Category Archives: 101

Talking With Anya Kamenetz: DIY Credentials and Updating Post-Secondary Education

Discussing DIY Education with Anya Kamenetz from Antero Garcia on Vimeo.

 

Recently, I talked with Anya Kamenetz via Skype about her new ebook, The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential. The book is free and offers strategies, resources, and networks that help readers achieve personalized educational goals from creating a learning plan to earning a doctorate.

Reading the book, I found it could be a useful resource to help students as they prepare for the transition beyond high school and into higher education. At the same time, Anya’s book acts as a useful blueprint for educators to think about how digital technologies are shifting the ways traditional credentialing, degree programs, and post-secondary learning take place.

[Due to a technical difficulty during the recording of this video, I wasn’t able to see my preview screen. I apologize in advance for blocking Anya during the interview. Bad form, Garcia, bad form.]

Your Summer Syllabus: Three Recent Examples of Participatory Media that Teachers Should Know About (Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy Ahead)

My browser is overcrowded with tabs of information I want to share here. Instead of focusing on a single example, I want to briefly reflect on three different aspects of the shifting nature of culture in participatory media: community, copyright, and civic engagement. By looking at all three of these, educators can get a quick & robust snapshot of what is on the horizon for pedagogical implications vis-à-vis all of this “new media stuff.”  The examples below speak to three different ways that media and culture are changing the ways young people are learning, interacting, and acting upon the world. For teachers, all three of these bring up significant ways that pedagogy needs to shift. (I’ve called this, previously, Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy.)

 

How to Have the Number One Book on Amazon Without Actually Finishing It

When it comes to YA literature, John Green’s works are not only a personal favorite, but also a consistent hit with my students. During the final days of June, John Green went live on YouTube to his legion of fans and (over the course of nearly two hours) announced the title of his new book, answered questions being sent in real time, and read a chapter from the unreleased work. He also announced he was going to sign every copy of the first edition of the book. As a result, The Fault in Our Stars shot to number one on Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites & Green’s work was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, and media sites are pointing to the phenomenon of the sudden sales. What’s important to notice here is specifically how this happened. Green didn’t go online overnight and simply announce the book title (as mainstream media like WSJ signals). Instead, this has been a sustained relationship with readers that has developed trust and identity. John announced that the title came from someone within his online community. Fans have created tons of covers for the book. John’s hosting an online book club that’s reading the Great Gatsby. He has a series of video exchanges with his brother. He interacts with readers through twitter constantly. If anything, part of the fun of being a “fan” of John Green is being able to interact & engage with other readers, the author, and other artifacts in varying degrees of intensity. Spending some time meandering across his official site, his tumblr, his various twitter accounts, and fan pages is a great way for educators to think about ways to collaborate and share the learning experience with young people.

The Good, the Bad, and the Bloop of Fair Use & Copyright

Do you like Kind of Blue? How many times have you heard a soloist riff on those opening bars of “So What”? And while the music is constantly pointed to as a vanguard album in the history of jazz, a recent reinterpretation of the music finds itself a useful case study in when art appropriation exceeds “Fair Use.” I’m regularly talking about the importance of discussing fair use, copyright, and Creative Commons with young people; I’m convinced that this is a space that  students need to explicitly understand as we shift toward a cultural shift from merely consumption to production. This case study, “Kind of Screwed,” is a fantastic introduction into the challenges that are being faced across artistic mediums. Related to this, I regularly either include Free Culture or the film RIP: A Remix Manifesto in courses I teach to teachers about media and technology- both of these are great resources for further investigation on this topic.

 

The Fall of Eve – Commercial Interests & Citizen Dissent

Think of Eve Online as the geekier, way (way) more complex version of World of Warcraft. With political and corporate intrigue at the center of a game that takes place on ships and in fleets of aircrafts, Eve isn’t as widely played in the U.S. as other MMORPGs. However, that hasn’t stopped EVE’s distributor, CCP, from cashing in on game updates & expansions. In doing so, the company’s revealed a strategy that is more interested in a bottom line profit than in continued support of a long term player community. The result? Nearly 5,000 subscribed players walking away from the game and community. Digging through forum postings and news articles, a clear tension between creator and user emerges. And while teachers aren’t likely to utilize EVE Online in daily instruction (though the class that does has got to be an interesting one, no?), the way that these players are signaling dissent within the game, through canceled subscription and through collective organizing demonstrate how civic engagement is reshaped through participatory media. There are past examples of this kind of work described by researchers, particularly in America’s Army and the Sims, for those who want to look at other work in this area.

