Bright Lines

In a post about parental whuspping of unruly kids, Simple Justice says

What is not at all clear is how to develop a rule for parents to understand where the line is drawn between good and responsible parenting and child abuse. Do we want to leave it up to the nearest Schandelmeier-Bartels, making the determination of whether one happens to have a zealot close at hand to call the cops any time a parent behaves in a way in which she disapproves? But then, we are also aware of many instances of serious child abuse by parents, resulting in death and disability of children that leaves us asking how this could happen without anyone intervening.

and asks

Where is the line? Both parents and children deserve to know.

I think parents and children do know. It's cops and judges who don't seem to get it.

Math students

Kitchen Table Math reports on a conflict with the local school administrators

I've just learned that the principal has faulted our Continental Math League for "widening the achievement gap."

It's been suggested that, instead of running a math club for gifted students, I instead run one for struggling students.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I tend to think that it's the school's job, not mine, to educate struggling students.

The lack of ability of our public schools to deal with students who are interested in math isn't anything new.
I wasn't much of a student in elementary school , mostly a B and C student. I didn't much excel at anything, didn't show a lot of interest in anything they had to offer. I read a lot but it was mostly comic books and adult paper back novels (I got sent to the principals office once for reading a western novel of my dad's during "free reading period" instead of picking a book from the school library).
But I was a bright kid, you just never would have guessed by looking at my school performance.
When was in the sixth grade the University of Texas (I lived in Austin) had this special summer program for gifted 6 graders that they made available to the top two students at each Austin elementary school as determined by scores on a standardized achievement test. By that criteria I was one of the ones selected from my school (Wooten Elementary). I think it was 1961.
Although my achievement test score was very high, my school principal didn't think much of my actual achievement. She didn't think I was worthy of going to that summer program. But for her to be able to offer it to her preferred selection I had to turn it down. It turns out that she just wasn't smart enough to figure out how to manipulate an uninterested 12 year old.
She called me to her office and gave me a speech about how I wasn't deserving of this program and shouldn't go. Of course I was going to go if she thought I shouldn't. Maybe she was trying to double fake me into wanting to go, but somehow I don't think so.
Of course I just confronted more stupid administration when I got there. They had a science track with math at 8:30 and biology at 10:30 or a humanities track with english at 8"30 and history at 10:30. I wanted to take math and history. But that wasn't allowed -- students had to be either science nerds or humanities dweebs -- mixed interests couldn't be tolerated.
So I signed up for the science track, went to the math class and cut the biology class, just hanging out with the beatniks just off campus during that class period.
Learning how to cut class served me well for when I started junior high that fall.

Education

While not actually a teacher, this woman is a member of the Texas Board of Education.

In a column posted on the Christian Worldview Network Web site, Dunbar wrote that a terrorist attack on America during the first six months of an Obama administration "will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny."

She also suggests Obama would seek to expand his power by declaring martial law throughout the country.

She is actually part of the process of determining education policy in the State of Texas.

The State Board of Education will begin revising public school social studies curriculum standards after adopting rules for science next year. Those standards will determine the content in new public school textbooks.

I went to grade school through a couple of years of high school in Texas and this sort of thing is really sad to see.

The criminalization of life

Now it's official. It's a felony to be a 13 year old boy.

A student at a Florida school has been arrested after authorities say he was "passing gas"

Rhetoric of Law Schools

The standard course grading system in United States colleges and universities is A, B, C, D, F. A five grade system. For most graduate and professional schools that effectively collapses into a four grade system since D and F are effectively the same (I been a student in 3 graduate schools and a faculty member in a couple others and I've never seen a grad program that will give a student credit for a course he got a D in).

Now we learn that our nations leading law schools are all deviating from the norm. Pretty edgy stuff. Tbey've established 4 and 5 point grading systems that use words instead of letters to represent grades.

Stanford’s new system — which will award grades of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit — resembles that at Yale Law School, whose four grades are honors, pass, low pass and fail. Across the bay, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law also eschews letter grades but has two levels above pass: honors and high honors.

To a lawyer, someone who has been trained to believe that meaning has no meaning, changing the name of something changes the thing itself. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare wasn't a lawyer.

“The new system includes a shared norm for the proportion of honors to be awarded in both exam and paper courses. No grading system is perfect, but the consensus is that the reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work,” wrote Stanford Law dean Larry Kramer

This stuff is just pathetic.

Althouse blogged about this.

Safe Streets

Quoting a school principle in San Francisco near the Potrero housing projects

"I get a lot of questions from parents about safety," says Rosenberg, a white man who majored in African American studies in college. "But John Yehall Chin Elementary (on Broadway) is a really good school with a lot of strip clubs around it. Do you think they get asked about safety? The fact is, people don't care so much about the environment when it does not include black people."

I've lived in San Francisco.

