Author: Jackie Koerner

Focus on Education

Last week I read this Op-Ed piece Arne Duncan wrote for the Washington Post.  This morning during my commute, I was delighted to hear the upcoming Diane Rehm Show would focus on education discussion for the first hour of the program, and the guest list included Arne Duncan.  The topics included early start of high school, ranking of colleges and their rising cost, early childhood education, and education law.

My comments concerning the discussion are swayed by my firm beliefs regarding a right to education for all and education can benefit all people.

Early Start/Late Start High School
Research has shown starting later gives way to better minds, but where do activities, homework and after school jobs fit into a high school student’s life?  Perhaps start later, and offer sports earlier.  Jump start minds with some zero hour sports!  This is a time to mesh research about exercise and education.  Also, the bus debate will always make staggering the start and release times of schools necessary as long as we make busses the priority.  I think everyone would benefit from school starting no earlier than 8:30 or 9 am.  Being functional at 7 am is a feat for many of us – young, teen and adult.

College Cost and Ranking
The U.S. News and World Report College Rankings are a little swayed.  All of the information depends on how the colleges report it.  What is that joke about violent criminals and white bread? Statistics can be manufactured to show what is meant to show.  For argument’s sake, questions asked to the colleges are potentially interpreted differently by the individuals answering the questions.

The quote about community colleges having a low graduation rate frustrated me for several reasons.  First, some people go to community college with intentions of taking a few classes, but not completing a degree.  Second, some people attend community college with the intent of transferring to another college to complete their degree.  Finally, some people attend community college to test the water to see if they like college.  If not, that is not a fault of their own or the community college.  We should not be focused on production of graduates, but on providing a service to the community served.

Cost is a very passionate topic of mine.  I feel strongly that college is a right and all people should be able to go to college if they so choose.  Some people do fine without higher education, but even if their career does not require a higher degree, the student development in college can lead to a well rounded individual in society.  There should not be a person willing to attend where cost is the prohibiting factor.  No, perhaps not everyone could attend a private school, where costs are also outrageous, but attend some form of higher education regardless of economic class.

Early Childhood Education
Research has shown access to early childhood education can impact the success of students.  A point during the show  focused on assessment of teachers who are teaching students with and without early childhood education, and how students without early childhood education could negatively impact their evaluations.  Perhaps we need to move into a system that looks at growth of a student educationally over the year, instead of the whole population reaching certain standardized test goals.

Perhaps also focus government financial support for children receiving daycare assistance on facilities that provide a meaningful early childhood curriculum.

Education Law and Standardized Testing
At curriculum night for Kari’s school, one of the teachers mentioned the standardized tests were changed this year and the curriculum would be changing slightly to address that change. I remember filling in bubbles after bubbles on standardized tests when I was little.  This portion of the school year was dreadfully dull and I imagine so for other children.  There has to be another answer besides a standardized test philosophy.

Will we as a society figure this out? I hope so.

Gaming Girls for God’s Sake

I fell in love with games when I was little playing on my parents’ Apple II and the coveted computer time at school.  I was not allowed to have any game systems when I was little because they were expensive and my parents would rather I spent my time with my imagination and studying.  When visiting my cousins, I would just want to play Duck Hunt and games from the Mario franchise nonstop.  Then when I had my first boyfriend when I was 15, I discovered PlayStation.  Now I kind of wonder if I didn’t just continue to go out with him even after our relationship lapsed to continue my affair with Bushido Blade, Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto.

Enter the college years:  Chris and I moved in together after I graduated high school.  He had a PlayStation 2.  Growing up without games, my learning curve was high, and I felt embarrassed to play in front of Chris, who could get me through crazy jumps in Ico on the first try.  I binged if you will on games.  While at the time, I would not admit to skipping my feminist theory class a few times to stay home playing Jak and Daxer, I will now.  You will find the irony in this later.

