While a lot of the reviews I’ve read of the book are comparing the protagonist Todd to Huckleberry Finn (mostly because of the way his voice is written), I found myself comparing him to Thomas Hunter from Tedd Dekker’s Black/Red/White trilogy.  Like Thomas, Todd is a man (or almost) who discovers that everything he had been led to believe is not as it appears.  The truth comes from odd places, discovered in bits and pieces until it comes crashing in on him in the final chapters of the first book.  After that discovery, he has to pick up the pieces and decide what is to become of him.

The other trilogy it reminded me of (because they’re all trilogies now, aren’t they?) is Pullman’s His Dark Materials, particularly in how Todd and Viola’s two-worlds-meeting relationship echoes Lyra & Will’s relationship from Pullman’s books.  As with HDM, in Chaos Walking, the protagonists have to grapple with the changes to the underlying fabric of their universe which, particularly in The Ask and the Answer, they have helped bring about either consciously or as an unforseen consequence of their relationship.  Also in a similar vein to Pullman’s books is the gradual realization, as the children lose their childhood innocence, that no one in power can be trusted with that power.  No matter which side Todd & Viola pick, they are ultimately betrayed by people for whom they have sacrificed part of their innocence.

I don’t know that Ness is anti-(religious)-authoritarian in the same way that Pullman is, but the betrayal his characters experience seems more broad, coming from all quarters… even places in which they thought they’d found refuge.  The only people who don’t betray are other youths, and adults considered “simple” by the community.

Ultimately, the third book will settle the matter.  Where in Dekker’s White and Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, the protagonists ally themselves with the side they see as good and right, I suspect Ness will have a more subtle and nuanced way of shaping their decision.  The repeated mantra, “We are the choices we make” throughout The Ask and the Answer, and Todd and Viola’s continued feelings of betrayal stemming from the choices of adults on both sides of the conflict means there won’t be an easy answer, and easy side to pick for them.  I can’t wait to see what they decide.

A New Hope:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Empire Strikes Back:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Return of the Jedi:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Enjoy!

via xkcd.com

This is hilariously (and tragically) true not only of too many university websites, but schools in general. Forutnately, since I have a hand in my school’s web presence, I can avoid some of these…

Posted by Ian via Posterous.

Not so frequent have been movies going to the small screen, but if Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was any indication, there is a market for that sort of thing. Some shows have seen success with animated series (Ghostbusters, MIB, etc), but with Star Wars set to become a live action TV series in the near future, I thought I’d ask what blockbuster SF movie you’d like to see adapted for the small screen.

My first choice would be GalaxyQuest. While some might argue that its one-note parodying of the Star Trek franchise would get old quick, I think it has to potential to be the new Trek without all the continuity baggage of the real thing, and with the ability to poke fun of itself.

My second choice would be to make a series based on the movie Serenity. I think there’s a lot of potential there that could be explored over a longer period. The show’s creators would have to be careful about what network they picked to run it on, though, since a network that didn’t appreciate it might screw it up somehow… (removing tongue from cheek)… Firefly, we hardly knew you.

So, what would be your choice to adapt to the small screen?

However, I came across not long ago the website of Shawn Cornally, Think Thank Thunk (thank-you, PLN).  He manages to clearly and concisely explain the why and, especially helpfully, the hows of standards-based grading.  As it turns out, I’m doing some of this already, but not to the right degree and not in the right way.  So.  I look at the final I give in my History class, which is three questions long, taken from the provincial curriculum, and right up to here on Bloom’s Taxonomy, in order to really get at what students understand about the semester’s work – yay me.  However, the mark still shows up as “Final Exam” in my gradebook (argh – hate you, Maplewood), which is the wrong way to go about it.  According to Mr. Cornally, I should be splitting the final into multiple marks in my gradebook (blergh, Maplewood) that show precisely which standard is being assessed and how the student did on that.  Okay, that’s remarkably easy to do, and as a bonus, it will actually be easy to align the rest of my History assignments with this style of marking, instead of slopping them into categories based on what kind of assessment they are.  Hooray.

Not so fast, says my CPT class.  That’s all well and good for content standards, which are History’s bread and butter, but what do you do for a skills-based class, where the assessments are designed for the student to show progress in a wide variety of skills before the end of the term.  Surprisingly, also easy to convert over.  As it turns out, we already have a CPT Shared Technical Skills Rubric that we use to evaluate all the CPT students in their projects.  According to SBG, instead of aggregating and averaging those project marks, we simply leave each row of the rubric (which each describe a skill the students are working on) separate and put those in the gradebook (blech, Maplewood) instead of one mark for the project.  Unfortunately, I won’t be putting this into practice, as I have no CPT classes on my schedule for next year.  Topic for another post, perhaps.

Sequences and series by JOCELYN, yo.

