teachers transferred to general education positions than vice versa in 2002-'03...

Jetzer is especially concerned these days about a first-grade girl who accidentally wet herself four days in a row earlier in the year. She is severely learning disabled and lives with her mother, who works a second-shift job...

Jetzer gives the girl as much individual attention as possible. When the girl works independently, Jetzer checks on her to ensure she's not daydreaming. He laments the child's greatest challenge - retention of material.

"If she can learn the alphabet by the end of the year, I'd be happy," he says. But amid the challenges and setbacks, there are gains. His reading students now can decode words such as fall, king and together. Three months ago, they could read only short words such as he, she and the.

God bless him. I sure couldn't do this job.

A diversity puzzle in Boston

Once again, a removal of race-based quotes results in a dip in "diversity":

...inside the accelerated classes at the Hennigan and other public schools in the city, the pipeline to exam schools is starting to look a lot less like Boston's public schools. Black and Hispanic students fill 44 percent of the 968 seats in the accelerated classes in the school district, though they make up more than three-quarters of Boston's students overall. White and Asian students now occupy 55 percent of the seats, though they are only 23 percent of the district.

In particular, the number of black students, now at 239, in the classes has dropped by half since 1999, when the city stopped using racial quotas to assign students to the classes...

''It's not a true picture of what the city is," said Costa, who presides over a majority white and Asian fourth-grade accelerated class in a school that is 85 percent black and Hispanic. ''You can't tell me that all black children aren't capable of achieving like white children. I wouldn't buy that."

No one is saying they aren't capable of achieving. The standardized test score is simply telling you that they aren't achieving, at least not in the numbers Costa would like to see. For some reason, everyone wants to now put the accelerated program under a microscope, instead of asking two simple questions:

1. Does performance on the standardized entrance exam seem to be predictive of whether one will benefit from accelerated learning?
2. If so, then why are black and Hispanic students not scoring well on the exam?

If the test is actually not useful, then other methods should be used. But if the test seems to be useful, the problem is not necessarily with the program or the test. One part of the puzzle might be the attitude that black and Hispanic students can't be expected to do well on objective measures of achievement, and require special set-asides to ensure that they make it to accelerated classes.

Pushing students who don't want to learn

An exasperated Florida teacher takes her students to task in a Sun-Sentinel opinion piece:

...what is most interesting under the No Child Left Behind Act is this tidbit about accountability: "No Child Left Behind holds schools and school districts accountable for results. Schools are responsible for making sure your child is learning." Schools are responsible, yet it seems low-performing schools have fewer and fewer resources to help promote learning gains.

As a teacher, I think the goal of increasing student achievement has much merit. However, we good teachers beat our heads against walls day-in, day-out trying to get our students to grasp not just the standards and benchmarks, but also the importance of reinforcing their education with homework and reading. When I tell students they have to do independent reading, they groan. I actually had an advanced student, when told the School Board expected students to read a new book every two weeks, ask, "Don't they think we have lives?"

The more important word in the phrase "student achievement" is "student." Until the students take responsibility for their own learning, test scores will not improve....

I don't think I would have been able to get away with the "Don't you think I have a life?!" argument in high school.

I'm sensing a link between this teacher's aggravation and this parent's downplaying of the importance of science:

With the single goal of boosting standardized test results, a third year of science will now be required for all incoming freshmen (Class of 2010) at Paso Robles High School. This is the latest action in a continuing trend to force students into academic courses regardless of ability, strengths or interests. While added courses can be a good thing, this change comes at the expense of electives and vocational programs. Many parents and teachers feel that such a reduction of electives will have a negative impact on all students.

All students need a curriculum rich in sensory opportunities, with a chance to do, play and move, and opportunities to learn teamwork, discipline, leadership and hands-on skills. There is not a test score out there that measures this kind of learning, but watching our performing arts students, I, for one, know success when I see it!

...student enrollment in courses such as art, drama, music, life skills, social studies and vocational programs will drop considerably with this change. Inevitably, Paso Robles schools will begin to lose their very qualified and dedicated teachers as well.

Let me get this straight - the entire school is going to go down the tubes just because now students will have to take earth sciences, biology, and chemistry? Are you kidding me? Has it really been announced that all the elective courses are now cancelled because one more science course is required? And has it also been announced that the work in the additional science course is utterly contrary to discipline, hands-on learning, teamwork, and all the other concepts this author believes are important?

