Rich's Other Pages
My Hometown Newspaper Depresses Me
A few weeks ago my paper, the Titusville Herald (http://www.titusvilleherald.com) ran a story of a local bunch who got arrested for running a crystal meth lab in their homes. All well and good. But what disturbed me was how the paper went the extra mile and also went into detail about how video tapes were found there that showed a couple of the women involved really liked their dog. Decorum stops me from going any further, but it didn't stop the paper. Nope -- we got a lot of the nifty details. Any more and it could have been a letter from the dog starting out, "Dear Penthouse Forum, I never thought it would happen to me..."
This is a paper that services at town of less than seven thousand (a lot less), and the paper has been really pushing its "Newspapers in the Classroom" program which gives classroom sets to any teacher who wants them. The first week this program went into effect in some elementary classes, they get this. ("Mommy...what's beastiality mean?") Not only that, but they have a teen page that is included once a week. One of the teen writers decided it would be great to write a story about an impressive deposit another student left in the boy's bathroom at the high school. Seven paragraphs' worth of story. Lovely reading over the breakfast table.
And the crowning achievement of journalistic style the paper achieves is "Open Line," a forum that allows people to bitch about anything and everything in town anonymously. Love that sense of responsibility. Honestly, I realize that newspapers are fighting reader attrition, but if this paper is going to continue to pander to the lowest common denominator, I'd rather it go under with dignity.
Getting some love from Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert has been doing a great job in the past few weeks promoting donorschoose.org, a site that allows people to donate directly to help fund programs in Pennsylvania public schools. Because of his efforts, the site raised more that $100,000 in just a few weeks. That alone puts him on my "what a great guy" list, but tonight he went over the top. He plugged the site once again during his build up to his own trip to Philly for the upcoming primary, and this time he mentioned a couple of the programs seeking funding. The first one took me by surprise because it was from my own district. Yes, he did joke concerning a request from Titusville Middle School's band program. Here's the bit:
Thanks, Stephen!
How can such a great presentation make me feel so lousy?
Yesterday was an in-service day in my district, and rather than the usual meetings and rigmarole those days normally entail, we had a guest speaker, Dr. Willard Daggett of the International Center for Leadership in Education. Dr. Daggett is an impressive speaker who has the ability to hold an audience's attention through a presentation over five hours long (well, we had lunch in the middle).
The problem is that it was one of those presentations that contained information that I'm sure will keep me up nights if I think about it too much. I'm not going to go into details here just yet, as I am still sorting through all of it in my mind, but in essence he spelled out in very real terms the challenges to education in the United States that will be occurring in the next decade or so, and by extension he outlined the challenges to the country as a whole as well. And, to me at least, it's not pretty at all. Don't get me wrong, he did give numerous ways to help improve education here, but I think an unintended byproduct was that he made me feel that in a lot of ways, it would be rearranging the deck chairs on The Titanic.
Christmas Should Arrive Early At My School This Year
The laptops are Lenovo R500 ThinkPads, and the primary differences between the student and teacher models are that the teacher models include a built in webcam and microphone and have some administrative software on them that the students won’t need to access. Also, the teachers’ memory was upgraded from the standard one gigabyte of RAM memory to two by the district so thanks go out to John, Sue and the administration for okaying that. These computers are a tad heavier than what many would think of for a laptop today, but that’s because they were built to withstand a bit more punishment than one you might buy for yourself from a retailer.
There is an amazing selection of software that is available that is already installed on the computers. Each computer has Microsoft Office 2007(Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Movie Maker, and more), Adobe Design CS3 (Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Acrobat, and more), Inspiration, ITunes , Google Earth and a number of free, Open Source programs. In addition, there is a collection of tools from Microsoft called Learning Essentials which is designed specifically for using Office products effectively in the classroom. Some of these products were new to me, so I would imagine some will be new to others as well.
The district opted not to get MS Vista as the operating system. These computers still run XP, so the learning curve is very slight. Microsoft Office 2007 may be a shock to those who haven’t ever used it because it is a complete redesign of the product from the 2003 version used here in the district. Personally, I like it better. It has several new features that make it much more efficient and workable, but it definitely takes some getting used to, and some people may be a bit put off by the differences.
Meanwhile, I’ve been flitting to and from various points on the map for training on how to best help teachers actually utilize all this stuff, and I’ve picked up a number of great ideas for all curriculum areas. I’ve also assembled a huge list of websites that can help teachers in the classroom. You can access my bookmarks by going to www.delicious.com/rrlane.