Amusement, irony, and sarcasm in classrooms across the blogosphere...

Teaching kindergarten is planning for Halloween 'academic games' and changing 29 children into costumes for a 20 minute party, solely for the amusement of her principal.

Hobo Teacher laments a colleague's use of "The Math Pimp" persona. I suggest announcing it over the P.A. system.

Mrs. Bluebird uncovers yet another reason to preview materials before passing them out to children...and it involves the male reproductive system.

Mrs. Chili writes a letter to her students' parents about laziness and apathy, and receives a single response.

John Spencer creates a video debunking the danger of "Denim Day". I would argue that certain teachers wearing certain jean styles could be, in fact, dangerous and may cause temporary blindness, but point taken.

The Bus Driver tries out some logical consequences for Puke Girl and Poop Boy.

Mystery Teacher poses for a school picture...and "the office" requests a re-take.

One of Tattle Teacher's students learns to shape up, or go back to Mexico and take care of the goats.

Sarah contemplates writing "See diploma. See resume." in lieu of filling out tedious lesson plan forms.

Mister Teacher spends a thrilling afternoon uncovering the reasons why his ESL kids don't understand elaborate word problems. Of course, if they couldn't define 'sum' two weeks prior, the outlook wasn't too bright.

Exposing NCLB and test-based accountability

The following is an excerpt from a comment (yes, just a comment) left by "Jane Doe" in response to an excellent post at Bridging Differences (follow the link to read the original post and the comment in its entirety). This is something every American citizen needs to understand about what's really happening with "accountability" in education. Big props to This Brazen Teacher and The Frustrated Teacher who are sharing this, as well. If you're already reading those blogs, skip this post; if you're not, follow immediately. Then spread the word about these lies:

A few of the many lies of NCLB, in no particular order:

We lie when we speak of proficiency as if it were an objective standard when really it is just a number guessed at by a dozen teachers at a meeting one weekend. And half of the teachers thought the number was far too low and half thought it was far too high.

We lie when we say that a high score on a minimum-skills NCLB test means a student is "Advanced" when really it only indicates that the child has mastered mediocrity. A perfectionist, perhaps. But well-educated? Not even close.

We lie when we say we need more data and expensive software to understand that a child who has not passed the third grade test will not pass the fourth grade test and a child who has not passed either will never catch up and will not graduate. We don't need more data to know what we already know. Giving the child the fifth grade test the next year doesn't count as an intervention.

We lie when we say that a "year's growth" is equal to moving from 50th percentile to 50th percentile when we know that the number of scaled score points between the two tests will change from year to year to year.

We lie when we restructure our for-profit education company as a not-for-profit company knowing that Arne Duncan will hand out innovation grants to districts who partner with not-for-profit companies.

We lie when we say that too many children are unprepared for college-level work and then tell schools to spend more time focusing on NCLB tests when we know that prepping for NCLB tests in no way prepares students for college-level work.

We lie when we pretend that the No Child Left Behind accountability system measures all children. As the Associated Press revealed long ago, NCLB has so many exclusions that millions of children are never counted.

We lie when we report NCLB test scores separated by race knowing it would be illegal to assign students to schools or programs using race.

We lie when we say a school is doing well when it failed to reach simple proficiency and failed to make AYP and only became a success when it had a third chance with a growth model which showed that it might be doing well at some point in the future. We lie when we say that an entire school district is a failure because some of its many schools are struggling. We are lying when we say that NCLB can accurately identify schools as a successful or failing.

We lie when we take a picture of a mentally challenged child pointing to the nickel and not the dime on a Friday afternoon because we need evidence of "applied number sense" for her NCLB portfolio, even though we know that by Monday morning she will have forgotten which is which.

We lie when we tell parents of mentally challenged children that we want them to get the best education so we will give them a small financial voucher to leave the public schools without telling them that removing their child from our rolls will help us to make AYP.

We lie when we keep very-high-functioning children in special education programs because they are the ones we intend to use when we decide whose test will be included in the 2% we are allowed to count under NCLB for our special education reporting.

We lie when we keep students who have learned to speak English in language learner programs because if they didn't take the language learner version of our NCLB test our scores might drop.

We lie when we say we have a system that can use test scores to identify highly-skilled teachers, but the same teachers don't show up as highly-skilled from one year to the next even when they are teaching the same level of students in the same school.

