Test / Future of College Education

English 11 - Today, we took our first quiz.  This quiz was most likely different than most of the tests students are used to as I was less interested in memorization skills and more interested in reading comprehension skills.  The scores were a bit lower but I added an extra two points for everyone so that it would even things out.  Grades aren't the only reasons for quizzes; they are also designed to give me an idea of what students can and cannot do effectively.  Looking over the results of the quiz, I can see that determining the definition of a word based on context is an important skill we will have to develop over the next few weeks.

On a side note, at the beginning of class the students discovered that I am a little color blind and I have difficulty discerning between purple and blue.  Interestingly enough, blue is a recent development for human eyesight and the Ancient Greeks were incapable of seeing the color blue and instead saw it as purple or green.  This podcast from Radiolab offers an explanation for how this fact was discovered and the reasons why it is true.



AP - We continued working with our summer reading and analyzing the appeal to ethos.  For the opening of class, I asked students to identify moments where the authors appealed to ethos and then we analyzed how effective Richard Rodriguez and Mike Rose were in making their appeals.  I thought the conversation brought up some of the important strengths and weaknesses of both texts. For the second half of class, we continued working on developing an understanding of different arguments being made about education.  Since in a few weeks the students will be writing their own arguments about education, I've tried to make them more and more aware of the different controversies and developments in the field.  Today, we looked at the future of online education by analyzing Daphne Koller's "What We're Learning from Online Education":


The video points out just how dramatically the field of education is changing.  With information so readily available and technology that can target the learning of all students becoming increasingly cost-effective, the need for the lecture-based classroom is diminishing.  While Koller uses these new developments to mainly make a case for the website Coursera, I think the argument can also be made that we need to dramatically re-think what classrooms look like.  Is the classroom a place where lecture notes are given or where we practice inquiring into new knowledge?  I think the latter is ideal and every day I work on transitioning my classroom into a place of inquiry, activity and critical thinking because I know it is what will serve students best in the long run.