Seattle Schools Community Forum

With the coming of the next installment of the Star Wars saga this Thursday/Friday (official is Friday but I see times on Thursday), the radio show, Here and Now, pulled the original NPR review by Tom Shales of the first Star Wars.  It's pretty fun to listen to with notable statements by Shales. 

Scholastic is launching a new Harry Potter Reading Club for the start of the school year.  There will be a live webcast with J.K. Rowling and she will answer questions from kids. Teachers can sign up now (it's on October 11 at 9 am our time).   As well there are welcome kits to the first 10,000 registrants (but you can download it as well). Hilariousness with an sober side.  It seems that there is this new idea for merit pay for teachers called "loss aversion." Economist Roland Fryer has been trying for years to find the magic incentive that would produce higher scores. He tried merit pay, and that didn’t work. He tried paying students to get higher scores, but that didn’t work. Now, he has at last found the key: He and his colleagues have perfected a technique called “loss aversion.” They give teachers a bonus (say, $4,000) at the beginning of the year. If the scores go up, the teachers keep the money.  If the scores don’t go up, they lose the...

Thank you to Dora Taylor for the heads up.  Dr. Goodloe-Johnson is one of two finalists for the superintendent job in Newark, New Jersey (the other is a TFA person).  The story is at NJ.com. Apparently Dr. Goodloe-Johnson wouldn't go on record with the press about what happened here in Seattle but the recorded interview captured this: "The board terminated my contract without cause," she told the group, immediately bringing up the finance issue "They decided, I think, based on a lot of things — I think politics, reform, union pushback." Her Broad pal, flack Tom Payzant, says she's one of the best urban superintendents in the country.  The proof of that is nowhere to be seen but apparently he thinks if he says it enough, it will be true. You know, Maria, it's not a good idea to misrepresent the past but like I say, we all need one good rationalization to get us through the day.  Yours seems to be that you are blameless in everything. Interesti...

I came across this article in the Science section of the NY Times about a young woman who see the world - almost the entire world - through mathematical eyes. She's almost hard to describe (so thank goodness for the writer of the article , Kenneth Chang). Read the article and then, I urge you, grab a kid and go check out Vi's blog with its great and fun videos about music, Harry Potter, balloon twisting, a mathematical food index and doodling in math class. From the article: She calls herself a full-time recreational mathemusician, an off-the-beaten-path choice with seemingly limited prospects. And for most of the two years since she graduated from Stony Brook University , life as a recreational mathemusician has indeed been a meager niche pursuit. Then, in November, she posted on YouTube a video about doodling in math class , which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art . The rapid-fire ...