The Painkiller Before the Knock in the Jaw

Riding to work this morning, I saw this ad. Apparently, the DOE has been footing quite a bill to set parents up for the idea of their children bombing the State Exams this Spring. My camera on my phone is lousy, so it's hard to read, but it says:

"This spring, state exams for students in grades 3-8 will be different and more challenging. And test scores will reflect that at first ( . . . ) We're not satisfied with just teaching your children basic skills. We want them prepared for college and a career."

Does the expenditure suggest that the city is concerned about growing public dissatisfaction with the fetishization of standardized tests? About the growing number of parents who are opting their kids out of the tests?  Or is this just damage control, trying to seem benevolent in the face of ever-increasing separation of the public from any form of control over public education in a world where tests and corporate educational trade secrets are strictly protected while student and teacher information is constantly for sale?

Maybe it's just a warning shot fired across the bow of students, parents, teachers, and anyone else genuinely interested in this junk science profit glut.  It's going to be painful, that much is certain.  

2 Odyssey Sample Annotations

Again, here are a pair of snapshots - this time from a class that is a tracked SPED section. Instead of the Fitzgerald trans of The Odyssey used in my other classes, this section has been working largely with a narrative summary. After reading these, we work with selections from Fitzgerald.

The two students couldn't be further apart in terms of approach to work, but both images illustrate the ways that annotation could be used as a reading comprehension strategy.

The first was concerned with her ability to read the text at all, despite the fact that the vocabulary wasn't terribly beyond her. After conferencing, we nailed down the nonstandard syntax as the main source of her problems. This image was the result of a period's work.

The second is from the same day, done by another of my target students. I especially like the second note from the top on the left, where you can see him parsing out a little bit of the meaning so that he has enough to read on with. Further down on the same side, you can see him still doing a bit of copying of the wording from the text itself - I can't be sure of his level of comprehension here - and near the bottom, he summarizes with the brief "The cyclops ate Zeus people." This character misreading is potentially disastrous, even though he's able to get the general events out of the story.

What about this passage suggested that the sailors belonged to Zeus? Just a misreading, based on speed or carelessness? The mention of praying to Zeus?

Reading The Odyssey

So this is just a quick snapshot, literally. We've been reading the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey, using my annotation method of focusing on what you understand in a text in order to provide an entry point for comprehension.

This is a few pages of annotations from a student who has consistently told me that she doesn't understand anything. However, by continually asking her to read a little, stop, and summarize what she does know, this student has been able to complete readings far above those that she felt comfortable with previously. I don't claim to know how this works, but I can suggest that lowering the amount of info a student has to hold in their short term memory seems to make acquisition of new content easier.

The passage was from Book XXIII, where Penelope is testing Odysseus by talking about his bed.