Visual and Performing Arts classes are beneficial to high-schoolers - but so is science. I'm failing to understand why, at this high school of all high schools, the two are considered to be in opposition to one another.

Reform K-12 is back from the void

After months of inactivity from teacher and edublogger Chett (which he claims are NOT due to drunken, wasted hours lying on the beach in Key West, but I have my doubts), Reform K-12 is now active again. Stop by and drop him a line.

Public Schooling vs. "Unschooling"

A fascinating viewpoint on "unschooling" in the Canadian system can be found in today's The Tyee. The article opens with a thick layer of anti-public-school attitude from the mother of a little genius:

Bashu Naimi-Roy is a smart kid...At age 12, Bashu was the youngest student ever to enroll at Malaspina University-College. He's 13 now and still studying there...

"...His mother has never been afraid to think, and act, outside of society's imposed norms. None of her three sons were enrolled in elementary or high school, being educated instead by Roy and her husband. "I believe in education," she says, "I don't believe in schooling"...

Roy and her sons are part of a growing community of what they call "unschoolers": parents and students who feel that the pedantic structures of the public school system are stifling kids by starving them of creativity and passion.

Unschooling, also known as "independent learning" or "experience-based learning," differs from conventional homeschooling, where a student will generally follow a set curriculum, which is often based directly on the public school system's program. Instead, unschooling students are encouraged to find the path that works best for them, and empowers them to choose their own intellectual destinies...

Public school students "are told when to be creative, and when to be excited about something," Roy says. "[Teachers] say, 'Now you have to be excited about the ABCs,' and an hour later, 'now you have to be excited about the color red.' What happens if the kid's not? Or what if at nine o'clock she is excited about the color red, and not what the teacher wants her to be? It's always their agenda, and that kills the creativity. The message the kids get is 'your creativity isn't as important as our schedule.'"

Roy says that creativity, above almost all else, is vital to our growth as humans.

Whew! What parents like Roy never seem to notice is that very few kids would actually do well in such an unstructured environment. Do hers? Great! - then give her the option to homeschool, or open a charter school, or spend her vouchers on alternative schools. But I always find myself scratching my head when critics of the public school system say the problem is that the system is too tough, that the environment is too regimented, that the problem is that students shouldn't be expected to be able to learn on anyone's schedules except their own.

Based on what I've heard, the problem is students who don't seem willing to learn at all, who don't have any rules at home and don't expect any at school, who are unfamiliar with the concept of valueing education, or whose parents don't really give a damn (or expect everyone to dance to the child's wishes). Those types of kids aren't going to make it in the real world unless someone helps them focus their intellect and understand that you can't always do what you what when you want.

The wonders of unstructured learning are all well and good for the Bashus of the world - assuming he does at some point learn that other people's agendas matter as well - but for those kids who aren't like that, it's easy to see that what works best is a system which encourages creativity while stifling the undisciplined behavior and thought processes that are problematic in the real world.

Be sure to read all the comments, too.

Update: In the comments, Liz notes:

Yes, it would be nice if I was always excited about exercise, but the discipline (desire for extrinsic reward and to avoid extrinsic punishment) carries me through on those mornings that I'm just not at all intrinsically interested in exercise! Either way, I'm exercising, which gives me more of a chance to learn to love exercise than if I sit around trying to find the motivation first!

That's a very good point. The idea that creativity is stifled when children learn on an external agenda is making the assumption that children do not benefit at all when taught that way. But as with exercise, when the action depends on the state of the motivation, the action probably won't get done.

Another analogy is the concept of good deeds in the Jewish religion (which I studied for two years, but if I get this wrong, please correct me). What's better, to feel charitable or be charitable? From what I recall, the Jewish religion teaches that a man who regularly gives money, regardless of whether he feels charitable towards mankind in his heart, does more good for the world than a man who has to wait until he feels like giving money before doing so. There is no need for the feeling to predate the action; the action is what matters in the end.

Likewise, the kid who learns that math and science and writing are important for him to learn whether or not he feels motivated to learn them may experience a great benefit when he grows up and understands the importance of such knowledge. The very smart little kids might understand all this earlier, but I bet the majority need a push.