 

Summing Up

While all of the examples above have related precedents, they point to the fuzzy edges of socio-cultural interaction that most educators aren’t thinking about. They are all from within the past two weeks and are related to the kinds of practices our students are engaged in every day. When are we, as educators, going to formally sketch out a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the paradigm shift that affects our classrooms?

 

 

Productivity and Unhinging Ideas From Books: A Collaborative Post with Jason Sellers (Part I)

 

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from a fellow teacher, Jason Sellers. We’d met several months ago while I was in Orlando for NCTE and he for the National Writing Project’s annual conference. Jason is a high school English teacher in Staunton, IL, a rural high school 45 minutes outside of St. Louis. He’s also a NWP Technology Liaison with the Piasa Bluffs Writing Project, a member of the Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory (an organization that provides professional development to schools), a Hill Country blues guitarist, a motorcycle adventurer, and an MMA fighter.

Discussing the ways we get tied up with information, we thought it would be useful to share out some ways we are organizing, synthesizing, and being able to just remember the myriad information strands we are engaging with on a day-to-day basis. Below we begin our discussion of academic productivity.

How do you manage the information you read in books for future reference?
Jason:

Here are possible options I’ve explored: purchasing traditional books and writing in the margins; purchasing e-books and using Kindle’s highlight feature to save passages; taking snapshots of passages with my cell phone and saving them in EverNote; taking notes in a journal; creating mindmaps.

My main reason for leaning towards ebooks and/or saving passages in Evernote is that I feel books will inevitably move to an electronic format. I don’t want to have to comb through my collection of paper books for marginalia, which I’ll then have to convert to digital format.

The problem with margin writing and ebooks is that they both require purchasing the book. I can’t write in books from the library, and pirated e-books are difficult to find online (waiting on the book equivalent of Napster). Ultimitely, I ruled these two options out, because I’m poor.

I prefer to check books out from the library. I tried taking snapshots of passages of library books with my cell phone. This may be a good method, but I have an older model of cell phone with a crappy camera — doesn’t capture text very well. Someone with an iPhone might be more successful doing this.

The best method I’ve found for retaining information in books is to mindmap the book. I’ve been using this method that past two months after reading Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book. I keep a 8.5″ x 11″ sketchbook with me while I read, and make notes with page numbers for quick reference. That way, I have all the information on one page. Single words and short phrases are enough for me to remember whatever it is I need to remember, and page #s help me track down the passage if I need to cite it directly.

When I finish a mind map, I take a photo, upload it to EverNote, and tag it. Easy to find, and EverNote recognizes handwriting, so it’s searachable.

Thanks again for starting off this discussion Jason. I’m definitely interested in finding out more about other people’s research and creative practices (and hope a few of you will share in the comments below).

As for me, if I’m reading generally, I do a lot of annotating in most books (with exceptions noted below). I also compile a note-taking sheet at the back of most books that allows me to reference back to specific topics and pages I think will come in handy later on.

If I’m reading for a specific project, I’ll also probably start typing my notes or direct quotations as they become prevalent. As I’ve talked about before, Scrivener is an essential note-taking tool for me and for how I organize work related stuff. If there are quotes, passages, or main ideas I want to draw upon or puzzle through, I will type those directly into Scrivener for later–they may get discarded, they may get expanded, they may lead to another book and to another ad naseum, but the point is to get them to the general “space” to which they are related.

I have a pretty strict but impractical approach to writing in books that I’ve been stuck with since beginning my undergraduate work. Basically, any literary, YA, or leisure reading text gets a kind of no-writing embargo placed on it. I’ll admit that the materialistic part of me appreciates the book as a product, especially Books So Ridiculously Awesome You Don’t Even Know What To Do With Them (BSRAYDEKWTDWT). I’ve amassed a handful of first editions of books that have felt important to me at one point in my life or another, and I’ll buy more than one edition of a book to have a “reader’s copy” of a book I don’t feel comfortable risking getting tattered by borrowers of books. Geek Love, Infinite Jest (though the second printing with Vollmann’s name correctly spelled, unfortunately), and–come to mention it–a healthy portion of Bill’s books as well:

Now, when it comes to academic texts, many get put through the wringer, as do books that are often drawn upon or which it’s a good idea to keep in a back pocket once in a while – some of Salinger’s books fit in this category and I’ve probably bought or given away a copy of Franny and Zooey on an annual basis.

