+ “Gap Year” Motivates Students: Research

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An article in Education Week, by Sarah D Sparks, reports that research has found that Australian students were more likely to take a gap year if they had low academic performance in high school.

But former “gappers” reported significantly higher motivation in college — in the form of “adaptive behavior,”  for example, planning, task management, and persistence, compared with students who had not taken that year off.

 University of Sidney researcher, Andrew J Martin, says

Findings from the two studies suggest that participation in a gap year may be one means of addressing the motivational difficulties that might have been present at school.

Statistics from the US Department of Education  show that, across the United States just 7.6 percent of 2003-4 graduates delayed their entry to college for a year.  Of those, 84 percent reported working; 29 percent traveled or pursued other interests. 

Unlike the Australian study, US students who delayed entry to college were less likely to complete a degree.  Aurora D’Amico, a researcher for the American study, says, however, that this report does not formally break out results for gap-year participants.

But anecdotally, there is some evidence to suggest the idea of a gap year may be catching on in the US.  Says Reid Goldstein, who organizes panel discussions on gap-year options in Arlington Virginia,

I think more parents every year are starting to come to terms with the notion that life for themselves and their kid isn’t going to end if the kid isn’t in a college freshman class two months after high school.

The schools have figured out that the number of seniors going to college is their success metric but… they don’t follow those kids to college.  They don’t see those kids binge drinking or dropping out or doing any of those things that show they are in the wrong place at that time. 

Linda H Connelly, who counsels high-schoolers at New Trier Township High School agrees.

We found we were counseling everybody to [go to] college, and we were finding a lot of these students were just not ready to go on.  The parents wanted them out of the house, and we wanted to give students another option.

 Connelly’s department started a “gap fair” five years ago.  It began with six programs and a handful of families.  This year, 30 programs are offered to more than 400 people from across Chicago. 

The programs have proved helpful to motivate both students who aren’t yet mature enough for college — and burned-out overachievers.

The president of the Princeton, NJ Center for Interim Programs, Holly Bull, feels that taking gap time can save a lot of floundering around.  “Changing majors, changing schools… it gets very pricey to be confused in college.”

Many elite colleges, including Princeton, Harvard and Yale, encourage deferments for gap years.  Princeton has 100 students annually performing a year of service work abroad.

Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson are co-authors of the 2005 book “The Gap Year Advantage.”  They conducted a study of 280 recent gap-year alumni.

Haigler says the results echo the findings from the Australian study.  They plan to release a forthcoming book titled (tentatively) “The Gap Year, American Style.” 

Haigler and Nelson found that students reported their top two reasons for taking a gap year were burnout and wanting to “find out more about themselves.”

Nine out of 10 of those students returned to college within a year.  Sixty percent reported that the time off had either inspired or confirmed their choice of career or academic major.

sole source: article by Sarah D Sparks in Education Week, September 15, 2010.  http://www.edweek.org

tutoring in Columbus OH:  Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021  or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Some High Schools to Plan Graduation Two Years Early

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According to an article by Sam Dillon in the NY Times, next year  dozens of public high schools —  in eight states  —  will introduce a program allowing 10th graders to get a diploma two years early.  They will have to pass a battery of tests; and they will immediately enroll in community college.  See the article at  http://tinyurl.com/ygmrrw8

 The plan is modeled largely on systems in high performing nations — Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore.

The program of high school coursework, with accompanying board examinations, is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy. 

The goal is to insure that students have mastered a set of basic requirements, and to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college.

Says Marc S. Tucker, president of the center,

That’s a central problem we’re trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges.  We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.

A planning grant of $1.5 million, to help the national center work with states  and districts to get the program running, was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Tucker estimates that start-up costs for school districts would be about $500 per student.  That would buy courses and tests, as well as the training of  teachers.

In the fall of 2011 high school students in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico,  Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont, will begin the new coursework.

Backers say the new system can reduce the need for community colleges to offer remedial courses, because the score for the 10th-grade tests would be set at the level necessary to succeed in first-year college courses.

That means that failure can provide an early warning system to 10th graders –  they would know which skills and what knowledge they would still need to master before applying to college. 

Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said  high school graduation requirements in that state had long been based on accumulating enough course credits.

This would reform that.  We’ve been tied to seat-time for 100 years.  This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready.

And Phil Daro, a consultant based in Berkeley California, thinks school systems like Singapore’s work well because they promise students that if they study  the syllabus material conscientiously, they will do well on their examinations. 

In the US, by contrast, all is murky.  Students do not have a clear idea of where to apply their effort, and the system makes no coherent attempt to reward learning.

This system is similar to the growing early college high school movement, according to Dillon’s article.  There, students begin taking college-level courses and earning college credit (through nearby community colleges) while they are still in high school.  

The states participating in this board examination-based pilot project will pick up to five programs of instruction, with their accompanying tests, for participating high schools to use.

Programs already approved by the national center include the College Board’s Advanced Placement, the International Baccalaureate Diploma, ACT’s QualityCore and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education programs offered by both Cambridge International and by Pearson Education’s Edexcel.

sole source: Sam Dillon’s article in the NY Times on 2/18/10.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021  or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com.

+ NY School District Offers All-Girls Tech Program

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The Fairport Central School District in upstate New York has approved an aggressive approach to counteract the gender gap in technology education, according to Ernst Lamothe, Jr in the Democrat Chronicle.

The district is set to begin a two-year pilot program starting next fall, to create four all-girl technology courses (two in ninth grade and two in middle school).  Enrollment will be voluntary, in compliance with Title IX.

