Senor Parrot's Perch

Here’s a sad commentary about our national teaching pool. KansasCity.com reports about the poor demand for teaching jobs in the Kansas City area. It’s common to see 100 applicants for each job. That’s an average though, and apparently there is quite a variation in the number of applicants depending upon the area of specialization.  Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects,  Special Education,and Foreign Languages get 10 to 50 applicants per opening. Half of the 190 open teaching positions are in those areas.

Still, isn’t that an adequate number of applicants to fill those positions with qualified teachers? Reading between the lines, you wonder just how qualified are the applicants for those STEM, special education and foreign languages positions, that the jobs should go unfilled. Yesterday I wrote about the task Don Mugan has taken on, up in North Dakota. His goal is to train the teachers that the school districts already have in how to teach the core STEM subjects. A good STEM project for our universities would be to clone Don and put a few of his clones in every school district in the country.

Are teachers the weak link in introducing and teaching STEM careers to our kids?  STEM, you may know, refers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  These broad subject areas are the key’s to successful careers in our kids’ futures.

A common approach to learning about careers is the Career Fair. In fact, career fairs in middle school are fairly common. In my own daughter’s school, it takes the form of a “Renaissance Fair”, really more of a medieval fair,  where each kid studies a trade, prepares a presentation and a booth, and then performs demonstrations of their trade for several hours before schoolmates and parents. The principal result of this is an excellent multifaceted teaching and learning experience for the students, but no real connection to modern day work and occupations.

Other schools handle career days differently. At the college  where I work we have steady streams of kids passing through and getting introductions to many career educational offerings that are available there. These include information technologies, electrical engineering, robotics, biotechnology and many other medical and technology related careers.

But what are the kids interested in? Recently a public school in North Dakota polled it’s students and found that the careers most appealing to students included hairdresser, snowboarder, or actor. Interest in careers in science or engineering hardly registered. Hmmm.

Don Mugan to the rescue. Don Mugan is Director of the Great Plains STEM Education Center at Valley City State University in North Dakota. Mugan says that survey results like this are fairly representative of kids interests nationwide.

In response, Don Mugan is busy reaching out to students and teachers to increase interest in sciences and math. As Director of the Great Plains STEM Education Center at Valley City State University in North Dakota, Mugan has his work cut out.

“Kids are thoroughly turned off by the abstract way math and science are presented,” he said. “Because America is slipping so badly in a lot of areas, we need to change the way we deliver those subjects.”

To stem this decline in American students interests and performance in STEM subjects Mugan directs a training center to educate and train teachers in ways to integrate these core subjects into the classroom in ways that spark kids’ interest.

The new way of teaching emphasizes hands-on learning and integrates the subjects around a practical theme, he said.

“If we want kids to get fired up, we have to connect with their lives, which our traditional model does not allow for,” Mugan said.

We parents need to see if similar partnerships are being forged at our schools. Some schools have brief demonstrations and visits incorporated into their school years, but there is rarely a clear integration into the curriculum and rarely are the teachers qualified or trained in how to teach these subjects.

The L.A. Times reports that Scholastic is carefully “screening”, or should we say, bowdlerizing, or more to the point, censoring,  books to be translated into Arabic. By careful they mean no dredels or other symbols of Jewish culture, no magic, no birthdays and no Clifford the Big Red Dog-he’s unclean! And they darkened Heidi’s skin, too. She was just too white, and European. The awful mistake in this translation was that they overlooked painting out a church steeple in one of the illustrations. How sad to miss an opportunity to obliterate vestiges of a Christian world in a book destined for countries where their religious and cultural heritages are founded on just that obliteration of other cultures. Just imagine if a state board of education were to do this very same thing?

The article stresses the incredible revelations into the outside world that these books bring. I’d find some revelations reading these books, too. Other religions? They don’t exist. Heidi’s a dark-skinned Arab? I never knew that either.

I wonder how any attempts to garner this sort of accommodation from a publisher for American Christians would play out? It don’t suppose it would be so pretty. You know, maybe Scholastic and the Hate League of Arab speaking countries have more in common than we think.

