Andrew Ferguson on the absurdity of the College Essay

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/20/the-college-essay-why-those-500-words-drive-us-crazy.html

By the author of "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College."

Here's a hint of the essay:

Amid all the Sturm und Drang, one important fact is seldom mentioned to applicants or their parents.

“For all the angst the essay causes,” says Bill McClintick of Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, “it’s a very small piece of the puzzle. I was in college admissions for 10 years. I saw kids and parents beat themselves up over this. And at the vast majority of places, it is simply not a big variable in the [college’s] decision-making process.”

Many admissions officers say they spend less than a couple of minutes on each application, including the essay. According to a recent survey of admissions officers, only one in four private colleges say the essay is of “considerable importance” in judging an application. Among public colleges and universities, the number drops to roughly one in 10. By contrast, 86 percent place “considerable importance” on an applicant’s grades, 70 percent on “strength of curriculum.”

Still, at the most selective schools, where thousands of candidates may submit identically stratospheric grades and test scores, a marginal item like the essay may serve as a tiebreaker between two equally qualified candidates. The thought is certainly enough to keep the pot boiling under parents like Meg, the lawyer-mom, as she tries to help her son choose an essay topic.

"The Trouble With Bright Kids"

The previous post is referenced in this HBR posting about the specific attributes of bright kids, which recycles Carol Dweck experiment about whether you believe skills are innate or learned. Worthy stuff to recall, though:

How often have you found yourself avoiding challenges and playing it safe, sticking to goals you knew would be easy for you to reach? Are there things you decided long ago that you could never be good at? Skills you believed you would never possess? If the list is a long one, you were probably one of the bright kids — and your belief that you are "stuck" being exactly as you are has done more to determine the course of your life than you probably ever imagined. Which would be fine, if your abilities were innate and unchangeable. Only they're not.

No matter the ability — whether it's intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism — studies show them to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. So if you were a bright kid, it's time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve, and reclaim the confidence to tackle any challenge that you lost so long ago.

Tom DeLong Interview - Flying without a net

Tom DeLong, Harvard Business School professor and author of Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success, is interviewed on this show. The blog post is called "The Hidden Demons of HIgh Achievers." He speaks about how high achieving people have a range of particular problems -- including the need to compare yourself with others, the need to compete, the lack of ability to separate the important from the urgent. His piece of advice here: very specific agendas. On the Harvard Business School website, the book is hyped with the following text:

Confronted by omnipresent threats of job loss and change, even the brightest among us are anxious. In response, we're hunkering down, blocking ourselves from new challenges. This response hurts us and our organizations, but we fear making ourselves even more vulnerable by committing mistakes while learning something new. In "Flying Without a Net," Thomas DeLong explains how to draw strength from vulnerability. First, understand the forces that escalate anxiety in high achievers and the unproductive behaviors you turn to for relief. Then adopt practices that give you the courage to "do the right things poorly" before "doing the right things well." Drawing on his extensive research and consulting work, DeLong lays out: (1) Roots of high achievers' anxiety: fear of being wrong and lack of a sense of purpose, and a craving for human connection, (2) Destructive behaviors we adopt to relieve our anxiety: busyness, comparing ourselves to others, and blaming others for our frustrations, (3) Behaviors we must adopt to gain strength from vulnerability: putting the past behind us and seeking honest feedback. Packed with practical advice and inspiring stories, "Flying Without a Net" is an invaluable resource for all leaders seeking to thrive in this Age of Anxiety.

Test post for reading blog

Sent from my iPhone

Promoting Students' Ability to Argue

See this Ed Week article.

Rationale for Banned Books

NCTE provides a rationale for reading banned books... 100s of them for purchase!

http://www.ncte.org/action/anti-censorship/rationales

60 second videos of the classics

USA Today reports that young freelance book reviewer for CSM, Jenny Sawyer, has posted the first 100 videos (60 seconds each), covering literature classics. Her website: 60secondrecap.com. http://www.60secondrecap.com

A better sparknotes? a better way to interest kids? the new format for book reports? Maybe just a fun diversion.

Paraphrasing: An Effective Comprehension Strategy

That's the title of a "The Reading Teacher" 63(1) article by Shareon B. Kletzien. Main points: research shows benefits of paraphrasing on comprehension. It encourages reader to make connections with prior knowledge to access what is already known about the topic and to use words that are poart of the reader's knowledge. It can be seen as a precursor to summarizing. It's "part of the moinitoring aspect of metacognition". Three short "case studies" are provided.

OECD data out

The new OECD report about investing in education (at the national level). Lots of interesting tidbits, including how much more a college graduate makes compared to high school... $367,000 over a lifetime for a male.

