The Horn Book reviews the new Beatrix Potter movie, which stars Renee Zellweger as Miss Potter.
Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons (a book I have been meaning to read), is doing some rethinking.
Have you read the December issue of The Edge of the Forest yet?
From The Wall Street Journal Online:
The rise of digital entertainment has upended whole
industries, from Hollywood to the music business. Now it’s striking at
a touchstone of the American family: the allowance. Kids are pouring
money into things that can’t be bought with cash — music downloads,
cellphone ringtones and online videogames. JupiterResearch estimates
teenagers spent $3 billion online last year alone. In many families,
the upshot has been the demise of the weekly cash dole that parents
have long used to teach kids financial responsibility and keep them
from busting the budget.Instead, "giving the kids their allowance" now often
entails untangling a complex web of electronic transactions. It means
figuring out which sibling blew $29.99 to download Season 4 of "South
Park" on iTunes and getting someone to fess up for charging those Jay-Z
ringtones to mom’s cellphone bill. Some parents find themselves taking
on the role of bill collector and dunning their kids for reimbursement,
while others are throwing up their hands and giving up on spending
limits altogether.
Okay, this paints a picture of a world so different from mine that I hardly know where to begin. I don’t have teenagers (yet), and I don’t have kids who are into ringtones or have any clue what South Park is. The only person in this family who has paid money to download a ringtone is, ahem, the mother. (A Green Day song to ring when Scott calls me, if you’re curious.)
But come on. Come on! Really? Kids are racking up e-bills and parents feel helpless to stop them? These kids are getting credit card numbers from somewhere. Surely their parents possess enough wit to figure out how to keep the cash card numbers out of their children’s keyboarding fingers.
What I remember is September 12th. Beanie had a doctor’s appointment in Queens, so I was driving west on Long Island, staring at the distant smoke that still rose in heavy plumes where the Towers had been. They were ghost towers now, made of smoke and ash. On the way out of my neighborhood I had to pass our town’s train station. On any other weekday it would have been packed full at that time of day, but on this day it was almost deserted.
Later I learned that there were thirteen cars left in the parking lot of that train station after everyone else finally made it home on that terrible day. Thirteen cars. Thirteen dads. Thirteen holes in the hearts of families like ours.
Beanie is five and a half years old now. If her dad had been one of those thirteen drivers, she would not remember him. There would be no Wonderboy and no Rilla.
I don’t know their names, any of them, but today I am thinking about those thirteen men who parked at the station one morning just like any other, and didn’t get back in their cars at the end of the day. Those men, and their families, and those thirteen empty cars.
Edspresso has had an ongoing debate about standardized testing all week. Dana Rapp is not a fan of testing; Richard Phelps is. I’ve been following their discussion with great interest.
Says Dana Rapp:
"Before I moved to Vermont in 2002, I lived in Ohio where standardized
tests and national frameworks created environments where recess was
eliminated, teachers’ salaries were linked to test scores, children
became ill during testing, teachers’ job satisfaction waned, and,
ironically, less appeared to be learned."
And:
"Testing is a booming market where companies like McGraw-Hill and
Harcourt-Brace are reaping record profits with the sale of the
textbooks, tests, practice tests, and improvement kits.
Schooled-to-order children force-fed on scripted curriculum also
benefit big business. As testing proceeds to earlier grades, even
kindergarten, CEO’s and industrial “leaders” can rest even more assured
that future employees will not have the skills, knowledge,
dispositions, and collective consciousness to recognize and act to
change disparities of wealth, loss of jobs, lack of health care, and
corporate corruption in the organizations in which they work."
He avers that standardized testing has "dehumanized" schools and has led to an increase in "sales of anxiety, depression, and attention drugs for children."
I am none too keen on standardized tests myself. I think the need to teach to the test can suck the joy out of learning and shift a student’s experience from connecting to cramming. Not always, not across the board, but in many, many cases. And being good at taking tests doesn’t necessarily mean you are good at thinking. Or remembering, once the test is over.
Rapp’s point about testing becoming a lucrative business is one that had never occurred to me. Interesting to contemplate.
Phelps responds with a reminder that "the U.S. Constitution grants (by deference) responsibility for education to our country’s original founding entities, the states."
"State executives and legislators have the right, and the
responsibility, to determine education policy. By implementing
high-stakes testing programs, state officials are being responsive to
their constituents, who strongly favor such programs."
Really? I’m asking seriously. I’ve never seen data on that question, it occurs to me. Are most average joes really in favor of standardized testing? Is the increase in reliance on testing REALLY a response to what the constituency desires?
You, for example. Reading this blog. Are you an advocate of standardized testing? Not all of you are homeschoolers, and I’m curious to know what you think. (I can hazard a guess as to the opinion of most home educating parents, but even there I don’t presume to KNOW.)