Chris bought me my first Gameboy (Gameboy Color in Teal) when they came out.  Then I became a Pokemon nut and dappled in Animal Crossing, Kirby, Wario, and Mario Kart.  Then he got me an SP, then a Pink DS in 2007, and last year he bought me a 3DS after finding an admittedly amazing deal on Craigslist (and, no, it was not a stolen one sold on Craigslist – I wondered that myself).

Enter Kari:  Chris and I were very cautious about introducing television and video games with Kari. We were the parents who followed the rule book.  Then, we thought maybe at 3 or 4 she could start playing games with us.  As expected, she loved games just like us.

Now that she is getting older, the games she sees are appealing to her; however, being her parents, Chris and I have to look at how balanced that game is. We continue to be very choosy about what she sees us play and what she is able to play based upon themes and handling of gender roles.  Earlier this year we went to PAX East and Kari was totally into it.  She loved playing new games and giving suggestions to the developers.  Kari is currently big into Animal Crossing, Pokemon and Style Savvy.

Going back for a minute to when Kari was 3 or 4 playing on the Wii.  She used to love to look at the Mii Plaza then graduated into playing games herself.  I remember one time when she kept scrolling back and forth through the available characters.  She was frustrated and said she wanted to play the girl one.  Well, in video games there are not many girl heroes or protagonists.  Just like preschoolers said, “Where’s the camera?!” about the iPad, they nail it with video games too.

While I know Anita Sarkeesian received a lot of flack for her role in exposing gaming for what it has been and still kind of is, I connect a lot with her videos.  Why do we have to sit back and have the female stereotypes perpetuated in front of us, others and our children over and over and over again? Simple. We shouldn’t.

Recent examples of female stereotypes being perpetuated in video games include Chase’s character in Uncharted: Golden Abyss (released in 2012) and how the script was written.  Many of the focus group found her character to be annoying.  Maybe a more active Chase would have rendered her less annoying.  Then the design for the Comic ConQuest featuring Cosplayers.  I hope the traditional exaggeration of the feminine form is not an indication of the game play traditional to female characters in video games we might witness.

I truly hope once Kari is old enough to play more mature RPGs, there is more opportunity for female characters than to be Peached.

Law School: Reduction under Debate

In this article, President Obama calls for cutting a year of law school.  I have to agree for two large reasons:  cost savings and experience.

Most of the students in law school graduated with at least some student loan debt.  Some students graduated with quite a bit.  Many students I saw in my office had over $100,000 in students loans.  All of the graduate level student loans are unsubsidized, meaning interest accumulates from the point of disbursement, even if the student is in school and unable to pay.

If students graduate and take an entry level legal job, most are not, especially in this economy, making over $50,000 annually. The final year of law school is mostly in externships and internships, which are unpaid and the students have to pay tuition for these externships and internships.  If only we could make it so students graduate after 2 years of classroom instruction, and use the traditionally reserved third year for externships, internships and Bar exam preparation.  This way, if these experiences are still unpaid (which should be changing soon with all unpaid externships and internships under debate), the students are not paying outrageously to gain experience.

Sure, there is the student loan repayment plan for students working with non-profits to have their loans forgiven after 10 years of service, but many individuals now change employers as opportunity strikes.  I personally would hate to miss an amazing employment opportunity because I need to stay with a certain type of non-profit to get my loans forgiven.  Employment to this generation is not just about salary, but impact one can have on the whole of society.

How impactful could these students be without the added stress of an additional year of student loans? Would the Bar exam preparation be less a trial of determination and more a trial of knowledge? How many more students could actually follow their intended career path of non-profit legal work with potentially $60,000 less on their student loan bill?

Writing

For the past 2 months, I have been struggling with my dissertation.  I write it, love it, hate it, redo it, assume I need to read some more. Rinse. Repeat.  Usually writing comes easily to me, but this is not just any paper, this is huge.

Some things that are helping me get over the perfectionism:

Reference first.  Before going off on a fact finding tangent, stop and take down the reference.  It’s easier to do it now than to get called out by the Ph.D. Candidacy Advisor later right at the finish line.  I personally use Scrivener to keep my references organized, but others I know use End Note and the like.

