NYTimes: Gay or Straight, Teenagers Aren’t So Different

Gay or Straight, Teenagers Aren’t So Different - NYTimes.com

This fall, when an 18-year-old Rutgers student killed himself after a live video showing him having intimate relations with another young man was transmitted on the Internet, public attention once again focused on the risk of suicide among gay teenagers.

WNYC: Chancellor Joel Klein Reflects on His Tenure

Chancellor Joel Klein Reflects on His Tenure: "
City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is packing up after eight years running the nation's largest school district. Klein led the system through dramatic overhauls and the creation of hundreds of new schools and privately-managed charters. But there were also controversies over school closings and the use of high-stakes testing during his tenure.

Klein was the first chancellor appointed under a 2002 law giving the mayor control of the school system. His successor, Cathie Black, takes over on January 3 and Klein is moving on to a new job at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

WNYC's Beth Fertig recently interviewed Klein about his tenure and asked the Queens native what he thought when he first took over as Chancellor.

Ferlazzo: The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”

The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”: "

I’m still trying to “get my head around” how to use Google’s new “Books Ngram Viewer,” the amazing application announced yesterday that allows you to easily analyze “the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.” I’m sure there are ways to use it effectively with students — English Language Learners and mainstream — but I just haven’t had a chance to think about how.

Please feel free to share ideas in the comments section.

In the meantime, though, I thought I’d start collecting posts and article that provide information about the service itself.

Here are my choices for The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New Books Ngram Viewer:

In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture is from The New York Times

New Visualization Tool from Google With Data From 5.2 Million Digitized Books is from Read Write Web

The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages is from Discover

New Tool Tracks Culture Through the Centuries via Google Books is from Scientific American

Peter Pappas shares some good ideas on how to use it with students at his post, How To Quantify Culture? Explore 500 Billion Published Words

Word-Wide Web Launches is an interesting article and video from The Wall Street Journal

You can see great examples of the Ngram Viewer in action over at The Atlantic, which has created a slideshow of comparing the usage of a number of words over time.

Here are more examples: 10 Fascinating Word Graphs, From 200 Years of Google Books

The Learning Network: What Words or Phrases Were Overused This Year?

The Learning Network: What Words or Phrases Were Overused This Year?: "Student Opinion | Tell us what words and phrases you heard too much in 2010, whether buzzwords, catchphrases from television, advertising, movies or songs, or just words that were used too often as conversational filler.

The Learning Network: Looking Back at 2010: Teaching Ideas

The Learning Network: Looking Back at 2010: Teaching Ideas: "Our 'Farewell, 2010' news quiz and a collection of other 2010 retrospective puzzles, articles, images, essays and videos - along with ideas for using them in or out of the classroom.

Ferlazzo: “Equality, a True Soul Food”

Equality, a True Soul Food is a piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. It’s on income equality.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources About Wealth & Income Inequality — Help Me Create A Simple Lesson Plan Using Them.

Some Myths About Reading

TERI LESESNE’S  EXPLODING  SOME  MYTHS  ABOUT  READING . . .

MYTH 1: Kids must read only “good” books and not be allowed to wallow in popular fiction. WRONG! We all have an appetite for some food that is not good for us. We all share some guilty pleasure when in comes to reading and books, some book that is not literary. We must extend the same courtesy to our students. See the discussion of subliterature in Chapter 2. There is another myth that generally follows from this one: It is not quantity but quality that matter in reading. WRONG! How much we read does matter. 

Take these statistics from NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

Achievement Percentile	Amount of Outside Reading in Minutes/Day	Word Gain/Yr
90th %ile	40+ min/day	2.3 million
50th %ile	<13 min/day	6000,000
10th %ile	<2 min/day	51,000

 MYTH 2: Readers are easy to spot; they always have their noses in books. WRONG! Readers go dormant from time to time. Weeks pass without my picking up a book due to my schedule or my level of fatigue. Kids are no different. And not all readers select books to read, either. They may prefer magazines, comics, or even e-books.  Sometimes it is tough to spot the readers. Occasionally, someone who presents as a nonreader is actually a reader between books.

The Value of Pleasure Reading in Middle School

The Research Says . . .

Research based Facts from Stephen Krashen’s  The Power of Reading

1. FVR results in: better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development.
2. Readers are better at writing.
3. Reading as a leisure activity is the best predictor of comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed.
4. The relationship between Free Voluntary Reading and literacy is remarkably consistent.
5. Each time an unfamiliar word is seen in print, a small increase in word knowledge typically occurs.
6. If children read 1 million words in a year (easily attainable for middle class children) at least 1000 words will be added to their vocabulary.
7. Students who read a novel with many unique words actually learned the meaning of many of those words from context clues only.
8. Teaching vocabulary lists is inefficient—the time is better spent reading alone.
9. The less literate are the first to fail and drop out of school.

Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2010

The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2010: "

The title of this “The Best…” list is pretty self-explanatory. What you’ll find here are blog posts and articles this year (some written by me, some by others) that were, in my opinion, the ones that offered the best practical advice to teachers this year — suggestions that can help teachers become more effective in the classroom today or tomorrow. Some, however, might not appear on the surface to fit that criteria, but those, I think, might offer insights that could (should?) inform our teaching practice everyday. Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2010 (not in order of any preference and, in fact, not in any order at all):

Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Year-End Collections Of Images — 2010

The Best Year-End Collections Of Images — 2010: "

I’m beginning my annual “The Best…” list highlighting “year in review” images. There aren’t a whole lot right now on the date of this post, but they’ll soon be coming out of the woodwork. I figured it would be helpful for teachers to get access to at least some of them prior to Winter Break. You might also be interested in:
The Best Year-End Collections Of Images — 2009; The Best Year-End Collections Of Images — 2008

Here are my choices for The Best Year-End Collections Of Images — 2010:
Reuters has their fifty-five Best Of The Year photos.; 2010 Pictures of the Year comes from LIFE.; The International Herald Tribune has the Year In Images 2010.; The Best of 2010 from The National Geographic.; The Best Photos From The Pages Of TIME 2010