The self-packing gift

New from Avon, special for this Christmas season - cats!

This particular model is disgruntled, grumpy, demanding, pissy, ornery, jealous, and possessed of a sense of entitlement that would do Paris Hilton proud, yet is able to switch to cute-and-sweet mode in a flash if crunchy treats are involved. Order now for shipping by December 25th.

Caught red-handed (and red-furred)!

Brit kits Tigger, Thomas and Max help police catch a burglar by doing what they do best - lying around the house shedding, the better to cover all possible surfaces in cat hair:

Gary Sutcliffe clambered through a window at a house he hoped to rob, but fled after being confronted by the owner. He was arrested after a police pursuit in which he drove without headlights through several red lights.

Sutcliffe denied any involvement in the burglary. But he was trapped by the tabby trio of law enforcers who produced all the evidence needed for detectives to pounce. Using DNA technology, police were able to place Sutcliffe at the scene of the break-in because fur from the three cats was found on his clothes.

What 43-year-old Sutcliffe had not known was that the window he had forced open served as the daytime cat-flap, so fur was all over it when he clambered in.

Left unmentioned - walking in through the front door, or touching any other surface in the household, would have left him just as furred. Cats make sure of that.

Look out, the literacy rates are falling!

Not a good sign:

The average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read.

The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.

When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills.

Reason? Well, here's one that seems rather bizarre to me:

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.

"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.

Perhaps...but isn't the process of gaining a college degree meant to offset this? Isn't Whitehurst suggesting here that what college students do in their spare time is more predictive of their literacy than what they do in the classroom? If people who surf the web and watch TV a lot have low literacy rates regardless of whether they have a college degree, then...something's wrong with a college education these days.

The entire report is here. Subjects included only those who spoke English or Spanish. For a 2-year degree, 24% have basic or below basic skills in reading prose; for high-school graduates, 52% fall into these lower two categories. Not impressive.

And the fact that there are small but non-zero percentages of people with graduate experience or degrees that fall into the below-basic literacy categories, which according to this rubric means that they would not be capable of "using a television guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time," is just bizarre.

Big changes in Norway

There's only one way in Norway, at least in the education world:

The government minister in charge of education, Øystein Djupedal, told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) on Tuesday that no new applications for private schools would be evaluated. He said the government will also reverse earlier preliminary approval for new private schools, meaning they won't be allowed to open.

Djupedal's initiative will block the opening of as many as 150 new private schools in Norway.

What's wrong with private schools? Well, those schools might want test their students, and Djupedal is having none of that:

Minister of Knowledge Øystein Djupedal announced Thursday that there would be no national exams for grades 1-9 this year. "The job of creating better tests is in progress," Djupedal told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK).

The minister has yet to decide if tenth graders - the final year of obligatory schooling - and videregående schools roughly equivalent to high schools or sixth forms, will have to take new national exams next autumn.

I'd love to hear what that criticism was. Were the tests really so bad that that only option was cancelling them? Or were these tests the only determinant of grades that students receive each year, as with Norway's college grading system? Or is this an indication of a growing anti-testing opinion, promises about new and improved tests notwithstanding?

(Hat tip: Mark S.)

Skipping along

Hey, Devoted Readers, I need some advice.

A friend of mine has a lovely and precocious daughter in kindergarten, who is very smart in reading and math, is extroverted, loves school, and is both taller and slightly older than the other kids in her class. She's used to hanging out with her older sister's friends, who are in fourth grade. The public school at which she is due to start first grade next year has recommended to my friend that she be allowed to skip it altogether and start in second grade.

My friend wants to weigh all the options before making such a huge decision. I'd love any links, books, people, advice, etc on this topic that you guys can supply - either email me or put them in the comments section. Personal anecdotes are welcome as well.

Mandatory in Maine?

Anybody other than me find it interesting that, as more and more small colleges are dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission, students may find themselves required to take the test in high school anyway?

The [Maine] Department of Education is pushing ahead with a plan to have all 11th-graders take the SAT on April 1, despite objections from some educators and legislators, who say the standardized test usually required only of college-bound students may not work for everybody.

“It’s one more time where the Department of Education has done a ‘ready, fire, aim,'” said Jay Readinger, new Wiscasset Superintendent of Schools, who used to work in the department. Schools are being told “here’s what we're going to do. Now let’s sort out the details,” he said.