The tricky thing for me is when a book straddles the line between work and play (Dewey reminds us that this is a false divide in the first place). So, having to read House of Leaves for an undergraduate seminar, made me struggle between writing in and not annotating (this sometimes leads me to do things like buy two copies of a book … I am not proud of this).

As for non-fiction, every page and inch of the book is fair game in terms of annotation. Some of my critical theory books are difficult to read due to third and fourth rounds of annotations. In general, however, the very last page of the book becomes a pseudo-index for me of pages, phrases, and ideas I may want to reference at some time in the future. The page is usually very sloppy may have notes to random people, doodling, and references to things that may not make sense to me. It’s pretty common for me to be unable to decipher some of these notes later on – the fact that many of these books are at least partly read in cars and on airplanes makes the notes that much messier. Here’s the back page of this book that I read last week:

Again, very random notes and jottings. However, considering that the majority of my academic books have similar pages, my library very quickly is distilled to a handful of pages that I can cull together around specific projects. It leaves me in the midst of an unfinished conversation I can pick up and add to very quickly.

So that’s a snapshot of two approaches to digesting reading materials. What are your approaches? I think we’ll, eventually, work through our approaches to writing, organizing, and moving from others’ work to our own. This reflective practice reminded me of this and I hope this can be a way to think about the different approaches pedagogues and researchers take in engaging with the mental labor of educating America.

Critical Literacy’s Google Wake Up Call

This New York Times article about search is fascinating. As much as I found the general peek into the power of a company like Google insightful, I think the article points to long-term implications for educators.

As we continue to think about the productive world that our teens are engaging within, how students navigate online, how students question the content they seek, produce, or encounter, and how students promote or validate sources is going to become a crucial part of their critical literacy development.

While traditional critical literacy and even critical media literacy engage in evaluating the power structures underlying authorship and production, this literacy is expanding to include how this information is found, suppressed, promoted. “White hat” and “black hat” optimization (whether knowingly or unknowingly as J.C. Penny claim in the article) are part of the components of critical literacy that educators could not have foreseen.

More than simply teaching students how to use critically the tools of search that are available (from Google to library catalogs to online databases like ERIC and DataQuest), we will need to engage in an inquiry into how results are yielded, how to parse metadata, and to question the programming structures at hand.  Program or be programmed indeed. Perhaps educators should be demanding a large place at the table at this summit?

Time for a new course of study. If you haven’t read the article yet, please take a look.

Stories Telling

We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surround them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

John Berger

[btw, if you’re interested in getting the entire text of Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos in regimented daily doses via email, sign up here. Not a bad way to get a bit of refreshing thought in the clutter of junk and business.]

“He’s Balancing A Diamond, On a Blade of Grass” (Dancing 101)

The last few days before break, Peter* – the tenth grade English teacher & senior Homeroom teacher in our SLC – spent time after school engaged in leading dance lessons. His vision: have all of the seniors of the School of Communication and Global Awareness waltz at their prom in five months’ time.

Starting small, a handful of students stayed after school days before their holiday break. Some happened to be engaged in board games, unknowingly witnessing the transformation of the classroom into a workable dance studio; the tables were folded away and the game players ushered to the walls, creating a sizable space for movement.

A half dozen of us then began the lessons of waltzing. Armed with only a single piano track and Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #2,” we patiently learned the give and take of the ¾ routine. There’s still plenty of work to be done.

What intrigued me most were the conversations that sprang forth – explanation of the typical male and female/lead and follow roles in dance lead to discussions of feminism that had already been well underway from reading The Awakening in my class throughout December. Likewise, the waltz lead to a lengthy exchange of cultural dances and a rushing forth to YouTube for songs students connected with, wanted to share, and felt worth explicating the importance of. I followed suit and shared my fascination with (and utter clumsiness at pulling off) Crip Walking. This too lead to discussions of power and representation and ownership of dances and culture.