The Science curriculum will probably be the most difficult to convert over to SBG, as it has a wild and woolly mix of content- and skills-based standards, and boy are there a lot of them (4 units, 5 main learning objectives/unit, and between 4 and 12 components to each learning objective… say 150 objectives — yikes).  Still, using the mechanisms described in Mr. Cornally’s SBG description, I suppose it’s possible.  I think the easiest path is to take the main learning objectives as the standards, and use the components as assessments towards mastery of the standard, which will have the added benefit of making it explicit in the gradebook (boo, Maplewood) what the assessment is for.  Hooray!

My other class is a Core French class, which again has a mix of skills and content standards, but should be transferable using the same sort of setup as for the science class.  Hopefully.

There are two things I need to make this work (well, probably more, but these are the two that immediately leaped to mind):

1. A markbook that will work with standards-based grading.  Obviously, that’s not going to be Maplewood.  As you may have gathered from my veiled comments, I’m not the program’s biggest fan.  I get that it does a lot of things (attendance, gradebook, timetables, etc), but that just means it doesn’t do any of them particularly well.  Fortunately, the aforementioned Mr. Cornally has a solution for that as well, in his hand-coded SBGradebook.com site.  I’m in the summer beta, so I’m going to try it out with some faked-up student data to see how well it works.  If it does the trick, Maplewood will become a secondary reporting tool where I will put just the midterm and final grades of the students, with all the heavy lifting done by the SBGradebook site.
2. Secondly, I need permission from my admin to fail a student if he or she does not pass one of the standards to the proficiency described in the rubric.  Normally a student would be able to simply do extra work and collect more points to pass, but under SBG, they have to show increased understanding in order to improve their mark.  The math teachers at my school are already doing this, so as long as I clear it with admin ahead of time, I should be good – they seem willing to work with the SBG framework, provided teachers give students every opportunity to demonstrate increased understanding.

Classroom by humdrumboy

I think the most obvious way this will change my classroom is that students will (hopefully) be less focused on what’s getting marked and more on whether they “get” the material, which is what I’ve been flailing blindly towards in my History class, at least.  I honestly couldn’t care less what numerical mark my students get in my class, as long as they are able to grasp and maintain the course material, a goal which should be helped immensely by using SBG.

I’m a little concerned that my higher-end students will not be happy with the system, as it will make it harder for them to excel simply by handing everything in, but those concerns are outweighed by my desire to have meaningful marks that better represent student learning.

So, consider me converted. I will be using SBG in all my classes come the fall.  This is not to say that I won’t be assigning any homework (here’s looking at you, TDSB), but that it will have a different purpose than simply existing so students can collect marks.  All the things marked in my class will now have to mean something, a change I am happy to make.

Social:

• Scenes from the Gulf – The Big Picture has a series of photos from the Gulf of Mexico, showing how the DeepWater horizon has affected life, both human and animal.
• 100 years of propaganda – A look back at the changing styles and unchanging nature of propaganda.
• World Cup opening – TBP’s collection of photos from the opening weekend of the World Cup of soccer in South Africa.
• Techo-parents – Has technology changed the way parents relate to their kids?  This alarmist NYTimes article says yes.
• Rent-a-white-guy – The Atlantic has this fascinating story of Chinese companies hiring fake white businessmen to give an appearance of international influence.
• Afghanistan, before – Our perception of Afghanistan is coloured by the war and the Taliban before that, but in the past, it was one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East.

Science:

• Hubble vs. Webb – With the James Webb Space Telescope set to take pre-eminence of place from Hubble in the next year, NASA put together this comparison of what they are and what they do.
• New media and the brain – Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker debunks the myth that media is ruining our attention spans and melting our brains.

Media:

• Google Image Swirl – A visual search engine for Google Images, this tool links progressively as you select the image that best represents the search you performed.
• Pixlr – Online image editor.
• Google Fast Flip – News in visual bites, views of pages of sources.  Easy to flip through, if you like.

That’s all for this week!  Have a great weekend and remember, June 20th – 27th is National Mosquito Control Awareness Week, so slap a skeeter to do your part!

Language:

• Language apps (1, 2, 3) – In this three-part post, Mrs. Jones, a second-language teacher from Britain, looks at iPod Touch applications useful for instruction and learning in another language.

Science:

• Oil spill comparison – The Deepwater Horizon spill is the first things that springs to mind when people think of the Gulf, but it’s not the first spill that’s happened in those waters.  In 1979, a massive 10-month spill dumped over 3 million barrels of oil into the gulf.
• Caught in the oil – The Big Picture has a short series on animals covered in oil from the BP spill.
• 10 Coolest coasters – Photos and videos of the top ten roller coasters from around the world.
• Not so smart – Common misconceptions debunked and explained.  Great reading!

Media:

• Symbol logos – Designing a logo can be an arduous process, but occasionally a flash of brilliance allows a design to shine.  Here are 24 logos that include hidden symbols in them, in a show of design mastery.
• Open Clipart – Copyright questions surrounding clipart educators take from the web are swept away by this site which offers free, copyright-free art for any use.

