the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
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Using Music to Close the Academic Gap - Lori Miller Kase - The Atlantic - 73 views
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Research demonstrates that music doesn't help as such. The same effect can be got from any discipline where practice and persistence are important. The musical component can be duplicated with explicit phonemic instruction in a short time. You would be better off drawing because it is the only non-academic that has a direct academic relationship - with geometry. The evidence for that has to do with the above, plus junction recognition and visualization. The only thing I didn't touch on is openness to new experience which has a strong correlation to measured intelligence. That's a component of the arts in general. -
I'm aware of the studies and also of the garbage science like the "Mozart Effect." While they don't support the correlation, they are also not definitive. This appears to be a valid study and it is working. Whether the reasons are because they learn practice and persistence or something else is irrelevant, a correlation still exists. Maybe it's just that music is fun and the way we learn music--practice, reflect, refine, repeat--is a good model for learning in general. It's certainly better than standardized tests. Personally, I don't feel a need to justify music's existence by its value to other subjects. It represents some of humanity's greatest achievements. That should be enough.
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Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 119 views
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Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
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What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
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Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
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some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
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First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
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Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
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inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks
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Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.
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In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
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At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
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if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
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The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges
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first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training
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Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
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But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
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We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
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education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
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teachers don't use them.
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Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
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these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.
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These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
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constant juggling act
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greater collaboration among teachers.
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But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?
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professional development is a massive undertaking.
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Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
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The first challenge is the cost.
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measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
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When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
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Motivating the Child with Attention Deficit Disorder - 3 views
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live very much in the present. Therefore, long-term goals and rewards (e.g., grades and report cards) are often ineffective motivators.
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basically two time frames — now and not now.
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This Now/Not Now worldview causes great frustration for the child, his teachers, and his parents, and must be seriously considered when designing activities and approaches for motivating the child with ADD.
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respond more positively to a curriculum that allows him choices and options. He will also be more likely to participate actively in tasks when there is a degree of creativity and novelty
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the presentation should be creative, colorful, multimodal, and enjoyable.
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pervasive and complex disorder that impacts nearly all of the child's activities and interactions.
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The child's impulsivity ("Ready, fire, aim!") can present serious safety concerns; his distractibility makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to understand and follow instructions; his memory difficulties make even rote learning troublesome; his executive processing problems (ability to plan and prioritize) present great challenges when he attempts to plan simple daily activities; his organizational deficiencies cause him tremendous problems with homework, household tasks, and long-term projects.
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two most important words when dealing with these special children: "support" and "challenge."
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The adult should continually challenge the child by presenting him with activities designed to improve his behavior and his learning, while simultaneously providing him with the support that he requires to meet these goals. Support without challenge is meaningless. Challenge without support is equally ineffective.
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Among the specific teaching strategies that may foster the child's motivation are:
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Good description of the limitations they have and how it affects them in school.
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Big Ideas - Exploring the Essential Questions of Education - 46 views
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here are at least three very good reasons, particularly for educators, to ask enduring questions. However, I will first define what I mean by an enduring question. What makes a question enduring is its transcendent quality.
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However, I will first define what I mean by an enduring question. What makes a question enduring is its transcendent quality. That is, a question that continues to be asked again and again, despite ages and sages. It is a really profound question that goes beyond human comprehension, but if not asked, would detract from our humanity. Enduring questions are ones that challenge the greatest minds and intrigue the simplest ones (i.e. children).
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We should ask enduring questions because they lead to thoughtful, soul searching reflection about great ideas.
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Enduring questions make life and learning engaging and interesting
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Enduring questions lead to more questions.
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The Teenage Brain: Spock Vs. Captain Kirk : NPR Ed : NPR - 64 views
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an adolescent's weakness is other adolescents
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prefrontal cortex is our voice of reason
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Kirk needs Spock.
