More on teacher effectiveness

"An L.A. Times analysis, using data largely ignored by LAUSD, looks at which educators help students learn, and which hold them back."

I haven't read the whole series yet, but the premise strikes me as so level-headed it's almost crazy. If we know that the quality of the teacher in the front of the room is the single greatest factor affecting student progress,* and we have the data to see how students progress from year-to-year,** and we don't look at it,*** what does that say about how much we care about student progress?

*and we do.
**ditto.
***ditto again.

Tenure

Some thoughts:

Christopher Beam at Slate, on tenure in higher education

Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker, on teachers and classroom success

Pip's progress

"We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me." -Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Dickens captures the fundamental themes with passages that are simultaneously sad and funny. It's a bizarre experience to be reading and suddenly find yourself laughing with a sob catching in your throat. He takes what makes us human and captures it with language. It's what made me choose the title for this blog (which is borrowed from a Melissa Bank novel, but aptly describes so many passages in Dickens). I'm not sure if pulling one of the B, F, S & T passages and posting it would do it justice. Dickens builds to his moments. Losing the context would present you with a pretty, eloquent pair of lines, like above, but you wouldn't have the emotional commitment to the moment like you would if you were reading the novel.

I'll try to find more examples of what I'm talking about. But again, this might not be the medium for it.

Great minds on education

"The greatest success of education occurs when the student learns to reject claims that are unsupported by reliable evidence - including his own." - My old French teacher, James Higby

Meta-textual silliness

Great minds on literature, part 1

"I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker." - Thomas Hardy