Dave Allyn, a special assignment administrator for the district says, “Girls sometimes won’t take technology classes because they don’t want to be the only girl in a class or in a technology club.  Job growth is happening again in engineering and some of the sciences where old stereotypes persist about those male-dominated fields, and we need to make our young women aware that there is an opportunity for them.” 

Although women make up more than half of the work force, they hold only 28 percent of technology positions (US Bureau of labor Statistics).  The number of young women studying computer science has fallen by more than 40 percent in the past two decades.

With computer support specialist, systems administrator and engineering positions expected to grow significantly by 2016, educators and employers worry that young women are failing to gain the necessary skills for those jobs.

Both the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology have less than 30 percent female enrollment in their undergraduate engineering programs.

More than 450 public schools nationwide offer single-sex academic classes, says the US Department of Education.  Research finds that female students learn differently, including preferring collaborative learning and quieter environments.

They are more concerned with complete understanding, doing quality work and helping others.  Male students tend to want to complete tasks as quickly as possible and move on.

Instead of trying to make girls fit into the existing system, school districts nationwide are changing to become more inviting for girls.  The solutions include instituting after-school technology clubs targeting young women as well as offering single-gender technology classes.

Universities also continue to push hard to attract more female engineers, since women make up less than 18 percent of six engineering fields, including single-digit percentages in civil and mechanical engineering.

Colleges and universities have started national programs such as “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day,” which is part of February’s Engineering Week.  The push continues in March, during Women’s History Month, when elementary and secondary schools can participate in live Web chats and teleconferences that encourage girls to consider engineering as a major.

The Rochester Institue of Technology began several initiatives six years ago.  They offer a middle school girls’ robotics program every winter, as well as an elementary design program camp.

At the Fairport schools, boys made up 90.3 percent of the enrollment in technology classes last year; this year, the proportion rose to 91.7 percent.   When the high school added a computer game design course to teach students programming skills, only three of the 115 enrollees were girls.

These single-gender classes will have the same curriculum and exams as their mixed-gender counterparts.  There will be two eighth-grade Technology for Girls classes that will last one quarter at two of the schools and a semester- or year-long course at the other two.

Fairport Middle School teachers purchased computer programming, designed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, intended to appeal to girls.

According to Allyn, “Usually computer games are all about car crashes, armies, gunfights and sports, which boys tend to like, but not always young girls.” 

But this new system encourages people to write stories and put them into animation, which taps into the creativity and technology aspects for the female students.

The district has also added hand-drafting units for graphic arts and two environmental-related units, because women make up almost 50 percent of people in the field of environmental engineering.

Elizabeth Brown, a technology teacher at one of the schools, says schools need to follow that up by offering young girls more classes focused on green and alternative energy issues.  She has her class building solar-powered cars this year.

“If we are serious about this issue,” says Brown, “you have to make inroads with our young women now, and it must start as early as middle school.”

The school district also started a new middle school club called Cyberettes, connecting them with female computer students enrolled at RIT.  They work together on projects such as Web design, encryption, programming and video editing, giving young girls an introduction to technology careers and advice from women talking about their experience in a male-dominated culture.

Margaret Bailey, mechanical engineer professor at RIT and executive director of its Women in Engineering program, says

There are some girls who are going to do well regardless of putting them in single-gender class or not.  But for those who might not, what Fairport is doing makes sense, expecially at a young age, when you see girls losing interest in math and sciences because they are not getting much encouragement about pursuing careers in those areas.

Additional Facts:

According to the US Census Bureau, women make up a small proportion of professionals in key technology fields:

• Physics: 21 percent
• Computer science: 18.6 percent
• Aerospace engineering: 11.5 percent
• Civil Engineering: 9.5 percent
• Mechanical engineering: 7.1 percent

sole source: article by Ernst Lamothe Jr at www.democratandchronicle.com on 11/16/09.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Latin is Back in Schools Again

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The number of students in the US taking the National Latin Exam has risen steadily to more than 134,000 students in each of the past two years.  Interestingly, large increases are even seen in remoter areas like New Mexico, Alaska and Vermont.

The number of students taking the Advanced Placement test in Latin has nearly doubled over the past ten years.  Although Spanish and French still dominate, and Chinese and Arabic are trendier, Latin is quietly flourishing.

The resurgence of a language once rejected as outdated and irrelevant is attributable to a new generation of students who seek to increase SAT scores, stand out from their friends, or simply harbor a fascination for it after reading Harry Potter’s Latin-based chanting spells, says Winnie Hu in an article in the New York Times.

Enrollment in the suburb of New Rochelle has increased to 187.  The two middle schools in town are starting an ancient-cultures club in which students will explore the lives of Romans, Greeks and other ancient people.

In New York City, Latin is thriving.  It is currently taught in three dozen schools, including Brooklyn Latin, a high school in East Williamsburg that started in 2006.  Four years of Latin are required, as well as two years of Spanish.  Latin phrases adorn the walls, and words like discipuli (students), magistri (teachers) and latrina (bathroom) are part of everyday conversation.  

“It’s the language of scholars and educated people,” says Jason Griffiths, headmaster of Brooklyn Latin.  “It’s the language of people who are successful.  I think it’s a draw, and that’s certainly what we sell.”

Adam Blistein, executive director of the American Philological Association at the University of Pennsylvania which represents more than 3,000 members including classics professors and latin teachers, says that more high schools are recognizing the benefits of Latin.  It builds vocabulary and grammar for higher SAT scoores, appeals to college admissions officers as a sign of critical-thinking skills and fosters true intellectual passion, he feels.

