Last month, for a book on the influence of media on youth, she had read them a study on the effects of cell phones and computers on the lives of young people, a column of newspaper on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4 200-word magazine article titled "Is Google." making us stupid? ?
A Professor of mathematics, José Rios, used to take a day or two about probabilities, curves Bell of drawing on the Blackboard to illustrate the pattern of normal distribution. This year, he extended the lesson a day and had the students work in groups to try to pull the same chart type by using the heights of 15 boys in the class.
"Finally, they realized that they could not because the sample was too small," said Rios. "They learned that the size of the sample of the questions, and I did not tell them.".
In three years, training in most countries may look much like what was going on at the Hillcrest, 100 schools in the city of New York experiment of new curriculum called common core standards.
Forty-two States, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have signed the new standards, an ambitious set of objectives that go beyond reading lists and mathematical formulas to try to raise the bar on what students in each grade are expected to learnbut also on how teachers are supposed to teach.
Standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of State guidelines that have become the Achilles heel of the No Child Left Behind Act. In many States, including New York, lowered standards in boost to meet the requirements of the Act that all students reach level school, as measured by each State, in English and mathematics. President Obama expressed the desire to rewrite the law, and many experts predict that the common core will be a centerpiece of the effort.
The new standards provide specific goals which, at the end of the 12th year, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will be ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be classified in part on how persuasive students express their ideas. History documents, will be read from multiple sources; the goal is for students to see how beliefs and biases may influence the way different people describe the same events.
There are a number of challenges.
There are guidelines for what students are supposed to do in each grade, but it is still in the districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer curriculum points, as the books to read.
There is no national agency responsible to see that standards are made because of worries about give too much control of education to the Federal Government. So far, only a few other major cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, began to apply the standards in the classroom. And according to how No Child Left Behind is remodeled, it can still be left to each State to measure its own success.
"Standards create a historic opportunity in what we have now a destination worth aiming for, but only time will tell if they'll create historic change," said Chester e. Finn Jr., a Reagan deputy administration education Secretary and the President of the Institute of Fordham Thomas b.a group that supports national standards.
With 3,200 students, Hillcrest is the second largest city pilot school. Its size and diversity - whites are a minority (4%), Muslims are religious plurality (approximately 30 per cent) and one-tenth of students learning English - makes an ideal laboratory for testing how the standards could operate in the cityofficials said.
A recent Wednesday, Jill Lee, a Professor of English, closed a unit on the meaning of the American dream not assigning a test of the first person, as it has done once, but by asking each student to interview an immigrant and write a profile of the person.
Eleni Giannousis made a change in her 10th-grade English class which may make some purists to launder. She had the students to look at the provision on filmed scene from "Death of a salesman," starring Dustin Hoffman: Willy Loman, before they read the piece. The idea was to bring students to absorb the information through a medium that they use for entertainment, a way she experimented with his lesson plans try to reach new goals.
"This is to make things easier for students, but to challenge to make the experience of a classic in a different way", said Ms. Giannousis.
While the English course will include always healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading nonfiction texts more as they get older, of them to prepare for the types of equipment that they will read in college and careers. In the fourth year, students should read about the same amount of "literary" and "informational" texts, the standards; in the eighth year, 45% should be literary and 55% of information and by grade 12, the split should be 30/70.
Shael Polakow-Suransky, academic Director of the city, said the city plans to create a package with exercises that have used teachers at the Hillcrest and other schools; work of the students that they have assigned; and guidelines for the assessment of the work.
In a session of training last month, teams representing several schools in the pilot have been invited to list of the lessons they had. Teachers of the Forward School of Creative Writing, a school in the Bronx Williamsbridge section, written on a piece of cardboard: "Visual help students make sense" and "many students read below grade level".
Timothy Shanahan, a Professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has helped write the common basic standards on how to incorporate the teaching of science, read said that overall, standards not to make any adjustment for students who are learning English or for children who could enter kindergarten without having been exposed in the books.
"If I teach fifth grade and I have a boy in my class that reads like a first grader, throwing him that a school level text will not make him any good, no matter what standards," he said.
Mr. Polakow-Suransky, too, warned against over-optimistic expectations.
"This is not one of those things where you switch and tomorrow, everything will be different," he said.
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