“The SAT is a valid test for what it does, which is predict a student’s ability to do college work,” Readinger said. “We in the schools still have serious questions about whether it is closely enough aligned with Maine Learning Results to determine how well we’re teaching to those standards.”

Those serious questions should be taken, well, seriously. If the test isn't aligned with the standards, it won't be a very good replacement for an MEA. And, as with others quoted in the article, it's not clear to me that forcing a student to take the SAT will push them to apply to college, if they were not already going to do so.

Doing things differently but aiming for the same target

A US teacher visiting Japan notes that we're heading in opposite directions, but towards the same goals:

[Sarah] Folzenlogen and 200 other American teachers spent three weeks in Japan as part of the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund Teacher Program. They examined the country's education system and compared it to ones in the United States...

One of the issues Folzenlogen learned about was Japan's desire to move away from standardized testing and more toward creative thinking. "They have a test students take in the ninth grade to determine what high school they will attend," she said. "They're trying to get away from test-based knowledge to innovation and problem solving."

Students oftentimes spend several hours after school reading and memorizing information. They all strive to do well on their high school entrance exam. This exam will determine where they attend high school and later college.

Although Japan ranks highly in the world for factual knowledge, it is falling behind in critical thinking and originality. Kevin Lydy, a teacher at the academy, said the focus on group welfare may impede individual critical success. "Over here in the U.S. it's me, me, me," he said. "There it's more about the group. It's a matter of finding students who are creative, not afraid to give their responses."

This country now is trying to target standardized testing through No Child Left Behind to improve its base knowledge. "We're two countries with the same goal going in opposite directions," said Lydy.

Flexing the rules

Schools have been awaiting the newly-flexible guidelines on testing disabled students:

The Department of Education this week plans to release proposed regulations on testing flexibility for certain students with disabilities, which will guide states in the lengthy process of developing new assessments. In April, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that 2 percent of students in special education who have “persistent academic disabilities” could be tested with alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards. Since then, states were given the opportunity to use some short-term measures to adjust their test scores for students with disabilities for the 2004-05 school year.

The goal of the flexibility policy is to accommodate students who can work toward grade-level standards, but cannot do so at the same speed as their peers, even with the best instruction. And the result of the flexibility, for some states, is that more of their students who are in special education will be deemed proficient under the No Child Left Behind law’s standards.

From Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's speech at Guilford Elementary School today:

As you know, No Child Left Behind already allows students with the most significant cognitive disabilities—about 1 percent of all students—to take alternate assessments. Further research suggests that an additional 2 percent of students should be assessed with modified standards. These are students who can achieve high standards but may not reach grade level in the same time frame as their peers, even with the best instruction.

Last spring, I announced the Department would work with states to help them establish more appropriate assessments for these students...Today, we are taking the next step forward by releasing proposed regulations on how states can implement this new policy long term. These regulations provide guidance on how states can identify these students and modify grade-level standards for them. We have published the proposed regulations in the Federal Register, and I want to invite you all to comment on them. We want your input.

Those amended regulations are here. States may now be able to "define modified achievement standards for some students with disabilities," in acknowledgment of the fact that "while all children can learn challenging content, certain students, because of their disability, may not be able to achieve grade-level proficiency within the same time-frame as other students, even after receiving the best-designed instructional interventions..."

Is some bullying worse than others?

The Texas state school board has withdrawn from a national organization over disputes about how to handle bullying and homophobia in schools:

In a 10-5 party-line vote Nov. 18, the elected Republican-controlled board dropped the state’s membership in the National Association of State Boards of Education, or NASBE. The decision was prompted in part because one of the Texas board members said the group had run a conference that included discussions of policies at odds with the board majority’s views on how to address bullying of students because of their sexual orientation.

“I disagreed with the whole framework of discussion,” Terri Leo, the board member who recommended that the state pull out of NASBE, said last week in describing the October symposium. She said some speakers had advocated policies prohibiting the bullying of particular groups of students, including gays and lesbians, not just overall bans on mistreatment of fellow students.

“They’re pushing for hate-crimes-type legislation through bullying policy,” said Ms. Leo, who believes that such an approach unfairly establishes special protections for gay students.

