Following up on the previous rant…
If you dig deep into those expensive plans to “fix” schools, almost all have two things in common: a heavy emphasis on the magic of technology, and the promise of “personalized learning”.
Except that latter promise is a whole lot of marketing. And not at all new.
How much homework should students be required to do every night?
In his column this week, Jay Mathews is outraged at the commonly-repeated number of 2.7 hours. He claims the amount is currently more like an hour a night, after “an inadequate average of five hours of class a day”.
Back in February, Technology & Learning magazine, an industry title that has been around in paper format for decades, published it’s “Best of the Year” issue for 2021.1 The annual awards are supposed to recognize “educational technology that exceptionally supported teachers and students last year”.
Except look closer and it’s clear these awards have very little to do with learning.
From a recent keynote presentation an online conference called Toddle TIES by Alfie Kohn, three excellent observations that stuck with me.
First, this observation about the math curriculum used in most American schools.
We are about three weeks from the end of the academic year here in the overly-large school district, and I don’t know anyone who isn’t ready to finish and head into summer break.
Except maybe, district administrators who are planning a huge summer program for “roughly 35,000 students total, making it 10 times larger than Fairfax’s typical summer offerings”, mostly paid by federal COVID relief funds.