Why Two Years of Algebra? Why ten months?

Shawn Cornally asks in this post, "Who decided that it takes an equal amount of time to teach every subject?"

No one decided.

What happened was that the time involved was "decided" upon by each school on its own and each one gradually came to the same conclusions: The summer months were too damned hot in NYC and all points south of Boston - since that was where the decision-makers were, that was the decision. Time off for major holidays and the occasional week or two here and there - Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter - and the rest is school.

Sorry to all you "It's all based on the agrarian calender" believers - it's obvious you were never on a farm. The summer months are busy (the definition of farmer is 'a busy man') but nowhere near as busy as other times of the year.  Planting and harvest are kinda important, and that's May and October. The winter months have their own flow - it's not like farmers are sedentary during all but the 10 weeks of summer break!

The class time has varied from 40 minutes to 1.5 hours, yet everyone who thinks about it usually comes to the same conclusion: "If I have to choose, it's 50 minutes, all year. That seems the best compromise for all the students." Since the classes are all mixed up, you have to find a compromise.

Once the times were decided, the courses expanded or split to fit the available hours. If a school tried a new initiative, the courses all shifted to fit. Books were written to fit the prevailing choice with a couple extra chapters of overlap so they could sell them to more people. Teachers who finished something early would add a topic or expand a earlier one. Teachers who went over made some resolution to move faster. Look at the way AP is 1 month shorter than the rest of the school yet somehow those teachers make 2x the work fit.

Then the time became flexible and the courses changed again, slightly. A chapter was added to the math class, another Shakespeare play was included.  It was decided that 1 year was too little for all the Great Ideas of Algebra, so let's do 2, etc.

When block scheduling became all the rage, the total hours were kept constant and the material shifted to fit the new format. If the course syllabus changed radically, the new would always be compared to the old because the old needed to be fundamentally similarity to the new.

Shift, change and adapt --- Evolution, baby.

Additionally, the expectations of a particular course become centered around the transcript, i.e, does a grade of "A" in a course labeled "CP Physics" taught by a guy named Cornally in the Midwest using SBG mean what I think it means and include what I think it should include?  Do I schedule this kid for a remedial physics class before allowing him to matriculate or do I throw him right in and let him become a Physics major at my Uni?  Do I hire him based on this report or not?

Given all that, it's surprisingly consistent from student to student. Match up the "A" students in CP Physics from 80 different schools and they'll be amazingly similar and their abilities and knowledge pretty damned predictable.

Awards for all?

Joanne Jacobs has a piece about a parent complaining that only some kids were recognized for their performance on state testing. I actually agree with the parent on this one.

This, he said, was unfair to students who traditionally score lower on standardized tests and might not reach proficiency no matter how hard they try — mainstreamed special education students, for example.

Some kids will never reach proficiency. It's just a fact of life. If you make your standards low enough for all, then the achievement is meaningless and all of the kids know it and blow you off.The better response, for me, is to simply thank everyone publicly, en masse, and announce the barbeque for all. Then, reward or thank the good students separately.

Really, the "Always Praise in Public" rule isn't always your best course of action. I am against, for example, the tactic of an academic assembly during the first two periods of the day for which every class trudges down to the gym and sits by class.

"Everyone is sure to be a winner
with these fun 4" trophies."

What happens next is the whole point and is also the most excruciating part: the Guidance counselor, feeling all very important because she gets to "honor" the "good" students and bask in the reflected glory, reads the names of the high honor roll (20 kids), honor roll (140 kids), and merit (15 kids). She asks them to stand while this endless list is being read. Do you know how long it takes to read 175 names?

A little subtraction shows that there's maybe 30 kids in that grade who couldn't manage to get anything ... administration is proud that they didn't publicly shame any of them by saying their names. Except that they are still sitting down while everyone around them is standing up. Is it any wonder that they feel like shit? Most memorable student quote about the assembly (in informal geometry afterward): "Here are all the smart people in the school and none of them are YOU."