"The fact is," says Phelps, "standardized testing programs are an expression of
democracy. If the public was strongly opposed to them, politicians
would be, too, regardless what corporate executives might want."
Hmm. I don’t know about that. I guess it depends on what "strongly opposed" means. I don’t think this is an issue that the public spends a lot of time worrying about, and unless the public starts marching in the streets ("No more tests!"), I don’t think politicians are going to pay too much attention to what the "public" thinks.
You can read the rest of the debate as it unfolds at Edspresso.
We like our internet. We like being able to get online and clickety click click wherever we like. We pay our monthly ISP fee and then click, the World Wide Web is world-wide open to us.
Some folks want to change that.
AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and other telephone and cable companies would like to be able to control the flow of information on the internet. Here’s how my hubby explains it:
The government is thinking about allowing Internet Service Providers to decide what websites you can or cannot go to, and who can or cannot send you emails. In other words, if this goes through, you may not be able to link to Left of the Dial* unless I’ve paid your specific ISP a fee. Otherwise I’ll get blackballed. Kinda like legalized payola.
* (Or, say, Spunky. Or FUN Books. Or even Google, if they haven’t paid up.)
Net Neutrality is the opposite of that scenario. Net Neutrality is what we’ve got now.
The telephone and cable companies are filling up congressional campaign coffers and hiring high-priced lobbyists. They’ve set up “Astroturf” groups like “Hands Off the Internet” to confuse the issue** and give the appearance of grassroots support.
Congress is now considering a major overhaul of the Telecommunications Act. The primary bill in the House is called the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006” and is sponsored by Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Charles Pickering (R-Miss.) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.).
The current version of the COPE Act (HR 5252) includes watered-down Net Neutrality provisions that are essentially meaningless. An amendment offered by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), which would have instituted real Net Neutrality requirements, was defeated in committee after intense industry lobbying against it.
**Case in point: the ad in my sidebar. What it calls the truth isn’t really.
We mustn’t ignore this issue. You can read more about it here and here.
Tags: net neutrality
Remember that board of trustees that scratched a bunch of books from a to-purchase list drawn up by a team of parents and teachers?
Turns out the trustees hadn’t read the books they axed.
“When it came time to say which were acceptable and which ones weren’t, they picked a bloc of books that had Clifford and Disney, that they really had no problem with, but they were in the same group that they did have concerns about,” trustee Maurice Kunkel said.
Now that is something that really, really gets my goat: people who make judgments about books without having read them—that is, judgments that affect whether other people can or will read the books in question. Obviously, we all make private judgments every time we decide whether to read or not to read a particular book. But those who make public judgments, those affecting policy decisions or reader opinion, have a responsibility to make informed decisions.
Camille has more. So does Becky.
(I do still see a difference between not buying and banning. But this board of trustees had no business overriding parent/teacher choices without even troubling themselves to read the books in question.)
Tags: children’s literature, kidlit, children’s books, books, banned books
Julie Snyder, a homeschool graduate, was 21 years old when she painted this beautiful portrait of Pope John Paul II last year. Last week, the painting accompanied a Monstrance that had been blessed by the Pope on an “Adoration for Vocations” pilgrimage to parishes, schools, and religious communities in the Boston area. Julie, who is now an art student at a Massachusetts college, completed the portrait last April, shortly after the Pope’s death.
Talent runs in Julie’s family: she is the sister of Emily Snyder, author of Niamh and the Hermit
Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home education, John Paul II
As a followup to my post about a school board’s decision to remove certain titles from an elementary school’s to-purchase list, here are some links worth looking at:
Becky of Farm School has thoughts both humorous and insightful about the issue. I too have considered this issue from the Charlotte Mason anti-twaddle angle…it seems to me that the school library could find a far better use for its money than Disney’s Christmas Storybook. (Becky’s suggestion, for example: much better choice.)
Roger Sutton, the editor in chief of The Horn Book, offered some fascinating behind-the-scenes information about library purchasing. (Scroll down to the comments section.) I’d like to learn more about the ALA Bill of Rights, especially in regard to how it applies to public school libraries.
The original news report about the matter gave the impression that parents were equally upset over the removal of twaddly titles and books featuring what the trustees deemed “bad role models.” Mr. Sutton’s concern is over the latter. “NOT purchasing a book ‘because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval,’ ” he writes, “is just as much censorship as removing a book for those same reasons later.”
I’d love to hear from more readers about this.
From EdWonk:
“If you’re looking for news about the Iraq War and the conflict in Afghanistan, then this is the website for you.”*
EdWonk also has a most interesting collection of posts on education (from all sorts of schoolers—public, private, home, you name it) at this week’s Carnival of Education.
*Looks like that link is no longer live. Here’s an alternate site for Iraq War statistics.
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