EdTechTrek

The headline reads: “Colleges spend billions to prep freshman.” The by-line: “High school graduates increasingly unprepared for college work, remediation falls most heavily to community colleges” A study is quoted at reporting that as much as one third of American college students have enrolled in remedial classes. Although this is often done at great expense to colleges, I think the sadder story is that it needs to be done at all for such high percentages of college freshmen. But, to shed some light on a different aspect of the problem, I share the following quotation from the article:

Eric Paris, who earned a 3.8 high school GPA but is finding his freshman year at Virginia Tech much more challenging, says the big difference is “it’s all on my own.” In class, “it’s up to me if I want to sit on Facebook or pay attention.” He, too, wishes he’d taken more challenging high school classes but thought a high GPA was more important.

We lead students to believe that grades are everything, that having a high GPA is critical to getting into a good college (and it is, but it’s not the only determiner), so they then take easy courses to boost their GPAs and end up with this false sense of accomplishment that get stripped away when they are told that they must enroll in remedial writing or remedial math their freshman year. I have had students like this. You wonder how the system has failed them. Actually, I have had graduate students who have never had to write a real research paper. I have had elementary education majors who wanted to teach high school, but could not complete the requisite math courses. They figured since they were not all that good at math that they could at least teach younger students. I want to strangle them at this point of the conversation.

You know, we have a number of highly complex problems that continue to plague American education. This should not be one of them. We desperately need strong math and science teachers at the elementary level. I, myself, am a recovering math disaster, largely due to many of my elementary teachers who did not have a clue as to how to really teach mathematical concepts. Sure, they could teach the rules of regrouping or the definitions of polygons, but all that takes is reading a few statements out of the teacher’s manual. That didn’t meet my needs. Today, I have a much healthier and sound conceptual mathematical understanding and am so thankful for some of my education professors who taught methods of teaching math and remedial math methods. I now reteach my own son when he comes home from school, not understanding the most basic of concepts.

I avoided the hard courses to keep my grades up in high school. I hope that my children do not. I hope that they are both empowered and challenged by their teachers. I hope that their teachers will see areas of need and address those needs ASAP. I hope their teachers will teach to their strenghts and strenthen those areas of weakness. I hope their teachers will value their interests and make learning relevant. I hope that their teachers use all resources and tools at their disposal. I hope that their teachers will fight for resources and tools that they do not have access to and desperately need. I hope that their teachers believe in them.

That’s a lot of hoping, isn’t it.

Should so much at stake be resting in the arms of hope?

For those of you who are mac users and have upgraded to the latest OS, Leopard, you have most probably been enjoying the built in quicklook feature that allows you to preview almost any document simply be selecting it and pressing the space bar. I think it just might be one of my favorite features because it allows me to browse through files without ever having to open them, including photos and videos! The only underdeveloped feature is when using QuickLook to view a folder rather than a specific file. The result was not all that informative. Well, there is a 3rd party plugin that you can download for free that really improves this functionality when viewing folders. You can download it here. After installing it (very easy to do), the result is this. You get to preview the file names inside of that folder, including timestamp, date modified, file size, and file type. This is a huge timesaver for me as I graze though files, and now folders, looking for that bit of information that I have saved… somewhere. By the way, if you are interested, there is also a QuickLook plugin for .ZIP files that allow you to preview these same bits of information in a .zip file without having to uncompress it. Anything like this that helps me manage my information is great. As storage gets cheaper we are having larger and larger hard drives that allow us to be real digital pack rats. These types of features, along with Mac’s great Spotlight search engine, make finding my precious bits, bytes, megabytes, and now gigabytes all that much easier.