Stephen Boyle's List: Education

• we don’t have ultra-wealthy outsiders tromping in with their dollars and agendas, trying to trounce on our democratic process. So please do your part and get to know your local candidates. Here’s the perfect chance to ask questions and learn where your future school board members stand on privatization, school closures, charter reform, high-stakes-testing, and sticking up for adequate state funding
• school board members with vision, who are

• For example, on a quiz for one of my classes, say the chapter has five main and ten secondary topics, the first four problems ask the same exact question just worded a little differently. Also, the question comes from one of the secondary topics. The next four questions are, again, the same question reworded four different ways, and from another secondary topic. That is the entire quiz, eight mostly multiple choice questions from two ancillary topics.
• two different types of questions. Review questions tend to be open ended, they can have many different answers. They are meant to get the student thinking, to engage them. We call them formative questions. The test questions are used to measure a student’s learning. They are called summative questions. One of the first things we learn in education is the difference between formative and summative questions and when to use each.
• Aventa quizzes and tests are taken from the formative chapter review questions.
• Teachers can then pick and choose the chapters they want so that they cover their particular state standards and still have time to go into detail in a few subjects. Not Aventa, they include every single chapter of every single book they use. This means that a chapter only gets about a week of time, just enough to give it the most cursory of inspections. So the students don’t really learn anything they just memorize some superficial facts, and it on to the next topic.
• company needs a product that they can market. If the most important factor in education is the teacher then they have no product, every school has teachers. So they treat the Aventa curriculum as if it were the gold standard even though they know it is substandard. And they treat their teachers as if they were chimps banging on a keyboard.

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