Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Blog

Freedom of access.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

I can understand why schools need to block some internet web sites, and also understand that it can be an imperfect science. I also understand that libraries don't block the internet and that some of the stuff I've seen patrons viewing on library computers is pretty nasty.

Having said all that...I prefer to go to the library for my free internet than, uh, borrow¹ the WiFi from a nearby school. The school blocks anything remotely associated with web-based email, proxy, Google services, social networking services, and even sites that I regularly use that are of little harm. I know why they do this -- no need for students to be checking email and such during the school day. My question is this: If they're going to be so medieval about filtering the internet, why in the heck do they allow a site like Blogger to be accessed?

Some of my more recent readers may not have been on this blog a few years back when I wrote about finding some high school student's blogs (from the school nearby that I've subbed at) that made fun of teachers and staff, including my mother, likely written at school on school time. Heck, I even made mention in the New York Post via a column by Dawn Eden on students and blogging.

Let me say that I didn't mince words when I wrote about what those kids did. Front and foremost wasn't that they didn't have "freedom of speech" (or, in this case, FreeDumb of Speech) according to their definition. The pitiful arguments that surfaced by kids on various online sites regarding my response to public speech online were easily shredded and revolved mainly around being aghast that they could be held accountable for what they said, and might even face negative consequences in oppositional freedom of speech.

In other words, right back at you, kids.

They were naive enough to think that adults are too dumb to find things on the internet, and had assumed that they had some kind of privacy and right to not get a negative or opposing response back once they hit "publish." Adults sort of helped build the internet, kiddies, I essentially pointed out. It's not your exclusive playground.

After a lengthy correspondence² with the then superintendent in which he seemed more interested in "disciplining" me rather than the students for my aggressiveness in the issue (and the fact that one of the kids' father was a friend on the school board), I finally suggested that, among other things, limiting the students use of journaling or blogging sites such as Blogger during school hours might be easier than trying to rewire the mistakenly construed concept of "freedom of speech" that had sadly taken hold in their heads.

There, as here, I can still access Blogger.

I really care very little, but after constantly hitting the "this site is blocked" message on just about every benign site I use, I find full access to Blogger odd. (Not to mention the fact that they leave their WiFi signal completely open and accessible. I hope the rest of the nearby community is enjoying it as I am.)

¹ For more discussion on the legalities of using an unprotected WiFi signal, read here, here, here, and here.

² I still have the letters. There are numerous grammatical mistakes, and I take special delight in reading them periodically. I'm that petty.

Labels: blogging, education, internet, summer 2008

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So far, so good.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

Things are going well on my little summer adventure.

There's still a few unsettled questions regarding the place I'm staying/working, but I'll know more about that today and am not going to dwell on it now.

I do like my room, in that place where I'm staying.

It's small and sparse. There's a ceiling fan that has a slight hum, windows that crack open just enough to let in a breeze from the alley/courtyard below, and about the only noise being the roar of the main building's air conditioning system periodically mixing with the wailing train that goes by. The bathroom, with it's cracked tile floor and old fixtures, is sort of a nice change from things at home. I have four hangers and hanging items in the closet -- that's it! I'm determined to keep it bare and empty, a sort of attempt at de-clutterizing my usual existence. Not having the distraction of easy internet, TV, or, essentially, anything beyond the silence of reading, seems to fit into that idea of taking clutter out of life. Everything is put in its place, very neatly, and I like it.

I'm right in the downtown area of the "city" I'm in, and I've just started exploring and finding where things are (grocery store, etc.). It's a nice switch from the farm, having little businesses and stores and coffee shops tucked into the buildings around me within easy walking distance. Part of what makes it fun, I think, is knowing I don't have to live here forever, but can enjoy it for what it is for now.

A little adventure, you know, is a good an necessary thing, even if it's an adventure that is very much "little" and may not seem like an adventure to anyone else.

Last night was my first night of "class." My instructor is very nice (I'm guessing around my age or a bit younger, though I'm bad at estimating stuff), and I feel comfortable around him. In watching how he was a stickler for detail, I feel like I can trust him to teach me what I need to know. It is important that a student is able to trust a teacher. With what I am trying to learn, it is overwhelming if I look at the huge picture and so I need to trust that I will learn what I need to know when I need to know it. I feel like I can do that. That's good. It helps me to relax and learn what's in front of me and not try to take it all in at once.

I had my first homework last night! It's been a long time since I had a huge textbook with diagrams and tons of stuff to learn. Kind of a nice challenge; I used to love school.