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shared by Sharin Tebo on 02 Jul 15
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Making the Most Out of Teacher Collaboration | Edutopia - 42 views
www.edutopia.org/...oration-strategies-ben-johnson
SDW PLC teacher collaboration teachers teacher collaboration Professional Development professionallearning
shared by Sharin Tebo on 02 Jul 15
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Collaboration
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collaborate
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effective teacher collaboration
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the attitude of professional privacy is not conducive to professional development
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Build relationships Observe the best Ask questions Share Come prepared
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preparation sparks much deeper conversation, more complete answers and better solutions. For informal collaborations, before I attempted to try out any new idea, I would ask one of my esteemed colleagues what they thought of it. In terms of assessments, the easiest way to improve the validity of the assessment is to have a colleague or group of colleagues review it.
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develop a list of "how to" and "why for" questions regarding student data, instruction, discipline, etc.
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bring my list of questions pertinent to the agenda in order to pick the groups' collective brain for answers.
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one of the reasons that schools do not improve as fast as we would like them to is that when teachers get together for a purpose, rarely has research been done by the teachers, neither have ideas been mapped out prior to the meeting.
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teachers, when it comes to their performance in the classroom, tend to stick to themselves.
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Personal Steps to Effective Collaboration
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Collaboration: Build relationships, observe the best, ask questions, share, come prepared
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The Teaching and Learning Foundations of MOOCs - 24 views
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The pedagogical benefits of these characteristics of MOOCs translated into: the effectiveness of online learning, retrieval learning, mastery learning, enhanced learning through peer and self-assessment, enhanced attention and focus due to “chunking” content into small packages and finally peer assistance, or out-of-band learning.
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When it comes to peer and self-assessment, there is general agreement that it is an effective means of marking. Assignments that are peer or self-assessed agree closely to those marked by instructors and tutors.
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Overall, the evidence is that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs provide any less a valid learning experience than face-to-face courses. In many ways, they are simply a restatement of online learning environments which are optimised for large class sizes and modes of learning suited to todays digital milieu. When used for students enrolled in a university degree, they are usually combined with on-campus learning opportunities in a “flipped-classroom” style of presentation which brings the advantages of both environments.
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What is exciting about the MOOC environment is that it will provide a rich opportunity to gather data that will tell us what does and doesn’t work and how students learn most effectively in as engaging an environment as can be provided. This will almost certainly mean that the current MOOC format will evolve rapidly over time as it is driven by this research supported by real data.
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MOOC research - pedagogical notions, and scientific outcomes regarding the effectiveness of MOOCs
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shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Occupy Your Brain - 111 views
schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy
education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect
shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Ant Heald liked it
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One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
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Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
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In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
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We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
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And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
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by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
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We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
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A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
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The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
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Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
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If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
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The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
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the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
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This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning.
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If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
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We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
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Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
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But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
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Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
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You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
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if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
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They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
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And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
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They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
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As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
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They must occupy their brains.
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Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012). -
This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
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shared by trisha_poole on 03 Jun 11
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Using ePortfolios as a reflective teaching tool - Case study | LTTO Episodes | COFA Onl... - 131 views
online.cofa.unsw.edu.au/...ltto-episodes
eportfolios teaching teachingtools teaching&learning learningdesign fbl flexiblelearning phd
shared by trisha_poole on 03 Jun 11
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Tried to search for an ePortfolio platform for some time now..... sadly, can't fond one that's catered to University students. Anyone know of a good one? e.g. Open platform (web accessible? able to store Google docs) and not proprietary. -
Kevin - have you looked at Myportfolio? It uses an Open source software engine (Mahara) and the web-based option gives you a free account with 100 student accounts to try it out, but the annual subscription rates are very reasonable, as well you can install your own instance of Mahara on a Linux server and run it in-house if you wish.
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Comparisons of Online Versus Traditional Education Miss The Point | The EvoLLLution - 21 views
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One reason educators search for alternative education modalities is to provide access venues to overcome student challenges. For many students, online is the only modality by which they are able to attend college or continue with a college education. But it’s by no means a panacea.
