Monica Edinger's Blog, page 86
January 17, 2012
2012 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction
Roger Sutton, chair of the committee, announced on his blog today that the 2012 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction has been won by Jack Gantos for Dead End in Norvelt, published by Farrar Straus Giroux. Excellent news!
January 16, 2012
Data Play
But for me, that also points to the study's limitations. Economists need to find a way to quantify everything. Teachers with high value-added ratings may indeed have long-term positive impacts on students. But it is also possible that teachers who are excellent at project-based education have an even stronger longterm impact and we would never know it because their results cannot be teased out of a million pieces of data.
From Michael Winerip's "Study on Teacher Value Uses Data from Before...
January 15, 2012
The Joys of Word Processing
My hunch is that using a word processor makes writing more like sculpting in clay. Because it's so easy to revise, one begins by hacking out a rough draft which is then iteratively reshaped – cutting bits out here, adding bits there, gradually licking the thing into some kind of shape.
That is what John Naughton thinks in "Has Microsoft Word Affected the Way We Work? and is actually exactly what I've long thought — that very same metaphor, in fact, of sculpting because that is what it feels...
January 13, 2012
Judging Teachers (Yet Again)
A teacher's "value-added" is defined as the average test-score gain for his or her students, adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics (such as their previous scores). Is teacher value-added a good measure of teacher quality?
That is the question three economists asked in a study, "The Long-term Impact of Teachers: Teacher Valued-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood." A study that got quite a bit of media attention, but made me simply sigh because yet again the f...
January 9, 2012
NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes for Teachers
Betsy Bird recently posted about a fabulous NEH institute being held at her library this summer reminding me of these wonderful professional development opportunities, several of which I participated in years ago. The first was a 6 week children's literature seminar at Princeton University with the brilliant U.C. Knoepflmacher; it did much to change the direction of my life. A couple years later I did a folklore institute at Bank Street College (where I first met Jack Zipes) and then...
January 7, 2012
Teaching Kids, Books, and the Classics
My Huffington Post blog post earlier this week on Walter Dean Myers generated some tweets including this one from NYDNBooks:
over at@huffpostbooks, teacher MonicaEdinger calls WalterDean Myers remarkable. Wonder what she'd think of this:nydailynews.com/blogs/pageview…
So what did I think about Alexander Nazaryan's blog post "Against Walter Dean Myers and the dumbing down of literature"? My first response was that it seemed so intentionally designed to ruffle feathers that I'd take the...
January 6, 2012
Cybils Finalists 2012
Congratulations to this year's Cybil Award Finalists! (For those new to the Cybils, they are awards given by members of the children's and YA blogging community.) I was pleased to see so many of my personal favorites given the nod including three of my nominees: A Monster Calls and The Cheshire Cheese Cat for the Fantasy and Science Fiction (Middle Grade) category and Amelia Lost for the Nonfiction for Middle Grade and Young Adult category. Good luck to all!
January 4, 2012
In the Classroom: Technology, Teaching, and Policy Makers
Having a new laptop "is not my favorite idea," said Sam Hunts, a sophomore in Ms. Rosenbaum's English class who has a blond mohawk. "I'd rather learn from a teacher."
That's from "Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools," an article that describes yet another top-down situation where technology is being seen as the salvation with teachers being barely attended to. Like many of the teachers quoted in the article I use technology when it appears to fit, not because I'm pushed to do so. ...
January 3, 2012
Congratulations to Walter Dean Myers, the New Ambassador for Young People's Literature
Later today at the Library of Congress the remarkable Walter Dean Myers will be officially presented as our new national ambassador for young people's literature. I am thrilled and delighted; not only are his books wonderful, but as those who have seen him will attest, he is an incredible speaker — passionate, funny, smart, and amazing. I've participated with Walter at a conference and have been fortunate enough to meet him a number of times. Always I've been blown away by his extraordinary c...
January 1, 2012
Bruce Handy Predicts!
And speaking of periods — and semicolons — 2012 was the year we finally got rid of them! Yay, 2012!
So sez Bruce Handy in his peek into the future, "How Great Was 2012?"
