Education: August 2004 Archives

Two articles from AP: Wheelock's Latin textbook gets an update, including a web site, audio clips, and racy poems.

I have a student who will be homeschooled this year. I am very interested in having her continue with her musical studies and she has been an asset to our program here. Her parents reside in and pay taxes to Fairfax County.

I've been reminded of some things, and learned some new ones:

Schools in Maine have spent $15 million (with $22 million to go) on a contract to put laptops into the, well, laps of middle-schoolers. After two years of the program, the students with computers performed about the same as the students without them.

One school board member tells what her son learned in the process:

... David, 14, who will be in ninth grade this year, said his classmates found ways to play games on their laptops without their teachers noticing. Also, he said students spent a lot of time downloading and pasting photographs and sound effects to create movies.

''You don't have to do as much work as writing a report,'' he said. ''It's more about getting pictures and putting in sound effects than learning about the topic.''

Education Commissioner Sue Gendron said teachers over the past two years were just learning how to integrate laptops into the curriculum, and that it is unfair to judge the program after only two years.

When asked when the test scores should improve, she declined to give a timetable, saying laptops are worth the investment even if they don't boost test scores.

''I believe that the jobs of the future will be based on technology, and part of Maine's goal is to have the best-educated citizens and to ensure that they are skilled to work in a creative economy,'' she said.

It's sad to think that educationists are falling for the attraction of shiny objects. They're spending money and time on machines -- admittedly cute, handy machines -- that don't make much measurable difference to learning, while local governments are forced to cut teachers' jobs.

Parents in Pennsylvania sue to overturn a law they consider an undue burden on home education.

"It really comes down to who owns the child," said Newborn, whose 17-year-old son just completed his freshman year at St. Vincent's College in Latrobe. "The parents are the stewards over the child, not the state."