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• California school moves to ban THE DICTIONARY; rest of world succumbs to despair about the state of American education: http://bit.ly/5Jw9WP #

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• Newsflash, rich people are meaner: http://bit.ly/5Mjlev #
• Interesting. Religious respondents (of any faith) have a more favorable view of Muslims than do the non-religious: http://bit.ly/51rQiE #
• "The hatred towards Muslims has grown to a level that defies all logic and is an affront to British values." http://bit.ly/81mULb #
• Texting and chat-speak actually improve children's spelling skills: http://bit.ly/5RBURZ #
• Realizing that one's intelligence may be improved may improve one's intelligence: http://bit.ly/5m1c6Q #

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• College admissions still overwhelmingly favor elite: http://bit.ly/6e1v35 #
• Liberty Clinic. Do you have a question about your rights? http://bit.ly/8yBeiq #
• The history of monotheism, if it were fanfiction: http://bit.ly/8t9HJ1 #

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• Conservatives re-write textbooks in Texas; all US students given same books: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html #
• What makes a great teacher? TFA releases 20 years of data: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching #
• Survey: South Asian languages taught in the US at the K-12 level http://desilearn.us/ #
• Are AP classes overenrolled? http://bit.ly/8uYF0C #

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• Why is feminism still so divisive? http://bit.ly/6uR3JS #

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Alternative classroom approaches to teaching Thanksgiving

• US taking wrong lessons from Chinese schools: http://bit.ly/JKKjJ #
• The king's son and the fish: http://bit.ly/1VxAFi #

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New program will teach students about 9/11

The 9/11 curriculum, believed to be the first comprehensive educational plan focusing on the attacks, is expected to be tested this year at schools in New York City, California, New Jersey, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kansas.

It was developed with the help of educators by the Brick, N.J.-based Sept. 11 Education Trust, and was based on primary sources, archival footage and more than 70 interviews with witnesses, family members of victims and politicians, including Giuliani and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a New York senator at the time of the attacks.

The curriculum is taught through videos, lessons and interactive exercises, including one that requires students to use Google Earth software to map global terrorist activity.

Teaching Students About 9/11

At a press conference on Tuesday at a hotel blocks from the World Trade Center site, Giuliani said the program can help students think critically about the attacks as both a historic event and one that shapes the present, noting the continued threat of terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Teachers say that today's middle and high school students might be too young to have strong memories of the attacks, so the program can help them develop insight into what actually happened.

"Students are getting progressively younger as we move further and further away from the events," says Torres. In a few years, students who are taught about the attacks will not even have been alive when they occurred, adds Anthony Gardner, executive director of the Education Trust, whose brother died in the World Trade Center.

9/11 as a Lesson, Not a Memory

Eight years later, this is an example of what Sept. 11, 2001, has become for a generation that's too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled "A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum." In Room C215 at Lincoln High School, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom "warm-up exercise." "Militant," "imploding" and "rubble" are boldfaced vocabulary words for students to memorize. Homework assignments and essay questions ensure that Sept. 11 will indeed be remembered by millions of schoolchildren, if with a new sense of detachment.

More:
The September 11 Education Program
The September 11 Education Trust

A federal court recently ruled that Ashcroft can be held personally responsible for the wrongful detention of an innocent American.

It's something. We'll see where it goes from here.

• Do teachers need education degrees? (Part 1) http://bit.ly/4itlF #
• The value of education degrees: teachers respond http://bit.ly/2aMN2J #
• Eduwonk: Responses to the NYT on reinventing teacher ed programs http://bit.ly/2JZYn #

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• You can judge a school by the boys' bathroom: http://bit.ly/njA7C #
• Lazy journalists and Detroit's "ruin porn": http://bit.ly/Ie6wf #

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For the last month I've been researching American K-12 textbooks and looking at how they depict immigrant groups, especially religious minorities. Today I found this gem, from an 18th-century public school textbook:

Fifteen Christians and 15 Turks bound at sea in one ship in a terrible storm, and the pilot declaring a necessity of casting one half of these persons into the sea, that the rest might be saved, they all agreed that the persons to be cast away should be set out by lot in this manner, viz., the 30 persons should be placed in a round form like a ring and then, beginning to count at one of the passengers and proceeding regularly every ninth person should be cast into the sea until of the 30 persons there remained only 15. The question is, how these 30 persons ought to be placed that the lot might fall infallibly upon the 15 Turks, and not upon any of the 15 Christians.

