Quotes from July 25’s TGI article (“New year brings new school, accountability”): “We have a strategic plan for a systemic change addressing everything,” Department of Education superintendent Daniel Hamada said. “If you get reading down really well,” said Val Tsuchiya
Quotes from July 25’s TGI article (“New year brings new school, accountability”): “We have a strategic plan for a systemic change addressing everything,” Department of Education superintendent Daniel Hamada said. “If you get reading down really well,” said Val Tsuchiya (district Educational Specialist, “everything falls into place, the (test) scores go up and the (bad) behavior goes down.” Yes, Mr. Hamada, you and the DOE/Board of Education have a plan for everything, except for how teachers are supposed to convey the background world knowledge or schema that kids need to know to construct meaning from printed text.
Every DOE administrator with a valid teaching credential from an accredited college or university should remember that students need to know a little bit about a lot of things before they can comprehend what they read. Unfortunately, many of our DOE students (those with low reading scores) come from homes where both parents work (and thus spend little time teaching or reading about the world to their kids), or there are little or no reading materials (books, magazines and newspapers) in the home. These kids come to school with the world knowledge gained from viewing mostly violent, slasher-genre videos or TV programs and MTV music videos with no story narrative (beginning, middle and end).
If you visit most corporate training rooms/boardrooms or any communication/advertising agency in the U.S., you will notice that they don’t rely on a chalkboard to convey information to staff or students. Their trainers (teachers) are jacked-in to the Internet.
They use the images, sound, video and animation of thousands of digital museums, science, literature, art, history and mathematics websites available on the Internet.
This is not only the most effective and efficient means of conveying information, but it is also a more interesting way to learn. And the DOE wonders why kids are restless and disruptive in the classroom. You’d be restless, too, if you had to spend six hours a day watching your teacher attempt to convey information using a chalkboard—a technology introduced to schools around 1850.
Mr. Hamada, your Kaua’i technology teachers use a large TV screen connected to their Internet computer to convey information from websites that all the students in their classroom can see, even from the back of the room. Why don’t you hook up and train all teachers on Kaua’i to do the same? After all, according to Val Tsuchiya, Kauai district educational specialist, “we put more money directly into kids than anybody else, rather than spend it on administrative-type things.”
LARRY LOGANBILL, Kilauea