I have been attempting to use my cell phone* to update on both Twitter and Utterz; it doesn't always work, but that's how it goes, I guess.

Whatever else this ends up being, whether it's the success I hope it to be, or a success in spite of things that at first seem to be failures, I know it's an excellent opportunity to get out of a rut and break the usual habits of life I'd acquired. New surroundings, completely new people, new challenges, and requirements for new kinds of discipline, including mental, spiritual, and personal.

On my list of things to do:

Locate free WiFi because there has to be some place in this day and age that offers it, besides McDonalds! Grrr.
Study.
Meet with the person in charge of where I am staying to determine what's going on there for me and what my job/place/role is. (I feel unsettled about that as of yet)
Write the Bible studies and devotions for our morning group meetings during the end-of-June Nicaragua trip, since that seems to be what the others in the group want me to do

* For those of my close friends who have my cell phone number, feel free to text or call me. Just for this summer, I am temporarily lifting the "Don't call me because I have to pay per minute and it's expensive!!!" ban that I usually put in place whenever I give my number to a friend. I'm using "my new cell phone" as my communication link, giving it the workout it has long deserved.

Labels: education, my life, summer 2008, work

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Relax. I'm not credentialed.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 7 comments link this post

Here's the money quote from an article on a recent California ruling which will wreak havoc for homeschoolers in that state:

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

"We're happy," said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. "We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting."

I can see the importance of kids being taught by a person being credentialed versus a parent who is not.

We had a credentialed teacher who had us watch The Silence of the Lambs instead of reading Shakespeare for Advanced Placement English when I was a junior in high school. And of course, those teach-all credentials make it safe to leave your kids with teachers. Credentials ensure that teachers make wise choices in literature for students. I also had an astronomy teacher who repeatedly likened the solar system to atoms, insisting that electrons had a neutral charge no matter what I said in disagreement.

I'll never forgive the teacher who messed up on the atomic structure.

Both sides could sit all day and throw out extreme examples of bad teachers and parents teaching badly, but I'm mainly just curious about the "we always think" and the "no matter what the setting" part of the above quote.

I question the accuracy of those statements.

But I'm not a credentialed blog writer.

So take that for what it's worth.

UPDATE: For your convenience, I've made available some generic credentials. This should cover it.

Labels: current events, education

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Dr. Seuss makes me sick.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 7 comments link this post

OK, Dr. Seuss doesn't personally make me sick, but the very delicious and completely packed-with-sugar cake I ate at school yesterday after celebrating a month of reading that was topped off with the entire K-12 playing relay games in the gym -- the cake made me sick later.

Darn sugar.

I simply cannot resist cake.

I love cake.

The cake was to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday and cap off National Reading Month.

The last time I did anything remotely celebratory of Dr. Seuss and National Reading Month was a few years back when I was at the state capitol, covering some meetings for the newspaper. I was hanging around my friend Naomi and her dad (a representative) and his cronies¹. The legislators were wary of me taking a photo of them in their Dr. Seuss hats, which they had to wear all at once for a few brief moments while a woman went to the podium and read some reading stuff. Most took them off right away, but a few kept them on for a bit.

"This better not get in the paper, heh heh nervous-chuckle kind-of threat please don't publish it."

I didn't publish the photos, though I did get a photo of a legislator sleeping on the job. The use of that photo is single-handedly keeping my bills paid...um... anyway, back to present day stuff.

This past week had been a lot of fun subbing and then, watching all the kids from preschool on up have such a great time doing relay races together...very cool. Made me want to go straight home from school and get to reading, though I instead got a delicious piece of cake with gobs of frosting which made my lips blue from the frosting and then rode with dad to Devils Lake to pick up a vehicle that was in the shop and then met Michael and Colleen for coffee and various discussion².

Side note: I have a pair of socks that I wear periodically that feature Seuss' poetic "one fish two fish red fish blue fish." I know this is incredibly non-age appropriate gear. I don't know how it features into National Reading Month, though, at this point, you've suffered through reading some incredibly dismal writing.

--------------------------------

¹ The word "cronies" makes me giggle inside. I want some cronies.

² Oddly, part of the "various discussion" involved a book we'd gotten recently and our hopes of using it to teach from for Sunday school. It also involved a computer question in which Michael stated that he "wished he knew more about computers" to which I replied that I, too, wished he knew more about computers. But the book part of the discussion? That relates to the topic at hand.