Occasionally, students would walk past the door and peer in: Elliott Smith crooning through one set of speakers, a pair of students teaching left-footed teachers to salsa, and Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” blaring distortedly through laptop speakers. It was the kind of organized chaos that only comes from multilateral engagement.

And what if such practices became the centerpiece not simply in elective courses but in the core – standardized tested – classes? If the history and power dynamics of dance became the center of social studies? If we read the language and analyze the suggestions of performance and aesthetic? And what about Sousaphones? Once we’d gotten past the awkwardness of uninhibited movement, we were all engaged in understanding and in learning; in the three post-finals days at Manual Arts – a time that finds teachers finalizing grades and generally showing films and letting students hang out – this was the most engaged I’d seen students.

*As with many of the friends I work with regularly, I’ve mentioned Peter several times on this blog. His comment to this prior post is especially worth a look.

“deny me and be doomed”: Reinventing Creation Myths

I fear that maybe in thinking about counter-narratives and the role of storytelling, I’ve been thinking too small. Maybe we need to start with a macro-vision of life in the classroom.

What would it look like for students to develop their own creation myths? In disrupting the “single story” of their neighborhoods and various cycles and pipelines that scholars say move our students around on a vast conveyer belt, perhaps it’s about having students reinvent the entire foundation from the ground up.

Travis, my SLC’s 9th grade English teacher shared with me the success he had in getting his class back on track through an introduction of mythology. Peter, our 10th grade teacher, will be starting Ishmael with his students later this year (a book also about creation myths). As my 12th graders delve into The Awakening, I borrowed a suggestion that Mark made for a different class, and showed my students this TED talk about the problems of the “Single Story;” it seemed most appropriate as a way of connecting Achebe, Conrad, and Chopin within the past month. I think also of Daye’s interest in Cargo Cults and the way they may act as a metaphor for deception in South Central.

I think the students would be properly situated in a foundation of already studied (as well as lived & experienced) creation myths. How about now reinventing them?

Aggregated Search, Phone Photos and Talkin’ ‘Bout Mobile Media

In the past two days, I’ve received no less than five emails asking me if I’ve seen this article (I have now … thanks to each of you!). Apparently my research interests have been made pretty explicit at this point.

In any case, I was reminded of a couple of impromptu lessons I created that I’d like to share briefly, related to new media and its application within the classroom.

Google Image Search & Assumptions about Success

After a brief writing exercise in which students projected and wrote about their lives ten years in the future, we took to the Internet. As students described the careers they are interested in pursuing – doctor, lawyer, architect, astronomer, engineer, etc. – we typed each word into Google’s image search*. For the most part, the search results didn’t surprise – predominantly white, male faces showed up as the top results. (Try this, if you haven’t already.) As a class, we talked about what the search represented and why it was one that didn’t reflect our class and community demographics. The lesson was a place to continue our application of fancy words like “hegemony” and “counter-narrative” and to think about how this image search could be changed in the future.

I haven’t written this out yet, but I think a next step for us will be to simulate an aggregate search within the classroom on post-it notes. I need to tweak this, but perhaps it will be similar to an analog game like Go Fish or even Pictionary. I think if we can replicate a model where the faces of success look like the ones in our classroom, we can think more critically about applying the experience to the larger world.

* A student – based on his own “experiments” – warned me not to image search “nurse.” I appreciated his candor, but think that – in the future – that search will be ripe for discussion about gender stereotypes and sexual objectification.

Photographing an Argument

The next assignment was just as simple. Students needed to email or text me a photo they took somewhere in their neighborhood. They would then use the photo to construct an essay-length argument about their community. By the following week, students shared their photos in small groups and then hosted a class-wide curated slide show. (My students took all of the photos in this post in and around our school.)

Again, the assignment itself isn’t novel. However, I found it impressive how – other than a few students that didn’t adhere to the deadline and subsequently borrowed my classroom camera to snap shots around the school – the majority of the students were able to quickly text or email me their photos on time. That our school’s wireless network is faulty or not open to student access, that many students don’t own computers, and the many other concerns that educators have with technology didn’t stand in the way of students taking carefully constructed photos and getting them to me in a way that could be easily shared and projected. Further, if you haven’t been snapping photos on your phone lately, you’d be impressed with the quality. And hearing students discuss the angles, lighting, color, and compositional features of their pictures was also promising. Did mobile media revolutionize my curriculum? No. It did, however, validate the skills and abilities my students had and helped bridge them toward standards-aligned instruction.

