First June Weekend Best Bet: A.C. Gilbert Discovery Village 16th Annual Garden Tour & Plant Sale

Image via WikipediaThis gets better and better. We got some amazing raspberry plants at this one last year. Watch this gorgeous slide show preview.

16th Annual
GARDEN TOUR & PLANT SALE
benefitting A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village

June 3 & 4, 10 am - 4 pm

Now in its 16th year, the Garden Tour & Plant Sale is a fundraiser for A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village, the nonprofit children's museum in downtown Salem's Riverfront Park. This year's event will feature a tour of private gardens in Keizer. We have eight fabulous stops on the tour, including the personal garden of Ray Schreiner of Schreiner’s Iris Gardens.

Tickets are now available for purchase at the museum and all Salem-Keizer Roth's Markets. Tickets: $15 / Ages 12 & under: $5

Get a sneak peek of this year's gardens!

THE FORECAST

• Friday, June 3 67 H / 50 L
• Saturday, June 4 69 H / 51 L

Partly cloudy. Partly sunny. Tomato. Tomahto. Whatever you call it, it’s a good day for a Garden Tour. Purchase your tickets at A.C. Gilbert’s Discovery Village or any of the Salem-Keizer Roth’s Markets.

Great Stuff: Solarize Salem is kicking off Round 2

Image via WikipediaGreat photo essay here on a local solar install project by Solarize Salem.

Regular readers of LOVESalem (and you both know who you are) recall that we installed a 4,338 w solar-electric generating system here at LOVESalem HQ that we turned on at nearly the absolute nadir of solar opportunity last December. However, since that day, roughly 28 weeks ago, we've generated over 1,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity. More important, if spring or summer ever comes, we still stand to have the best months left (June, July, August) before the days shorten up faster and faster in September. I'm hoping for another 2000 kWhs by October 1, and then maybe another 800 between then and the one-year anniversary of system startup on December 11.

We got our first "negative" power bill last month, with our output to the grid exceeding our home's draw for the month by 165 kWh. We'll keep banking that great excess through the summer, and draw it down over the winter. Cool.

If you want to have an expert come out and look at your home or cabin or business to see whether solar electric makes sense for you, you can contact Solarize Salem, a local community venture.

SHAMELESS COMMERCIALISM PARAGRAPH: Alternatively, if you're not into joining a co-op, you can call SunWize, a local solar installer who is the outfit who did the system here at LOVESalem HQ. If you have them come out and assess your house and you tell 'em we sent you, they'll give us $50. If you actually buy and install a system with them, they'll give us $500. And if we get any such referral cash, we'll put it to good use for good causes here in Salem. You can reach Matt Henderson at SunWize at 541-230-5001; tell 'em LOVESalem sent you.

Word

(Another hat tip to Sam Smith's Progressive Review for this one too.)

WORD

Standardized testing is the worst thing that could have happened. You're producing scientists that think every experiment has perfect answers.

- Reid Walker, Colorado biology teacher

Powerful piece: "On Patriotism"

Image via WikipediaThe last refuge of scoundrels takes another lashing here.

Excerpt:

When we say “John is a patriot,” we mean “John is a reliable member of our dog pack,” nothing more. The pack instinct seems more ancient, and certainly stronger, than morality or any form of human decency. Thus, once the pack—citizenry, I meant to say—have been properly roused to a pitch of patriotism, they will, under cover of the most diaphanous pretexts, rape Nanking, bomb Hiroshima, kill the Jews or, if they are Jews, Palestinians. We are animals of the pack. We don’t admire patriotism. We admire loyalty to ourselves.