Did Shakespeare Want to Suppress His Sonnets?

Yes, he did, and the broadcast tells why. Morning Edition, National Public Radio, May 20, 2009

Summer Reading

Short Tribune article about a true summer reading list here. The idea is that it's from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I love the part about doing summer reading for school "to get the full use of tuition"!

Should the law be "just" or "just legal"

Stanley Fish blog asks that question here as Obama is mulling his choice for a new Supreme Court justice.

OK basketball coach demands an essay per game...

from her athletes. Check it out: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/04/04/ST2009040403264.html?hpid=topnews

Pocket Mod Poetry

I've been wanting to put some poetry on a pocket mod to keep in my pocket to memorize. Then my old friend Doc Wingler sent me this inspiring NYT Book Review essay on memorizing called "Got Poetry: The Case for Memorizing Poetry," by Jim Holt. He claims that he's got about 2000 lines of poetry so far.

Learning Argument Practices Through On-Line Role Play

by Richard Beach and Cadance Doerr-Stevens
in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
March 2009

The article knits together several ideas about engaging kids in writing and argumentative literacy. It borrows ideas from Harris (How to do things with texts), Flower (Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement), and Graff (They say/I say). The example, of an on-line collaborative argument/problem solving, addresses engagement, authenticity, role-playing, building argumentative skills. The article addresses teachers' role in helping kids negotiate the recent media movement to the "echo chamber" of particular value groups.

I'm going to try to use some of this in my fourth-quarter writing assignment for English 1.

New Literacies are Everywhere!

Including the March 2009 issue of Educational Leadership. I've read the lead article: "Orchestrating the Media Collage," in which author Jason Ohler says, "New media demand new literacies," and gives the following 8 guidelines for teachers:

1. Shift from text centrism to media collage
2. Value writing and reading now more than ever
3. Adopt ART as the next R
4. Blend traditional and emerging literacies
5. Harness report and story ("creative nonfiction" "blend research and storytelling")
6. Practice private and participatory social literacy
7. Develop literacy with digital tools and about digital tools
8. Pursue fluency (not just basic literacy)

If you're interested in "new literacies" -- visual literacy, media studies, film study -- come check the issue out.

Then and now

Here’s an interesting then and now for you! (and it’s two pieces of visual literacy):
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/02/jonathan-kay-on-the-lesson-from-israel-apartheid-week-anti-semitism-is-now-a-creature-of-the-left.aspx

Here’s the argument: anti-semitic pictures have replaced the image of the hook-nosed Jew with the Israeli tank/gunship shooting down innocent kids. Anti-semites used to be part of the far right, now they’re aligned with the far left. Provocative and interesting.

Academic Vocabulary BIG LIST

Coxhead (2000) compiled the Academic Word List containing the 570 most common academic words.

Here are the top 570 Academic Vocabulary terms: http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm

Why Bother Theorizing Adolescent's Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?

Why Bother? by Donna E. Alvermann in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Sept. 2008

see PBS Documentary - "Growing Up Online" aired Jan 22, 2008.


"the increased availablity of hypermediated digital texts is having profound effects on how young people process information" (see Dresang, 2005

a move from "collection" to "connection" (Luke, p 400, 2003)
"Akin to Freire's banking concept of education, collection code curriculum implies that teachers depost knowledge 'bits' into students who, in turn, accumulate, indeed collect, largely disconnected discipline-baed facts and figures through skill-and-drill pedagogy. By contrast [in connection code courriculum], digitalized knowledge and networked environments, critical understandings of teh relations among ideas, their sources and histories, intertextual referents and consequences, are as important if not more so than mastery, reproduction, and recomination of discrete facts or units of information"

Bean and his daughters offered this observation: conventional text-bound teaching in the content areas belies how contemporary youths locate and use information that has relevance for them. (Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999)

The work of literacy instruction is as much about listening and learning as it is about telling and teaching. Kirkland (22).

Bean. 1999. Intergenerational conversations and two adolescents' multiple literacies: implications for redefining content area literacy. JAAL, 42(6), 438-448.

Kirkland, (in press)

Luke, C. (2003) Pedagogy, connectivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinarity. RRQ, 38(3), 397-403.

Hoerr "How Book Groups Bring Change"

In Feb 2009 Educational Leadership

titles for faculty book groups

Alexie - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
Gurian -- Boys and Girls Learn Differently
Gardner -- Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligence
Barth - Improving Schools from Within
Levine, Mel - A Mind at a Time (differentiation)
Charney - Teaching Children to Care
Tatum, Beverly Daniel -- Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?