Back to the fun. Guidance has them sit ... and does the 11th grade. And repeats for the 10th. And the 9th. Can't have anyone left out, can we? An hour and something later, you've managed to humiliate as many people as possible, so you send the school back to class. "Don't make any comments to the Dweeb in the hallway, now."


Maybe the proper response is to not require everyone to recognize them. Give them their own awards night and invite them and their parents to come or not, as they choose.  You know, like the sports awards night, where the non-athletic can avoid having to sit through endless coaches' attempts at public speaking.

God knows there is nothing worse than a coach with limited vocabulary and no experience speaking to a crowd who's attempting to appear smart, clever, witty and interesting ... for each of his 54 football players, naming and praising the "spectacular work ethic" of every member of the 1-6 team, including the kids who lost eligibility for drinking and fighting.


It was also interesting that the rest of the fall teams had much better seasons, one winning a state championship, but the football team spent the most time congratulating itself.  But I digress ...

Maybe the takeaway from all this is simple:  The people who attend an awards night should be the ones who were there to watch the achievement itself.  Anyone else is excused. Those who wish to attend can do so.  I'd much rather have an awards night with the rest of my team and the spectators who were at the games. Everyone else feels like "Johnny come lately" hangers-on.  The same is true for academic awards:

If you weren't there when we did it, why would you want to be there to celebrate it?

If you can answer that question, then you can come to the ceremony and we'll all have a blast. If you can't, then you shouldn't be required to be there and we probably would feel uncomfortable if you did show up.

Psychologists say NO to Learning Styles

I'll have to read the rest of this NYTimes article carefully, but this paragraph stood out:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Hallelujah. Striking and disturbing, indeed.

Embedded Content and the Foreign Language Paradox

Joanne Jacobs: Kids Don't Know Grammar. Although neither of those quoted (perhaps misquoted) can spell "embedding," their point is good. Embedded curriculum doesn't work.

Less than 10 percent of Robert Archer’s 10th graders know grammar. A 14-year veteran teacher in Spokane, Archer doesn’t blame middle-school teachers. He blames curriculum developers for “imbedding” grammar in the curriculum.

"in my experience, the term “imbedded” is nothing more than educationalese for “not ever specifically taught.” Somehow, this grammar-is-imbedded movement is supposed to help students naturally take in what proper grammar is (i.e., grammar by osmosis). It’s very much a hyper-constructivist approach to education; the students are supposed to “discover” proper grammar on their own as they read good pieces."

He's right. They don't pick up on the proper forms of grammar, nor do they pick up much of anything that isn't specifically presented and what is, doesn't last.

Maybe I'm an old-school fart but it seems to me that if the students really could do this type of learning by assimilation, they would be miles ahead of where they are now. I do SAT prep classes and the grammar skills are terrible -- except for the kids in Spanish or French III or IV.

I call this the "Foreign Language Paradox." When learning English in an English class, grammar and basic forms are not supposed to be explicitly taught. Literature reigns supreme and some limited essay forms are required. Grammar and proper sentence structure are supposedly understood as 5th graders. Then we are all surprised that no one seems to know them.

In any foreign language class on the other hand, noun and verb declensions, grammar and sentence structure are specifically taught; then drill, drill, drill. Every student learns through actual work and walks out with an understanding of the language and a better understanding of English, too. "I never understood the subjunctive mood until Señor told us." "Past, imperfect, pluperfect - wow! Then, a couple of present tenses and more than one future tense? Damn."

It's not just Latin that builds English skills, although Latin does have power in its rigid simplicity and endless lists and mnemonics. It's specifically teaching grammar to students when they are finally sophisticated enough to really understand and appreciate it in all its nuanced glory.

Hello? Is my curriculum coordinator listening?

Apparently not.

Joanne chimed in with her own anecdote:

On Back to School Night, my daughter’s eighth-grade English teacher told parents she was going to go off curriculum for two weeks to teach grammar and punctuation. She got a standing ovation.

It's not just English, but math as well. Bunches of my students go off to the tech center for a one or two year program and then return. They have me for algebra I and then go to forestry or woodworking or something. Invariably, I hear about the embedded math credit. They are then placed in the next class and have no clue about the missed material. What's worse is that they are in my class for the eleventh grade and thus on my roster for the NECAP tests in November. I think of myself as a good teacher, but that's just not fair to either of us.