The pack dominates humanity. Observe that the behavior of urban gangs—the Vice Lords, Mara Salvatrucha, Los Locos Intocables, Crips, Bloods—precisely mirrors that of more formally recognized gangs, which are called “countries.” Gangs, like countries, are intensely territorial with recognized borders fiercely defended. The soldiers of gangs, like those of countries, have uniforms, usually clothing of particular colors, and they “throw signs”—make the patterns of fingers indicating their gang—and wear their hats sideways in different directions to indicate to whom their patriotism is plighted. They have generals, councils of war, and ranks paralleling the colonels and majors of national packs. They fight each other endlessly, as do countries, for territory, for control of markets, or because someone insulted someone. It makes no sense—it would be more reasonable for example to divide the market for drugs instead of killing each other—but they do it because of the pack instinct.

Packery dominates society. Across the country high schools form basketball packs and do battle on the court, while cheerleaders jump and twirl, preferably in short skirts (here we have the other major instinct) to maintain patriotic fervor in the onlookers. Cities with NFL franchises hire bulky felons from around the country to bump forcefully into the parallel felons of other cities, arousing warlike sentiments among their respective fellow dogs. . . .

Give yourself a present -- go see "I AM" at Salem Cinema, quick!

The Willamette Valley's pre-eminent movie house scores again with "I AM" -- a movie difficult to explain but wonderful to see. Treat yourself, and take friends and family, you won't be sorry.

Great Resource: Progressive Blog Digest

Should be on every thinking person's RSS feed. And it covers the obese media too!

(h/t to "Reality-Based Community")

A Mathematician's Lament -- the best article on teaching math EVER

Image via WikipediaLong but very, very worthwhile (download or open the pdf to read it).

A great Sam Smith: "Let 'Em Play"

Image via WikipediaAnother oldie from the Ed Archive:

Sam Smith
1986

This spring I graduate again from high school, this time vicariously, and one of the major lessons of this return trip has been a deepened appreciation of the role that sports and other extra curricular activities play In education. I no longer think of them, in fact, as extra-curricular at all. The category seems oddly discriminatory and, despite the skill with which academia bedizens its petty prejudices in the cloak of wisdom, it is anti-intellectual as well. To suggest that sports, drama, art, politics or community service are external to the curriculum of an educated person borders on yahooism. Absent these elements, education becomes a brutish parody of what it says it is, a motley collection of facts without context, without integration either with one's own body and soul or with any human community.

I suspect, in fact, that some of the less appealing characteristics ascribed to the stereotypical yuppie are the result of a failure of this integration. The roots, in part, may be found in an education that, at best, did not value extra-curricular activities highly enough to see them other than as the first in an endless series of performances separating the successful from the not so.

For, in truth, extra-curricular activities can be a bad form of education. Micro-Lombardis of high school football have perverted the learning of discipline, cooperation and effort into a tool of self-aggrandizement. Arts programs have modeled themselves on Hollywood or Broadway. And there are campus politicians, such as the new rightists at Dartmouth, who have mainly learned the worst that polities have to offer. . . .

Such problems, however, are not addressed by "no pass, no play." Rather they reflect, in their own way, the fact that extra-curricular activities have been assigned to the slums of education instead of given the place they deserve as part of the basic curriculum.

If school activities were not so arbitrarily divided, if the relationship between what goes on in and out of the classroom was considered and respected, we might not find so many dichotomies. Academics might be enticed to face the issue, for example, of why schools teach the evils of totalitarianism in history classes and venerate it on the football field. Or why students in English class are made to read poets and novelists who lived and died in penury while encouraging show business values on the school stage.

Of course, "no pass, no play" is not new. I encountered it myself in college two weeks after I had been elected station manager of the campus radio station. I was informed that since I had also been selected for probation I was barred from any extra-curricular activities. Although I had to give up my administrative position, the invisible nature of radio permitted me (as with a good many of my similarly distressed colleagues) to continue full tilt on the air -- under a pseudonym. I spent just as much time at the station, but I got my grades up as well. The main lesson I learned from no "pass, no play" was how to buck the system.

It was not a bad lesson, but it certainly was not the one that the academic community had intended, just as I suspect that the lessons learned from the current crop of "no pass, no play" laws will not be the ones intended.