“Goethe is better in German, Flaubert is better in French and Virgil is better in Latin,” says Dr Blistein.  “If you stick with it, the lollipop comes at the end when you get to read the original.  In many cases, it’s what whets their apetite.”

Once upon a time, Latin was required at many public and parochial schools.  It fell into disfavor in the 1960s when students rebelled against traditional classroom teachings and even rhe Roman Catholic Church abandoned the use of Latin as the official language of the Mass.

Interest was somewhat revived in the 1970s and began picking up in the 1980s with the back-to-basics movement in many schools.  But it has really taken off in the last few years as an ivory tower secret that has infiltrated popular culture.

The Harry Potter books use Latin words for names and spells, and at least two have been translated into Latin (“Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis“), as have several by Dr Seuss (“Cattus Petasatus“).   Movies like “Gladiator” and “Troy” as well as the series “Rome” have also lent glamour to ancient subjects.

Marty Abbott, education director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, says it is possible that Latin might edge out German as the third most popular language taught in schools, behind Spanish and French. 

Abbott is a former Latin teacher, and says that today’s Latin classes appeal to more students because they have evolved from “dry grammar and tortuous translations” to livelier lessons that focus on culture, history and the daily life of the Romans.

In addition, she says, Latin teachers and students themselves have promoted the language outside the classroom through clubs, poetry competitions and mock chariot races.

In Scarsdale, NY, where Latin enrollment rose by 14 percent this year, the high school sponsors a Roman banquet on the Ides of March, during which students wear tunics and wreaths in their hair.  Seniors serve bread, olives, roasted chicken and grapes to younger students, as they all break bread with their fingers.

The Latin teacher, Marion Polsky, says she still receives postcards in Latin from former students, and that at least three have gone on to become Latin teachers.

Ciera Gardner, a sophomore at New Rochelle (and an aspiring actress), started Latin three years ago, and while two friends have dropped away she persists, because Latin will look good on her college applications and — in the meantime — it has already helped her decipher unfamiliar words in scripts.  “It’s different,” she says.  “Everyone says ‘I take Spanish’ or ‘I take Italian,’ but it’s cool to say ‘I take Latin.’ “

And Max Gordon, also a sophomore, says he has learned more about grammar in Latin class than he ever did in English classes.  He occasionally debates the finer points of grammar with his mother, a video artist who studied Latin.

“In some ways it’s really frustrating,” he says.  “I’ll hear someone say something that isn’t grammatically correct and I’ll cringe.”

sole source: article by Winnie Hu in the NY Times on 10/7/08.  www.nytimes.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ How to Read a Novel: What Page One Can Tell You

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Thomas C Foster is the author of the rich and wonderful “How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form.”  The book is concerned with the “grammar” of the novel; the specific, formal elements of this most popular of literary forms.

He explores how authors’ choices (about structure, point of view, narrative voice and other aspects of a novel) create meaning using a special literary language.  Foster gives us the keys to this language.

Chapter One starts off roundly, offering the 18 (count them) things you can learn on the first page of a novel.

Foster suggests that the first page is a promissory note between the author and a prospective reader, saying, “Hey, I’ve got something good here — trust me.”  But more: the first page of a novel teaches us how to read it.

EIGHTEEN THINGS PAGE ONE CAN TELL US

1.    Style    Are sentences short or long, simple or complex, rushed or leisurely?  How many modifiers?  Hemingway, says Foster, was ”badly frightened in infancy by words ending in ‘ly.’ ”  Open any American detective novel, he says, and you’ll see that the author has probably read Hemingway. 

2.    Tone    Every book has one, Foster tells us: elegiac, matter-of-fact, ironic.  Jane Austen’s masterpiece opening sentence in “Pride and Prejudice” distances the speaker from the source of that “universal truth” she mentions and gives her permission to trot out the rest of her ironic statement about men with fortunes being in need of wives.

3.    Mood    Similar to tone but not the same, says Foster.  Tone is about how the voice sounds, but “mood” is how the voice feels about the story it’s telling.  “The Great Gatsby” narrator, Nick Carraway, speaks in a reasonable sounding tone, but his mood is one of regret, guilt and even anger. What is it, we wonder, that he’s not quite saying here?

4.    Diction    What kind of words does the novel use?  Common or rare, friendly or challenging?  Are sentences whole or fractured, and if they’re fractured, is it accidental or on purpose?  Foster mentions Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange:” his character Alex uses a combination of Elizabethan elaboration, colorful curses and a kind of Slavic-based teen slang called Nadsat.

5.    Point of View    Not necessarily “who” in the story is telling the tale (see “narrative presence” below), but “who” relative to the story and its characters.  Is it a ‘he/she’ story or an ‘I’ story?  If ‘he/she,’ we can assume this is a more distant third-person narration.  If ‘I’ is the narrator, we can expect to meet a major or minor character, and our suspicions are aroused.  If the narration employs ‘you,’ says Foster, hang on to your hats: you’re likely in for some strange experiences.  Even if the author gets “tricky” with the third-person or the ‘I’ narrator, we usually get hints in the first paragraphs.

6.    Narrative Presence    Is it a disembodied voice or a person who is inside or outside the story?  One of the servants?  A victim?  A perpetrator?  Authors usually give us hints right away.  With first-person narrators, the “presence” is usually quite clear.  Third-person narrators can speak to us as genial companions (Austen), passionate participants (Dickens), or impersonal, detached and cool observers (Hemingway or Brookner).  In the 21st century, Foster reminds us, authors are less likely than their Victorian counterparts to mix it up emotionally.

