Don't be afraid to be involved - even intrusive - if you want to keep your kids off drugs, a Middleton High School student advised parents at a forum Tuesday night.I sent an email to Tom Vandervest, Middleton High's principal urging him to post an html/pdf, audio and video transcript on their web site. He responded with "Our school personnel will be recording it for our use. Thanks, Tom".More than 250 people packed the school's cafeteria to ask questions and get information from a panel that included school officials, social workers, students and police officers. Catherine Zdeblick also sat on the panel. Her daughter Julie, a junior at Middleton High School, died from an Oxycontin overdose in March. That death has had a big impact on the community.
Beth Wild, 18, who was a friend of Julie's, talked about her own recovery from addiction to marijuana and Oxycontin. She told the crowd that her parents were instrumental in getting her sober because they were always there for her.
Wild, a senior at the Middleton Alternative High School, said she has been sober for 99 days, although she has been in treatment for two years.
She said that after several unhealthy relationships she finally decided to take her treatment seriously. Wearing a T-shirt that said "high on life," Wild told the crowd, "I love life and I'm very proud of myself."
I hope that includes posting it online.
Superintendent Rainwater's rejection of Reading First funds hits students of color the hardest. The funding would have gone to the following schools:
Lincoln - 77.4% of the students are minority students
Midvale - 72.5%
Hawthorne - 61.1%
Glendale - 64.4%
Orchard Ridge - 39.1
Ed Blume
Ms. Dempsey circled all those numbers on her own chart, which was being projected onto the blackboard. Now, she said, everyone in the class should color in all the multiples of two on his or her page. The students uncapped their yellow markers and set about filling in the appropriate boxes, noting the patterns they formed."Wonderful," Ms. Dempsey said, looking over one child's completed worksheet. "Just awesome."
At one particular desk, though, Jimmy was solving a different problem. He had just transferred to Claremont from a nearby Catholic school, and during the lesson he had whispered to an educator who happened to be visiting the room, "I know all my facts," by which he meant his multiplication tables.
So that educator, Ferzeen Bhana, the math coordinator for Ossining's elementary schools, gave him a problem to try: 23 times 16. Within a minute, Jimmy delivered 368, the correct answer. Ms. Bhana asked him how he had gotten it. Jimmy offered her a shy, yearning face and said nothing.
That brief moment, one moment in one school in one middle-income town, described the divide of the math wars in America. It was evident to Ms. Bhana that Jimmy had learned multiplication the old-fashioned way, with drills, algorithms and concepts like place-value. The rest of the students were using a curriculum called Investigations, one of the new constructivist models, which teaches reasoning out a solution.