Among the lessons that may be learned will be how society discriminates against those who do not fit its mold - either because of ethnic background, economics, physical or mental idiosyncrasies, or inclination. And since extra-curricular activities are too often used as early imprimaturs of success, the very student who is failing in the classroom will be forced to fail a second time outside the classroom as well.

If, on the other hand, one views these activities as part of the core, of education, then barring participation becomes as stupid and futile an act as banning students from English because they are flunking math. Further, one begins to see the connections between these activities and the conventional academic subjects, connections that can be exploited to make both more valuable. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of extra-curricular activities is that they provide a rare course in applied knowledge. The student in the classroom is tested primarily against a single criterion: the judgment of the teacher. Despite the enormous utility of this, it is hardly a typical example of how knowledge is used in adult life.

To take a simple case: consider a problem that you as a parent perceive at a school. Now think, truthfully, how you would describe and argue your feelings about that problem with the principal, a teacher, your child, another student, your spouse, a friend who has a student at the school, a friend who has a student at another school, a friend without children. The same knowledge you possess, the same feelings, must be translated in a variety of different ways to have either meaning or effect.

It is in the extra-curricular activities more than in the classroom that this sophisticated use of knowledge occurs. In the classroom, knowledge is organized according to a curriculum and in this sense the term extra-curricular is quite right. For in out-of-class activities, knowledge is acquired or transmitted much as in adult life -- in a random, unorganized fashion that provides both excitement and frustration to that life. Learning to deal with this disorderly flow is an important part of becoming an educated adult. Further, extra-curricular activities provide training in what some psychologists have come to call social intelligence, which can include not only understanding the information that words give us, but the enormous variety of non-verbal data available to us ranging from interpreting the mood of a group to comprehending the meaning of a turn of the lip. To train students to only understand words and printed symbols is to cheat their education.

For the parent, there is a special virtue of extra-curricular activities: they permit the parent to enter the school life of the student in a manner no academic course offers. The parent relies on report cards, an occasional term paper and teacher conferences for some feeling of the what happens in the classroom. If my experience is at all typical, further investigation into the academic environment tends to produce curt, glib or over-generalized responses. But with extra-curricular activities, the interest of the parent is actively sought, whole dinner-table discussions can actually occur, and feelings can be truly expressed. Thus the extra-curricular activity becomes a rare experience that both parent and student can share, especially at a time when words on other subjects may be hard to come by. To a school administration this virtue may not seem a high priority; to parents, and even students, it can be priceless.

Further, I think many parents presume a broader and less rigid limit to education than some educators do -- certainly more so than do many school boards and system administrators. Parents often define education in a non-curricular way -- blending academic, social and cultural goals and values. It may sound vague to a professional but it is really only an amateur's holistic vision. And it is a form of fraud for professional educators to suggest that these goals can be met without the aid of extra-curricular activities.

My own experience of late has been with drama and sports. I have found in them advantages that are either absent or weak in my childrens' classroom learning or which have supplemented or strengthened what has occurred in the classroom; advantages that have led me to regard these activities not just as a source of sharing or pride, but as evidence that my sons' schools are doing what they claim. As in the classroom, not always has the the lesson been learned, or learned well, but at least it has been taught.

In sports, my sons have learned to work in a group, to cooperate, and to understand and value their peers for a variety of reasons. In some cases this appreciation may come from their peers' skill, in other cases their determination, helpfulness, or supportiveness. They have learned that in real life the penalty for failure of effort may not merely be a bad grade and annoyed parents and teachers, but the disappointment of a whole group whose respect and friendship you seek.

While learning to try harder, they have simultaneous learned how to fail. I watch my sons' teams go down to defeat and think back to Little League years when a bad loss could cast a pall on the house for a whole day. No longer. They have also learned that success may not be an individual triumph at all, but a joint mystery, as with a soccer team that won its league championship not because it was blessed with stars but because this highly individualistic group of players developed a remarkable ability to make each other do better than they normally would and to become one for a common goal. It was more than a championship; it was a priceless lesson in the power of a community. to raise itself up collectively.