7.    Narrative Attitude    How does the narrator feel about the characters and the action: amused (Austen), earnest (Dickens), or detached and impersonal as the narrator of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”  Flaubert, says Foster,in reacting to the overheated involvement of previous romantic era writers, created the next narrative cliche.

8.    Time Frame    Is all this contemporary or did it happen a long time ago?  How can we tell?  Does it cover a lot of time, or a little?  Check Gacia Marquez’s opening in “One Hundred Years of Solitude:” “Many years later…”   Foster feels any writer serious about the craft should be jealous of those three simple words.

9.    Time Management    Will it go fast or slow?  Is it being told in or near the “now” of the story, or long after?  Foster tell us that Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine” takes place in the time it takes the narrator to ride an escalator from the first floor to the next landing – a feat that requires the elongation of time to the extreme.

10.   Place    Setting, but also more than setting, suggests Foster: a sense of things, a mode of thought, a way of seeing.  The second paragraph of TC Boyle’s “Water Music” tells us that the Niger River locale is both the setting and the story.

11.   Motif    According to Foster, motif is simply “stuff that happens again and again.”  It can be action, language pattern, image — anything that happens repeatedly.  Escapes in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”   Flowers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”  Cultural blunders leading to disasters in “Water Music.” Vonnegut’s ‘And so it goes,’ from “Slaughterhouse Five.”

12.   Theme    (Stop groaning, says Foster.  There won’t be a test.)  Theme is about “aboutness.”  Where the story is what happens, “theme” is the idea content.  Sometimes it’s simple: most mysteries carry the message that crime will be found out.  In “Mrs. Dalloway,” it is the presence of the past — and we get it right there on the first page.  It might be more subtle: a secondary theme in Agatha Christie’s novels is the decline of the aristocracy — all those inept, bumbling inhabitants of magnificent manor houses.

13.   Irony    Or not!  Some novels are in dead earnest — the entire 19th century, for example.  (Except Twain.  And Flaubert.)  But other novels are ironic on any number of levels: verbal, dramatic, comic, situational; and the irony usually shows up right away.  Robert Parker’s “A Catskill Eagle,” Foster tell us, begins “It was midnight and I was just getting home from detecting.”  Spenser (the protagonist and narrator) is in deadly earnest about what he does for a living when he’s doing it, but he knows that his chosen trade is morally dubious and he wants you to know that he’s also someone who likes wine with dinner.  Throughout, he veers between hard-charging action and ironic, distanced commentary.

14.   Rhythm    Prose rhythm shows up right away (narrative rhythm takes a while to establish) says Foster.  Prose rhythm often suggests how the larger narrative’s rhythm will work.  This rhythm is related to “diction” but with this difference: while diction has to do with the words a writer uses,  “rhythm” is how they are deployed in sentences.  Actually, they’re largely inseparable, because prose rhythm depends a good deal on the words chosen while also coloring how the words sound. (Everything in narrative is related to everything else on some level.)  Does the writer blurt out information or withhold it?  State it directly or bury it in a tangle of subordinate clauses?  Check out Barbara Kingsolver’s opening in “The Poisonwood Bible;” the rhythm is calm, measured, almost leisurely, but every detail is terrifying.

15.   Pace    How fast will we go?  Henry James opens “The Portrait of a Lady” with language that lets us know this will not be a hundred yard dash, says Foster: long, abstract words, embedded phrases.  Every sentence tells us this will be leisurely, so get used to it.  Psychological insight and interior drama can’t be rushed.

16.   Expectations    Not only of the writer — of the reader as well.  Page One, says Foster, is the most interactive of them all.  The writer gets to announce his or her expectations: one expects her reader will be patient (George Eliot); another expects readers to be hip, savvy and unafraid of the unconventional   (Thomas Pynchon); yet another wants a relaxed, jaunty companion (PG Wodehouse).  Authors do announce their expectations. But Page One is also where readers get to say whether or not  we will agree to his  terms.  Do we WANT to read it?  Do we approve of his word choice?  Are we that hip?  More?  The first page, according to Foster, is the beginning of a negotiation between writer and reader.  It’s where we have — or don’t have — a meeting of the minds.

17.   Character    You won’t always find a main character on page one, but more often than not, you will.  And it will probably be THE main character.  “Protagonist” comes from the Greek meaning “first agent,” Foster reminds us, and writers from the fifth century BCE to the 21st century usually trot them out straight away.  First-person narratives give us a character immediately: Huck Finn, Mike Hammer, Humbert Humbert.  But we find Mrs. Dalloway in the first two words of her novel; Joyce begins “Ulysses” with “stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” the protagonist’s nemesis; and in Garcia Marquez’s hundred-year saga, Aureliano Buendia faces a firing squad in the first sentence.

18.   Instructions on How to Read This Novel    The 17 previous elements instruct us how the novel wants to be read.  Every novel wants to be read in a certain way. It’s our call whether we read it that way.  It’s worth noting that we won’t get all of those features in every first page, but most of them will show up.  Even a dozen will provide a goodly assemblage of information, Foster says.  We will be well prepared to turn the page and grapple with the story.

Buy this book!

Sole source: “How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form,” by Thomas C Foster.   Cost: $13.95.  Published by Harper Collins Books, 2008.  ISBN 978-0-06-134040-6.  Foster’s previous book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor,” is also available.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ High School Drama Geeks: 2008 Festival in Lincoln Nebraska

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This is Charles Isherwood’s article in the NY Times:

THE room hummed with excitement. Table hopping was rampant. Warm congratulations and lavish compliments spritzed the air with fizzy good cheer. That secret ingredient that transforms a festive gathering into an electric one — the presence of celebrity — was easily detected.

