Sloane Mak's List: My learning lists

• Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests
• “Merit pay,”
• Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning.
• “Incentives by themselves were not going to be enough.” Lemov calls this the Edison Parable, after the for-profit company Edison Schools, which in the 1990s tried to create a group of accountable schools but ultimately failed to outperform even the troubled Cleveland public schools.
• Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own
• Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try.
• “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
• what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise.

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• Nature Medicine 13, 688 - 694 (2007)
  Published online: 7 May 2007 | doi:10.1038/nm1577

  Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic antioxidant by selectively reducing cytotoxic oxygen radicals