Videos Splainin’ LDs

The best teachers, it turns out, are eight year old alien kids. Who’da thunk. Video courtesy of the Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario. And here’s a great video by the International Dyslexia Association. Keep an eye on the subtitles/bouncing ball. And kudos for having the kids run away in terror. I think many organizations would call that too “negative” and have the kids hug the faceless dog as an ending. Right on.

I Hereby Vote for the Middle Way

“A committee at the Toronto District School Board is recommending homework-free holidays and a cap on daily homework for the city’s 270,000 public school students.”

The long-simmering culture-wide debate about Homework flared up last week after a Toronto board’s trustees proposed some new rules, including an end to penalties for lateness. Click here and here for news featuring details. And then read this article sent to me by the Info Pusher, to find out how the news is making teachers anxious.

I’m glad the debate is open: homework for kids has gotten way out of control since the mid-90s, to no one’s benefit. I think it’ll be good to reduce the expectations for homework. But creating rigid caps and doing away with a teacher’s ability to enforce deadlines will not make things better – it’ll just swing things the other way. In fifteen years we’ll have another call for stricter rules (and no doubt, we’ll blame the teachers for things being too loose).

Teachers didn’t suddenly choose to overload kids with homework. They were pressured in those rotten 90s to constantly PROVE that they were doing their jobs, and the proof was most easily given in lame, non-useful things like giving a lot of homework. ‘Cause, you know, when dad and mom are busy at work, they have to bring work home.

I’d like to share a story about pendula. In Iran, in the mid 1900s, a Westernizing Shah made the hejab – the headscarf worn by some Iranian women and not others – illegal.

When that fella’s son was overthrown in the 1979 Revolution, the victors, sore about the illegalizing of the hejab, made the headscarf mandatory.

Now the headscarf is a big giant deal. It’s hard to imagine it being an option ever again

Teachers don’t need limitations imposed on them to curb homework loads. To stop the pendulum’s boring, predictable course of never-ending back and forth, all we need to do is let teachers know that we trust them to do their jobs again. Just grab that pendulum and hold it still and be quiet for a minute.

Camera Games

A friend at a party told me about this short film by Chris Ware and This American Life – I just watched it and need to share it. Watch:

I told him after he told me the story that in my first year of teaching, which would have been 1998 sometime, I was on yard duty, and saw a group of little kids – probably third or fourth graders – chasing a lone child. This drew my attention, and as I watched them all race past, I saw that the whole crowd of chasers were holding imaginary cameras and making that “chicka chicka” sound that symbolizes a fast camera shutter. They were playing Paparazi. It was a year after Diana and company had died.