Write every day. Ninety minutes should be the goal per day of solid writing time.  During this, I just write.  I am a perfectionist and all of a sudden much more so with this dissertation.  Let the sentences and words fall, rearrange and replace later.  This process gave me an introduction I’m pretty happy with.

Be the scholar.  This I think is the biggest thing for me.  A faculty member told me nothing can be in my own words in a dissertation.  The writing bootcamp instructor told me this is not completely true, and I have to consider this dissertation as my piece.  I am driving.  I am the scholar! (maybe.)

Save drafts.  Maybe you get excited about something and decide to go a different direction.  The next day, you come to your senses and think, “Omigod – whatdidIdo?!”  Save everything.  I don’t keep a daily save, but if I decide a paragraph has got to go, or even a sentence I love that just may not fit anymore, I slip it into another document called “Dissertation Dump” so it’s not lost forever if I have an impulse edit.

For those of you writing, or just watching me go though this experience, I hope this helps.

Because I think I am hilarious…

Here is my email I sent to IESI Waste Management:

I reside at address. Each spring I sign up for yard waste service. Each spring I am told my start date, and then the debris is not collected. I then phone to remind of the pickup.  Each time I am told to phone by 7 pm that day to remind of the missed pickup.  I work full time, attend grad school, and run a non-profit.   I was not aware that I was on the payroll at IESI.  I don’t have time to phone every service I use to remind them of their part in the contract.

When I phoned today to see if the start date of my service could be adjusted to the actual date my debris was collected, I was told that if I do not phone within 48 hours of the missed pickup an adjustment will not be made.

While I am used to the level of service provided by waste companies in the area, this by far was the most offensive policy I have heard yet.  I as a customer should not be told how I need to be more diligent about reminding your company to uphold its piece of the contract.

Sincerely,

Jackie Koerner

Text Later, Save Lives

Texting and driving didn’t used to be a thing.  While inattention while driving is not something new, cell phones have added to the list of distractions one could have while driving.  Driving is a great responsibility and inattention should be limited where possible.  Sometimes fussy children and sunlight in your eyes can’t be helped, but chosen inattention can be.

This morning, being a sleepy morning, Kari missed the bus, which usually picks her up on our side of the street.  I told her we would just go out and catch it on the way back.

Kari was crossing the street to get on the bus and someone failed to stop for her. The bus driver laid on the horn to get the driver to stop. I yanked Kari out of the street.  The driver slammed on her brakes.  She stopped 2 feet from where Kari had just been.

What was the cause of her inattention? She was texting.

Too often lately have I seen people driving and texting.  Always can I tell when someone is texting and driving, because, frankly, they are driving terribly.  This includes not signaling for turns or lane changes, swerving in lane, braking at nothing, etc.

If communicating on the phone is more important than operating a large object speeding through space and time, pull over.  It’s that simple.  Pull over.  By the simple act of making a choice to not text while driving and pull over if it is something dire, you are saving lives.  I applaud you.

To those of you who think it will never happen to you, it will.  Or perhaps it has.  Maybe you have caused an accident but were too absorbed in texting to notice.  The driver this morning was too absorbed to notice a stopped school bus with flashing lights and a child in the street.  Please don’t let a text cost you your life, because this morning it nearly cost me the reason for mine.

A Scholar’s Struggle

Tomorrow starts another semester.  In preparation for the oncoming hours of study and various activities related to my dissertation, I decided to clean out the email and finally read the backlogged copies of scholarly news I ignored over holiday.

I opened the most recent one: Inside Higher Ed:  Parents, Tuition and Grades / Academe Reacts to Aaron Swartz’s Suicide – January 14, 2013

I just stared.  That is the extent of it.  Just staring at my laptop.  One thing I have learned along the road to becoming educated is that the more aware I am, the angrier I am.  Hence the adage: ignorance is bliss.  This man died because he was smarter than people could see.  They misunderstood the message in his work and threatened his freedom because they simply did not understand.  Information is not to be coveted, but to be shared.  That was the whole point – the whole point of his activism!