We lie when we say that we are measuring whether a student is on grade level (using proficiency), determine that some students are not on grade level, but then advance those students to the next grade when we have just said that they were not ready for the next grade -- grade after grade until the 8th grade student is still stuck at a 5th grade level. Even the proponents of NCLB testing aren't confident enough in the tests to use the data to make a decision that might have some real impact.

We lie when we say that we have a system of rating teachers that is more rigorous than the old principal evaluations, but somehow a far majority of teachers are always better than average and almost every teacher willing to participate gets a bonus check of some size.

We lie when we claim that tests are designed by large groups of educators when only one or two people will make the decision about which test items will be on an actual test.

We lie when we speak of impossible theoreticals as if they were facts. If the worst students had the best teachers for three years in a row, then those would not be the best teachers any longer. And two of three teachers would have left the school after the first year of the program.

We lie when we don't report that the statisticians asked about the validity of growth models were just given a multi-year million dollar grant to study their use, so they probably won't have a definitive answer until that money runs out.

We lie when we say that there are no bad teachers and no bad students and no bad parents. Some bad parents have bad students who even graduate and somehow become bad teachers and go on to sire bad students of their own. We should stop hiring bad teachers, right after we stop hiring racist cops and firefighters who turn out to be arsonists and computer programmers who just sit there in their cubicle surfing for porn. We should find out who claims to have the perfect system for hiring teachers and fire that liar.

We lie when we say that what was learned from NCLB was never known before NCLB, but that is understandable. Every generation believes that it invented sex. No wonder these young ed reformers and the recently converted think they are the first to use "data" or the first to document differences between groups. Please, read a book published before you were born. Talk to someone who doesn't own an iPhone. If you're not careful, you might just learn something.

We lie when we say that what gets measured gets done and then say that what doesn't get measured (history, science, the arts) is still getting done. Some people aren't very good at lying.

We lie when we say that we need to pursue what is in the best interests of the children and not the adults because the real goal of education has always been to create a healthy, productive, creative, civilized society and that has always been in the best interests of adults. Adults, the far majority of society, benefit more from having well-educated children than the children do. We lie when we criticize some adults for being motivated by self-interest while suggesting that we, ourselves, are above that. The best lies are the ones we tell ourselves, aren't they?

We lie when we say that test-based accountability using these deeply flawed measures is the best system we have because it implies that the system is good enough and we know that getting and using so much misleading or wrong information cannot improve education. Having more misleading data and powerful computers to allow us to get to the inaccurate information faster will not help. It can't, it hasn't, and it won't.

And that's the truth.

Read the rest here.

Call me Judge Judy Jr.

Please? 'Cuz I really am obsessed with her show. My husband and I watch it faithfully (4 pm in both New York and Fort Lauderdale!), and we're convinced she is the solution to all the world's problems related to personal responsibility and integrity.

The show is of particular interest to me because being a judge is one of the many unofficial roles that teachers must play, especially when navigating the choppy waters of kids' interpersonal conflicts. Next time your students do some truth-twisting or rely on the tired "I ain't DO nothin!" as their standard line of defense, try out one of these Judge Judy-isms:

See? She even knows how to give 'the teacher look'!

"If you're telling the truth, you don't have to look over there while you think up what to say next. Look at ME when you're talking."

"Now you're making things up as you go along. Don't make it up as we go."

"That story doesn't make sense. And if it doesn't make sense, it's not true."

"So if I call ____ and ask whether s/he gave you permission to do that, s/he's going to agree with your story?" [Makes the call immediately.]

"Someone's not telling the truth here. It's either him or you. Which one of you is lying?"

"I am a human lie detector. I don't need a machine."

"You know how I can tell if a young person is lying? If her lips are moving."

Obviously, I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. However, there are at LEAST four incidents every single day in which I have to determine which kid is being honest and who needs the Judge Judy truth-telling smackdown. I've actually used each of these lines with considerable success (except the last one, which I've never uttered in the interest of professionalism, and also because the kids wouldn't get it). Now imagine my success rate if I sat on an elevated platform and invested in a black robe and gavel...hmmm....

Breaking up is hard to do: the story of my love affair with Twitter

I can officially say that the thrill is gone. It's been a whirlwind romance this year:

Winter: Twitter became my latest social media crush when I joined somewhat hesistantly in January 2009. I promptly earned a social media blogging job because of my post about the experience (which certainly heightened my enthusiasm for the trendy platform) and made some amazing connections at the ASCD conference solely because of Twitter. Those first few months were a time of borderline obsession as I spent a disproportionate amount of time with the object of my affection.

