California English
Call for Manuscripts
February 2007: Closing the Achievement Gap
(deadline December 15, 2006)
The
achievement gap between African American and Latino students and their
white and Asian counterparts is a national embarrassment. While
socio-economic factors, parents’ education, peer pressure, language
challenges, school funding, and teacher expectations may begin to
explain the disparity, the gap must be closed. What is your school
doing to raise student performance? How can we insure access to high
level, rigorous instruction for all students? What have you done in
your classroom to help students who lag behind catch up and stay caught
up? How can we accelerate student learning? The magazine welcomes
stories of individual students who have beaten the odds.
April 2007: The Literature of Atrocities
(deadline February 15, 2007)
During
World War II, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer, coined the term genocide to
describe “crimes against humanity.” Survivors from various Twentieth
Century genocides have published their stories widely Currently, nearly
half of the states recommend or require teaching about the Holocaust
and other genocides. How does a teacher approach what has been called
the “literature of atrocity”? Which memoirs should be taught and at
which grade levels? How can one provide historical context for
survivors’ stories? What about students’ loss of innocence? How do you
help students deal with literature that probes almost unimaginable evil?
June 2007: Homework Re-envisionsed
(deadline April 15, 2007)
September 2007: MySpace/YourSpace: Teaching Ethical Internet Usage
(deadline July 15, 2007)
Please
send all submissions to California English editor, Carol Jago. Articles
should be limited to 2,500 words. Please submit manuscripts via email
to jago@gseis.ucla.edu.
Want a nifty, free, drag & drop web site builder? Check out Weebly.
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your favorite theme? Follow our theme guidelines to submit a theme for
approval, and we’ll add it as soon as we can.
Student tapes teacher proselytizing in class
Accept Jesus or ‘you belong in hell,’ he said
Wednesday, November 15,
2006
JERSEY JOURNAL
The primary story should be that the administration tried to bury the complaint by not see the child for a month. Like no student or teacher ever complained about this teacher to the administration before? Why aren’t whistle-blowers protected? That part gets half a sentence.
On Sept. 14 — the fourth day of class — Paszkiewicz is
on tape saying, “He (God) did everything in his power
to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he
took your sin on his own body, suffered your pains for you
and he’s saying, ‘Please accept me, believe
me.’”
He adds, according to the tapes: “If you reject
that, you belong in hell. The outcome is your prerogative.
But the way I see it, God himself sent his only son to die
for David Paszkiewicz on that cross … And if you reject
that, then it really is to hell with you.”
Paszkiewicz didn’t limit his religious observations
to personal salvation, according to the tapes.
Paszkiewicz shot down the theories of evolution and the
“Big Bang” in favor of creationism. He also told
his class that dinosaurs were on Noah’s ark, LaClair
said.
On Oct. 10 — a month after he first requested a meeting
with the principal — LaClair met with Paszkiewicz, Somma
and the head of the social studies department.
At first, Paszkiewicz denied he mixed in religion with
his history lesson, and the adults in the room appeared to
be buying it, LaClair said. But then he reached into his
backpack and produced the CDs [emphasis mine].
What do you call drop out rates?
Students Dropping Out of High School Reaches Epidemic Levels
31 percent of American students were dropping out or failing to graduate in the nation’s largest 100 public school districts.
If you call it an epidemic, as this article does, than it seems like an accident of biology. It’s not. High dropout rates are caused by social and political neglect. We can do so much better.
A 2005 resource, but new to me. A grant from the Florida Dept of Education to UCF College of Education was behind this Literature Circles Strategy of the Month.
I love WWW pages like this that are hard and lean, comprehensive, and give links to many other resources. Start or renew your understanding of Literature Circles here!
From ReadWriteThink.org, a terrific lesson plan by Lisa Storm Fink, a teacher I met at the National NCTE conference last week. ReadWriteThink is perhaps the best place on the web to find language arts lesson plans. Because of Lisa and Traci (Traci’s List of Ten), the quality of planning is ridiculously competent.
Stay tuned for my detailed impression of meeting Jim Burke.
From Jeff Jarvis, quoting David Brooks:
Cohen understands that when you are telling socially insecure audiences they are
superior to their fellow citizens there is no need to be subtle. He also
understands that any hint of actually questioning the cultural suppositions of
his ticket-buyers — say by ridiculing the pretensions of somebody at a Starbucks
or a Whole Foods Market — would fatally mar the self-congratulatory aura of the
enterprise.
