Busy busy!

Lots of items to report.

1. I am going to be a reader for the FLAP grants - FLAP is the Foreign Language Assistance Program, funded through Title V of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I'm not sure how that's abbreviated. In any case, I might be extremely busy between my two jobs, classes, and being a reader between Aug. 9-18. Just a warning. However, once I return I will share whatever knowledge I can about how to apply for your hunk of government cheese - for your school of course.

2. Because I'm in a quantitative methods class right now (which basically means I'm learning how to apply statistical analysis methods to education research), I found this editorial really interesting. Normally the WSJ editorial page makes me angry, but I found this refreshing. No, really, No Child Left Behind does lie about progress schools make. And it is criminal.

"Acid Tests." (Murray, C. WSJ, Tuesday, July 25th.)

3. I can't believe the attitude of some of my fellow graduate students. As some of you know, I taught middle school for 3 years. Part of teaching middle school - in fact, a very large part - involves giving students "life lessons" - how to behave in school, how to study, how to take tests. I spent time going over how to take a test and how to study, but never would I give them the exact material the test covered. Or tell them how many questions there are. (Except on the final, because I thought it was ridiculous that 7th and 8th graders had a "final" anyway).

Once you reach graduate school, these sorts of lessons should be learned. And if you have not learned them, well, you need to get a job where you don't need to worry about them. Apparently I am alone in my thinking, however. Yesterday in my EDMS 645 (this is how everyone refers to the class; I tend to call it "Statistics," but no one ever knows what I am talking about), graduate students demonstrated that middle school tendencies are alive and well in COLLEGE GRADUATES.

On Tuesday, one young man (who continually asks questions in class that demonstrate he has not yet cracked his textbook) asked a question during lecture to the effect of "Will this be on the quiz?" My teacher, K., really cares about our learning, unlike the other EDMS 645 professor whose nickname is "Speedy." She's from Minnesota, has one of those cute accents, and enjoys teaching us and making us laugh at her truly awful jokes. In any case, K. answers by saying, "We'll talk about that tomorrow," since, well, the quiz is Thursday.

He asked the same type of question again yesterday, and she replied that we would talk about the quiz later in the class. At this point, my response would have been, "The quiz is on everything we learned in class. That's what you should study." K, because of her kindness, did a brief review of everything we needed to know, not just for the quiz, but for the midterm and final as well. She did it to "jog our memories" and help us recall everything we had learned. We've covered a lot of material, but it is a summer class.

Anyway. I'm blathering on. One student in the class raises her hand during the review and says, "Um, like, I don't mean to be rude, but can you just tell us exactly what is going to be on the quiz?" When she didn't get her desired answer, she tried again,"Well, how many questions are there going to be? Like, 20?" When she still didn't get an answer, she proceeded to mumble nasty things about the teacher for the rest of the class under her breath.

Sigh. These are graduate students. And our future teachers. And, apparently, incapable of acting like adults.