Won’t Back Down is a 2012 drama starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as a single mom to a dyslexic daughter, Viola Davis as a teacher at a failing inner-city elementary school and Holly Hunter as a teacher’s union representative. In the movie, Gyllenhaal’s and Davis’s characters use a fail-safe law to take over the underperforming school. The film plays out in typical Hollywood fashion with plucky [...]
High schools are always changing. During my time in high school, I was a member of the unlucky class required to take standardized testing junior year, and then again senior year when the state decided to change the grade level being tested. Washington State students, however, aren’t just presented with the inconvenience of extra testing, but with the added pressure of another course. [...]
As a person a little scared to so much as add without the help of a calculator, I understand why STEM has a menacing reputation among high school students. The STEM skills—that is, science, technology, engineering and math—are often considered complicated and unnecessary lessons to students who don’t want to be scientists, technicians, engineers or mathematicians. Many students assume they’re better off avoiding [...]
With answers becoming so accessible that students can find them with just a click of the mouse, it’s understandable that some may worry that technology is becoming more of a hindrance and less of an improvement to education. For students who saved their summer reading until the last minute, finding detailed book summaries has become relatively easy. With the variety of online games [...]
As a Latina riding on the school bus to my predominately white elementary school, I remember the way we would all peer out the windows with our faces half hidden when the bus from the northern part of town passed by us. “That’s the school with all the black people,” someone would say, and we’d turn to her and wonder how she could [...]
In high school, I tried to avoid gym. Who wanted to change into shorts in the middle of the school day, run a mile, and return to class sweaty—because who really used those showers? Not me. I had friends whose physical education requirements were waived for any reason from varsity sports to asthma. While my friends took extra nonathletic electives, I learned the [...]
Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) in Brooklyn entered its second year this September, touting a unique six-year program that goes from grade 9 through grade 14, after which students graduate with an associate’s degree. The initiative began in September 2011 to develop science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills in students to better prepare them for the job market. In [...]
Elementary schools are saying, “Class dismissed!” to traditional lectures. The Responsive Classroom approach, a teaching technique promoting social-emotional learning strategies, was discussed this past fall at a meeting that the Society for Research on Education Effectiveness (SREE) hosted. The study, funded by the US Department of Education and conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia, found that fifth graders who were taught [...]
“Pick out any book you want.” These are the words my preschool tutor said to me when I was seven years old and still couldn’t read. My mom had already tried everything: flashcards, bedtime stories and several programs promising increased literacy in young children. But all of them ended with me sitting on the floor still trying to pronounce banana while flashcards and [...]
Question everything is a principle to live by--and to learn by. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) promote inquiry-based education, thrusting students into a hands-on relationship with their education. This is a great power and responsibility, but luckily the students have help. Every school has a secret resource, trained to support students and teachers alike. Who is this mysterious superhero? The school librarian, [...]