Research on the relationship between teachers’ characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most research has examined a relatively small set of characteristics that are collected by school administrators in order to satisfy legal requirements and set salaries. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. Individually, we find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, when all of these variables are combined into two primary factors summarizing cognitive and non-cognitive teacher skills, we find that both factors have a modest and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores. These results suggest that, while there may be no single factor that can predict success in teaching, using a broad set of measures can help schools improve the quality of their teachers. 

Link: Rockoff, Jonah E., Jacob, Brian, Kane, Thomas J. and Staiger, Douglas,Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?(November 2008). NBER Working Paper No. w14485. 

For our science lessons, we’ve been learning about some of the physical processes involved when gasses and liquids are heated up (or cooled down).

We measured a balloon filled with air, then measured again when we heated it over the furnace vent for an hour or so, then put it in the fridge for an hour and measured it again tp learn that when air is heated it expands, and when it is cooled it contracts.

We also tried some experiments to demonstrate the movement of hot and cold air. The most fun was the Warm Air Whizzer (from The Best of WonderScience)

On a piece of cardstock, we traced around the lip of a coffee mug to get a perfect circle. Then we fold it in half three times to get folds that look roughly like the image below.

We measured and cut 2cm slits down each of the folds, and folded the left side of each “pie piece” down and the right side up. Then we poked a hole in the center, and hung it from a knotted piece of string.

Then all we had to do was find a heat source. Sadly, we have over-greened our home, and we couldn’t find a light bulb that generated enough heat to spin our whizzer. They did quite adequately illustrate that it was NOT light that spun the whizzer, however. In the end we used a candle to demonstrate the air movement, and it worked rather well.

We spent several hours experimenting with the whizzer… getting it to spin the other way, trying to get it to spin using cold air above it, and using magnifying glasses and mirrors to see if we could get it to spin using solar energy.

My little guy sometimes has a hard time understanding why he’s being homeschooled. He has a desire, like many little kids, to be like everyone else.

I explain the benefits, and he doesn’t exactly want to go to school, but he still doesn’t want to be different.

Tonight I found and ordered a book about homeschooling called “I am Learning All the Time.”  I haven’t seen it yet, and won’t for at least a month, but I’m hoping that it will at least give my son a sense that there are more than just him and his handful of homeschooled friends who are ‘different’.

If your young child is feeling the same way as mine, this might be a good pick for you too.

Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version will have a short video about each one.

Check it out here.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Have a wonderful day celebrating the birth of a country that turned the whole idea of government on its head. A country formed not by the idea that a government should ‘take care’ of its people, not that the people serve the government, but that the government exists solely to protect the liberties and inherent rights of its citizens to take care of themselves.

Happy Independence Day

What a darned good question.

The answer is, of course, nothing.

A high school graduate is not really trained for anything. Not by their traditional education, anyway.

If they’re lucky enough to have a gift for computer programming or art, they can certainly adapt those skills into a business or career, but by and large, the education you receive at school doesn’t even get you so far as to be perfectly competent as a retail clerk. If it did, I wouldn’t have gotten the confused and panicked look I got today when I dug up 31 cents after a cashier had run in $20 payment for a $10.31 bill.

And so, it’s not surprising to see that, according to an associated press poll,  Americans think that schools are not properly preparing kids for life.

Half of Americans say U.S. schools are doing only a fair to poor job preparing kids for college and the work force. Even more feel that way about the skills kids need to survive as adults, an Associated Press poll released Friday finds.

Given that in the not so distant future, we’re going to need to expand the workforce to include those high school graduates in order to pay for the benefits promised to retiring boomers, perhaps this is something that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Or, do we just need to accept that the new ‘high school diploma’ … the new benchmark for entry level jobs … is going to be a college/university degree?

And to those of you who are homeschooling, what do you want to say your children will be educated to do when they’re done high school?

No, it’s not the name of a new reality TV show, though the early auditions would be fun to watch if it were.

The Canadian Space Agency began its latest recruitment campaign in May and over 5000 candidates had registered for two positions when the deadline closed last week. The list will narrowed down to a 120 who will undergo physicals in September. Of those, about 15 candidates will be left next April.

The Canadian Press reports that this is just the third time since the creation of the Canadian Astronaut Corps in 1983, that Canada has added new space explorers to an exclusive group of astronauts.

The winning candidates get a starting salary of  $83,3000.

I love weekends. Every weekday I get to spend the day at home, but I have to work. I have to answer the phone, and work in front of the computer, and I feel guilty if I spend a few extra hours playing a game or going to the park on a Monday afternoon.

