Today is an “A” day.
Secondary Final Exams: Today’s exams are I.T. (grades 9/10 8:00 AM – grades 11/12 10:00 AM) and Social Studies (vice versa). Tomorrow there will be Make-Up exams for those students who have missed Monday, Tuesday, or today. Students are to make arrangements with the individual teachers.
Orphanage Donation Run: Ms. Sherri and the grade 4 students will be delivering the donations to a local orphanage today. All community members are reminded to donate non perishable food items this morning.
Despedida For Katheren: We will hold Katheren’s Farewell Ceremony tonight beginning at 6:00 PM. The community is invited to attend. It is not obligatory for the entire teaching staff to attend. The family has invited many teachers to dinner afterwards. Tomorrow we will have the ceremony and party for Audrey.
TIE Care Health Care Extension: Departing teachers interested in extending their health care coverage past July 31st can check their email. I forwarded a message from Frank, our TIE Care representative. The cost of the extended coverage are the responsibility of the teacher.
Security Update: We have put in an internal phone network in the homes and the school. Rosangela placed the phone number list in your boxes. There are now lines among the homes, both guard houses, and the school (office, Media Lab 2, Early Childhood, and gymnasium). With regards to security, communication is the key. The installation of the phone system is a direct result of our drill we did early in the year. We found that radios and cell phones can only be used as a back up, not as the main form of communication on campus.
School Paint: The choices for paint scheme are posted on the wall in front of the office. Ms. Nadia and Ms. Alejandra are organizing the voting and will be giving us more information on how we can vote.
School Yearbook: We uploaded “The Guacamaya” – Escuela Anaco’s Yearbook yesterday. It is available for purchase on blurb. Click on book store and search for “Escuela Anaco” and it will come up. Some of the photos may not be of the highest quality so please know that you purchase at your own risk. We printed some of the questionable photo pages here and they looked fine. If local parents are interested in purchasing a copy and need a local address to send it to, please see the office.
Educational Research: This excerpt from an article in Education Week:
“The Consortium on Chicago School Research, based at the University of Chicago, found that teachers in the 409,000-student district would spend about one month of instructional time on ACT practice in the core classes offered during junior year. But the ACT scores were slightly lower in schools where 11th grade teachers reported spending 40 percent of their time on test preparation, compared with schools where teachers devoted less than 20 percent of their class time to ACT preparation.
The study examined surveys and test scores of high school juniors in 2005. Teachers were also surveyed as part of the study.
Elaine Allensworth, a co-director at the consortium and the lead author of “From High School to the Future: ACT Preparation—Too Much, Too Late,” identified two problems: First, devoting so much time to preparation diverts attention from the broad content knowledge that students need to do well on the test. Also, the test preparation that most teachers are doing in the classroom is poor.
“The ACT is not designed for instruction,” Ms. Allensworth said in an interview.
The ACT, administered by Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT Inc., is a three-hour test of language arts, mathematics, and science tied closely to the high school curriculum. Five states—Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Wyoming—give the test to all high school juniors. About 1.3 million students in the class of 2007 took the test, according to ACT Inc.”
The article in its entirety can be found here.
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