Spring: I blogged regretfully about how few of my readers were on Twitter, but this very limitation caused me to discover hundreds of new and interesting people. By now, Twitter was my primary tool for sharing and uncovering important educational news: the infatuation was in full swing, and Twitter was always on my mind.

Summer: As the honeymoon drew to a close, the very qualities that once attracted me to Twitter now annoyed me to no end. Though my enthusiasm began to wain as I became disillusioned with Twitter's flaws, many of you all became tweeters during that time, so I stuck it out. Even my mom joined Twitter this summer. Twitter became that annoying guy who followed me around, and even through I wasn't really into him, he was too nice for me to ask him to knock it off.

Fall: Ugh. I'm now in that painful phase at the end of the relationship where I have to fake interest in anything Twitter has to say, and tuning out its incessant chatter is getting easier because my mind is so preoccupied with ways I can end the relationship without it being too traumatic. In a word, awkward.

I'm certainly not the only one falling out of love with Twitter. And I probably won't be the only one to hear the classic rebuttal from those still deeply infatuated: "The value of Twitter is in who you follow; if you don't like the system, it's because you don't follow the right people!" But for me, that's ridiculous. I follow only the people whose tweets are interesting, timely, funny, inspirational, or educational. Usually all of the above.

In fact, it's the awesomeness of my follow list that causes me to dislike Twitter. It's simply too difficult to have meaningful conversations and interactions with the people I respect.

When users toss out valuable questions like "How do you integrate technology into your homework assignments?", followers must respond in 140 characters or less. Tryng 2 figr out how 2 do this=ridic. time consum. &irritatng. Then searching for others' replies is nearly impossible in the cascading stream of random tweets. Heaven forbid you come into the conversation late and read a whole bunch of @ replies without even knowing the initial conversation starter. The whole @ system is infuriating, especially since you can only reply at a person and not their exact status. Sometimes people @ me about a tweet I sent twelve hours earlier and I have no idea what they're referencing or how it relates to my most recent tweet, until I finally figure out they're responding to an older message. If I can't remember what my own tweet was about, there's no way I'm going to remember someone else's when another follower @'s them about it the next day.

Twitter, for me, has become an endless stream of random bits of conversation that I simply don't have the energy to follow. And don't even get me started on the hassles of using the #. Seriously, is there not a better way?

There is certainly value for Twitter in the classroom--I don't disparage that (at least not in this post). And sure, Twitter is a great way to share links to interesting studies, stories, and research. I used to keep Tweetdeck open on the right side of my screen so new tweets would scroll by as I worked on other projects. I could discover dozens of interesting resources in mere minutes. But that just distracted me from the other work I was doing and prolonged my time online. So I started checking Twitter whenever my beloved Google Reader was empty and I felt like reading random information that other people found useful. That would be NEVER.

There is another object of my affection now. You guessed it. Facebook.

I've been two-timing Twitter since the beginning, as I joined Twitter the same month I created my Facebook fan page. Yet I have nearly three times as many Facebook fans as I do Twitter followers, which means I'm able to interact with considerably more educators on Facebook. There, I can pose a question, post a status update, or share a photo/video/link that's embedded right on the page. Fans can reply using multiple sentences with proper spelling in a coherent thread which is simple to read and respond to. Best of all, Facebook is an application that I can check in with a couple times a day for a few minutes at a time, have some meaningful interactions, and get on with my life. I'm able to read and enjoy every single message posted by my fans, people I'm fans of, and my friends.

As long as there are people who want to read my tweets (and evidently there are 400 of them), I'll login to Twitter once or twice a week to share some interesting links or insights. And I love being able to send messages to influential quasi-celebrities in education and Christian circles to let them know how much I enjoyed their latest book/speaking engagement/podcast. But since I rarely read what anyone else tweets anymore, it's become largely a one-way conversation, and that renders the whole thing silly and self-indulgent.

If and when Twitter finds a practical way to allow its users to converse, I'll jump back on the bandwagon. Until then, I'll spend the majority of my time courting my love that has (so far) stood the test of time. Facebook, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

What are your feelings about Twitter right now? Have you found a way to keep it relevant and useful? Or is there another form of social media that's stolen your heart?