A thoroughly bad idea: public schools with opt-out on core curriculum
I suppose I do believe in the existence of some core subject matter. Lakeland, FL, columnist Cary McMullen has proposed an opt-out option for parents who disagree with public schools’ teaching evolution. While he sees no conflict between teaching the neo-Darwin model and respecting people’s religions, he argues in favor of letting parents remove their […]
Pacing: when adrenaline is not enough
Bad head cold time today, involving sinuses and other stuff you don’t need to know about. I’m heading to western Washington state on Tuesday for most of a week, so I have to get some things done before then. Yesterday was shot, so today requires getting stuff done (priority: editor stuff). I’m sitting here in […]
Bill Clinton’s Ego, redux
I think Leo Casey is wrong about the politics of Bill Clinton’s slamming Ted Kennedy. Since I agree with Leo on a large swath of education policy, including the effects of NCLB, I should explain a bit. For the most part, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama share significant rhetoric on education and quite a bit […]
At least Timothy Leary chose to drop out…
I think I understand Leary’s choices, or at least the temptation: It’s the end of two very tiring days, when I had a chance to talk for a few hours with one of the folks who tore down Florida’s old Pork Chop Gang. Short story: an undergraduate I’ve been mentoring for a few semesters had […]
Evaluating college teaching
Since my energy is now sapped, I’ll address Eduwonkette‘s four questions from yesterday: 1) How should learning be evaluated in college? There are two separate questions (what did individual students learn? and what did groups of students learn?), though I think Eduwonkette is asking more about personnel evaluation. The first two can be evaluated using […]