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FILLING THE TOOL BOX - 158 views
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As one of the primary goals of education is to develop autonomous but interdependent thinkers, students deserve frequent opportunities to shape and direct classroom inquiry. To fuel this inquiry, it is also essential that we validate the importance of curiosity in the process of learning. While curiosity may have killed the cat, there is no reason for us to kill curiosity
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Critical to all of these activities, however, is some kind of guided practice in how to think through such questions.
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" Most of the strategies described below have been developed and tested by teachers in Princeton, Madison and elsewhere. They are offered as practical, effective activities that help shift the focus of classrooms from teacher orchestrated mastery and memory of information to student processing of information to create understanding and improve problem-solving." -
Some great ways to stop killing curiosity and stimulate questioning in science and technology. An oldie but a goodie.
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Which is better -- reading in print or on-screen? - 12 views
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In a review of educational research published by SAGE Journals in July, Singer and University of Maryland professor Patricia Alexander discovered that readers may not comprehend complex or lengthy material as well when they view it digitally as when they read it on paper. While they concluded with a call for more research, the pair wrote, “It is fair to say that reading digitally is part and parcel of living and learning in the 21st century … No matter how complex the question of reading across mediums may be, teachers and students must understand how and when to employ a digital reading device.”
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In an interview with “Inside Digital Learning,” Singer confirmed, “Digital devices aren’t going anywhere. This no longer is a question of, ‘Will the digital device be in your classroom?’ but ‘What do we know about the digital device, and how can we make this equal to print?’”
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For example, she said instructors should take the time to show students how to annotate a PDF and make them aware that most people read more quickly on a screen than in print and therefore could lose some comprehension. She also suggested that teachers ask students to answer, in one sentence, what the overall point of the text was every time they read a chapter or an article online.
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“Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material, have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.
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Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in comprehending from this format.”
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But he said he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”
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This Is How The Way You Read Impacts Your Memory And Productivity - 17 views
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Studies have shown that taking notes by longhand will help you remember important meeting points better than tapping notes out on your laptop or smartphone. The reason for that could be that “writing stimulates an area of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system), which filters and brings clarity to the fore the information we’re focusing on
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says one explanation for the benefit of reading analog books may come down to something called metacomprehension deficit. “Metacomprehension refers to how well we are ‘in touch with,’ literally speaking, our own comprehension while reading,” says Mangen. “For instance, how much time do you spend reading a text in order to understand it well enough to solve a task afterwards?”
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“Length does indeed seem to be a central issue, and closely related to length are a number of other dimensions of a text, e.g., structure and layout. Is the content presented in such a way that it is required that you keep in mind several occurrences/text places at the same time?” says Mangen. In other words, she says, complexity and information density may play a role in the importance of the medium providing the text.
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“It is not–and should not be–a question of either/or, but of using the most appropriate medium in a given situation, and for a given material/content and purpose of reading,”
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As the study cited above mentions, like other digital readers, you probably think you are absorbing the information better than you actually are, and thus move through the book faster.A simple solution to this is to simply slow down and take more time reading the material, and you might absorb the information just as well as those who naturally take longer to read a paper book.
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10 Best Practices for Implementing Gamification - 15 views
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make sure you know what constitutes success.
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Only use gamification as a learning solution when it makes sense and resonates with learners.
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Explain why the learners are earning points, who they are trying to save, why they are searching for a treasure. Remember, gamification works well when it is within a context—create a reason why learners should interact with the content you have created.
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Retrieval practice requires learners to recall information rather than simply re-read or re-listen to it.
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The learners should be able to directly link their actions and activities to a score so they know what they need to do to be successful.
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Keep leaderboards small
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Use levels and badges appropriately
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Let the learner know how many levels they are going to need to complete before the learning is over.