Sports also teach the importance of concentration; they require the absorption and use of a wealth of small data under extreme stress and time limits. They teach respect and understanding of the human body. And at a critical time of learning about one's self, they can provide a confidence that may not be so easy to come by in other arenas.

Drama, like sports, requires a concentration equal to anything in the classroom. Like sports, functioning within a group is critical. Like sports, the lessons learned are not only applicable to traditional academic courses, but to becoming an educated adult.

One of these lessons is the ability to memorize. It is remarkable that, given the repeated need to memorize in school, so little time is spent developing the skill. One of the few places in school where one can learn how to memorize is during the production of a play.

Further, good drama teachers can introduce their students to sophisticated forms of character analysis that one would find in professional theatre schools. One of my sons was given an exercise that involved figuring out what the characters were really thinking while they were saying their written lines. This sort of study not only produces better actors and actresses but better English students. Once you have seriously acted a part in a play, whole new understandings await in your reading of other literature.

Drama also requires a level of perfection that can only come after one understands the importance of failing over and over again until you get it right. Even the brightest student, used to skimming material and spewing out the correct answer, can be brought to earth by this requirement. A good drama teacher will make even the best try to be better.

Finally, drama encourages the development of self-confidence at an especially timely moment. For both psychological and practical reasons, being able to "perform" may be one of the most useful things one learns in school.

Of course, extra-curricular activities can be abused by both students and school. But often this is because of a tendency to use them as a form of star-shopping, a tendency that "no pass, no play" only accentuates. If one is conscious of the danger, however, it is not hard to avoid. At my high school, there was not one spring play but a whole series of them. Every senior who wanted a significant part in a play got one, indeed was urged to take one. Every year, there would be surprises, as someone not considered a "drama type" turned in an especially good performance. I think many of us who were not "drama types" are glad today that someone pushed us into tryng it at least once.

As I await another high school graduation, I think back about the teachers who were the real influences of the last twelve years. And the names that come to mind include, far out of proportion, coaches and drama and music teachers. I can't conceive of those 12 years without them, nor without them would I have considered that my son had received a decent education. Those school boards around the country that think otherwise are not raising educational standards, but lowering them by removing a part of what should be the basic curriculum of any student whatever their grade in math or English.

Against Homework (from the Ed Archive)

Cover via Amazon

THE CASE AGAINST HOMEWORK

BOING BOING - Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish 2006 book "The Case Against Homework" is a fine and frightening explosion of the homework myth: that giving kids homework improves their educational outcome. The authors start by tracing the explosion in homework since the eighties, and especially since the advent of the ill-starred No Child Left Behind regime, which has teachers drilling, drilling, drilling their kids on math and reading to the exclusion of all else.

Kindergarten kids are assigned homework. Kids get homework over the weekend. Over vacations. When they're away sick for a day.

What's more, all the credible research on homework suggests that for younger kids, homework has no connection with positive learning outcomes, and for older kids, the benefits of homework level off sharply after the first couple assignments.

Not that most teachers would know this -- homework theory and design isn't on the curriculum at most teachers' colleges, and most teachers surveyed report that they have never received any training on designing and assessing homework. . .

One thing the authors keep coming back to is the way that excessive homework eats into kids' playtime and family time, stressing them out, contributing to sedentary obesity, and depriving them of a childhood's measure of doing nothing, daydreaming and thinking. They quote ten-year-olds like Sophia from Brooklyn, saying things like "I have to rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush through my day, actually through my seven days, and that's seven days wasted in my life."

No Child Left Behind has to shoulder some of the blame here. No Child Left Behind and standardized testing not only turns your child into a slave to her test-scores, but they can even affect your property values: a school with low test-scores brings down the neighborhood property values. That means that whatever your approach to your kids, the chances are that the other parents in your neighborhood are busting their asses to get their kids great test scores, drilling them, sending them to tutors, helping them with assignments that they were meant to complete themselves. If you don't do the same, your kids will suffer by comparison.

