Teen Summer Camp Opportunity: Teen Writers' Workshop at NCSU

The hits just keep coming at NC State, which also has a summer program for burgeoning creative writers.  The Teen Writers' Workshop, sponsored by the NC State College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of English, is a two-week, nonresidential summer camp with daily afternoon activities to help students in high school to develop their creative writing abilities.

The students spend two and a half hours on campus each afternoon with lessons on four different tracks:  fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama (each students lists their preferences, and are placed in two different areas).  Established professional writers, most of whom also teach at area colleges or high schools, give lectures, assign writing activities, put students into small groups to discuss or create something together, or work with students one-on-one on their writing.

The students-to-teacher is kept low (a maximum of 12 students per instructor) to assure that all writers get individual attention.  The teen writers get instruction in such creative writing components as plot, character development, conflict, action, and more.  On the final day, students invite friends and families to celebrate the creativity of the group through a public reading of the work they have produced; they also get to take home a journal of work created by themselves and their peers.

The Teen Writers' Workshop costs $250, and is open to rising 9th through 12th graders as well as students entering college next fall.  They are now accepting applications, which require teens to express what they hope to achieve through their participation as well as to submit up to two pages of their current creative writing.  The deadline for applying is Monday, June 3.

For more information, check out their website or contact the program director, Laura Giovanelli, at lbgiovan@ncsu.edu.

Is American Education Too Competitive?

Is the American educational system too focused on competition? I would say "yes," not that anybody really cares what I think. But this month, I am in good company, as that is the position that Deborah Stipek, Dean of the Stanford School of Education, takes in an editorial in this month's Science magazine.

Stipek argues that the burden to be on top among higher-achieving American high school students leaves them anxious and physically exhausted, makes them prone to cheat, and robs them of the intrinsic beauty and interest of the subject and the joy of learning. The more they fill their transcripts with high test scores, exemplary GPAs, academic honors, and mountains of extracurricular activities, the emptier their actual experience of education is. As Stipek said in a telephone call to reporters, "For the most part, high school has become for many of our students not preparation for life or college but preparation for the college application."

Stipek also believes that the impetus for change must come from the schools--high schools and colleges--rather than from the students. She urges high schools to reduce this pressure by such steps as:
linking subject matter to students' lives and interests
focusing more on active student involvement in innovative solutions, problem solving, and hands-on experiments and activities and less on getting the right answer on a standardized exam;
giving students multiple opportunities to achieve higher grades (by allowing papers to be rewritten or tests to be retaken, for example)
publicizing and pushing a wider number and variety of high-quality educational options rather than merely worshiping at the alter of the top 10 or 20 elite institutions
priding itself on how well it matches all its students to the postsecondary education best to each individual, rather than on the number that were accepted by "name" universities
focusing and celebrating learning at whatever level, rather than test scores
She also states that colleges must do their part as well, and to encourage a student body that is passionately interested in the educational offerings at that school over having a high average SAT or GPA score.

How Do You Know When You Are Done?

Even though we homeschool, we are in our final push towards the end of "school."  Now, most of the homeschoolers I know consider that they homeschool year round.  However, at least in our community, most of the organized classes and coops and sports and such are organized around the traditional school calendar of August/September through April/May/June.  To some extent, that is just a practical economic decision--lots of facilities that host homeschoolers during the day when most students are in school can make a lot more money over the summer by running camps.  But I think most of us enjoy the break from the scheduled events and having to prepare classes and events for multiple students beyond our own, and use the summer to just homeschool on our own and to do the typical summer things with vacations and swimming and the like.  At least for us, summer is a good time to catch up on some of those things that we don't tend to do in groups--things like grammar and spelling and such.

But how do you know when you are done?  When you are homeschooling, which means you basically have the same teacher in the same "school" for as many years as you homeschool?

In our case, our local homeschool group holds an annual student showcase on the first Saturday in June each year.  Participating families get a table on which to display whatever they want to share about what they have been doing for the past 12 months.  We invite family members, friends, neighbors, and the general public to come, which helps the community better understand all the things that homeschoolers do. In addition, our children get to hear from someone besides US about the quality and interesting nature of the work they have been doing for the past year.  It is also an opportunity for the parents to assess all the things we have accomplished over the year (given that, overachievers that we tend to be, we tend to focus on all the things we HAVEN'T gotten around to doing), and that is a really good feeling.

