Tips for revising and submitting your final essay

As I read and respond to your essays, here are some important tips, reminders, and cautions:

• You MUST choose a format (MLA, APA, etc) and then submit your essay within the guidelines of the format chosen, including proper title page, headings, page numbering, etc. You must title your essay (and do NOT format your title in any way, no UL, no QM, no BLD) and include all proper information on the essay, including page numbers. Select a reasonable font (Times, for example) and use ONLY 12 pt. size and 1" margins all around with double spacing only.

• Be careful with your clarity and specificity. . .avoid "it," "this," "how," "thing," etc.; see 24 here for more help and 19 here.

• Details, details, details. If you mention your school, doesn't it have a name? If you mention a real person, doesn't he/she have a name? Do not avoid details, add them, look for them, use them.

• Stating something doesn't make it true. All, I mean ALL, claims made in an academic essay must be supported by evidence. That evidence must be credible. And if that evidence is from a source, it must be CITED and cited properly.

• Giant paragraphs are not appealing to readers. Consider the length of your paragraphs as well as your sentences. In general, paragraph and sentence lengths are best if you have purposeful VARIETY.

Consuming Kids

Consider this documentary about the impact of a consumer culture on children:

Consuming Kids

Attacking Public Schools. . .A Historical Perspective

This Op-Ed raises the problems with attacking public schools.

And if you look at the online comments, some seem to believe that schools are worse today than in the past. Which raises the question: Just when were the good old days?

1947?

1955?

What the general public believes and says about education. . .

Read this letter in the Greenville News. . .and be sure to read the comments thread. . .

Teacher equity?

See this study from Peske and Haycock (2006) about the inequities in teacher assignments:

Teaching Inequality

From Krashen

Sent to the NY Times, May 10, 2010

In his speech at Hampton University ("Obama asks graduates to close

education gap," May 9), President Obama remarked that "…..students

in well-off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban

communities, no matter what skin color. Globally, it’s not even

close. In 8th grade science and math, for example, American students

are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries."

The president is correct: Students in those well-off areas, who attend

well-funded schools, do very well. They don't rank 10th overall

world-wide: They score at the top oiin international tests of science

and math, while American children in "poorer rural or urban

communities" score below the international average. Our overall

performance is unimpressive because such a high percentage of children

in the US live in poverty, among the highest of all industrialized

countries (about 22.5%, compared to Sweden's 2.5%).

This means that there is nothing seriously wrong with American

education. The problem is poverty.

Stephen Krashen

Professor Emeritus

University of Southern California

Corridor of Shame, School reform, poverty, etc.

See my blog on poverty and education, FYI: Living & Learning in Poverty

After watching Corridor of Shame, take a look at the schools' report cards mentioned in the film.

What about the poverty index for schools in SC?

What are the assumptions in this Op-Ed by State Superintendent of Education candidate and FU professor Nelsen?

Does children living in poverty impact international comparisons?

See page 4 of the report on childhood poverty throughout the industrialized world:

Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005

Bracey on 2 Million Minutes

"2 Million Minutes Takes a Lifetime to Endure"

Gerald Bracey (from The Huffington Post)

It feels like it takes 2 million minutes to suffer through the insufferable 2 Million Minutes (it takes 54). It was worth my time 'cause then I can write about it in several places, but I have to admit I borrowed the copy I viewed. Not about to plunk down $25 for something I knew I'd hate (I had seen the producer and clips on ABC TV).

2 Million Minutes is roughly the time that elapses from the start of 9th grade to the end of the senior year. It follows a boy and a girl in the U. S., India, and China. The idea that two kids could represent a country is ludicrous on its face, especially for a country that has one third of its people still illiterate (India) and one where 40% of the students don't get past 9th grade (China).

The Americans are slackers, although they have ambitions and get good grades in a highly rated high school in Carmel, Indiana. The Indian and Chinese students are hypergrinds, 24/7 students (the Indian boy does kick a soccer ball around and sings with a group he and three friends have formed). They go to school many more hours and do much more homework. Rohit, the Indian boy, says American kids have more fun. "In India, you're cooped up studying," Then he adds with a smile, "At least you're SUPPOSED to be cooped up and studying. One senses his computer does other things than homework. Ruizhan admits to playing computer games a lot while he's cooped up.

Rohit says that by the time you reach 17 in India, you know what you'll be doing the rest of your life. Neil, the American says he can imagine doing many different things over a lifetime, anything except sitting in a cubicle. The Indians and Chinese want to be engineers, although the Chinese girl potentially has a musical career option.

Options. That's really what the video is about although it never emphasizes that. American kids have them, Chinese and Indian kids don't.

The voiceover and still screens supply the usual (and sometimes erroneous) statistics about 900 hours in school for Americans and 1500 in front of TV. There's the infamous 70% graduation rate which has been attacked, successfully in my judgment, for using bad methods that overestimate the drop out rate.

Three of the four Indian and Chinese students do not get their university of choice (the one Rohit applies to gets over 100,000 applications a year. The Indian students end up in nearby universities. Xiaoyuan, the Chinese girl studies music. Ruizhan gets his university of choice, but a general studies program, not the advanced math program he wanted. Neil gets a full scholarship to Purdue to study computer graphics while Brittany, the American girl, enters Indiana University with a double major--pre-med and Spanish.

Brittany early on mentions well-roundedness as a goal. Neil was captain of the football team the previous year but gave it up "to pursue other interests" in the words of the video. The foreign kids never talk about anything but studies.

The kids are interspersed with interviews of "experts." Some offer good comments, some don't. Vivek Wadhwa who splits his time between Harvard and Duke thinks that the U. S. hasn't fully realized the nature of globalization. But he also points out when you have economic security the way American students mostly do, there is not the external push for success. American students "have to rev their internal engines. In India, the students are struggling to get out of poverty." Makes a difference (I think between Duke and Harvard, Vivek might have a somewhat romanticized notion of economic security in this nation). Vivek, by the way, was part of a team at Duke that first debunked the false "650,000 Chinese engineers." Turned out a lot of "engineers" in China (India too) were what we'd call "technicians" at most.

For my money, the best comment from the experts came from another Indian-American, Vivek Paul who arrived here in 1980 and went on to found what became a multi-billion dollar company. "What America is REALLY about is creating opportunity. Economic mobility is greater in the U. S. It doesn't exist that much in other countries. This really is the land of opportunity." (I recall hearing a German businessman say once that if Bill Gates were a German, he'd still be a middle-level manager).

Toward the end, when the Indian or Chinese kids were on the screen, I wanted to yell at it: "Get a Life!" Not as a put down, but as a wake up call.

Related Note: When I came back from a visit to China in 1996, people who had been their 5-10 years earlier didn't recognize my descriptions. On June 21, the program "On the Media" was broadcast from China and a group of young people talking to hostess Brooke Gladstone said China has generation gaps just like we do, but they come every 8 years. One commentator mentioned that China now makes and consumes more concrete that the rest of the countries in the world combined.

May X 2010 Schedule

May X 2010

EDU 115-01
The Reel World: The Depiction of Schools on Film

We will meet 9 am until 12 pm (or longer if needed depending on the film) on dates listed below.

Date/ Session	Focus
Session 1	Introduction: Film, documentaries, education (educational debate), critical perspective
Session 2	High School and 2 Million Minutes
Session 3	Corridor of Shame
Session 4	Flock of Dodos (Expelled)
Session 5	Little Rock Central
Session 6	Hard Times at Douglass High
Session 7	Clearcut
Session 8	Prom Night in Mississippi
Session 9	Grain of Sand
Session 10	Group presentations
Session 11	Group presentations/ debrief