What does "Support our troops" mean?

http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/34701-why-won-t-mccain-support-our-vets

Sen. Chuck Hagel is a Vietnam vet and a Republican, Sen. Jim Webb is also a Vietnam vet and a Democrat, and they proposed a new GI Bill to support the troops fighting in Iraq, similar to the GI Bill that came about after World War II.
The Bush administration is against it, so the threat of a veto makes it impossible to pass with just Democratic support in the Senate. The bill would therefore need 60 sponsors to be "veto-proof," and that means Republicans like John McCain would need to sign on. But most Republicans, including McCain, have refused.

McCain's reasons were in today's NY Times Magazine:
"...When Webb and Hagel (a close personal friend of McCain’s) proposed a bill to give troops leaving Iraq and Afghanistan more time at home before redeploying, McCain, whose 19-year-old son has served with the Marines in Iraq, forcefully opposed them, saying the troops were needed in the theater. More recently, McCain has found himself on the opposite side of Webb and Hagel again, this time over their “G.I. bill” that would offer education money to every returning veteran. McCain and others want a more limited bill that would encourage rank-and-file soldiers to re-enlist rather than return to civilian life."


Also in that same article today:

"...In his book, Chuck Hagel writes of listening to declassified tapes from the mid-1960s in which Lyndon Johnson admitted to advisers that Vietnam probably couldn’t be won but rued that withdrawal would make him the first American president to lose a war. “I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy,” Hagel observes acidly."

Why change anything if we're doing well?

During our Marratech session, the observation was made, “If 50% of New York City students are dropping out, something’s not working.” The problem for most of the rest of us though, is that we are shielded from the worst consequences of such outcomes because we work in districts where such numbers are safely far enough away from our outcomes. That reduces the pressure to try something new, anything, in order to address those devastating outcomes. As long as our students score in the 90th percentile, who will ask if anything better can be done? What’s missing is a sense of comparison, that if we only measure our students against each other, then a general consensus of failure will insulate us, which is what I think is happening.
Many times in my classroom-teacher past, I have performed miraculous demonstrations of incredibly complex concepts, leapt across great chasms of misunderstanding, and landed on the opposite cliffs of understanding,* only to look back and see the empty looks of students who didn’t get it. At that point, I could of course resort to blaming the students, since my own performance as a teacher was beyond reproach, but one thing kept nagging me: The sense even as I was performing that this wasn’t going to work, no matter how great I performed Why? In simplest terms, because you can’t tell everybody everything, you can’t tell everything to somebody, and you can’t tell some things to everybody. I knew that something else needed to be tried. Luckily for me, those reflections came while teaching in East Harlem, where I was not shielded from the knowledge that many of our students weren’t making it, even out of 6th grade.
At about this same time, I had experience while working in various international banks with tools called computers, which I knew had the potential to help with some parts of the teaching and learning in my classroom. So I started emptying out the closets filled with Apples and Macs and set them up in my classroom and began the imperfect, still-under-way transition from non-differentiated instruction, sage-on-a-stage, single modality of my first classrooms toward a vision of differentiated instruction and activities, and a place where students were valued as having their own knowledge, understandings and abilities that could be valued and could contribute to the success of my classrooms.
My current work mostly in the computer lab of Center Street School seems to be all over the “Paradigm Map,” depending on the class, circumstances and goals. Some days the students search for information themselves, create their own content, questions and solutions to problems. Other times the instruction is more directed, the goals more modest. But compared to my earlier forays, this at least most times has the feel of being real, of connecting to the needs of my students and eliminating the blank stares so often encountered in my classroom teaching days.


*(Tongue planted firmly in cheek here)

Which Way Is It?

I'm in a kind of strange position when it comes to technology. Most of my job involves acting as an evangelist for the kinds of change that technology can bring. My role is to promote the promise of technology and to help with its implementation in any way possible, certainly a role I embrace. And yet any teacher who has been in a classroom for more than a few years quickly learns that too much technology is not teacher-driven, but rather foisted upon us by those with other agendas. TV's were supposed to change learning, so were projectors and film clips. B.F. Skinner even promised teaching machines back in the 50's. I have seen the reality that technology can distract teachers from real learning ("PowerPointlessness"), that it sometimes only promotes commercial interests over educational (closed-circuit TV's paid for by Coke, free computers from Apple and others), and that it often seems to be enhancing inequities among schools and students instead of diminishing them.
The technologies that are seen likely to be implemented in the near-term, such as grassroots video and collaborative technologies, clearly demonstrate this dichotomy of possibilities. On the one hand, the power of video and other collaborative technologies is indisputable in reaching out to people and connecting them in new and powerful ways. Yet I've seen too many times where this ability is its own rationale, that the assumption becomes because we can do this, that we must do this. Too many times in my career, I've seen teachers scared into embracing technologies not because they need them or understand how they can enhance learning, but because they fear the scrutiny of not being on board with the newest thing. Heaven forbid that you are the only teacher in your grade who hasn't published a podcast. My somewhat different position on that is, you should understand the technology well enough to use it when it does something that you could not do otherwise, or as well. But that is not the pressure placed on teachers. Instead, the pressure to embrace the "latest thing" comes from outside the boundaries of what is educationally appropriate, and that (any veteran teacher will tell you) just drives us nuts.
And then, further down the road, teachers hear of technologies such as "collective intelligence" (wikis, etc.) and "social operating systems" and with a panic realize, oh my, we better get on board with this before some parent, administrator or school board member sees us as the only one NOT using this technology! From my work inside the classroom, working with teachers on how to embrace and exploit technology, I have tried to develop a sense of not cynicism (which too many colleagues do embrace), but rather a professional sense of judgment about which technologies should be used, and how they enhance learning. I worry that the unexamined embrace of technology will lead to situations that do not help teachers, students and learning. For example, in the article, Which Technologies Will Shape Education in 2008, there is a quote about weaving the connections and clues of our lives together, "and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know." That notion clashes (mashes?) with another critique I read recently about social networking, that what is happening is that it is connecting people only with people who think like they do, which is most definitely NOT what the goal of teaching is about.
I feel that the more fully I can help to empower teachers to make their own professional judgment about the use of potentially useful technologies, the more that the embrace of those technologies will be truly deep and meaningful, not merely public relations.