Education:

• Confidentiality – A good read on why educators should be mindful of what they say, and to whom.  Mostly applicable in the US, but good advice for anyone who doesn’t want to add problems to their job.

Miscellaneous:

• Saying “no” – This column dissects why differences between two types of people cause social awkwardness when one requests something from the other.
• Internet vices – Possibly NSFW look at which internet site compares to which mind-altering substance.  Pretty funny and more-or-less accurate.
• Businessman’s lament – Disturbed artist Tetsuya Ishida portrays the dark side of everyday life in Japan with a series of unsettling images where man is but a part of a machine.
• Micromobs – Secured chat room that might be good as a classroom backchannel.
• Tax Freedom Day – Hilarious video pointing out the date of “tax freedom day” in Canada.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There you have it.  Have a great weekend and remember, June 12th is The Wicket World of Croquet Day!

Oil Spill:

• Deepwater Horizon resources – A teacher lists sites with updates on the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
• How bad could it get? – Article describing just how bad things are getting and could get in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• So, what happened? – This depressing slideshow speaks to why the courts are going to eat BP alive.

Math:

• Applebee’s combos – A math teacher dissects Applebee’s combo claims in class, then calls the company to get the straight deal.
• Monty Hall problem – Math teachers know the Monty Hall problem is one of the most counter-intuitive examples of real-world probability problems.  This Alg20 teacher found a really effective way of showing why this problem confounds even university profs.

Science:

• Oxygen’s playground – This hilarious and sad video shows oxygen’s reactivity with other elements.
• Near-now tech – Technology Review’s annual list of 10 world-changing technologies about to make the leap from lab to life.
• Worst. Invention. Ever! – Time Magazine’s list of the 50 worst inventions include some doozies – a parachute jacket that failed to open, asbestos and carbonated flavoured milk. Er…
• City-In-A-Box – The world is bracing for an influx of billions of new urbanites in the coming decades, and tech companies are rushing to build new green cities to house them.  Networking giant Cisco has a prototype ready to go in Korea.
• 1000 year plan – Japanese corporation’s “dreams” for the future, including a solar-cell belt around the moon’s equator, a floating pyramid city and a low earth orbit hotel.
• Monkey brains = teenagers – Binge drinking in adolescents is studied through primate testing, showing a permanent decrease in short term memory.

Social:

• Guatemala – Guatemala’s not having the best week: between volcanic ash, mudslides and a tropical storm opening up a sinkhole that swallowed a three-story building, they’ve been better. The Big Picture collects their story in photos.
• Afghanistan – TBP’s monthly take on life and death in the troubled country.

Miscellaneous:

• Educational blogs – Categorised list of top education blogs by and for educators.
• iPad street tricks – I’m not sure this is what Steve Jobs had in mind when he described the iPad as a “magical, revolutionary device”.  But that’s okay…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have a great weekend and remember, June is National Celibacy Awareness month.  However, it’s also Entrepreneurs “Do It Yourself” month, leading me to believe no one is co-ordinating these awarenesses.

• Online collaborative whiteboards – K. Walsh reviews six sites online which allow you and friends to collaborate on a shared “whiteboard” space.  Might be fun to use with SmartBoards!
• Posterazor – A service which will slice up large images so they can be printed on regular-sized paper, then re-assembled into poster images.
• Magic numbers – A bi-annual convention where math meets magic and puzzles abound.  Sounds like loads of fun!
• Kiddy table – Restauranteur Nicola Marzovilla doesn’t believe in kid’s menus at restaurants, and thinks parents shouldn’t either.  He believes children should learn to love all kinds of foods by trying them.
• Facebook privacy – Facebook’s privacy woes continue as Canada’s privacy commissioner looks to take the company to court for violating regulations set in place to protect Canadian consumers.  Are you at risk? Find out by using this handy online tool to see what Facebook has set your privacy settings levels at.
• Worst Case Scenario – As if it wasn’t bad enough for two semis to collide with two cars, one of the trucks was carrying what was quite possibly the worst cargo for firefighters looking to help the crash victims: millions of bees.  Gah.
• Oil on shore – Oil from the BP spill reached Louisiana’s shores this week, and The Big Picture has a roundup of shots showing the environmental impact.
• Super school – Since I already recommended my favourite grading method last year, this year, I’ll have to settle for sharing some superheros’ term papers, rife with plenty of in-jokes for the comics fan.
• Online video editor – This handy online tool is for editing simple videos when you don’t need a full-fledged editor, or don’t have access to one.
• Unitasking – After finding out that multitasking kills productivity, one man set out to unitask, that is, to focus on a single task at a time.  Here is his 30 day experiment.
• Iron baby – I would totally watch a film of this

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s it for this week!  Have a great weekend, and remember, May 30th – June 4th is National Spelling Bee Week, so grab your dictionary!