wasting bandwidth since 1999
Returning to the topic of students “losing” learning while not in physical classrooms, Alfie Kohn, one of the smartest education writers in this country, has a broader view of the topic that goes beyond speculation based on grades and test scores. In an excellent essay for the Boston Globe from last September, he questions whether learning is really “lost” when kids are in online school.
Speaking of clueless education writers, as in the previous post, Jay Mathews again promoted charter schools in his column from last week.
It starts in the headline with a completely false conditional statement: “If charters do more with less, why can’t traditional schools do the same?”.
Education reporting in The Washington Post is very often tone deaf (see also almost everything from Jay Mathews). It has been especially so during the pandemic.
A recent case in point is an article based on statistics from the overly-large school district with the blaring headline “Failing grades spike in Virginia’s largest school system as online learning gap emerges nationwide”. A similar story a week later declares “Failing grades double and triple — some rising sixfold — amid pandemic learning”1, followed today by yet another article about failing grades in another Northern Virginia district.
Travel, of course, has been very limited over the past year, so I’ve been making short trips to interesting local sites never visited to photograph. In October, we discovered Fort Washington National Park in Maryland south of the District, a beautiful place for a fall photowalk.
As with everything else this year, the annual mix of holiday songs I can actually stand to have in heavy rotation is odder than normal. How else do you get Spinal Tap, Tom Lehrer, Queen, Jeff Goldblum, and The Beach Boys on one list?
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