Saturday, July 20, 2013

Charles J. Cornelius has a blog worth visiting. I just spent 45 minutes wandering and wondering. The Churchill quote is worth a visit.

https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=34409816

His book begins with the Winston Churchill quote
"The only time my education was interrupted was while I was at school."

With those words I was hooked, not only to the blog post but to many of the observations by this graduate student in University of Bath.  He worked in Pest (buda is the other side of the river) in 2009 but he has no email link or twitter account listed on the blog.  Can anyone help me find him?   Here are some excerpts that I found remarkable and / or thought provoking:


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FROM HIS BLOG

Perhaps you have heard of this initiative in Singapore.  I just came across it thanks to a blog post by Charles Cornelius of University of Bath (he’s a student there).   This guy has rants.   Here’s an example:

My Rant
But the problem isn't with assessing skills: if you can break a skill down into a list of progressive standards, and you are prepared to accept a degree of subjectivity in assesment, it's easy to assess skills. Reading between the lines, Silva's comments reveals the real problems:
·       an adherence to an outdated scientific notion that the only valid form of assessment is an objective test that uses quantitative data;
·       that accountability can only come through testing;
·       that the purpose of testing is accountability, not improving students' learning.
This wouldn't be so bad except that the testing culture is so deeply embedded in the whole education system (especially after NCLB) that even when teaching is not to the test, it is influenced by the type of skill demanded by the test. Learning seems to be the slave of accountability.
Instead of trying to shoehorn learning into an accountability system based solely on tests, Silva and the other researchers might be better off rethinking educational accountability rather than skills assessments.




I like this guy.  I want to have coffee with him.  I just can’t find his email address.  Can anyone help?  Maybe you can see what is obvious… perhaps a “click here to send a comment to the blogger.”



Here is the blog by Charles.

Note to parents:  If you want your child to be given materials to prepare him/her for these skills, let me know.  We’ll put something in his/her personal learning plan to move toward these areas.  There must be some books and websites that we can read together …







Here is the link to the Singapore page that Charles pointed to.




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The reason that I have quoted massive swaths of his blog is simple:  This guy should get more attention.  The next thing he posts about ought to catch my attention.  I hope you agree.  So help me find him.  I want to thank him for providing the poster of the week that I'm hanging in August.

TLSTEve@gmail.com   +1 (954) 646 8246 is my contact.  I hope to chat with him.   Skype  SteveEnglishTeacher





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