A Few Summative Thoughts

Going back to the article that kick started this post, I guess my larger concern with mobile media isn’t if students are cheating or abusing their phone privileges. Instead, I’m interested in student positioning and understanding of the mobile device and of themselves as authors and creators. As we inevitably move toward the eventual acceptance of phones in the classroom, it will be useful for us to construct a foundation on which students can think responsibly about media and their role in consuming and creating it. This may sound like I’m either spewing abstract hogwash or stating the obvious to some, depending on where you stand on the tech debate. I’ll be piloting this theoretical foundation within my classroom later this year, with activities and texts ranging from cell phone ”Freeze Tag” (for lack of a better name) to diving into the words of Bruno Latour. Of course suggestions are always considered and appreciated.

Because I’m all for using the word “oppressors” in the lunchroom over a chalupa: Boy-Silent Day and an example of a Best Practice

After getting an email largely excerpted below, I asked friend and colleague Kate, an elementary school teacher, if I could share her story here. Below, she spells out an exciting activity she conducted, which I’m thrilled about adapting for students that are nearly twice the age of her 10 and 11-year-old students. Enjoy! [Kate’s words follow, student names removed.]

Something great happened today. When I tried to share this with my colleagues at lunch today, I was kind of met with silence and then I felt weird for being “too political.” I muttered to myself on my way out of the lounge “Who actually uses the words ‘oppressors’ in the lunch room over chalupa???” but I can tell you, right?

A couple of months ago, after saying, for the millionth time, “Can I hear from one of the females in the house?” One of the boys said, “They don’t like talking.”

Me: “Oh really? Why do you think that’s so?”

“Cuz they’re shy.”

Another boy: “Cuz they don’t know the answers.” etc.

Since then, I pointed out to them that pretty much whenever a girl opened her mouth, the boys either: shut her down, started talking to a neighbor, or interrupted her. I thought of a “boy silent day” and asked them about a month ago what they thought of it, as an experiment. They agreed in the spirit of exploration. We’ve discussed homophobia, racism, and sexism, and when we discussed this habit of theirs, it was always as an observation, not a judgment. I’m assuming this is why they were willing. I think they were also genuinely curious to see what would happen.

So today we had our “boy-silent day.” We posed it like a science experiment. We had discussed this several times in the past and they knew it was happening today. All but one boy was on board (and even the nay-sayer went along with it). We discussed the goals–everyone was clear that this was in no way a punishment, but an exploration into why the girls don’t participate more. We started with a question–what will happen if the boys don’t talk? Then we thought-paired-shared, made a list of predictions, and then dealt with ground rules (“What if I have to use the bathroom?” “What if two boys are in a partnership?” “What do we do for think-pair-share or group work?”). This was fun and collaborative; we came up with answers together. We discussed the use of body language to communicate and that the boys could still participate, but in silent ways (like attentive listening, e.g.). Everyone kept a sheet of paper at their seat so they could jot down observations of the class and their feelings throughout the day.

And the day started. I have to say, from a teacher’s point of view, my day felt stress-free. There were literally no behavior problems and no distractions. I had no private interventions. During writing workshop–quiet, calm, focus. During independent reading, the same. Incredible. The boys, to their credit, kept their commitment! During directed lessons, they didn’t call out, they didn’t sabotage. They were so mature and reflective. I have had a very challenging year. Many of my little ones struggle with academics and impulse control, so this was all the more exciting (btw–my class is 2/3 male and 1/3 female). The girls did not overwhelmingly participate (i.e. pretty much the same few girls who normally participate were the ones participating), but they seemed…more in control. More confident. They were chatty in the hallways. Was I imagining that I saw more of them smile? I dunno…but it seemed like it. Maybe it was me–giving them more attention, noticing them in ways I hadn’t prior. We joked around at several points throughout the day and it felt so collegial and close, like we were sharing something special.