The fact that her fellow Republicans all supported her motion to leave the national group, while all the board’s Democrats opposed it, is an “indication of the partisan direction that NASBE is going,” Ms. Leo said in a telephone interview...

At the Oct. 12-13 symposium in Phoenix sponsored by NASBE, Ms. Leo said, speakers argued that bullying policies should specify homosexuals as students who need to be protected from harassment and suggested that those who bully gay students should receive more-serious punishments than those who bully other students.

“Bullying is wrong, period,” Ms. Leo said. “All victims should be dealt with the same—compassionately—and all bullies should be treated equally.”

I wondered how long it would take the "hate crime" debate to reach into schools.

An outrageous event goes unnoticed

Oh sure, kids will be kids. But any school in which kids can get away with this in class should be shut down.

Three First Coast students are facing criminal charges after a teacher says they were involved in oral sex in the classroom. Christopher Lemay, 18, is accused of paying a 16-year-old-girl to perform the act on another boy at Sandalwood High. Those two are under-age, so First Coast News is not releasing their identities.

Sandalwood administrators say the act happened under a table in a large class full of students, so the teacher had limited visibility.

You'd have to get up early in the morning to build a classroom so large and crowded that a teacher would not be able to notice something like THAT going on.

A review of Our School

I've just finished reading Joanne Jacobs' Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and The School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2005). Joanne (who also hosts the book's site here) should require no introduction to Devoted Readers of N2P; those of you who have been here since the beginning know that I consider her my blogmother (the part about her grandfather inventing Whoppers candy; that, you may not know). Without her trailblazing edublog, her thoughtful advice, and her generous and helpful nature, Number 2 Pencil would have never existed.

So on to her tale, four years in the making (in more than one sense of the phrase)...

The book details the efforts of two San Jose teachers, Greg Lippman and Jennifer Andaluz, who were struck by, and devoted to, an absolutely crazy idea. Specifically, that it would be possible to create a charter school that was so innovative, tough, supportive and phenomenal that poverty-stricken and shortchanged students from bad neighborhoods who graduated from that school could and would receive a guarantee that they'd be qualified for a four-year college or university.

Their craziness can be quantified. It hardly seems possible for the odds to have been any more against these two. You want statistics? Joanne's got them, right in the first chapter, and they are ugly: "Hispanic and black students in the twelfth grade read and compute at the same levels as white students in the eighth grade." "Among native-born Californians ages 25 to 29, 13 percent of Hispanics...and 62 percent of Asians have a college degree." "Of every 100 Hispanic students entering kindergarten...fewer than 10 obtain a bachelor's degree."

Finally, "Only 12 percent of Hispanic students and 14 percent of blacks who start ninth grade will graduate in four years with the course work and grades required for admission to California's public four-year universities."

And here Lippman and Andaluz were promising that 100% would be prepared? This magic could be worked by two young (yes, I feel old) firebrands? Jennifer Andaluz was a 27-year-old teacher who'd worked as a waitress to pay for college, while 30-year-old Greg Lippman went to Princeton and ended up with Andaluz at Gunderson High School, where teachers spent time hashing out mission statements while the students who needed the most help were barely noticed.

They quit their jobs, set up office in a Starbucks, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and grants, got the charter granted by the local school board, hired teachers sight unseen from as far away as NYC, and set up classrooms across two donated sets of rooms (a church and the Y) that were 8 blocks apart. They barely got the weeds pulled from out front of the church building before Downtown College Prep opened on August 30, 2000. The first freshmen class was 83% Hispanic. Half the students were not fluent in English; most students were reading at the sixth-grade level.

Were Lippman and Andaluz nuts?

If so, the world needs more of that brand of insanity. Joanne's book follows the first four years in the development of DCP along with the first incoming freshman class (she was there not only as an observer and reporter, but also tutored along the way). Did the school keep its promise? I won't keep you in suspense (the book provides enough of that when the DCP staff realizes just how unskilled their incoming freshmen are). Every student who graduated in the first class of DCP was not only qualified for, but accepted to, a four-year school.

How did they do it?

"Progressive" educators should not read further unless smelling salts are at hand. Enough "protofascism" (one critic's words) exists in DCP's academic and disciplinary policies to make a touchy-feely educator faint dead away. There is no pretense of the students being at the same level of the teachers, and no condescending sugarcoating of the intensity of the work. Homework is assigned in every class, every day. Students who are still learning English aren't immune from academic probation. English students who haven't done their homework must march "the walk of shame" to update their homework charts in the front of the classrooms. No 11th-grader earns promotion to their senior year without having the GPA and test scores indicating they're eligible for Cal State (for which scholarship funds were raised).

