The Science of Cooking

Response to: "At Harvard, the Kitchen as Lab" by KENNETH CHANG
Published: October 19, 2010. The New York Times online.

I am loving the New York Times education page! I will move off of it soon, but I have missed quite a few blog entries and need to catch up, so some of them should be just for fun.

This article is about a Harvard professor who has created a class in food science. I have totally had this idea before! I like cooking, but more than cooking I like the idea of cooking and the process of discovering the properties of food. I actually just picked up a book called The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy by Pim Techamuanvivit. The more I learn about cooking the more I realize how many chemical and physical properties are made manifest through the process.

In terms of education, I think that this article demonstrates how good creative teaching can excite students and make accessible subjects like physics and chemistry that are typically very daunting. I have always said that if I were to teach at Hogwarts I would want to teach a class like this or botany through planting things or the science of burning things - all activities I enjoy. I truly believe that bringing the kinds of intellectual curiosity and freedom offered at the university level down to the level of K-12 would help to make students love school more as well as to inspire and attract a different caliber of teachers. I had a conversation with my physical therapist, who is an avid news follower hailing from England. An older gentleman, he described a time and place in which "there were Oxford and Cambridge graduates teaching eight-year-olds". Perhaps if the classroom environment were more academic we could attract more academic minds.

HCZ revisited

Response to "Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Problems" by By SHARON OTTERMAN. New York Times online. Published: October 12, 2010

Continuing my (and the media's) interest in the Harlem children's zone, this article actually demonstrates what I believe is seriously difficult about pursuing any educational reform. Policy analysts, academics and the media are extremely quick to criticize new ideas. I mean, it is what we are trained to do. In this case, the schools are criticized for not having produced extreme advances in learning. Additionally, there is discussion of the Brookings Institute paper suggesting that there is no conclusive proof that the social policy elements are tied to the advancements in student learning.

"But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them." (Otteram). With this quotation, we come back to what always seems to be the central issue in policy circles: the ever central question of whether money matters, and if so how is most widely spent. I would argue that while money is what allows Canada to undertake this project on the massive scale he is working with, the focus at this stage should be less on what he is spending and more on the model he is testing.

It seems that the Brookings Institute report is not so much trying to argue that the social interventions are unnecessary, but that the funding for scaling them up should perhaps not come out of the federal budget for education. I think that is a valid point. However, if it does appear over time that shoring up the institutions around the school make learning within the school easier, the government will need to work harder to change those factors and relieve some of the burden on schools in struggling neighborhoods. This of course is one of the soapboxes upon which I currently stand.

My opinion of the critique on Canada is that Canada should simply ignore it and persevere in this social experiment. Only by trying these things over the medium and long-term will we be able to push the debate along.

Race to the Top win means $400 million for Ga. Â | ajc.com

Race to the Top win means $400 million for Ga.  | ajc.com

At another date, I will read and post on the actual Georgia race to the top application, but for today I will focus on this article summarizing it. It appears that a good portion old George is focus will be on improving and rewarding teacher effectiveness. as far as I'm concerned, this is a good sign. Both because teachers have such immense impacts on student learning and because having a more specific focus of boys what most. Take me in the discussion surrounding education policy: the millions and millions of conjectured people have for what will be the silver bullet.

Some of the usual conflicts are hinted at in the article: the issue of using standardized tests as the sole measure of teacher and student performance, the tendency of policymakers to leave teachers out of the process of reform, and the political issue of under whose jurisdiction education should fall. I have forced myself to take somewhat of a stance on these issues. It is my opinion that in order to ensure that students have some equality in terms of educational outcome, there has to be some accountability across the board, i.e. at the federal level. The federal government rightfully has some role in setting standards that states should live up to. following from this, national testing in and of itself is not wrong. this tendency of hours to increase and increase the importance of standardized testing is ridiculous, just one of many examples of humankind's imperfect ability to implement concepts, in this case he validation needs some agreement as to what she learns throughout the nation that there should be some way to measure what is learned.

As for the tendency to not include teachers in policy efforts surrounding educational reform, a colleague of mine when I was a graduate student at the University of Texas and I collaborated on a piece entitled " talking past each other" which addressed the disconnect between legislators, bureaucrats, and teachers. comedian. Is a really tricky issue, and both illuminates and underlies the marginalization of teachers in American society is. We complain about the quality of teachers, yet do not treat them us professionals or experts concerning the field in which they practice. We do not pay them well or respect them enough to include them in policy decisions.

Without increasing respect for teachers among lawmakers and the media, respect among the general public will continue to suffer and it will remain difficult to attract the best and brightest in large numbers.

fist, stick, knife, gun

I am currently reading fist, stick, knife, gun by Geoffrey Canada, the famous founder of the Harlem Children's Zone. HCZ has been the news a lot lately, especially in the past few weeks after having apparently received accolades in the film Waiting for Superman. The book does not focus on HCC but rather is a personal history of Canada's experience with violence as a child and in his work as an educator.