The opening-night party for a Broadway show after the socko reviews have come in? Bar Centrale, around midnight at the height of the season?

No, it was an Applebee’s here, just after noon on a Wednesday in June.

This particular branch of the restaurant chain, you see, sits on the edge of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For a week every year the tides of Husker fever that roil the university are stilled, as this sports-crazed campus becomes the world capital of high school drama geekdom. More than 2,000 students from across the country, joined by a sprinkling of foreign visitors and a couple of hundred teachers and chaperones, descend on Lincoln for the International Thespian Festival, an annual extravaganza organized by the Educational Theater Association.

Part summer camp, part summer school, part arts festival and part recruitment fair, the gathering fills the campus with packs of eager young drama freaks, flip-flopping from workshops to auditions to performances to nightly dances, poring over callback lists, gossiping over iced coffee, scurrying off to rehearsals with worn binders of sheet music in hand.

I use the phrase geekdom advisedly if not officially. On sale in the lobby of the Lied Center, the 2,000-seat auditorium where the festival’s biggest productions are staged, are T-shirts with the words “Theatre Geek” emblazoned upon them above masks of tragedy and comedy; these young drama enthusiasts are clearly happy and proud to declare themselves Thespians. (The Thespians are an honor society founded in 1929; the first festival took place in 1941.) And while there were a few students who assertively embrace the geek aesthetic, I saw a plenty of poised, elegant young women in skinny jeans toting designer purses, iPhones clapped to their ears, mascaraed eyes just visible behind big smoky sunglasses. And lots of guys in long shorts and Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts, hair spiked in gentle fauxhawks.

Throughout the week the boyish Richard LaFleur, the chairman of the International Thespian Officers, even managed to wear the bright yellow sash announcing his office as if it were an Obama button, the coolest accessory in the world.

Attending the festival for a few days as an observer, I was quickly swept up in its strange atmosphere. Just before heading to Applebee’s for a burger, I sat on a bench outside the Lied Center organizing some notes. Nearby a pack of students broke into a spontaneous chorus from a song I recognized.

What was it? Sondheim? Don’t think so. Certainly not Rodgers and Hart or Rodgers and Hammerstein. Could it possibly be Andrew Lloyd Webber? Then it hit me — it was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the first time in a while I’d heard anyone of any age sing pop or rock, and it was weirdly disorienting. A few minutes later the kids segued into a chorus of “Mr. Cellophane” from “Chicago,” and the world righted itself.

The center of attention at lunch at Applebee’s was a big table of performers from “Hairspray,” the festival’s gala opening-day presentation. They laughed and chattered over Cokes, celebrating a birthday, their energetic interplay infused with the extra exuberance of people who have noticed that they are being noticed.

(A production staged exclusively for the festival, “Hairspray” featured students from all over the country, selected through regional auditions. The rehearsals and a sort of out-of-town tryout took place a week before the festival began at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, where the show’s director, Vance Fulkerson, runs the musical theater program.)

At one point Jeff Zicker, the unofficial heartthrob of this year’s festival, who appeared as both Link Larkin in “Hairspray” and Anthony Hope in “Sweeney Todd,” walked past a table of girls, inciting a burst of pandemonium of adoring praise and autograph gathering. “That was insane,” he burbled to the table of kids next to me when he returned, sheepish but also delighted by the attention.

“Hairspray,” with its sweetness and jubilance, not to mention its cast of juvenile characters, seems a natural enough choice for teenagers, although its racially mixed cast could present problems for a lot of schools. But I’m sure some of you are smirking, if not chortling, at the idea of 15- to 18-year-olds tackling the musical mountains of “Sweeney Todd,” not to mention the various British accents, the complex staging, the rampaging gore and ghoulishness.

It is all too easy to take an eye-rolling attitude to the notion of high schoolers playing at being big bad adults in dramatically complex material. Other productions at the festival included the musicals “Rent” and “Little Shop of Horrors” and the plays “Proof,” “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” “Noises Off” and “ ‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys.” But I’d wager that even the editors of The Onion, who recently made wicked sport of preening student actors in a parody of the Tony Awards, would find themselves teary-eyed at some point during the festival.

Heck, I even managed to get choked up during “Sweeney Todd.” (With the exception of “Hairspray” the shows presented at the festival were chosen from actual high school productions vetted throughout the year by representatives from the Educational Theater Association. “Sweeney Todd” came from the Las Vegas Academy, a public performing arts magnet school that regularly sends shows to the festival.)

Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who wrote the score for “Hairspray,” attended the festival before heading off to China to witness their hit musical’s latest international incarnation. Mr. Shaiman bopped in his seat all through the show’s opening-night performance; Mr. Wittman, himself a former Thespian, was wiping away copious tears at its conclusion. And they’d already seen the matinee.

“This is what the movie and the show are all about,” Mr. Wittman said later. “John Waters would love the idea that the high school kid who always used to play Bud Frump gets to be the star, and the girl who was always stuck in the best friend role is the heroine.”

The next day they sprinkled some stardust the students’ way by sharing stories of real-life showbiz at a Q.&A. Then midway through the session Mr. Shaiman happened to notice that a voice-mail message had come in from their friend Patti LuPone. Giving the students an extra thrill to take home, he returned the call and had the class shout out a big hello to Ms. LuPone. Giddy whispers ran round the room.

The list of more than 120 workshops offered indicates the breadth and depth of the students’ interests and the festival’s scope. A small sampling includes Fun With Dialects, Creating Believable Stage Villains, Power Auditioning, Understanding Belting Techniques, Basic Unarmed Stage Combat and Period Hatmaking. They are taught by a mixture of high school teachers, college professors and theater professionals.