Hoodies are confiscated; rough language is cause for a discipline referral; any student caught with drugs or alcohol is expelled (three strikes applies only in baseball - at DCP, only two referrals are necessary for a disciplinary meeting). One girl gets pregnant her first year; she is allowed to return, but is not allowed to bring the baby on campus for other girls to fuss over, and never mind free daycare. One teacher proudly displays a card, written by a student, that says, "Our teacher makes us suffer." In another classroom hangs an old WWI poster, aflame with images of crashed warplanes: "Consider the Possible Consequences If You Are Careless In Your Work."

Their policy on standardized tests? You have to ask?

Unlike many educators, Lippman and Andaluz spend no time complaining about standardized tests. They know they will be judged on measurable results by their sponsor, San Jose Unified, and by their donors. DCP started behind but it catching up...DCP jumped to a 731 on California's Academic Performance index (API) in 2005, exceeding the state average for high schools; compared to high school with similar demographcs, DCP is rated a perfect 10...

Passing the state graduation exam is not a hurdle for DCP students, who beat the state average. DCP's class of 2006 had the second highest pass rate in San Jose Unified.

It should also come as no surprise to you that mixed in with these high standard and tough sanctions were a tremendous amount of love, acceptance, and determination from Andaluz, Lippman, and every other staff member at DCP. Teachers scored the incessant homework, hiked between buildings with students, called parents when students were late or rowdy, and adhered to the same fashion and behavior standards as their charges.

Everyone, teachers and students alike, learned to turn disadvantages into possibilities for triumph. One ninth-grader's classroom misreading of the line, "ride the carousel" as "ride the carrot salad" inspired the unofficial school motto. "Riding the carrot salad" meant struggling through the unknown and conquering the seemingly-impossible. Another student made the school's bright orange "Loaner" shirt his personal, stylish trademark. When there were too many students and teachers to fit on the shuttle bus between campuses, the entire assembly walked the distance - making sure to pass the San Jose State campus on the way.

It's true that of the 102 freshman accepted the first year, only 54 graduated in four years, with two more expected to graduate the next year; the remainder transferred, moved, or were expelled. But San Jose Unified's average four-year graduation rate for Hispanic students in 1999 was only 55%, and SJU wasn't guaranteeing the results that DCP not only promised, but delivered.

The book is more than an inspiring tale of two dedicated teachers (and a raft of other crazy people devoted to the same ideals) who worked magic on their students, some of whom were entering high school with elementary-school level reading and math skills. It’s also a phenomenal and concise summary of the charter school movement in the United States. There's even a handy "How To Start A Charter School" chapter in the back. And believe me, after reading this book, you'll want to do so. I hope this book's true purpose is to convince truly progressive education reformers to reject the current system and strike out with new charter schools, because that's what it's sure to cause.

Oh, and the student whose English was so poor that he read the "carrot salad" line so wrong? After taking AP and honors classes, he was headed to Cal State Monterey Bay after graduation.

The problems for boys

A USA Today editorial asks the provacative question: Boys lag behind - Does anyone care?

Maryland educators opened their latest test results recently and discovered their 10th-grade boys lagging far behind girls in literacy skills. The same thing happened in Kentucky, Vermont and Washington. Teachers and parents can tell you that in elementary school, girls are more facile learners. But gender differences are assumed to level out over the years and clear up by high school.

That's not happening...It gets worse. Boys are twice as likely to land in special education and far more likely to be held back a grade and drop out. At many public universities and some private colleges, barely 40% of the students are male.

Oddly, educators, researchers and philanthropists agree there's no serious effort to figure out why this is happening and what can be done. Other priorities prevail...

Yes, they certainly do, to the extent that some critics today continue to repeat the tired canard that tests and schools are inherently short-changing girls. Even though who have changed their tune and are no longer claiming this are very reluctant to propose that special attention be given to boys - witness the insistence, in the face of contrary data, that the same teaching methods that help girls excel must also help boys excel.