I have only completed about half of the book, so this is not meant to be a review per se, the just my first gut reaction to the contents of the work.

It is sad.

Having recently become a mother, I think I am even more sensitive than usual to stories or instances in which the innocence of children is corrupted. To be witness to the purity, trust and utter vulnerability of a baby; to feel the responsibility of protecting a child from the sometimes ugliness of the world - they even talk about this in baby books - makes it seem so much sadder that there are people out there who would harm other people. Canada speaks of his mother in the early part of the book, but describes how as a young man in a tough neighborhood one must very early on turn to his peers for acceptance and guidance.

I, like most Americans, everywhere of the violence that occurs particularly in the inner-city. I, like many "middle-class" African-Americans, have ambiguous feelings about the great extent to which the children involved in and subjected to violence are minorities. in my reflections on educational reform, I am often tempted to push aside the issue of violence. in I feel as though I don't understand people who wants to harm other people; I just don't want to deal with it. I don't think that schools are really the place to deal with these issues; they are issues that society as a whole must resolve. yet society is not dealing with them, so the institutions that are the sites for violence are left to contend with them when they are not necessarily equipped to do so.

This is what appeals to me about the Harlem children's zone - the attempt to holistically address the culture that creates violence and low academic achievement. I am curious to see where fist stick knife gun ends up - the distance left to be covered between the reflection and the creation of HCZ.

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

I chose to write about this press release as I’m working for SREB as a consultant in their work with the national Board for professional teaching standards (NBPTS). NBPTS is in the process of developing and field testing a national principal certification program similar to their very successful national teaching certification.

The notion of providing a national standard for teachers is appealing as a way of standardizing teaching quality without penalizing teachers. It rewards those who wish to go out of their way to improve their practice and hopefully in the future might make it easier for teachers to move from state to state without encountering the barriers of state licensure. This issue is somewhat dear to my heart; in the moving from Texas to Georgia I had to jump through a few hoops in order to get even a provisional license.

From their initial research on the principal licensure, it appears that NBPTS create assessment with the goal of encouraging participants to reflect on their practices and incorporate best practices as much as possible.

It is interesting that so many states have’s mentioned the certification in their proposals for Race to the Top funds, and it will be interesting to continue to follow the results of the implementation.

“Proof” Against Need for Small Schools

This is in response to NY Times article “4,100 Students Prove ‘Small is Better’ Rule Wrong” (Sam Dillon, 9/27/2010). I have decided not to make this blog about bashing the media for misrepresenting/overstating educational issues or research. That said, while I know that in journalism exceptions are more interesting than the rule, I think it slightly disingenuous to use 1 (or 14 as is really the case in the article) to suggest that proponents of smaller schools are wrong.

The article references a study conducted by Ronald F. Ferguson,“How High Schools Become Exemplary.” I think that the most important point mentioned in the article (from Ferguson’s study) is that in each of the exemplary schools studied, “Achievement rose when leadership teams focused thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction.” To me, this seems the essence of any ed reform, and the particular circumstances of a school will mold the solutions that will bring it to excellence.

Kicking off Project Ed 365

This is the launch of a 365-day project in blogging around issues in educational policy and reform. The objective from a personal standpoint is to increase my own immersion in the educational debate and to track my own reactions to that debate. Each day I will read an article, post it or a piece of it, and/or share the link to the article and a brief response to the content and comments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/education/01math.html?_r=1

The first article I have chosen is from NY Times Education news, about “Singapore Math,” a reform in mathematics education based – you guessed it – upon the method of teaching math in Singapore. As a former student at a Science & Tech magnet and math teacher at the middle school level (although only trained and certified in science, but that is a whole different topic) I know that quality math education is very hard to come by. I basically taught myself BC Calculus because my calc teacher was sub-par at best. For that matter, my Algebra II/Trig teacher and Pre-Calculus teachers were not particularly diligent or competent either. As a teacher, I did my best with my students, but felt very much constrained by the amount of material to be covered and the wildly divergent strengths my students brought to the classroom.

One of the commentators mentions that in Singapore Math, the progression in instruction moves from concrete to pictorial to abstract and that American math curricula often skip the middle step. I found that very interesting, as the problem I faced and still sometimes face on a much more complex level as a learner and the problem I encountered with my students was almost always in the leap from concrete to abstract. That and of course the amount of time one has to “master”any topic.

Bringing it back to policy, which I intend always to do, the national outcry over American students’ lag in math understanding really requires in-depth investigation rather than jumping from fad to fad. I believe that every educator would recommend paring down the curriculum and focusing on: 1.) higher-order skills rather than memorization; 2.) application to real-world situations and 3.) greater attention to individual learning styles and paces. The real question is how to accomplish that on a widespread basis.