Good morning!
Obviously, yesterday’s PSAE day gave me too much time to get stuff
together to send you:
Remember “Is Making Us Stupid?” published in the Atlantic a
couple years ago? They’ve just published
“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by
Stephen Marche. It’s free online: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/ It’s
not short, but it would be an interesting thing to look at with kids about how
the author spins together narrative and research. The author’s weaving of an macabre
introductory narrative through the essay is pretty cool – it’s about an ex porn
star who dies with her computer on and isn’t found in her apartment for days.
This morning on NPR was a short piece about “Poem in your pocket day” (which is
Thursday, but at HC, according to the signs hung around school, Friday). One cool idea from the program – a high
school teacher from Oklahoma says that he’s having kids write poems in sidewalk
chalk in the courtyard of his school so all kids read them during lunch. http://www.npr.org/2012/04/25/151339990/celebrating-poem-in-your-pocket-day
Sibyl passed the hard copy of NCTE’s policy brief entitled “Evaluating English/Language Arts Teachers”
to me. This reads a good corrective to
all the news about “value added research” that we’ve been reading. If you have only 3 minutes, check out the “Dimensions
of Teacher Quality” on the third page.
Not to brag, but our CPPs have it pretty much right. http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CC/0213-mar2012/CC0213Brief.pdf
Heather sent me this USA Today article yesterday about “essay grading machines.” “Study: Machine scoring of essays shows
promise” http://usat.ly/IklU8s Here’s an interesting bit:
Jeff Pence, an English teacher at Dean Rusk Middle School in Canton, Ga., uses computer-aided scoring for his 120-plus students, since hand-grading just one set of writing drafts "with any sense of thoroughness" could take two weeks. The computer takes about three seconds to deliver feedback. So far, each of his students this year has completed more than 25 essays. … He understands the limits of computer grading but says that teachers have limits too. "I know, as does every teacher out there, that on that 63rd essay, I am nowhere near as consistent, accurate or thorough as I was on the first three."
(Here’s another take on these grading machines (which is
not a euphemism for “English teacher”) that Jan Bujan sent me. It’s a blog post that’s linked to the
original studies: )
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