I suspected that the more career-oriented choices might be more popular than those devoted to developing technique, but there was nary a seat to spare in the classroom hosting Acting Shakespeare for Real. About 30 students — including an ethnically mixed table of kids who’d traveled 35 hours by bus from Los Angeles — worked their way through samples of verse from “Measure for Measure” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” The instructor led them through the process of finding the meaning in the language through the emotion underneath it.

The students were not the only ones advancing their educations this year. The songs chosen by the musical theater students were a revelation to me, both inspiring and a little humbling. Watching some auditions for the individual showcases at the end of the festival and attending a couple of vocal workshops, I expected to hear a lot of classic repertoire — Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Instead I heard three songs from Jason Robert Brown’s “Last Five Years,” one more from his “Parade.” I heard a song from “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and another from “Spring Awakening.” O.K., those two are popular hits. But I also heard a selection from Andrew Lippa’s “Wild Party,” a complex soliloquy from “Caroline, or Change,” a comic romp from “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” a ballad from Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’s “Dessa Rose” and a number from “The Wedding Singer.” (How does a girl from Missouri even obtain sheet music for “The Wedding Singer”?)

The assumption that the American musical theater canon is unofficially protected for posterity by critics in New York thus crumbled into dust. Many of these shows received mixed or negative reviews and had limited runs on or off Broadway. Show-tune-crazed students across the country, it is clear, have their own opinions. For them the American musical theater is not a carefully edited collection of golden oldies but a living organism, and the newest shows are a primary source of their excited devotion to performing.

At the end of the week the festival also presents staged readings of short plays written by students. Chosen through a competition before the festival begins, the four plays are cast and rehearsed at the festival. I sat in on a couple of rehearsals, watching the young playwrights seeing their words leaping to life before their eyes. At one point I thought I might be witnessing a writer’s first disillusioning encounter with a domineering director. Luke Slattery, of the Colorado Academy in Denver, looked on with an ambiguous expression as the director of his play, a Holocaust-theme drama called “Icarus,” had the actors run through a “sensory exercise” involving two actresses making small talk while one cowered under a table and the other peered at her through a wall of paper. But when the exercise concluded — and at last the attention turned to Mr. Slattery’s words — he expressed satisfaction at the result: “That was amazing!”

Mr. Slattery’s amazement was nothing compared to my stupefaction at the emotional depth and professional polish of the production of Athol Fugard’s “ ‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys,” which came from the private Westminster School in Atlanta. I practically crawled from the Lied Center after the 10 a.m. staging ended, so moved was I by the performances of James Franch, Omar Ingram and Hampton Fluker in Mr. Fugard’s drama about the complex relationship between a white South African adolescent and the black workers in his parents’ cafe. It took me a full hour to recover, with the assistance of an Applebee’s margarita. (Not recommended, by the way; an olive bobbed in mine.)

Eric Brannen, the drama teacher who directed “Master Harold” and runs the drama program at the Westminster School, has sent 11 productions to the festival over the last 20 years, including such rarefied fare as “Tartuffe” and Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” (Block that smirk, please.) He is also a former president of the Educational Theater Association.

The cast members had been working on the production for a year, and their research included a trip to California to interview Mr. Fugard, video excerpts of which were screened before the show. I sat down with Mr. Brannen and his actors a couple hours after the performance, curious to hear about their future plans and how they came by their interest in theater.

The taciturn Mr. Ingram, who has a special interest in dance, has already choreographed several shows for his school. He heads to Howard University in the fall as a musical-theater major. Mr. Franch, 13, comes from a family of amateur actors and can already speak with an intuitive intelligence about the particular appeal of live theater. “It’s more personal,” he said. “You’re there with everyone, and you feed off the energy of the audience.”

Although he is just 17, Mr. Fluker has had to make significant sacrifices to pursue what he has come to see as his “calling.” He was a star of the football team, scoring 17 points in one memorable game, but abandoned the sport last year when he came to realize that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted to as an actor if his focus was divided. (His other recent roles have included Coalhouse Walker in “Ragtime” and Othello; it’s a testament to the power of his performance in Mr. Fugard’s play that I can honestly say I wish I could have seen this 17-year-old’s Othello.)

The football coach was not pleased. He instigated a frantic campaign to get Mr. Fluker to change his mind. “Eventually I had to get the headmaster to call him off,” Mr. Brannen recalled.

How did Mr. Fluker make the decision?

He seems to have considered the question in some depth. Evincing the wisdom of someone who has not just taken to the particular thrill of performing but is also beginning to understand the profound influence of art, Mr. Fluker answered, “You’re never going to change someone’s perception of the world by running a football.”

Amen to that. Spoken like a true Thespian. Theater geeks rock!

source: this is Charles Isherwood’s article in the NY Times on Sunday July 13, 2008.  www.nytimes.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Career Programs Stress College Too: Study Shows Effectiveness

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This is Erik Eckholm’s article in the NY Times:

Forget the old-fashioned “vocational ed” classes that sent students on a decidedly noncollege track. Over the last quarter-century, a new kind of high school program known as a career academy has proliferated, especially in low-income districts, that combines job placement, college preparation and classes beyond the vocational trades, from accounting to health care.

Now, a long-term and rigorous evaluation of nine career academies across the country, to be released in Washington on Friday, has found that eight years after graduation, participants had significantly higher employment and earnings than similar students in a control group.