Revolution in the Classroom?

I don't necessarily disagree with Dr. Weston's assertion that there will be (maybe is) a revolution in the classroom, especially in terms of technology. There has certainly been the veneer of change with regard to what students do each day, compared to when I started my career. I think what gave me reservations was the sense that this may not be universal, or worse, may not ever reach a majority of students. I would LIKE to see a revolution in terms of how we educate students, and I certainly have dedicated much of my professional life to trying to effect that. But I'm pessimistic about how far-reaching it might be. And from a longer perspective, it may not happen at all.

Cognitivism Blog

How could software applications and/or other technologies help you provide opportunities for your students to access their prior knowledge and better organize their information? That is, describe a lesson for which you might use technology to help with organization and describe the technology(ies) you might use.

One of the great things about being a computer teacher for the past dozen years is that I get to call upon a whole range of activities that I've already done and look back and reflect on them in a new light. This idea of looking through a cognitivist lens at some of those activities is challenging and interesting. Did I know that what I was doing then fit this model? Did the activity lend itself to functions of memory that make learning better for the students?

When I read item #1 in the cognitive module here, it made me think back to the times I've used Inspiration over the years to help students record, organize and use information. The NASA essay about Human Memory discusses the notion of "stores" where we may save things we wish to know. In particular, the idea of how information may be stored in the Long-Term Store (LTS) was something I needed to think about in relation to the use of this tool. On a superficial level, students have been asked over the years to find information about invertebrates, or global warming, or facts about famous adventures, and record that with Inspiration. What happened then?

I want to think that the mental processes discussed in that essay, (Encoding, Maintenance, and Retrieval) somehow became explicitly performed by using a graphic organizer like Inspiration. Is it possible that this kind of tool is an outward manifestation of exactly those kinds of interior cognitive processes? That would be great, of course! And I do think that the kinds of activities that were performed by students using Inspiration over the years were explicit performances or rehearsals of those kinds of thinking activities, but it's hard to determine first if facts get recorded in long-term memory, and then whether or not they lead to deeper understandings and a synthesis of knowledge beyond just that recall.

In "Learning Theories: An Overview," the idea of "transfer" is discussed, where transfer is a function of how information is stored in memory and that learning is indicated when a learner can apply knowledge in different contexts. For me, thinking of these kinds of lessons that I’ve done in the past in this new light give me an inkling of where I might take them in the future. It’s not enough to organize, record and save the information in a graphic organizer; the real key is (has been) where the student applies that, whether through the next step of a learning project or in other directions, and how that synthesis allows them to move to different contexts.

Pet Peeves

I hear it mentioned frequently that kids know more than adults when it comes to computers, and up to a point, that's true. They certainly know how to play games better than we do, and they probably are less afraid than adults when it comes to testing things out. But to say that technology is easier for kids is to ignore a couple of realities. First, adults are usually trying to do work with a computer, and losing work is much MUCH more frustrating than hitting the reset button when Super Mario crashes into the ocean. Second, and more important, to say that kids "know" more than us or are more comfortable with technology, does not mean that they do not need us to catch up, so that we can provide them with guidance and leadership, and not leave them to fend for themselves. Kids may know more about technology than many adults, but they do not know about trust, decision-making, appropriate behaviors, and more. They need responsible adults to help them as they learn to live in this world, electronic, virtual or otherwise.

Something to blog about

For the longest time, the thought of this blog was very oppressive. I mean, what would I write about that even I myself would care about? And then I stopped thinking about the blog and started thinking about what I've been thinking about, and I realized that much of my school day is concerned with the same things this Post program is. I go to work every day and play the role of tech evangelist, trying to assist teachers in integrating technology into their curriculum on a day-to-day basis. Professionally, that's just about all I think of, so you'll pardon me if that's all I can think of to blog about!
It feels like one of those situations where I couldn't see the forest because the trees got in my way. I join the Post program because it's about spreading the Technological Word, we focus in class on constructivist learning environments, I go to school during the day and try to recreate the same thing, and only now do I see how intimately the connection between my studies and my professional focus have been. A great big "doh!" for me!