Here’s a review of a book by Allan Zullo entitled  Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust. Will we ever see this book translated into Arabic and introduced to their schools? It’s a Scholastic imprint, why not?

I don’t recall exactly why I grabbed Dinosaur Scientist: Careers Digging Up the Past by Tom Holmes from the Library. I had stopped by the new books section on my way out and saw this book, looked at the cover, thought it looked cool, and took it home. It wasn’t until I read the full title, the part about careers, that I said a silent ‘Oh, no!’ I shouldn’t have said it. I was just a page or two into the first chapter before I was hooked. Now that I finished it, I’m giving it strong recommendations.

Dinosaur Scientist is one of the rare and excellent science books describing what scientists do at a level that elementary and middle-schoolers can become engaged with. Holmes approach is to present 6 top paleontologists and describe their careers through short bio pieces, each making up a chapter. Along the way he explains the cool science, adventures and discoveries that each of these scientists has made, and how they solved the problems that they encountered. He shows how multi-faceted they are in their skills and backgrounds and the paths they took to becoming paleontologists.

The author has a personal interest in the subject and, it seems, considerable experience, as well. This shows throughout the book. He isn’t just relating facts and activities, but he exposes the interesting personalities of each scientist and bits about their science that are most engaging, that is, the very things that draw a person into a scientific field.

And there is the career component of this book. Each scientist expresses in their own words how they prepared themselves and what they found most useful to know. In this day and age, it’s common for college students to have no idea what they would like to do with their lives even when they’ve reached their junior and senior years in college. They have no vision and they have no valuable guidance. Books such as Dinosaur Scientist are excellent resources to help our kids choose a career path and begin planning to achieve their dreams.

The author, Thom Holmes, has a web page and a paleo-blog. He has a short bio here. He’s written about 20 books on dinosaurs, evolution and other prehistoric life.

Benny And Penny in Just Pretend by Geoffrey Hayes is a fantastic book. Two little mice, brother and sister, fill the pages of this little book that kids will love. Older Benny wants to play alone at being pirates. His younger sister Penny wants to play together. So Benny, in a pique, tries to ditch her, so he can play by himself. After all, girls are cry-babies, not bold pirates. A lot of funny hiding and seeking ensues. Finally, giving in, they encounter a scary dragonfly as they crawl through the tall grass, and it is brave Penny who saves the day.

The pictures can easily tell this story all on their own. Each page is a magnet for your eyes with simple details and layouts that are beautifully drawn. The expressions Hayes has put on their faces are perfect.

The book is easy to read, that is, the writing level is perfectly aimed at the beginning reader level. I was surprised, though, that my younger daughter, age seven, had trouble with this book, and initially didn’t like it. Generally, she can’t resist a well illustrated, funny story for even 10 seconds, but that didn’t happen. It turned out that she was  completely unfamiliar with the graphic layout of the book, with is word bubbles and brief, occasional narratives in boxes here and there. The story layout is not completely linear like the stories she was familiar with. She was confused by the story layout on the page. So I sat down with her and we read through it together while I pointed out to her the flow within the pages. She soon fell in love with this book and it’s wonderfully drawn story. Now, she wants the other books in the series,  as well.

Here is a sample page from Benny And Penny in Just Pretend by Geoffrey Hayes. I snagged these pictures from Geoffrey Hayes’ website where you can  find all the details you need to convince you to go out and buy each of the Benny and Penny books for your own kids, grand kids, and as birthday presents for your kids’ friends. These books are treasures.

Geoffrey Hayes has won lots of acclaim for these books. Benny And Penny in Just Pretend has won these honors:

• Booklist Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth
• Iowa Goldfinch Award
• Maryland Blue Crab Young Readers Honor Book
• Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year

There are two other books in the Benny and Penny series; Benny And Penny in The Big No-No
picked up these honors:

• 10 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Winner
• ALSC 2010 Notable Books for Children
• Kirkus Reviews Best of 2009 Continuing Series

And the newest addition, Benny and Penny in the Toy Breaker , has been chosen as a A Junior Library Guild Selection.

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