We just lost an intelligent ally.  He made the leaps in thought his prosecutors apparently could not make.  They were blinded by the laws designed to prosecute malicious Internet criminals, not thinkers. Aaron did not want the gain for himself.  He was promoting awareness and open distribution of knowledge.

His activism has been always something I have loved to see in action.  And now I don’t get to see the next chapter.  It is now a book with missing pages.  Someone can write another ending, but it will still be missing something.

I am saddened by this.  Aaron’s death. The way institutions for education treat creative thinkers. The way our democracy responds to freedom differently when on the Internet. And finally how education is still very limited to the elite few.

For these reasons, and perhaps for many more I will discover later, I am making a decision today to provide PDFs (or whatever the future evolution) of my publications, current and future, openly to anyone who would like copies.  My research is not for myself.  It is done for the masses.  I just ask for credit where credit is due.

By coveting our knowledge, we will stunt our growth as a people.  The movement of several higher education institutions and other groups to offer free courses excites me.  It excites me beyond belief.  I love learning and always have and to have everyone be able to learn as I – no, even better than I have – is absolutely encouraging.

For more information about Aaron, see the wikipedia page about him.  Also, while there, consider writing an article or editing one.  Contribute to the collective.  (See also Cognitive Surplus, or at the moment, the skim NYT review for a brief overview).

Also see:
Coursera
edX Course Listings
Khan Academy

The Gifts of Gifted

As I am writing this, I am exhausted.  Not only this morning did I help at my daughter’s school for their holiday party where I had to keep up with 15 six to seven year-olds, but I had to keep up with my own kiddo.  For those who don’t know, Kari is what most term “gifted” in the education system.  The kids had about seven crafts to do.  With each craft, Kari would become frustrated if it didn’t look just as she wanted and would begin to cry.  I tried to field the tears so the other moms didn’t have to juggle her tantrum and help the other kids at the station as well.  After each instance, I would approach her, tell her, “I think it looks great.  If you spend too much time making this craft and trying to make it exactly how you see it in your head, you will not have time to do all of the crafts.” I would then walk away. She would stop crying and move on.  At the end, I was very proud of her.  She did not get to make one craft because she ran out of time.  She looked like she was going to cry, so I told her about my warnings and maybe she could be allowed to make one later if she finished her schoolwork.  She changed her expression and agreed that was a good plan!

Chris and I were both “gifted” in school, but it is rather different dealing with it from the other side.  And, frankly, she’s a mix of how we were in school so we have to combine forces to understand.  She won’t do school work she knows and has to be bribed to do so, because “what’s the point?!” This is very Chris. She wants everything to be just so and will cry if not perfect.  This is so me. And, in some cases, it takes the two of us to logic it out against her.  We try very hard as parents to not say, “because I said so!”

Many people don’t understand why I suck in a breath before I tell people she’s gifted.  They think gifted is great and parenting a smart kid should be a cinch.  Yes, gifted is great, but like any other child, they have their challenges and that is hard to explain to people who think gifted equals easy.  It’s like trying to parent a child with super logic skills and intense emotions.  It’s hard having such intense feelings for such a small kiddo.

What many don’t know unless you are an educator or a parent of a gifted child yourself is that the giftedness applies to more than just school work. Many days it is a challenge to keep up with them.

Concentration
Sure, they hear you, but they might reason that what you’re saying isn’t a priority for them right now and continue on with their project. Also, just because they are in deep concentration doesn’t mean they cannot hear you.  They are like little absorbant sponges sucking up all the stimuli around their environment.

Logic
For Kari, the everyday challenges we battle involve her fixation, perfectionism and reasoning.  Getting her to brush her teeth isn’t just, “Kari, go brush your teeth please”, rather, “Kari, go brush your teeth right now. We need to XYZ and we can do ABC later. Go now please.”  Otherwise, she’ll reason in her noggin she can do XYZ later because it’s not what she is fixated on right now.