Bottom line: No matter how smart, no matter how motivated, all kids need some instruction. Unless you are specifically making things clear, you are allowing kids to construct any old thing, and it's usually flawed.

Forcing Teachers to Read: Useful or just a Time-Suck?

Scott Macleod, over at Dangerously Irrelevant, wonders if we should require teachers to read the RSS newspaper: Should we require school employees to have RSS readers? He and his reader community created lists of rss feeds:grade-level and subject-specific blogs.

I'm great up to this point. Most of these blogs (I haven't read them all so can't say about all) are good people with good experience writing well and intelligently. But then Dr. Macleod goes a little off the end when he thinks about the next step ...

1. Should we require school employees to have loaded RSS readers (with a concurrent expectation that they spend time checking them and reading in them)?
2. How would the lives of the educators in your school organization be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
3. How would the lives of preservice educators (i.e., student teachers) be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
4. Can we figure out how to give educators professional development / licensure renewal credit for time spent with RSS readers, interacting with other educators in social media channels, etc.? We seem to be able to do so for face-to-face training, discussion groups, school book clubs, and so on ...

Thoughts on any of this? Got your own questions you’d like to add to my list?

No,
Not by much,
To brainwash them some more - haven't they already read these blogs as part of their classes?
and YAY! Another meaningless credit for meaningless professional development!
 Then there's time and viewpoint.

Time? I get to school at about 7:15. I start the computer, which takes maybe 15 minutes to complete, and then load a firefox folder of bookmarks - the things I do everyday like check my and the school's calendar for games or meetings, read email (I only do it once at the beginning and once at the end of the day) update the SAT problem of the day, open the gradebook. I am checking that all my first classes are ready - emergency copying, bookmarking the text. I check my school mail box on another floor. I get my caffeine. Classes start. During my prep period, I prep. During my classes I teach. After school I help students, go to a game or go home. When do you suppose I should spend an hour on my school computer reading an RSS feed? How pissed off would the taxpayers of my community be if they knew that I spent that time surfing the internet every day?

Viewpoint? All the blogs listed are definitely opinionated. The viewpoints are not ones that I agree with all the time. I don't care to have my principal, who knows little about teaching and basically nothing about math and less about educational technology, decide what things I must read daily. I would hate to see what he would require I read -  he already photocopies pointless articles (FYI) and forwards joke emails. The upshot is that so much of his correspondence is junk that it lessens the importance of the rest of it.
 Suppose I read Right on the Left Coast, which is not on the list, but not Dy/dan, which is?  What if my blog were required reading instead of this Macleod's?  Or Theo, or Moonbattery, or Breitbart or Malkin?

Overload.  The list for math has 31 blogs on it.  If you overload people with this much new educational thought and trivia during a time when they can't process it, you will lose much more than you possibly gain. "Even though it could yield great results" - but it won't.

I see it far more likely that any time allocated will be spent with BostonHerald's Red Sox feed than on head-in-the-sky education dreamers who can save the world instantly if you only do .... this.  Does anyone really think that updating a facebook profile is a good use of a teacher's time?

Macleod seems to have plenty of time during the day to read, relax and tend to his presence on the web (he lists a Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Twine, Delicious, Digg, Gmail, Skype, coComment, Technorati, Wikipedia), but I have other interests, i.e., teaching. I have precious little time to browse during the day and I don't care to waste it reading Macleod's recount of some conference he went to.

In the evening, which is when I do my reading, I can read and consider, answer and comment -- but certainly not under my principal's eye. Of course, that's also when I tend to my own life, virtual and otherwise. I volunteer my programming time and server space for a bunch of websites, maintain this blog and my own, keep track of my own facebook account (which the students do NOT have access to) -- have a life, such as it is.

I might even grade papers or (GASP!) watch a game.

