“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” ― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Monday Morning Mental Mix is a collection of articles I stumbled across during the preceding week, not necessarily articles written or published in the past seven days. It will generally be an eclectic collection of items that made it into my Diigo feed or onto Instapaper. If you have any great articles to share, please feel free to send them my way. Eric Alterman...
It makes sense that an Orwellian proposal would involve some delightful double speak to accompany it. As Whitefish High School considers a proposal to conduct drug tests on all students involved in extra-curricular activities, the proposal’s defenders don’t want you to get the wrong idea: it’s not a violation of rights, it’s an opportunity: On...
Roy Brown says he wants to adequately fund Montana schools…sometime. Not, of course, when he served in the Legislature, nor when his Party adopted an extremist agenda about education during the last Legislative session, nor during a time of large surpluses in state budgets. In fact, rather than advocate for more school funding, he and his running mate suggested...
Not all of my students intend to go to college. Many of them believe that college would be a waste of time and money, hope to work in fields that do not require an advanced degree, or simply don’t enjoy education. These students would (and have) told me that high schools should not be so focused on preparing people for college. Many teachers and guidance...
Last week, in a post about education and poverty, I took a pretty critical look at Ruby Payne, a popular, if misguided, advocate for ‘middle class values’–whatever those are. It turns out that I’m not alone in my criticism. Lee Enterprise’s Jodi Rave offered a critical look in the Gazette today: And while middle-class educators tend to...
There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times magazine this morning, discussing a variety of strategies to deal with the difficulty of educating students from the lowest economic brackets. The strategies discussed in the article range from the answer Mississippi has adopted (lowering standards to claim that all students are proficient) to...
In the climate of No Child Left Behind and bitter recriminations about the failure of public schools, Richard Whitmire offers a critical look at one of the largest issues facing school: the gender achievement gap. The statistics he cites from the Department of Education are sobering: Nearly every chart told the same story. Boys are over 50 percent more likely than...
Dan Seligman, who seems to delight in pathologizing the poor, writes in a new piece for Forbes.com that attempting to close the gap in achievement between disadvantaged and middle/upper class kids is is a waste of time, because it’s impossible to achieve. He writes: It is not possible to close the achievement gap. The mission statement is a summons to a...
“Gifted advocate” Susan Goodkin has an interesting, if flawed, criticism of No Child Left Behind in the Washington Post: that it damages the prospects of “our most capable children.” Essentially, Goodkin argues that NCLB forces districts and schools to become so obsessed with improving the scores of low-achieving students that they neglect...