Labels: education, friends, my life, work

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Bricks, the building blocks.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 13 comments link this post

::This is a follow-up to my earlier post from today.::

I received an email from a reader who has many years of experience in the education field. The reader responded to both the original article by Mark Morford as well as the post by Dan Edelen that I linked to.

I've been a teacher for far too many years and have seen quite a number of changes in public education. I've also had the benefit of some private education. My feeling is that both the Morford article and the Edelen piece are somewhat simplistic in their views and conclusions. That's not to say that I don't agree with some of their observations, it's just that there are circumstances they don't address.

There is no question that parental involvement is a significant factor in a child's success in school. But it also is true that many children with less than ideal home circumstances are able to achieve much. I don't agree with Dan Edelen that a "6 out of 10 parent can't hope to produce an 8 out of 10 child." I have seen that very outcome many times over the years. What is crucial is how the parents address education, not just in words but in deeds.

What I have observed over the past 20 or so years is not that children are any less capable but rather that they are moving through the system less and less prepared. The skills that were taken for granted that a high school freshman should have are just not present in ever increasing numbers of students. Fewer kids appreciate good literature in part because fewer kids spend much time reading. I cannot expect the level of discourse in an essay today as I did even 10 years ago. Again, it's not that the students are less intelligent, it is simply that they don't approach education in the same manner as I and my peers did.

There are far too many distractions in the average child's life. One of the most frequent complaints we receive from parents is that their children are given far too much homework. I can tell you that I and my colleagues give far less homework than we did 5 or 10 years ago. The truth is that many of our kids are over committed to a wide variety of after school activities, and parents are increasingly reluctant to deny their children any experience.

I am not blind to the fact that public education is not fulfilling its responsibility to the children. In this I fault the propensity of our profession to swing from one fad to another without giving due consideration to the impact it may have on the education of our children. There is no question in my mind that the worst offenders are the education schools that perpetuate this mindless pabulum. My biggest lament is that we find ourselves increasingly teaching to the lowest common denominator, rather than challenging everyone to their highest potential.

Finally, I am not pessimistic about the future. There are far too many young minds who excel in spite of the deficiencies of public education. I still have the thrill of seeing young minds, with little life experience, struggle with weighty issues and form their own opinions after much due consideration. Mostly, I am happy to say that if challenged, most rise to meet the challenge.

After receiving this email, I received a few comments on the original post. Edelen left a comment in my original post that struck me as... well...it struck me.

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the case that rural kids are just as smart as their "sophisticated" West Coast and suburban counterparts, but in my rural area that's definitely not the case. (And yes, I lived in the Bay Area a few years, so I can honestly compare.)

Just yesterday we went to the polls to vote on funding the libraries in our county (since the state of Ohio has cut their funding so drastically most can barely even buy books). The modest levy, which would've cost most families about $30 a year, was defeated 56% to 44%. What stunned me as an enormous supporter of our libraries is that in the course of the run-up to the vote, I'd not talked with a single person who opposed that levy.

Only after the levy failed did I realize my perspective was off. I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries. I didn't talk with Cletus Sixpack who would much rather the government ensure free satellite access to every NFL game than toss a month's worth of cigarette money to a library. And guess what? Our county is full of Cletus Sixpacks.

While I don't run in Cletus's social circle, I do bump into Cletus a lot. The Sixpack household tends to be fertile, so I run into all his kids, too. Once you meet the kids, you realize Morford may be more aware than we know.

The line that caught my attention first was "I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries."

There's a lot in those two sentences that I could comment on, but I'd much rather just pick it out and say "look at this."

My response to his comment was that I hadn't attempted to make any case for "ruralism" and, in fact, tried to avoid the trite country mouse vs. city mouse debate that seems to arise in far too many discussions, education or otherwise.

I'd hesitate to say that I was trying to make any case regarding regional intelligence, but instead was saying that Morford's simplistic cause/effect limitation on what makes a non-dumb kid with all exceptions just being "lucky" was a very poor theory.

[...]

I think throwing in a reference to Cletus Sixpack is a kind of lazy way to discount that Cletus has his counterpart in urban areas, though the counterpart is often better dressed and has more electronic gadgets.