• Feminist Hawks: http://bit.ly/s7gX4 #
• "The Curse of Knowledge" – Excellent analogy to teaching: http://bit.ly/HWIXl #

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This is part one of "Children Full of Life," a documentary about Toshiro Kanamori, a schoolteacher in northwest Tokyo, who not only prizes empathy but teaches it as a skill. In other words he doesn't just model "niceness" and then chastise the kids who can't intuitively figure it out and copy him — he actively explains how empathy works, and gives his 4th graders ample opportunities to exercise it.

A few things I noticed here… One is that this class is huge! I count 34 children. I've read elsewhere that small class sizes are not prized in Japan the way they are in the U.S., and that it's common to have classes with 40 or more kids. I would love to know more about how they manage this.

Another is the noise level. The classroom doors are open and you hear a steady stream of shouting coming from other parts of the building, but no one seems annoyed or distracted by this. I find this interesting because the American stereotype of Japanese schools envisions kids in identical uniforms bowed silently over their desks. "We could have their test scores," we say, "if only we were willing to stifle children's will like they do." As you can see from the scenes of children sliding around in the mud during recess, that's not really what's happening.

Part three is amazing. I've never seen a child take this kind of risk on behalf of another child:

I also find it interesting that the kids took collective responsibility for one child's actions. In one telling story I read about Japanese middle schools, a 9th grader had stolen some money from the treasury of one of his extracurricular clubs. Stop and think about how that would be dealt with in an American school — probably by isolating the child, giving him detention or a suspension, involving his parents and possibly the police. How connected would such a child feel to his club or to the school after such an incident? What pathway would he have to get back in everyone's good graces? And how frustrating would that be? It's easy to see how kids who make a few mistakes quickly go down the path of total disengagement.

In Japan, however, they took a totally different approach. They called in one of the older boys in the club and criticized him for not providing leadership and mentoring for the younger boy. The older boy apologized, and right away the younger boy (i.e. the thief!) felt guilty and embarrassed and promised to make amends. He was welcomed back into the group despite his actions… but also with a dose of "hey, dude, quit making the rest of us look bad." It worked.

It's easy to see where this approach could go wrong. I remember spending more than one recess standing by the wall with my whole class, being punished for the actions of one or two kids. It felt profoundly unfair. But in those cases we weren't given the responsibility, or even the option, of interacting directly with the "problem" kid, except I suppose by teasing and bullying him, which the teacher probably hoped we'd do. In the case above, the older boy was punished (lightly) for someone else's actions, but he was _also and simultaneously_ reminded of his power and responsibility in the situation.

One of my first instincts is to wonder how inefficient it must be to spend so much time working on group dynamics and social skills. When I step back, though, I think it must be time-saving in the long run. A few years ago I took an intensive workshop for ESL teachers, and was surprised that we spent the first 3 or 4 days just talking about the culture of "the group." Isn't this a waste of time, I wondered? We're only here for a month! A couple weeks into it, though, I realized how beneficial that had been. As everyone started to get burned out from the intensity of the workshop they naturally started to turn on each other, but knowing that this was a normal stage in the process, and that it would pass, made it easier not to take things personally. We also worked better as a team, because we'd already discussed the kinds of problems that typically come up with the kind of group projects we were doing. We didn't spend a lot of time on petty resentments.

I imagine it would be even more important with young children, who are still getting used to school culture and who might lack the vocabulary to talk about shame, fear, anger, justice, and other emotional concepts that are difficult to articulate. Spending time learning exactly how to do this gives them the tools they need to avoid eruptions later. It also helps them feel safe in the classroom and invested in the classwork, which is good for the teacher because it's easier to explain things one time well than to repeat the same information all year long to kids who are half-engaged, anxious, or defensive: kids who don't feel like their classmates are allies or their teachers advocates.

I've never been to Japan, and I realize this teacher is unusual there, too, but from what I've read Japanese schools do spend more time than American schools on fostering group dynamics and a sense of inclusion and belonging. It's funny to me because in the United States these are considered useless feel-good hippie concepts — get back to your basal readers, everyone! — but Japan is hardly known for its lack of rigor. It would be nice if we could discuss the importance of emotional learning outside the culture wars framework.

The last segment is just beautiful:

I've added a curriculum review of Rosetta Stone's Arabic software. I apologize for its length, but it was the product of several months of frustration.

I'd like to add more reviews of Arabic language learning books and software to this site. The more I think about education and pedagogy, the more I find it useful to be a student myself. How do I learn? How do I not learn? I think learning a foreign language is an especially good way to keep you humble. When I was first learning the Arabic script, I found I had a lot more sympathy for the kids I was working with who were learning to read.

Wordpress doesn't allow me to put a comment box on static pages, so this post will serve as the comment space for Rosetta Stone. If you've used it in the past, in any language but especially in Arabic, feel free to share your experience here. I'm especially interested in the changes they've made since version 2.