But weekends are all about NOT working. It’s not like we do millions of things. It’s just that there’s no guilt, or opportunity cost, associated with doing them, so it feels all that more free.

It wasn’t always that way.

When we started the business, we didn’t distinguish between one day and another. The only difference on weekends was that that phone rang less. We still sat and worked as much as we could.

Now, as I approach 40, I just can’t keep up that pace, and with a 5 year-old son to enjoy, I don’t want to.

So, yesterday we went to the barn and helped with the haying. We groomed and grazed a horse, and ran around the fields like madmen. We went to a movie (Kung Fu Panda) and ate pie.  Today we played in the garden, made messes in the mud, and spent hours playing Treasure Quest, a game I picked up  from a clearance bin at Toys’R'Us.

Now, I’m having a coffee, while kiddo plays in the mud puddles. When he comes in we’ll have bathtime then a story.

No regrets. No worries.

I love weekends.

When I was in school, I generally tended to fall in the upper end of the ‘Average Students’. As such, I never received much attention from teachers. I wasn’t a brilliant genius who could make a teacher or a school look good at an academic meet, and I didn’t need any remedial help with my schoolwork. I just showed up. And from my end, that’s about all I bothered to do too. I never had much enthusiasm for school, I skipped when I could, but I at least did the minimum amount of work required to hand in each assignment.

The only year that actually changed for me was in Grade 9. I didn’t get any academic attention that year, but I did find out my teacher enjoyed the same types of fiction as I did. For the entire year, we swapped books and suggested authors to each other. And that was all the attention I needed. Just that little bit of connection between me and one teacher, and my entire attitude toward school changed. I worked harder, cared more, and bumped myself to the top of the class.

The next year, that connection absent, I reverted to the old habits once again.

All this is prelude to my comments on a report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute called “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB”

The report claims that:

Congress was quite clear about NCLB’s objectives. Right on its cover, it’s termed “An Act to close the achievement gap.” Congress followed through with accountability mechanisms that have one clear and explicit purpose: drive up the achievement of low-performing pupils. As for students on either end of the spectrum, indeed all youngsters who could already be termed proficient,  NCLB’s core provisions treat them with benign neglect. Let them fend for themselves. Let someone else worry about them. Let them eat - well, whatever is left over at the bakery when the bread runs out.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the results of the NCLB is that gifted students are gaining little ground. That’s simply a necessary part of the design of the act. After all, the achievement gap can’t close if all groups improve their performace at an equal pace — that’s simply moving the gap up the scale a little, not reducing it.

And while I agree that it’s a travesty to ignore the gifts and talents of advanced students, the statistics seem to show that advanced students have college educated, strongly participatory parents who can lobby for them, or get them outside tutoring if they wish.

I wonder if the greater tragedy is that, now more than ever, those average students with the potential for greatness are being ignored. The average students, by far the largest portion of a class, are the least likely to get any one on one attention from a teacher. After all, they’re doing fine.

Likewise, of the home educators I know, quite a number are homeschooling kids who are either gifted or special needs.  Would those parents have considered homeschooling if their kids were in the ‘average’ range? Would they pull them out of government schools where  “they’re doing just fine?”

Is “just fine” as good as it gets for someone labelled Average?

Maybe they’re the most chronically ‘left behind’ group of all.

This year, our summer project is container gardening. Last year, our gardening attempts failed miserably with snails, slugs, squirrels and chipmunks eating nearly everything we planted before it even ripened.

This year, we’re working on solutions… copper for the slugs and snails, bloodmeal for the rodents. So far, it’s working pretty well. The tomato plants look healthy, and already have a dozen small tomatoes growing, with many more flowers indicating a bumper crop. The green peppers and celery seem to be thriving too.

We’ve been getting a TON of rain lately, which seems to be bothering the carrots, parsnips and onions. Perhaps they weren’t quite big enough to survive the deluge. We’ll cross our fingers and see.

So far the only casualty of the garden pests has been our lettuce, but I’m going to try plant some new in pots and place them higher up in a windowsill instead of near the ground, in hopes that it’ll be more difficult for the rodents to reach.

David’s flowers are doing amazingly well. He’s got poppies, violets and marigolds planted from seeds earlier in the year all over the flower beds. They look amazing.

Last year we learned that he’s got quite a green thumb when the marigolds and delphinium he planted and tended bloomed and thrived when the rest of the garden crashed. This year he’s got a bunch of vegetables too… maybe he’ll be feeding our family with his harvest before long.