I am certainly not familiar with Ohio or any of its funding policies, nor do I want to make this a long and in-depth debate on funding policy. However, I can attest to one reason why reasonable people Not Named Cletus But Still Rural in a Rural State Like North Dakota tend to not support "minor" mil levies to fund schools and such: unbalanced reliance upon property taxes to do the funding of all things educational. Farmers and other landowners get tired of being called on to constantly fund the school expansion or new computer lab, particularly if they are part of a district that has an odd mix of students mostly from the cities while landowners fund schools that don't directly benefit them or their families. This example doesn't necessarily address Edelen's point, but the reason I noted this example was that there are sometimes reasons that people don't vote to fund things that seem "reasonable" beyond wanting NFL or NASCAR pumped into their home by the government, i.e. there are more complex explanations than simple Redneck-ism.

Obviously, that is a specific example which can be negated by someone else's specific example. My point, here, is that our personal examples and personal experience is limited. This makes Morford's column simplistic and out of touch, just as Edelen's comment revealed something very disheartening and just as out of touch. My own experience with the definition of "rural" is as equally out of touch as perhaps the reality of "rural" that Edelen has evidently experienced where he is from. I can't say that Morford has ever experienced "rural" since it didn't even come up as a consideration in his article.

All this talk about being dumb assumes we know what makes a person qualified as dumb. Inevitably, someone brings up people who can't make change. I will hereby admit that I loved geometry and calculus but that, when pressured to make change with a person standing in front of me, I absolutely cannot add and subtract. Oh yes, I understand how it should be done, but I can't do it. I take great comfort in Madeleine L'Engle's quote about math:

"Six months after I started to write Wrinkle, I discovered higher math. And for me, higher math is much easier than lower math. Lower math lost me in 4th grade when I was taught that 0 x 3 equals 0. Now, I understand that if I have nothing and I multiply it by 0, 3 something's are not going to appear. But, if I have 3 apples and I multiply them by 0, why are they going to vanish? So I wiped out lower math as philosophically untenable."
- Madeleine L'Engle

There is much to be said for different kinds of intelligences. In the comments section of Edelen's post, by Edelen himself, is the agreement that there are different kinds of intelligences:

Now I expect a person to be able to read and do math to at least a junior high school level, but some seemingly less educated people know things you and I don’t. Quite a few of the farmers in my area can’t keep up with some of the things I know about tech, but when it comes to knowledge of agriculture and animal husbandry, they make me look like an idiot.

I am having some difficulty reconciling this statement with the Cletus Sixpack juggernaut. I don't doubt the existence of some forms of Cletus Sixpack -- stereotypes exist for a reason -- but I doubt the simplistic take on the who, why, and what of Cletus' actions.

I would assert that many urban people have come off as very dumb to me because they have priorities that seem disconnected from the reality of the earth and nature and the basics of things like the origin of food and what farm equipment is. Though they seem erudite and able to discuss literary theory or list their favorite Handel pieces, or are able to list the obvious poor qualities of those not like them, the lack of understanding in what I consider fundamentals astounds me. But, rather than throw a name like Gregory Metrosexual at them and make jokes about men who are unable to change the oil in their own car, I chalk it up to different intelligences.

In the end, out of concern for showing disrespect for Morford or Edelen, I want to say that the email that I received from the reader and shared at the beginning of this post is the most heartening. And that's why, after getting permission, I needed to post it in its entirety.*

*(UPDATE: Last sentence reworded. See comments below.)

Labels: current events, education

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As bricks.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 6 comments link this post

Are American kids dumb?

American kids, dumber than dirt.

Dan Edelen points out, with a little less ferocity, that there's a parent issue involved. I agree. I also note that the writer of the original article, Mark Morford, has forgotten a couple of things, namely that not all kids are from the same area of the country and that his take on private-schooled, privileged kids doesn't necessarily apply as the main reason kids that succeed actually do succeed.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

The description of kids that do well, and what it takes for success (wealth, privilege, private schooling) according to Morford, are rare in rural parts of the country and so for the kids that do well here to have being "lucky" as the only reason they have succeeded is a bit of a stretch.

Morford has some good points, although he writes with his usual "style" that almost hides it. I think he's missed the boat in trying to clarify why some kids in this country do well and others don't by forgetting that not all kids are:

from San Francisco
from the West coast
from cities

There are no doubt examples of dumb, rural kids who went to public schools. But there are more that do extremely well in college and don't have the problems described in Morford's article. Very few kids in rural areas have access to the factors for success that Morford outlines, so there must be other reasons for the educational decline in some regions and success in others. I'm not going to be so simplistic to assert that everything about a small, rural school is automatically better because it isn't always so. I'm just going to say: Morford wrote this from a very narrow viewpoint.

UPDATE: Read a follow-up to this post here.

Labels: current events, education, links