More on inflated Florida graduation stats
Today’s article by Margaret Susca on GED withdrawals in Florida (hat tip) again raises issues about an official measure that inflates graduation stats by making schools and districts unaccountable for students who drop out and enter a GED program. More from a 2004 John Merrow video segment More from a 2006 brief I wrote I’m back […]
Why vocabulary makes a difference
Notes on student misunderstandings of vocabulary, and how that affects performance: citation vs. quotation. One is acknowledging one’s sources, and the other is using exact passages and making those passages typographically distinct. Some students misunderstood my advice to cite several sources and turned in drafts where more than half of the words were quoted. I […]
Reading… but not what you think
Yes, I was at a local bookstore at midnight, getting two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But I’m in my office this afternoon, reading student papers. I don’t get the Harry Potter until I’m done. In other news, Jeff Solochek reports correctly that I’m now the representative of the Florida Coalition for […]
Disappointing reading
After crunching through three rounds of papers, it’s time to take a break and review Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence (2006), the fourth in a series of coffeetable books on presenting information: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), Envisioning Information (1990), and Visual Explanations (1997). Tufte’s website is a cornucopia of fascinating discussion of graphics and […]
The discussion glow
I left the classroom for a few minutes this evening, after telling students to arrange themselves in small groups, making sure that each group had at least one member who had read each of the two books I had assigned the class (half to Gilberto Conchas’s The Color of Success and half to David Tyack’s […]