Poverty experts called the findings encouraging because few interventions with low-income teenagers, especially blacks and Hispanics, have shown significant and lasting effects, and they come at a time when young minority men, especially, are losing ground disastrously in the job market.

Career academies offer students experience in the workplace, and help them get paying jobs while they pursue standard academic coursework. When the study, by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, began 15 years ago, there were fewer than 500 career academies in the United States. Today there are more than 2,500, and the new findings are likely to spur more growth, several experts said.

The participants were mainly Hispanic and black, and the schools had emphases including business, tourism, health care and electronics, with students enrolled for three or four years.

Eight years after high school, when most participants were about 26, the academy group had average earnings 11 percent — or $2,088 a year — higher than the control group.

“The findings show that you can make an investment in high school that has a measurable payoff in earnings well after,” said James J. Kemple, the author of the study and an education specialist at Manpower, a New York-based group that evaluates poverty programs.

“They also show that you can provide a solid foothold in the labor market without compromising a student’s capacity to go on to college,” Mr. Kemple said.

To compare similar students, all those who volunteered to join a career academy at each school were randomly assigned either to participate in the academy or to serve as part of a control group outside the academy. The increase in earnings was higher for men in the academy group, who showed a 17 percent difference, or $3,731 per year. The researchers were mystified by the negligible gains for women and plan to study possible factors like the time the women spent raising children and the longer time they spent in postsecondary schooling, which might portend better earnings in later years.

To the surprise of researchers, the groups showed no difference in rates of high school and college completion. Ninety percent of students in both groups finished high school or obtained a G.E.D., and half gained some postsecondary credential — rates far higher than among their school populations over all. Researchers believe that those who initially expressed interest in the academies may have shared similar motivation to succeed, whether or not they were chosen for the special program.

But this also suggests that something about the academy experience, apart from educational achievement, promoted greater success in the job market. One likely factor is the exposure the academies provide to a range of adults in real workplaces, said J. D. Hoye, who directed a “school-to-work” initiative for the Clinton administration and now heads the National Academy Foundation, which advises career academies on curriculums and other topics.

“The students see what work is like, and they build a network of caring adults at school and in the workplace,” Ms. Hoye said.

Students in an academy stay together as a group. They usually get paying internships after their junior year, which for some turn into jobs they keep through college or longer. At the tourism academy at Miami Beach Senior High School, for example, many start working on the front desks of major hotels, some with hopes of entering management.

One school in the study is Valley High School in Southern California, where nearly 90 percent of the 3,000 students are Hispanic and about 180 sophomores, juniors and seniors are in its Global Academy of Finance. Along with traditional subjects, students take computer training and accounting courses and study the stock market, real estate and personal finance. They do internships with banks, law and finance firms and in the school district’s administration, among others.

Students seem to benefit from being part of a special, small group, said Mark Bartholio, the academy director. Many do not pursue finance careers but instead go into teaching, social services or criminal justice, he said, but one graduate said the accounting skills he learned in the academy had enabled him to help start a small business.

One student who just graduated, Henry Gomez, 18, started working as a Wells Fargo Bank teller last year and is continuing this summer. “I’m not sure this is what I want to do, but I like the experience I’m gaining,” he said.

Before he entered the academy, he had worked at a Target store, said Mr. Gomez, whose parents did not finish high school. He plans to enter a community college in the fall, with the bank wages helping him pay his way.

Another graduate, Cathy Castorena, 18 and working at Wells Fargo, said she would continue at the bank, while she attends a state university and studies psychology. Her dream, she said, is to become a prison psychologist.

“The career academies tell students that if you are willing to make the effort to succeed in a bachelor’s degree program, here’s a way to do that,” said David Stern, an education expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who was an early proponent of career academies. “But if you end up not wanting to apply, or start college and don’t finish, you have some work experience and training to fall back on, to give you a little edge in the labor market.”

source: this is Erik Eckholm’s article in the NY Times on 6/26/08.  www.nytimes.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Saving the World in Study Hall

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This is Nicholas Kristof’s article in the NY Times on 5/11/08

Teenagers are supposed to be sullen and self-absorbed, but Rachel S. Rosenfeld never got the memo.

Rachel is a high school junior in Harrison, N.Y., who came down with a painful intestinal ailment that forced her to miss the entire 2006-7 school year. So she resolved that if she couldn’t go to school herself, she could at least help other kids who wanted to.

From her sickbed, Rachel sold T-shirts and solicited contributions to build a 316-student elementary school in rural Cambodia. Borrowing an idea from university fund-raising, she offered naming opportunities: for $25, donors could buy chairs to be named for them. All told, she raised $57,000, which was channeled through an aid group, American Assistance for Cambodia.

Now Rachel is mostly healthy again and back in school, but over the December vacation she traveled to Cambodia to cut the ribbon at the R. S. Rosenfeld School.

“The children were all so grateful and well-behaved,” Rachel said. “It truly was a life-changing experience.”

College students used to be the activists, but increasingly they’re joined by high school pupils and even younger children. The spotlight may be on billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, but one of the country’s healthier trends has been the rise of piggy-bank philanthropists.

Two high school students in Massachusetts, Ana Slavin and Nick Anderson, started a nationwide high school campaign, Dollars for Darfur, that has raised $420,000 for the people of Darfur from 440 schools.

The humanitarian prodigies like Ana and Nick are laudable for going beyond simple protesting to help their causes. Today’s young social entrepreneurs come across as more constructive than my generation of student activists, and more savvy about how to accomplish their goals cost-effectively.

