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Monday, May 22, 2006
When Kids Try to be Funny
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Our regular Get Schooled participant “V for Vendetta” suggests this blog topic, bouncing off the spate of cases where kids have gotten in trouble for things they thought were funny:
V for V writes:
“Where to draw the line between funny and inappropriate. Examples…
Girl singing “On Top of Old Smokey”
Kid making comments on MySpace
Girls suspended for singing Spice Girls song
Which are deserving of punishment? Which are idiotic overreaction?”
Well, friends? Should intent play into this at some point in determining how and if to punish?
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Using E-Mail to Teach Writing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This Cherokee teacher is using e-mail to get her kids interested in improving their writing. Here’s Kristina Torres’ story.
The story says: “Literacy instruction and written instruction tend to be quite old-fashioned; we’re still working from a 1950s model,” said Jennifer Stone, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Most workplaces include some form of e-mail. Most financial things, most personal things, often include online literacies that schools are not preparing kids to do.”
Ramsey is naturally curious about how the world relates to her classroom. That curiosity brought her to the idea of using e-mail to teach her students writing, and it can be summed up by an article she saw in The New York Times more than a year ago that offered this staggering assessment: Businesses are spending as much as $3.1 billion annually to teach white-collar professionals how to write clear, concise e-mails, reports and other texts. Ramsey thought those kinds of basics should start way earlier — in places like her classroom.
What is associated with e-mail? Plain old letter-writing,” Ramsey said. She starts her students on the road to good writing by focusing on electronic letters before building up to reports, essays, biographies and poems, all of which have some sort of electronic component.”
A good idea?
