This week’s Carnival

This week’s Carnival of Education links to some fascinating posts, including one on TEN!

A few Carnival entries I found particularly interesting:

Why Gifted Students Still hate School
At Lorem Ipsum, a blog focusing on homeschooling and gifted education, a scathing post that is really less about gifted students and more about what’s wrong with American ed schools. 

In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through because only your personal ethic, your sense of wanting to do an outstanding job on whatever meaningless, useless, time-wasting group project you’ve been assigned stands between you and just doing whatEVurrr to get the meaningless grade you were going to get anyway. Going through education classes was like trying to sharpen a knife on a marshmallow - you meet with no substance, no real resistance. You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is either viewed as useless or pretentious, or it’s groupworked and PowerPointed out of existence. Mediocrity is the norm — and that creates an environment that is downright hostile to gifted students.

Classroom Management
At the In Practice blog, teacher Larry Ferlazzo shares nine strategies that helped revitalize the classroom culture of his 9th grade class after five new challenging students joined it at the start of second semester. I highly recommend this for newer teachers who are struggling with getting their classes on track after testing!

I certainly did a number of these things before, but I let behavior issues lead me into a downward spiral of threats and punishment.

The difference in class is like night and day now.  There are regressions...But there is no question that there is a sense of fun and joy in the learning that’s happening on our classroom again.

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