Thomas Education

My overall statement about the goals of my literature courses, at all levels of high school: Through our program, students learn to appreciate and analyze a wide range of texts, exploring the different ways the human condition is expressed across time and culture. YISS students seek to demonstrate excellence in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in order to evaluate information, listen actively, communicate responsibly, and inform and articulate their worldview. Through the tools of language, YISS students are empowered to form and communicate their identities and utilize the gifts that God has given them.

I have 8 0 World Literature students.    If I assign a 3-page essay, how much time should I spend reading and marking and scoring each essay?   10 minutes each (on average, plus typical paper-shuffling or computer startup time) totals 6 hours.   My instructional time with those same students (again, given typical attendance administrative settling down time; and including occasional summative assessments) is 3.5 hours per week.   In my conversations with several different principals on this topic, all have cannily refused to even mention an expected number. When I am scoring an essay, one of the big psychological hurdles is getting past any misspellings or minor grammar errors.   My reader-brain finds it hard to avoid marking those errors, or to avoid reducing some related score because of those errors.  A computer can catch many of those minor spelling, punctuation, word-choice, usage errors (note: the computer does not corr...

Private schools can be selective, by definition.  And international (private) international schools are patently selective, excluding students who do not meet certain standards of ability, whether that be linguistic, physical, or social.   But I would argue that international schools should do more to accept students outside that range, particularly when the schools are (at least partially) funded by government or charitable foundations, and when they are intended to serve a particular population, as is the case with our school. In the More Developed Countries, Special Educational Needs are required by law and funded by the taxpayer.  Typically the principle is to educate all students together, providing as much support as possible in the main classroom or in the same building.  Private schools can follow the same principle, with the extra-support funding from specific tuition surcharges, as many schools now do for ESL.  It certainly makes for more cha...

The NYTimes published a fascinating portrait of the modern writer, and a discussion pertinent to all students of writing, about research, style, and serendipity (open the old newspaper!). Laura Hillebrand has had a surprisingly important effect on recent writers, after the success of Seabiscuit .  Her meticulous research is unusually old-fashioned, relying on paper artifacts rather than google or microfilm simply because of the author's own physical limitations.  This allows her to be more immersed in the time period, and thereby include the small details that then immerse the reader as well.   We also find out that the idea for Unbroken  came from her accidental viewing of an article about Louis Zamperini while she was reading an actual copy of the New York Times with an article about Seabiscuit. Let this  be  a vote for varied research sources!

TypeToLearn is the keyboarding software purchased for use at YISS.  The current version is called TTL4, with category settings for Young (K-2), Intermediate (3-6), and Older(7-12) students.  The TTL4 program should already be pre-loaded onto ES and MS macbooks. E . Kosmack started using TTL4 with her sixth-grade tech classes in September 2014. We have built teacher usernames for all teachers of grades 1-5, and we encourage those teachers to try the software themselves, so see how it could best work for your students. There are student usernames for middle school (6-8), and we are planning to add younger grade levels when requested by the teachers. Notes about usernames and security:  this program provides minimal security -- any teacher can update any other user’s name and password.   It also allows duplicate names, so be careful when selecting Alicia Kim, for example.    We are standardizing on username=first initial lastname;  for ex...

My policy on quiz re-takes : Because my moodle quizzes select from a random pool of questions, and shuffle those questions, and shuffle the possible answers, every student’s quiz is slightly different.   Typically half the questions are new -- i.e. taken from the NewQuestions pool.  Therefore, the assessment is more likely to demonstrate students’ actual knowledge of the topic rather than their ability to memorize prior sequences or even rote answers. The structured nature of a test, along with its numeric reward system,  motivates students to prepare (study) in the first place, and then the focus required to answer the questions helps to cement those answers in memory.   Thus, repeated test sessions can actually encourage learning, as opposed to simply serving as a measurement tool -- if that were the case, we should administer a single test just prior to the reportcard. Currently for every quiz, I offer a second re-take, with the average result tr...

Building a pool of questions for online quizzes (we use Moodle now, but this ought to apply to most such Course Management Systems) requires some considerations that may not be obvious at first. It also raises questions about relative importance of quizzes at different times in the semester. Quiz question tips:  in order to make best use of moodle’s random-pool and random-shuffle mechanism, each question must be written to stand on its own.   Further, the answers will be shuffled as well, so they may occur in any sequence  (do not use phrases like “None of the above”). Do not assume any time-based or contextual reference points, as this question could crop up 3 months later, all on its own.   Make sure to include fully any book title references.  Use standard tag-prefixes in the question title (note that the question title is not seen by the student) as tips for the teacher: for example,   “Grammar”  or “TKAM”.   If a q...