We spent the last hour or so of the day debriefing. We started with a quickwrite, answering two questions: 1. What have I learned (about myself and the class) from this experiment? And 2. What will I do differently as a result of this experiment? Then we sat in a circle on the rug and discussed these same things. Many boys expressed their frustration and boredom during the day. At one point, [a girl] said, “It felt…weird…because when we talked, they were, like, listening.” Some girls spoke of how the boys made efforts to give them eye contact and to show them through body language that they were present, but some said that the boys did not do this. This was an opportunity to revisit the meaning of sexism and how it appears and gets perpetuated. One boy said, “Can we have a girl silent day?” to which I responded, “What would be the goal?” [Another boy] said, “So they know how we feel!” [Another boy] said to him, “They already know how we feel. This is how they feel all the time.” At the end, we went around and said one thing that we would do differently as a result of today. A shy boy said, “I’m gonna raise my hand more and take risks.” Another said, “I’ve been disrespecting girls; I haven’t been listening to them. I’m gonna listen more.” Another: “I’m going to try not to interrupt.” One of the girls who is a frequent participant said, “I’m going to step back so others can share.” A shy girl said, “I’m going to risk myself more.”

I asked them to do some writing tonight about their thoughts, and I’m excited to read their essays. One boy who stays after school with me wrote something like, “For girls to feel safe, the boys need to listen to them.” One thing I’ve said to them is that sexism doesn’t get crushed if it’s only females fighting against it, that we need boys and men to recognize it and fight against it too. I was really pleased with today and proud of the maturity of these 10 and 11 year olds!

Two final stand-out comments from kids about the day: one girl said, “This was the best day of my life” (remember, she’s 10!) and a boy had written on his observation sheet, “It’s so quiet in here. I feel like I can learn more.”

In case you were wondering…

This Daily News database of all LAUSD salaries is accurate.

If you’re wondering how I feel that anyone can search and find out to the cent how much money I make, I can’t say I’m angry or upset. Frankly, teacher salaries have never been much of a secret. The real value here is peeking into what’s happening with all those many, many employees out of the classroom in the behemoth of a tower on Beaudry.

The articles connected to the database are worth a look (hey, guess someone’s stock might be rising in light of the constant LAT job massacre). In particular, I’d like to draw your attention to the article titled: “LAUSD administration swells 20 percent from 2001 to 2007.” It should be noted that this good ol’ swelling took place just about a year after Ray Cortines handed over the keys as interim Sup. to Roy Romer. Cortines came in, cleaned up shop, urged Romer to reduce the Central District, and pretty much watched Romer do the exact opposite. I know I’ve linked to the interview Travis and I did about a million times at this point, but look at these choice quotes from Cortines when we talked to him last year:

I came to the district in a very difficult time; the board was firing Dr. Zacharias and not handling it well. The Board asked me to stay on and I said I would stay on until June. We agreed that I would reorganize the district, cut the central office, move to decentralization, balance the budget, and create stability. We did that. And we did that in about nine months in the year 2000.

And

I envisioned a collegial kind of relationship in the decentralization of the district. Not that you don’t need a central office – you do. But you certainly don’t need Beaudry. Roy [Romer], instead of getting rid of anybody every time they weren’t doing their job, he just moved them down or up a floor. I don’t do that.

And he certainly doesn’t “do that.” If the article is to be believed, Cortines will be making significant cuts in the coming months. Praise be. Talk to just about any teacher and they’ll scoff at the kinds of “insight” and “aid” and “assistance” that most out of the classroom employees are able to offer. Beaudry is a sinkhole of financial waste in the eyes of most of us here on the front line. Fortunately, I still feel like I have a peer in Cortines: “This is not a good central office,” concedes Senior Deputy Superintendent Ramon Cortines. “It’s not inviting to parents and the community. Parking is atrocious; getting here is atrocious.” That’s from another choice Daily News Article.

Economics 101!

And while we’re on the topic of this database, where are my Econ teachers at? I’ve been thrilled thinking about the kinds of amazing lessons and service learning activities that this database offers. I’d think students would be able to offer great analysis comparing their teachers’ salaries compared to the services rendered to said students. I suspect their would be a disparity between the teachers they respect and the salaries they earn. After all, the teachers I see putting the most time into their students’ well-being don’t have the time that other teachers do to get additional salary points, teach intersession, or eek out that oh-so-valuable z-time that others are so skilled in getting. Hmmm … smaller paycheck might equal more committed teacher? Blasphemous talk if I’ve ever heard it. Someone call Steven D. Levitt!