A recent research report in the journal Neurology speaks to the brain benefits of speaking two languages. NPR’s Barbara King explains in a short, well-written piece at http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/11/14/244813470/new-study-shows-brain-benefits-of-bilingualism.
Category Archives: In the News
The Poverty Trap: Slack, Not Grit, Creates Achievement
Poverty is a trap children are born into: No child has ever chosen to be poor. Children have never caused the poverty that defines their lives, and their education. Yet, the adults with political, corporate, and educational wealth and power—who demand “no excuses” from schools and teachers serving the new majority of impoverished children in public schools and “grit” from children living in poverty and attending increasingly segregated schools that offer primarily test-prep–embrace a very odd stance themselves: Their “no excuses” and “grit” mottos stand on an excuse that…
Read more of this provocative blog post, The Poverty Trap: Slack, Not Grit, Creates Achievement, by P.L. Thomas of Furman University and the National Council of Teachers of English. Don’t skip over the dialogue in the comments section. If you want to learn more, Thomas recommends his longer piece: http://www.alternet.org/education/learning-and-teaching-scarcity-how-high-stakes-accountability-cultivates-failure. I’d also recommend reading How Children Succeed by Paul Tough.
As Migrant Farm Workers Settle in Oregon, Stability Boosts Their Children’s Education
http://s.oregonlive.com/ONv3dwD
In this Oregonian article, Andrea Castillo reports on changes in Oregon’s migrant labor patterns and the effects on children’s education. OSU’s own Susan Rivera-Mills is featured in a discussion of how migration has changed from being international or interstate to intrastate. The photographs and data make this an especially worthwhile read. Did you know Oregon ranks 5th in states with the most children qualifying for migrant education services?
Poverty: A Different Normal?
The Southern Education Foundation has published a map of low income students in public schools (using 2011 data): A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South and Nation. Oregon is listed as having 50.7% of public school students classified low income. The site further breaks this down at the city, rural, suburban, and town level.
In a similar vein, our own Cheridy Aduviri blogs about A Different Kind of Normal on her When Tech Met Ed site. Here is an excerpt…
I love the view out of my window today. Each gust of wind whisks a cascading twirl of leaves that settle in my yard, beckoning for my kiddo and dog to rake and splash them about before packaging them for compost. Beyond the beauty of the fall, I love my view outside and inside my window because it is my view. Mine. I have chosen it and make it my own on a daily basis. I invite people I care about to fill the space about me and to create and share my view.
As much as I love returning to my view, I find value in traveling. It’s a process to see beyond the first glimpse that a new view offers—to peer deeper into the everyday lives of the people who inhabit the space, the space they invite me into. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes; they all contribute to the reality of my growing worldview.
I recall the first time I saw a favela in Brazil. It was almost too much (no it was too much) for my aspiring middle-class, twenty-something, American mind to process. Also imprinted upon my memory is a moment in Bolivia while crossing a bridge−my experience up until that point in time told me I traversed over a garbage dump; but a glimpse of an orphaned street child huddled into a drain pipe cemented the realization it was a home to someone. It left me numb and silent. I searched the procedures−the laws that didn’t allow me to adopt that child, or another little one half-wrapped in bright colored, dingy llama wool peering up from under a bridge.
Years later, after seeing countless similar views, my mind still doesn’t process these sights. It doesn’t because it’s simply not fair, and I should find it unsettling! Yet, I now realize the people inhabiting these spaces have unique voices that reach beyond my silence. Beyond. Silence. Mine. Kids in poverty. Their voices reach beyond anything we pretend makes sense.
Simultaneously, I never cease to be amazed by the juxtaposition of joy and rich culture that is experienced within these spaces. Through reading; discussion of space, design and architecture; traveling; and technology, I continue to expand the view beyond my window…
The related issue of poverty is NOT a problem that only exists outside of my home country. All I have to do is look beyond my window’s view within my state, within my neighborhood. Some of the struggle of families in my own back yard are highlighted in the documentary, American Winter, that follows eight families in Portland, Oregon.
This has direct implications for us as educators…
The Changing Face of America
The October issue of National Geographic has a feature article on racial identity for multiracial Americans: The Changing Face of America. Here’s an excerpt:
When people ask Celeste Seda, 26, what she is, she likes to let them guess before she explains her Dominican-Korean background. She points out that even then she has revealed only a fraction of her identity, which includes a Long Island childhood, a Puerto Rican adoptive family, an African-American sister, and a nascent acting career. The attention she gets for her unusual looks can be both flattering and exhausting. “It’s a gift and a curse,” Seda says.
While you’re there, visit the “interactive gallery” (to the left of the article) that illustrates how multiracial people identify themselves and which boxes they checked on the U.S. census.