It's very odd, indeed, that the current data is not being taken seriously especially given that this problem wasn't exactly uncovered yesterday.

And if educators and administrators seem unwilling to deal with the fact that boys are falling behind academically, I wonder how willing they'll be to deal with these types of problems within their schools:

Many Hillsborough County middle and high school students lead double lives - one for their parents and one for their peers.

In a districtwide survey, nearly half of high school students and one in five middle school students said they have had sexual intercourse, and a higher percentage of high school boys than girls reported being physically hurt by their "significant others."

Emphasis mine. The survey's past results are here. Kudos goes to the first school district who tackles these problems by admitting that both boys and girls can be abusive, and ensuring that victims of either sex should be unafraid to reach out for help. Then again, if this article is anything to go by, administrators who are unfraid to acknowledge and tackle female violence may find themselves under attack.

: Sometimes the differences seem bizarre:

Faced with students' declining scores in mathematics, Bozeman High School [MT]is strengthening its math program while the school board considers whether to make an additional year of math study a graduation requirement.

Bozeman High will add a remedial math class, increase teacher training and make attendance at a drop-in math lab a requirement for struggling students, instead of an option, Principal Godfrey Saunders told the board...

At Chief Joseph Middle School, 58 percent of eighth-grade boys who took a standardized test showed proficiency in math, down from 76 percent in the previous testing cycle. Girls held steady, at 77.

Emphasis mine. Good grief, what a drop (though a middle school in Montana might have a small enough population that only a couple of boys could make a huge impact; I can't download the software to check here)

An awfully big testing boo-boo in Ohio

People who criticize exit exams on the basis of the potential for error unfortunately have a point:

A testing company faces a fine after it mistakenly failed hundreds of students on Ohio's new graduation test, state education officials said Monday.

Measurement Inc. graded 1,599 tests and failed 890 students after accidentally converting raw test data to passing and failing grades, the state Education Department said. The error was made on tests given last summer to students entering their junior and senior years, as well as students who were in 12th grade last year but haven't graduated.

Whether the test was the only thing keeping any students from graduating -- and whether anyone might have wrongly been sent back to school this fall -- wasn't immediately clear.

The scores have since been corrected; the state and the company planned to notify 272 school districts this week whose students were affected. The corrected test scores still were not enough to pass for 543 students.

So let's do the math here. 1599 students across two grades. Most exit exams, though given to 11th- and 12th-graders, are set at a level below that. Thus, one would hope that the pass rate on such an exam would be around 70-80%, at least.

Measurement Inc comes up with a pass rate of only 45%. Even given how much we bemoan the current state of public school affairs, that's astonishingly low. The true rate - if we assume the corrected scores to reflect reality - is more like 66%, which is not great, but it does include a variety of school districts and seniors who hadn't managed to graduate yet.

Someone should have caught this - specifically, Measurement Inc. should have. From the description given here, it sounds like raw scores were directly scaled onto the final score scale, and the equating was left out. That's a pretty damn big part to leave out. What's more, the horrendous 55% fail rate for a group of juniors and seniors should have been a major red flag. There's no way that equating was done properly if that were the case, not unless the state of Ohio had recently changed to using much harder test items, or just happened to not require students to actually show up for class last year.

I would not care to defend exit exams to someone who's been disadvantaged by this. When we attempt to convince the public that these tests can be advantageous in pointing out the importance of basic skills and the need for schools to teach them, we have to be willing to guarantee that we, the psychometricians, are not going to screw up on our basic equating and scoring skills. Errors like this are perhaps not unexpected as we gear up for The 21st Century aka The Century of Testing Anyone Who Moves, but errors like this are still unacceptable.

A Homegrown - and homeschooled - genius

Michelle Malkin has dubbed Michael Viscardi the "Westinghouse Wunderkind." It turns out he's also a homeschooled wizkid:

A 16-year-old California boy won a premier high school science competition Monday for his innovative approach to an old math problem that could help in the design of airplane wings. Michael Viscardi, a senior from San Diego, won a $100,000 college scholarship, the top individual prize in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

Viscardi said he's been homeschooled since fifth grade, although he does take math classes at the University of California at San Diego three days a week. His father is a software engineer and his mother, who stays at home, has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, he said.