Everyone does their showcase exhibits differently, but for the past several years, our family's focus has been on creating an electronic portfolio.  We create a DVD of me interviewing my son about what he thinks are the highlights from the past year in the different disciplines---language arts, history, science, math, art, etc.  The visuals behind his discussion of favorite or most valuable aspects of the past year's learning are photos or videos that relate to the project he is describing.  For us, that is the best way to remember, re-evaluate, and record all the many things we've done over a year of homeschooling.

However, since he is now in middle school (hence the name of this blog, right?),  I'm also starting to think about how to know when we are DONE done--as in, done with homeschooling and ready to move on to college or employment (or some combination of the two).    There was a great article in the Washington Post about that yesterday in their education section.  Entitled "How high school should really end," it describes one high school's graduation requirements beyond the typical standardized test.  Seniors at this school must develop a portfolio that demonstrates (1) their plans for the coming year; (2) proof of their competency in the major subject areas; and (3) the positive impact they have had on the world.  They must also present the results of a senior year project in which they show major learning through a significant project in the topic of their choosing.

I love this kind of thing as an end to our pre-collegiate education, and plan to do something like this when my son gets to an appropriate age and level.  I think that any student who can pull off the above will be ready to take on the world, whether it is through college, work, travel, volunteerism, or the other paths that young adults follow.

Middle School Minorities Achievement Gap in Math and Its Effect on College Success

On an email loop of my friend Maria's Natural Math community, there is a discussion going on right now about some research that taking advanced math, particularly calculus, in high school leads to greater success in science classes in college.  But I think the path to calculus in high school begins earlier, particularly with the math instruction students get in middle schools.  And several articles or reports published lately suggest that advanced math instruction in middle schools is problematic for many ethnic minorities, particularly African-American males.

One great example of this, I think, came from a recent article in The Washington Post about the school many publications list as the best public high school in the country, the magnet Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County (outside Washington DC).  While the school is almost universally lauded for the quality and subsequent success of its graduates, it has come under fire recently for the low percentage of black and Hispanic students, despite several years of a concerted minority outreach and recruitment program.  While blacks and Hispanics represent about one third of all students in the surrounding public schools, they make up only 4% of the TJ population.  Approximately 90% of students are Asian or white (with Asians accounting for a slight majority of that number), while the remaining students categorize themselves as "multi-racial."

The school's explanation for such a dramatic under-enrollment of blacks and Hispanics?  One of the pre-requisites for applying to Thomas Jefferson is that the student passed Algebra in middle school.  School officials claim that there is not a large pool of black or Hispanic middle school students with Algebra already under their belts from which they can recruit.  So should Thomas Jefferson drop that requirement for underrepresented minorities, or should the area middle schools do a better job of getting more of those students through Algebra?  (For comparison, the state-wide magnet program at the the residential North Carolina School for Math and Science has about a 10% black, 3% Hispanic, and 1% Native American population; that high school strongly recommends, but does not require, Algebra.)

This issue has been under a lot of discussion here in Wake County, because recent data shows that in previous years, where teacher recommendations were a major factor in admittance to advanced math classes, Asian and white students were admitted to Algebra at much higher rates than other minorities.  In 2008, over half of all test-qualified white or Asian students were enrolled in Algebra 1 in 8th grade, while among black and Hispanic students with similar test scores, only 40% went on to Algebra.  Things were even worse in 2006, where only 19% of high-scoring black male students were placed into advanced math.  This led to a policy change this year where students were placed into math classes purely on math scores, rather than considering teacher recommendations (although the effects won't begin to show up in Algebra until next year, because they still have a requirement for students to complete pre-algebra before entering the Algebra 1 class).  For a detailed analysis of this data, see the article entitled "Math Placement and Institutional Racism in Wake County Schools?" on the excellent blog "Barbara's Take on Wake."

It will be interesting to see the data in a couple years about what happens with this policy change.  Is it really true, as Barbara suggests, that the WCPSS has institutional racism in terms of minorities in math?  Or do the teachers know something that the test scores don't show?  Of course, if we refused to allow failure and gave minority students additional time, if necessary, to complete such classes, that might be the best of both worlds.  But as my blog posts ofNovember 14  and November 21 demonstrate, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

But this only deals with the under-represented minorities who are actually scoring well on their math tests.  According to a recent study by the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban school districts, among the urban school systems participating in the study, only about 12% of black males tested at or above the Proficient level in 8th grade math; at least 50% of 8th grade urban black males scored below the Basic level.  According to CGCS, this eventually leads to black men accounting for only 5% of all college students in 2008.

I don't know the answer to all this.  But it is a troubling question to examine.