The reason parents ask about safety near the Potrero housing project and don't ask about it near Broadway is that it's safe to walk the streets on Broadway and it's not near the projects.

Teaching them how to put a list in rank order

Patterico has a blog post about some high school student who is being denied a diploma unless she apologizes to the school district for making an unauthorized reference to Jesus in her valedictorian speech.

The school, of course, is simply run by idiots. The student either fulfilled the requirements for a degree or she didn't. I don't think that giving an approved valedictorian speech is listed somewhere as a requirement for a degree. I think the requirements were fulfilled long before the offending speech, they owe her a degree, she doesn't owe them anything.

But after looking at it more closely, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe giving an approved valedictorian speech is requirement for a high school diploma in Denver.

Erica Corder was one of 15 valedictorians at Lewis-Palmer High School in 2006.

Fifteen. Fifteen v valedictorians? What does valedictorian mean in Denver? Does it mean student? Were there 15 students in the graduating class?

What the hell is the matter with these people?

Math geeks think they're special

Some math professors from England were running a free summer school program in mathematics in the hills of Turkey. For some reason they ran afoul of the local political types and got shut down because of some zoning violation. Then they tried teaching in tents, and that got shut down. It's hard to tell for sure but it looks like the math teachers got a little defiant with the local mayor. That's almost never a good idea.

The school shut down and the head guy is charged with a criminal violation of running an unlicensed school. They've recently reopened but the guy is still facing charges.

Math blogs all over are up in arms about this government attack on the teaching of mathematics.

I guess they think teaching math is special. Governments all over regulate all sorts of commercial activity (and teaching is a commercial activity even if you're doing it for free). A guy in Jackson MS was recently arrested for being an unlicensed auto mechanic. Where's the petition for that guy?

Criminalize life, institutionalize stupidity

In Katy, Texas a good hunk of July was spent cleaning up after the over-reaction to school officials of a 6th grade girl writing a boy's name on a wall with a marking pen. She didn't use a 4 inch brush and bucket of paint, she used a regular, ordinary writing device. Like a pencil but with permanent ink.

The initial response by the school administration was to try to charge her with a felony charge of property destruction because the pen had permanent ink.

They've since gotten a little closer to an actual sane response, but I doubt they'll ever completely reach sanity.

It's basically simply a crimeto be 12 years old in Texas. And we wonder why our prisons are all full.

The Houston Chronicle covers it here and here and here and here and here.

I'm fairly sure that if I was a student today I'd never be able to graduate from high school.

Will they need it after high school

The question How many students will need algebra after they get out of high school? is one that really irritates me.

How many will need American Literature, or Civics, or Chemistry, or Texas History, or World Geography, or any other damn course they take in high school.

What a pointless question.

Schools and silence

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has an editorial pointing fingers at some Pennsylvania school administrators who try to use their power over students withing the school setting to squelch speech outside the school that's critical of their martinet approach to doing their jobs.

Mr. Layshock mocked his Hickory High School principal by creating a fictitious and unflattering profile of him on an Internet site in December 2005. The then-high school senior's sophomoric parody, which caused no disruption in class, was created outside of school and on his grandmother's computer.

He wasn't even making fun of the school policy against drugs, he was just making fun of a pompous ass of a principal. We kow the principal is a pompous ass because

Nonetheless, the Mercer County public school system suspended him for 10 days, ordered the honors student to enroll in a program for troublesome students -- and prohibited him from attending the prom or graduation ceremony.

You'd think the people who run our schools actually have important things to do that would take up most of their days. But you'd be wrong, they don't really have anything to do except protect their own fragile egos.

When my generation was in school the same jerks ran the schools, and if you laughed at them they'd hit you with a big piece of wood. Now they suspend you.

Schools run by the asylum escapees

It appears that those running the schools in Canada are no more sane than those idiots running the Bong Hits 4 Jesus school.

God forbid that these kids might ever actually learn something in school other than if they don't bow down to authority they'll be crushed.

Lesbian art teachers in Tennesse

I just love these kinds of stories.

Headley said that Thorsby, who is in her third year of teaching art at the school, told school officials that she'd been having an inappropriate relationship with a female student.

According to Headley, Thorsby said that she and the student, who is now 18, had been in a relationship since December that began as a friendship but later turned sexual.

The crime of having a sex life

This news story is accompanied by a short news clip of two people having sex in an office. The action's all blurred over but it appears they were both fully clothed.

It's news because the man is an elementary school principle and the woman is a school teacher. That and whoever videotaped them send a DVD of it to parents of students in the school.

That's just awful, they all seem to think. They just can't allow their kids to go to a school were actual adults with actual sex lives work. The teachers involved have resigned.

No one seems to be asking who the hell made the tape and distributed it to strangers? They don't seem to care. They don't mind having that kind of person in their community. Just get rid of the adults with normal sex lives.

Another nutcase teacher

I really just don't get it