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Merit pay and eliminating teacher tenure, while turning teachers into at-will employees are the biggest disservice our leaders can do to students.

The teaching of history, civics, geography, and the arts have shrunk to almost nothing in some schools, or are made to serve the tested areas.

Even worse, in some schools weeks of valuable classroom time are wasted giving practice standardized tests (and tests to practice for the practice standardized tests) so obsessive administrators can track how the students are doing

. Pearson

received the contract to create the tests, has a full series of practice tests, while other companies like McGraw-Hill with its Acuity division, are already changing gears from offering practice materials for state tests to providing comprehensive materials for Common Core.

Common Cor

Why would anyone willingly sign up for this madness?

I cannot remember a time when the classrooms have been filled with bad teachers. The poor teachers almost never lasted long enough to receive tenure.

there are exceptions

here is nothing to stop administrators from removing those teacher

tenure

provide teachers with the right to a hearing. It does not guarantee their jobs.

Times have changed. I have watched over the past few years as wonderfully gifted young teachers have left the classroom, feeling they do not have support and that things are not going to get any better

That framework is being torn down, oftentimes by politicians who would never dream of sending their own children to the kind of schools they are mandating for others.

After all, what other profession would allow me to make $37,000 a year after 14 years of experience and have people tell me how greedy I am?

Level 1. Reject the question.

Level 2. Restate or almost restate the question as a response.

Level 3. Admit ignorance or present information.

Level 4. Voice encouragement to seek response through authority.

Level 5. Encourage brainstorming, or consideration of alternative explanations.

Level 6. Encourage consideration of alternative explanations and a means of evaluating them.

Level 7. Encourage consideration of alternative explanations plus a means of evaluating them, and follow-through on evaluations.

a teacher may use bumper stickers or well-known slogans and have the class brainstorm the inferences that can be drawn from them.

The Torrance Tests were developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, when he was an education professor at the University of Minnesota.

Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.  In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.  We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.

In the next essay in this series, I will present research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of overdirective, overprotective, ov

If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity.  “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country.  We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.  In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.  In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1] 

judgmental teachers and parents.

using color to differentiate between addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems can be very helpful. In learning sequential step problems, highlighting each step in a different color can also overcome this natural difficulty.

What To Avoid With Visual Learners

Rote memorization and drill will not only be mostly impossible for your visual learner, but will also sap his natural love of learning.

Visual learners also tend to “visualize” time passing, so timed quizzes and tests put almost tangible pressure on them, causing unnecessary anxiety

not always be able to “show their work.”

, be prepared for a visual learner to

It is important to help them to understand that their visual learning style is not a disadvantage, but simply a different way of acquiring knowledge

Motivation comes from within, not external threats or bribes

-"People to contribute rather then just show up and grind out their days." (100) -What teacher has not wanted this?

-"Control leads to compliance: autonomy leads to engagement...only engagement can produce mastery" (110-111) When was the last time you had true engagement and what caused this engagement?

-"Do the workers refer to the company (school) as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"?" (129)  Do your students see school on their team?

First, Student's need to gain autonomy, not empowerment (we love this word, it gives the impression that students have power in the system).  Autonomy is self direction. Second, Mastery of the topic (big word in education ten years ago).  And third, purpose (education likes to use meaning or relevance).

the system right now makes this very, very hard to do

I find it very difficult sometimes to convince students that I am not grading a project, or that they can take a quiz whenever they are ready.  Students have learned that they will be told and shown how to survive in education. 

We need to encourage students to be independent thinkers that formulate their own methods to their own answers.  The data collection systems of education need to change to meet the new education system of the 21st century; we need to stop attempting to make new methodology fit into old data collection routines.

audits are most often triggered by the kind and amount of deductions taken

a professional should be hired in all audit cases.

For example, after widespread fraud was discovered, the IRS audited most taxpayers who claimed the First-Time Homebuyer Credit," Reed says. "The Earned Income Credit and the Adoption Credit are also common audit targets, but these are also credits that are often abused, so it makes sense for the IRS to verify that taxpayers qualify for them."

Two common examples are receipts for contributions to charity and mileage logs. When taxpayers try to recreate these expenses, they discover it is hard to remember events that happened more than a year ago," Reed says. "In the absence of good records, the deductions are disallowed when audited."

According to Rozbruch, the best track to take when an audit begins is to attempt to make things right immediately.

Reed adds that if the taxpayer is not maliciously trying to cheat the government, the IRS can be lenient.

internalization and externalization

Interpersonal interaction

Discovery learning:

Spiral Curriculum:

sociocultural constructivists

focusing on the individual cognitive construction of mental structures;

Cognitive constructivists focus on the active mental construction struggling with the conflict between existing personal models of the world, and incoming information in the environment.

According to TIP's

Theory Into Practice

that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student

learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

Bruner's major theoretical framework is that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

The laptops might help breach the economic barrier to school success. Silvernail found that on statewide writing exams, economically disadvantaged students using laptops did outperform advantaged students who didn’t use their computers.

Still, the laptop program has faced setbacks. Maine wanted to expand its laptop program to all high schools four years ago, but state budget cuts have prevented that.

Still

“What we need to look at is the broader impact on student improvement,” said Timothy Magner, the director of the Office of Education Technology, a branch of the U.S. Department of Education. “One of the key metrics is test scores. We’re keenly interested in that.”

Some schools’ programs around the country have faced widespread computer glitches, teachers not knowing how to teach with laptops — and to a much lesser degree, yet way more publicized — the issue of students using the Web to cyberslack, cheat and view porn.

spawning original ideas.

But whether its program can measure up to the federal government’s key yardstick — improvement in standardized test scores — is another question.

He punched out words when stressing the 600,000 jobs that the company supports, and underscored that Apple is the nation's largest corporate taxpayer.

Cook did so voluntarily

In effect, Apple is holding out for a lower corporate tax rate, and Cook spent some of his time in the spotlight to advocate for one, as well as a streamlining of the tax code to eliminate deductions and credits.

At the same time, lawmakers must tread lightly as they attack Apple, a company held in high esteem and whose ubiquitous products are seen as both innovative and indispensable

"What Apple is doing is pretty mainstream," said accounting expert Robert Willens, in an interview. Shifting around the intellectual property rights has a minor effect compared to the simple avoidance of U.S. taxes by not repatriating profits, he said.

The story explores how the relationship between the two main characters is shaped by their racial difference. Morrison does not, however, disclose which character is white and which is black.

te—from the time they meet and bond at age eight while staying at an orphanage through their re-acquaintance as mothers on different sides of economic, political, and racial divides in a recently gentrified town in upstate New York

‘St. Bonny’s’’ or St. Bonaventure, the shelter where Twyla, the narrator, meets Roberta, the story’s other main character, when they are both eight years old. Twyla recalls that her mother once told her that people of Roberta’s race smell funny, and she objects to being placed in a room with Roberta on the grounds that her mother wouldn’t approve. Twyla, however, soon finds Roberta understanding and sympathetic to her situation. While most children at the shelter are orphans, Twyla is there because her mother ‘‘dances all night’’ and Roberta is there because her mother is sick. Roberta and Twyla are isolated from the other children at St. Bonny’s and are scared of the older girls, so they stick together.