This TimeForKids quote amuses me:

Viscardi has been home schooled since fifth grade. He takes math classes at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) three days a week. The college level classes paid off! Viscardi worked on his winning math theorem for about six months with a UCSD professor. His father is a software engineer and his mother has a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

So, a year or two of college math "pays off" - but nothing about the seven years of homeschooling? Heh.

Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!

Be sure to join the politically-incorrect brigades watching A Charlie Brown Christmas tonight at 8 pm on ABC:

It's been forty years since A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted on network television, instantly becoming one of the most popular holiday specials of all time. Written by Charles M. Schulz, with Bill Melendez directing and Lee Mendelson as Executive Producer, the show won an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program, despite initial concerns about the show's leisurely pace, jazz soundtrack, religious theme, and use of children's voices. In December 2005, A Charlie Brown Christmas was named "Best Christmas Special," by TV Guide.

InfoPlease notes that:

Even Schulz admitted that he was probably the only person who could have gotten A Charlie Brown Christmas made. Television executives hated it from the start.

It was criticized as being too religious—Linus quotes straight from the King James Bible (Luke 2:8-14). It was criticized for featuring contemporary jazz, an offbeat choice for a cartoon. It was criticized for not having a laugh track. It was criticized for using the voices of real children (except for Snoopy, who was voiced by animator Melendez).

But it was an instant hit with viewers and reviewers alike.

I'm sure the Llama Butchers aren't the only ones with tears in their eyes when Linus finishes his speech.

Update: Great article from 2000 - the year Charles Schulz died - here. Hugh Hewitt's site also has a recent article by Mary Katharine Ham, who notes, "Thank goodness Shulz made it in 1965. That baby would be a Veggie Tales straight-to-video these days."

Joanne's book has arrived!

Recieved in the mail today: A copy of Joanne Jacobs' Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds. I had hoped to have a review up by today, but Wednesday is more likely.

March of the Mummy Cats

Ew. Ew. Ew.

The Egyptians have King Tut, the Incas have ice maidens and one Cache Valley school now, officially, has joined them with its own preserved artifact. Students at the Cache Valley Learning Center, a private school in Logan that moved to a new location this fall, voted Tuesday for the school's first mascot: a Mummycat.

The idea didn't just come from nowhere. A real, naturally mummified cat sits on a shelf in the 116-year-old building's basement, just a few feet from where it was found in a dark crawl space. About 3 feet long, the cat appears to have died while on its back, looking upward and stretched out. While parts of it seemed to have decayed, others are completely intact, including its whiskers and ears.

Of the 78 students who voted at the K-8 school, 35 students wanted to be the Mummycats. A wolverine and raven came in second and third in the mascot poll.

Middle-schoolers have the grossest sense of humor. On the other hand, perhaps the school administrator should run with this, and have anthropologists and Egyptologists come in to teach more about the specifics of mummification. I doubt that'll be covered on the state standardized exam, but what the heck.

Christmas Shopping Guide # 1

Doctors Foster and Smith's Cozy Cushion for Cats.

Cozy Cushion works like an electric blanket without the electricity! Your cat will snuggle warmly on this faux fur, double-thick thermal cushion. Patterned on the front, coordinating solid fabric on the back, with a core layer of thermo-reflective material that uses your cat's own body heat to warm the entire cushion - no cords or electricity costs! Soon to become your cat's favorite snuggle spot. When soiled, you can throw the entire cushion into the washer. Please specify Tan Leopard or Gray Leopard. Cushion measures 18" x 22".

Price: $19.99. Endorsed by: Pippin.

Update: "Ha ha ha ha!!! The cushion is now mine!"

I'd like to thank the (Freshmen) Academy

Rock Island High School (IL) announces the end of social promotions:

The Rock Island-Milan school district's Parent Advisory Committee met Wednesday to further discuss what parents want incoming freshmen to get from the federally-funded Smaller Learning Community, or Freshman Academy...

Under the SLC’s plan, next year's ninth graders will receive extra academic, social and motivational support from teachers; lessons that will address different learning styles and cultures; and be identified early for pre-advanced placement and honors classes, or the opposite -- for needing extra help in reading and math.

Former Rocky principal Nate Anderson, who is heading up the SLC, told parents Wednesday he is "not a proponent" of social promotion. Along with that ideal is the token phrase being used to catapult the SLC: "failure is not an option."

More of the principal's mess