Perfectionism
Like with anything, most of us want to do our best.  With gifted kiddos, it is this perfectionism that drives them to frustration and it can be very hard to talk them down off the ledge of a tantrum.  Kari’s frustration with her perceived inability to do the activity perfectly drives her concentration further.  This is often where my patience is tested!

Vivid Imagination
Daydreaming is a great activity, but it sure can be disruptive if something else should be occurring at that point in time.  All of these ideas and thoughts inside can be very distracting, and sometimes gifted kids need their daydreaming or introspective time.  Many gifted

Fairness, Rules and When Injustice Happens
Gifted kids often understand the rules, why they are important and they fail to have patients for when the rules are broken.  Kari is a stickler for the rules.  She would constantly correct other kids.  It wasn’t until I had a conversation with her about when she corrects the kids at school she is doing three things:  being what the other kids might see as bossy, depriving the other kids from a learning experience and not following the rules herself.  Once I laid it out for her like that, she stopped her outbursts of frustration.  She will still come home and vent her frustrations about how the kids didn’t listen and it affected the class’ day.

There are emotional challenges too.  This is where Living with Intensity Living with Intensity was particularly helpful for me to help me go back in time to recall those feelings.  It can be frustrating for gifted children as they are dealing with all of these ideas in their head, their tendency toward fairness and rules, and then their logic when working out social issues with other kids.  They also sometimes have conflicts with listening to the adult or their logic.

 

 

 

Rights and Responsibilities

For those of you who know me personally, you’ll find it no surprise about how affect I have been by this most recent massacre.  My favorite things in life include children and teaching and my strongest opinions are about gun control.

For those of you who do not know my daughter, Kari, she is 6, nearly 7.  She is beautiful, funny, intelligent, and one of my favorite people in the whole world.  She loves animals and wants to study their behavior.  Her favorite food is spaghetti and meatballs. Dancing and soccer make her top ten.

All of those children killed on Friday were 6 or 7.  All of them were exactly like Kari:  full of energy, fun and happiness.  I could not imagine.  I still hope to wake from this horrid reality of what is.  I cannot understand what constitutional right can overrule this wrong.

I will never in my life touch a gun.  I have no desire to touch an object that is specifically designed for ending another life.  To the argument is that shooting is a sport:  that may be.  Yet one cannot argue with the inherent design of a gun.  It is designed to kill.

Last night, Kari clung to me, scared to go to school today.  I explained to her that this likely wouldn’t happen at her school and Connecticut is very far away.  To that she replied, “Mom, guns are all over.”  Amazing how easily children figure out our biggest problems.

Pro-gun individuals are all about guns it seems regardless of the lives lost, statistics and the overall reality. See this report from the Onion. Pro-gun individuals’ biggest worry is not trusting the government or the police.  Yes, because we live in a third world war torn country where the issues in a democracy are best solved with brute force.  I honestly ask pro-gun people:  How many times in your life have you actually had an instance where you were oppressed or otherwise and a gun would have made that situation better?  Let me fill this in for you.  It’s a very minute portion and likely you’re not in it.

I am sick over this.  I cannot express enough how much I hate guns and the lack of gun control in our country and our overall total disregard for life.  We are an embarrassment.  Our children our being killed yet we still hold dear our “government-protected right to own a portable device that propels small masses of metal through the air at lethal rates of speed.”

Americans generally have always had a few things backwards forcing not participants to participate in their choices: smoking, drunk driving, guns, etc.  I live in one of the most dangerous cities in America.  Our news should just be called the obits.  I know about violence and how absolutely senseless crimes occur out of emotion.  When people have access to lethal weapons when in such emotional states, crimes occur.  Maybe you don’t run around shooting your gun, but, honestly, what practical reason do you have for carrying a gun? Don’t tell me it is for fantasized heroics. That doesn’t do it for me.

Please allow this tragic string of massacres and overall gun violence be a call to everyone to take an issue with gun control in America.

See more objective and rational information at kottke.org.