Senator Chris Dodd has pushed for a requirement of 100 hours of public service in high school. There’s a risk that a mandate undermines the virtue, but on balance I’m in favor. Colleges should also emulate Princeton and encourage young people to take a “gap year” of public service abroad (I list a few possibilities for a gap year and for student activism on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground).

Climate change has particularly galvanized high school students — perhaps because it’s their world that we’re cooking. A 16-year-old in San Francisco, Taylor Francis, has been speaking to groups around the country about global warming; after some training by Al Gore, he has set up his own Web site and is heading to China in June to give a dozen lectures there.

“There’s an enormous outpouring of young people who are trying to do community service,” Taylor said. “Unfortunately, a lot of that is probably just to get into college.”

These days, even some elementary children are getting involved. More than 2.5 million children participated in a drive on Club Penguin, a children’s activities Web site, that directed $1 million to charity.

In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, I should be wringing my hands about adolescents these days, so lazy and degenerate compared with my own upstanding generation. But when I see high school students working energetically to save the lives of people half a world away, before they are even allowed to buy a beer, I’m reduced to mumbling admiration. These kids are truly inspiring.

As a 16-year-old in Melbourne, Fla., Allyson Brown organized a Valentine’s dance at her high school, with the proceeds going to fight malaria in Africa. That dance grew into Stayin’ Alive, a campaign that has attracted more than 100 schools in 31 states to raise money to buy mosquito bed nets that cost $10 each and protect a family from malaria.

The aim of Stayin’ Alive, which is run by a group called Malaria No More, is to buy enough bed nets to protect two million children. Allyson, who remains very involved in the program, will have saved more lives as a student than many doctors save in a lifetime.

It’s true that some of the activism may have less to do with humanitarianism than with college applications. But even when greedy, self-absorbed cynics take on some worthy cause for the most selfish motives, they often learn and grow from the experience.

“I’ve seen some people who just want to bump up their résumés,” Allyson acknowledged. But she said that most participation seemed heartfelt — including that of a girl, about 7 years old, who ran a lemonade stand to buy bed nets for African kids.

“A lot of people say that teenagers aren’t thinking about the greater good,” Allyson added, just a hint of protest in her voice. “But when you give teens a chance to help, and they know their contributions will make a difference, then they help a lot.”

So maybe it’s time that we all learn from our juniors.

Nicholas Kristof invites you to comment on this column on his blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com  

 

+ MIT Gives Free Course Materials to K-12 Teachers & Students

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Adapted from an article in Education Week magazine by Sean Cavanagh

Famed research university Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge Massachusetts, offers students and teachers free video, audio and print lectures and course material taken straight from their classrooms.

One program is called “Highlights for High School.”  All are an extension of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative.  The Open Course Ware initiative was launched in 2001 with the goal of providing free public access to all the university’s courses and curricula via the Internet.

A high school biology teacher, Rebekka Stone, says “It empowers students to think beyond this classroom.  A lot of students have no idea what a college is like.  They have no idea what a college lecture is like… It takes away some of the fear.”

Jesse Southwick, a teacher at the Boston Latin School, has taught AP physics for five years.  He believes the biggest beneficiaries of the site will be new teachers, or those returning to a topic they haven’t studied since college.

“If I was new at this, I’d watch all those lectures beforehand.  You’d watch a lecture to know that you were not way off base, way off track.”

The MIT high school site  is at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/home/home/index.htm.  

The comprehensive MIT Open Course Ware site is located at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm.   It now houses material from 1800 courses in subjects such as architecture, physical education, history, literature, political science — in addition to math and science.

The course sites are unusual both in terms of the sheer volume of information available and  specific organization for K-12 audiences.  The high school site includes more than 2600 video and audio clips from faculty lectures, as well as assignments and lecture notes. 

Some of that material is assembled on the site for specific high school classes, such as Advanced Placement biology, calculus, and physics, which are college preparatory courses.

The portal also allows teachers to search by topic for faculty lectures and assignments and use them as they see fit.

Ms. Stone sometimes plays online MIT video clips on her classroom’s overhead projector, or has students take turns watching them on individual computers.  For some teenagers, she adds, seeing or hearing an explanation of a concept is easier than reading it in a texbook — and much more entertaining.

source: article by Sean Cavanagh in Education Week Magazine on 2/6/08. www.edweek.org

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Research Paper Strategies: Web Sites

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From “Classroom Tools & Tips,” an EduHound Newsletter, this week’s topic is Research Paper Strategies.

• A+ Research & Writing   To get started, look over the Table of Contents to see what’s at the site, then browse the Step by Step section to follow a proven approach to success on your research paper.   http://www.ipl.org/div/aplus/ 
• Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers    A premier source of classroom-tested, Internet-based lesson plans for K-12 teachers and their students.   www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id+306  
• How to Write a Research Paper   While it may  seem like a monumental project, it is really a straightforward process that you can follow, step by step.  Make sure you have plenty of note paper, multicolored highlighters, and a pack of multicolored index cards.  www.homworktips.about.com/od/paperassignments/a/writing.htm
• Writing Research Papers: A Step-By-Step Procedure   This printable page illustrates the step-by-step procedure of writing a research paper.  www.owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_ressteps.html
• Basic Steps in the Research Process   This list of steps is a guideline for you to use.  Not everyone will do these steps in the same order and you may go back and forth between them.  Also features a “Make Your Own Outline” form.  www.crlsresearchguide.org
• Research Paper Rubric (pdf)  Use the printable Research Paper Rubric to evaluate students’ work on the paper itself.  www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson419/Rubric.pdf 

source: EduHound’s “Classroom Tools & Tips” on 5/12/08.  You too can subscribe at www.eduhound.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com