[ale] Going OT: Cobb Laptop Deal

[Jeff Hubbs]

My wife and I found an article online that blew holes into AR; one of
the points it made was that because the test questions were multiple
choice, it changed *how* the kids read the book, i.e., it's more
important that you knew that Johnny's eyes were green than why Johnny
did what he did (that's not an exact example but I'm just trying to
illustrate).

On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 09:24 -0400, Mark Wright wrote:
> On Aug 15, 2005, at 11:15 PM, Pete Hardie wrote:
> 
> > On 8/15/05, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> >> I grew to hate Accelerated Reader with a passion.  It basically wrung
> >> all the desire out daughter had to read out of her when she was in a
> >> Gwinnett County school.  The books were classified crazily, with  
> >> widely
> >> varying books put in the same classification, only a fraction of the
> >> books the AR instance knew about were actually available in the  
> >> library,
> >> and, what really got our goat was that the competition between  
> >> teachers
> >> for AR points resulted in good readers getting their backs broken by
> >> unethical teachers who were setting individual kids' goals.
> >>
> >> The school staff had nothing to say about any of this; in fact, they
> >> told us that the only reason they had AR was because a long-gone
> >> librarian refused to believe that some of the kids were actually  
> >> reading
> >> the books they said they were reading.  And, no telling how much this
> >> all cost, but it had to be thousands.
> >>
> >
> > What ever happend to the SRA reading tool?  I remember it from my
> > youth, and it seemed quite easy to manage without computers.
> 
> I think they still have it but it does not grade the students for you  
> and it requires more input from the teacher to use.  AR is the  
> perfect example of the deception of politics.  As I mentioned  
> earlier, I was hired to among other things install the networked  
> version of AR at a private school.  I had to prioritize some of the  
> other things so I asked the teachers what they needed most.  AR was  
> at the top of the list.  They would regale me with stories of how it  
> helped the kids learn and how the parents that put their kids here  
> wanted to see this school do it because the gov school did it.   One  
> teacher of preschool children said she had to have it because she had  
> kids that needed reading material above the picture books that she  
> had.  That really got me to wondering what this incredible program  
> was and I was worried it might be a nightmare to install.  Again,  I  
> was amazed to see all it does is ask questions and tally grades.  The  
> kids get a book from the library, read it and take the AR test on the  
> book.  At this school the student printed the test page and put it in  
> their "show to mommy" book.  It is sold as "learning through  
> computers" but it is just grading through computers.
> 
> Mark
> >
> > -- 
> > Better Living Through Bitmaps
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale