I hadn’t been worried yet about paying for college for the girls: now, I might not have to.

The Corporation of Brown University has approved a new financial aid policy that eliminates loans for students whose family incomes are less than $100,000, reduces loans for all students who receive financial aid and no longer requires a parental contribution from most families with incomes of up to $60,000.

Laura points at this rather-painful article about how the education system today is doing everything it can to stomp out the development of creativity and genius.

It reminded me strongly of the Advanced Math teacher at Classical who marked most of my answers on the polar coordinates homework wrong, because I had read a couple of sections ahead in the book and seen that you could write, for example, a 315° angle as a -45° one. But that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, so even though it was perfectly correct, I lost credit.

(Of course, this was the same teacher who gave me the Martin Gardner math puzzle book he saw me reading over and over, so he wasn’t all bad…)

A briefing paper prepared for Congress argues that performance-based assessments of students are much more accurate and meaningful than most current standardized teaching. Would you want states to license drivers who aced the test, but couldn’t parallel park?

Extensive research and experience, both here and abroad, have demonstrated that the use of performance assessments which are locally administered and use multiple sources of evidence offer the opportunity to turn assessment systems to serve their primary purpose—assisting students in learning and teachers in teaching for higher order intellectual skills. In fact, the assessment systems of most of the highest-achieving nations in the world are a combination of centralized assessments that use mostly open-ended and essay questions and local assessments given by teachers which are factored into the final examination scores. These local assessments–which include research papers, applied science experiments, presentations of various kinds, and projects and products that students construct–are mapped to the syllabus and the standards for the subject and are selected because they represent critical skills, topics, and concepts. Central authorities often determine curricular areas and skills to assess, but the assessments are generally designed, administered, and scored locally.

Adventures in Applied Math has some thoughts on the subject.

BAD IDEA #3:
Frame an otherwise entertaining story about computing the power usage of your computer within the context of your math-illiterate wife blaming you for the high power bill. For extra bonus points, explicitly tell the students that women can’t do math. (This happened in a classroom I was observing.)

(h/t Laura)

Might it be because the reading programs are designed to bore kids to death?

One mid-September night, when I was tucking my 5-year-old son Eamonn in bed, the standardization madness came home to roost. With quivering lip and tear-filled eyes, Eamonn told me he hated school. He said he had to read baby books that didn’t make sense and that he was in the “dummy group.”

Then he looked up at me and said, “I just want to read Frog and Toad.”

Hat tip to TeacherKen@Kos.

Dissent@DailyKos is writing a series of articles on New York State’s handling of schoolkids with ADHD, Tourette’s, etc. For example, one principal had outright refused to allow the teacher and staff to get training on how to help “Joey” deal with his OCD, TS, and ADHD. After they switched schools, it took a year with a full-time aide to get him to feel safe, so that they could start helping him improve.

Another student, “Patti”, had to be removed from her school - again, to protect her from the principal.

A paragraph that caught my attention because of Erin’s and my attention-deficit issues bears repeating.

There is, for example, a tremendous literature on ADHD in school settings and classroom environment factors and individual strategies that make a difference. Yet when I go into the schools, most teachers have never been given the information about simple things like what kind of seating arrangement works best for kids with ADHD if you’re teaching new material. Or they’ve never been told or shown how to effectively use color to organize and enhance attention.

We need to make sure our schools are taking care of our kids properly. Be aware.