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Badges, on the other hand, are good for showing non-linear progress. Badges can be tied to either terminal or enabling objectives. Also, if possible provide a place where learners can “show off” badges to leverage the social effectiveness of gamification.
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Bonus: monitor learner progress
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Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class Culture | EdSurge News - 60 views
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the following eight actions have a positive impact on the blended learning culture among our students.
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1. Identify Online Learning Behavior You Want To See
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128 27 Romain Bertrand · May 15, 2014Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class CultureHow to get students to value and care about the work they do onlineRomain Bertrand
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2. Model and Narrate These Behaviors Constantly
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3. Celebrate Rock Star Online Learners!
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4. Make Students Explain Their Reasoning Online
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5. Provide Students With Written Feedback
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6. Use Data To Make The Right Connections In Class
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7. Provide Support During Online Learning Time
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8. Create Activities Tailored To Student Needs
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Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 48 views
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I think we forget to ADD our knowledge to the "great database" in the sky. Maybe our curriculum needs more of this?
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Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
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media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought
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chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
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Another challenge and another reason to totally re-haul the way curriculum is developed and delivered.
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""Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial " brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it." "
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Bertrand Russell's Inductivist Turkey - 3 views
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The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”. However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut. It doesn’t matter how many cases we list during our inductivist reasoning, nothing guarantees that the next case will lay in this inference we deducted from our observations, as the possible experiments and observations are infinite by number and type. The only valid scientific method is to test the theory using the assertions which can be deduced.
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gathering information only increases your chances of being right but there are never any guarantees.
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Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views
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Very clear imagery. He opens the essay with his personal anecdote to set the scene for this discussion. It also lets the reader know right away that he is a gun owner.
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What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
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Should this be changed to prevent criminals from buying guns from private sellers? How is something this dangerous allowed to take place?
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so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.
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I felt uneasy
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He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.
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There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.
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We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
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Rarely do we mention what we carry
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I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
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Guns were often a bridge between father and son.
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or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
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had a gun put to my head
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I can remember that
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steel
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I can remember
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In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
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surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.
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I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.
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I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
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his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.
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I stood there trembling while they apologized.
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Jackson County
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I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
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hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.
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Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.
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A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
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centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night
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the .308 blew apart the morning.
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There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
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Life is sustained by death
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the killing is not easy, nor should it be.
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would feed me for a year
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I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
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He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”
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As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,
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situation was re
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All I could think about was how things might have been different if the
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versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
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It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.
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Ruger 10/22s and Marlin Model 60s, the .22LRs
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This guy knows his guns. Even though his essay doesn't cite research, you can see his ethos through his personal experience and his use of precise jargon.
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There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.
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firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.
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I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
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they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.
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as they wait for the end of the world.
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they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
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step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
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None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
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They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
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I understand what’s at stake
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I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
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changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
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an unrelenting fear of what could be lost
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a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
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He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.
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I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban
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question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.
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Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
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As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier
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there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
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ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
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The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.
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The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.
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I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
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Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
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I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
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I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.
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I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
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we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
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How does fear drive so many of us to distrust and hate our fellow Americans? How does the Gun Lobby and the NRA use this fear to their advantage? What role does fear play in racial prejudice? How do we combat and address this fear?
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8More
Want to improve literacy in your school? Here's how | eSchool News - 23 views
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the district adopted the McGraw Hill curriculum for ELA.
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we teach students how to build an argument and develop critical-thinking skills using five steps: Claims, Evidence, Reasoning, Counterarguments, and Audience.
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To evaluate the effectiveness of our school-wide initiative, we now administer quarterly writing assessments for each content area. We analyze student writing samples at the end of each quarter and include norming as a department, using the district writing rubric to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement.
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- ...3 more annotations...
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“I agree with what ___ said about ___, but disagree that ___.”
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Much of what our students learn is told to them, so it is critical that they develop listening comprehension.
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We started with a baseline assessment in September and will compare those results to a final writing sample at the end of the year.