The authors report on an elementary school in North Carolina where at least twenty standardized test books have to be replaced after their use because the stressed out elementary school kids working to them have vomited on them.

The stories go on and on, and just when you're ready to throw in the towel and send your kids into the woods to be raised by wolves, the authors supply several long chapters of strategies and sample dialogs for convincing your kids' teachers to ease off on homework, for changing the homework policies in your school district and for rallying other parents to their cause.

STOP HOMEWORK
http://stophomework.com

Another from the Ed Archive

Image via WikipediaNote especially the late start age--this is something that a friend of mine who had been a reading teacher for many years first alerted me to--the Nordic countries don't set kids up for failure the way we do. They start kids in formal schooling much later, so even the slower kids are developed enough to succeed in school.

With later starts, brilliant children stay brilliant (after all, it was the home environment that made them that way in the first place) and the lesser-gifted ones succeed much more often, rather than being singled out for "special attention" and labeled as slow learners at an early age (and, predictably, becoming frustrated and disruptive as a result of being asked to do what they are not yet developmentally ready to do).

The factory school model has many, many sins, but the worst is the way it turns children into failures with such skill.

Worse, the push in America has been to start the process at ever younger ages, continuing the American tradition of deciding that, whatever you're doing, from Vietnam to Iraq, from highway congestion to the war on drugs, whenever it's failing, the only possibility is to do it more and harder.

There is a huge class bias apparent whenever you suggest starting kids in school later--the kinds of people who sit around and talk about ed policy (upper and middle class) inevitably agree that their children would not be harmed by keeping them out of the factory schools longer, but that we need to get the 'at risk' kids into those schools as early as possible, to counter the "educationally deficient" environments they experience at home.

This is perverse--it leaves kids in precisely those environments during the most formative years (0-3 years) and then starts them on the failure track in schools before they've had the extra years needed to catch up and have a chance to succeed. What we need is to bring more resources into those homes without taking the children out of them and putting them in institutions until they are ready to succeed.

WHY DO FINLAND'S SCHOOLS WORK?

[This is a long but consistently interesting report on the Finnish educational system, especially for those struggling with the hypocritically named No Child Left Behind and other peculiarities of American public education. A major difference is that Finland is a much more homogenous culture than the U.S. but there is still much to learn.

SIX DEGREES, FINLAND - Finland has repeatedly been rated top of the class in international comparisons of educational standards, even though spending on education is low, and Finnish children spend much less time in school than kids in other countries. . .

Foreign educationalists are particularly interested because Finland's success does not seem to be related to money: OECD statistics show that Finland spends just 6.1% of its gross domestic product on education, significantly below the OECD average of 6.3%, and well below spending levels in many similarly wealthy countries.

Another factor to discount is the amount of time children spend in the classroom. For a start, Finnish kids only graduate from the kindergarten sandpit to the primary school at age 7. Their schooldays remain short, often ending as early as midday or one o'clock, and their 10-week summer holidays must be the envy of kids all over the world. All in all, Finnish pupils spend an OECD record low total of some 5,523 hours at their desks, compared to the average of 6,847 hours. . .

The results of Finland's brightest students are not significantly above those from other successful countries, but where Finland really shines is in the scores of the lowest performing students. This means that very few Finnish schoolchildren are falling fall through the educational net. . .

Looking after low achievers The Finnish system is designed along egalitarian principles, with few fee-paying private schools, and very little streaming of pupils into different schools or classes according to their exam results. . .

Another factor behind Finland's success could be the narrow focus of the PISA tests. Levels of reading literacy are extremely high in Finland. Many children learn to read before they even start school. Although many foreigners find Finnish hard to learn, the language is so phonetically logical that words are always simple to read and write correctly. . .

The atmosphere in Finnish schools is generally informal. Teachers are given considerable freedom to teach as they see fit, without overbearing supervision or bureaucratic reporting. . .

http://www.6d.fi/index.html/page.2007-02-21.9993404054