Value-Added Teacher Evaluation

The Value of Value-Added By Rick Hess Original
I've been meaning to do a longer postmortem on Florida's Senate Bill 6. As I've noted before, I enthusiastically supported it even though I thought it a deeply flawed bill. The flaw? Its ham-fisted attempt to strip out one set of anachronistic strictures (governing tenure and step-and-lane pay scales) only to replace it with a set of test-driven processes that were almost equally troubling.

Don't you love it? He spends most of the post pointing out flaws but he was for it anyway. I can almost hear him say "Yes, Russian Roulette is a dangerous game, but let's play anyway. Here's my automatic. You go first."

Actually, Rick, I have a better idea. Let's run this model on your paycheck first. Then we can talk.

Gender and Achievement

In his article "The Boys Have Fallen Behind", Nick Kristoff makes a case for why boys are doing worse than girls.

The average boy has a lower GPA (-0.23), is 2x as likely to be suspended and 3x as likely to be expelled, and 25% more likely to drop out, earn fewer degrees and do more poorly on achievement tests. Add in that boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and you get an almost "perfect storm".

I think that what we have here is a change in the focus and attitude of classrooms and schools in general - more "sensitive" and less competitive, more inclusive and less exclusive. Teachers cannot be sarcastic or mean, or even critical. Bullies are immediately squashed or there's hell to pay. Letting "Boys be boys" is a no-no. Literacy across the curriculum. 21st Century Skills. "Show your work" has become "Write a report that includes ..." English teachers are assigning Flannery O'Connor and Maya Angelou instead of Hamilton's Mythology.

1. The move to limit bullying is a good one, of course, but there does need to be some discretion to say, at times, "Tough it out, kid. That isn't really bullying."
2. Teachers shouldn't be mean, of course, but there also shouldn't be a total ban on pointing out errors or letting the class trade papers to correct each other's work.
3. Kids should learn to write, of course, but the math classroom isn't necessarily the best place for that.
4. There's nothing wrong with one right answer.
5. AP and Honors classes should have prerequisites. Hard and fast ones.
6. Challenges work for boys. Competition is an incentive.
7. Single-sex classrooms are AN answer.
8. Sometimes, "The Answer" is sufficient. You don't always have to get an explanation of the blindingly obvious. The "AFCS Proof" is acceptable.
9. Shakespeare is rude, crude, but strangely acceptable.  Feel free to point all that out.
   

Wordy Rubrics and the Search for Higher Thinking

From Jay Matthews comes a tale of an AP teacher who was told by his principal that

“I am not opposed to multiple versions of a test or quiz; it is standard operating procedure for every type of testing program,” the principal said in an e-mail to me. “Instead, I would prefer that teachers use more rigorous assessments when possible, that require written responses and higher levels of thinking. In addition to being more challenging and requiring a sophisticated skill set, these types of assessments are also more difficult for students to copy.”

This has got to be the biggest line of bullshit ever perpetrated on teachers ... that multiple choice is bad and that long answer, essay questions require higher levels of thinking, are more challenging and require a high skill set.

Phooey.

Anyone take the AP math test? How about the SATs and the SAT IIs? How about the Praxis content tests? How about all those college courses? The difficulty and the skill set have more to do with the teacher than the format.

But then, most administrators have never taken actual tests before. They don't understand that I can make a very challenging multiple choice test or an easy one, a challenging calculus essay test or an easy one. I can make questions that take an entire page to answer, that have objective measurement, that take very high skill sets to finish and that bring out the best in my students. Or I can make one that uses a rubric full of things like this from a teacher automatic rubric maker website:



Can someone tell me the difference between a "Good Solid Response with a clear explanation" and a "Complete Response with a detailed explanation" and, while you're at it, perhaps you can explain why being correct is only one of 6 equal parts? Why the intense need for a visual or sketch or for counter-examples? And the "Goes beyond the requirements of the Problem" is a beautiful way of saying that the kid doesn't know beans for what he's doing but he sure is good at typing. Please don't tell me to use a better rubric -- they all seem to suffer from this rot.

Give me the AP scoring method every time. This rubric stuff is utter crap.

Innovation and Teacher Pay

In my wandering, I came across this little gem on how to fix edumacation:

Instead, a better solution would be:
- Get rid of the unions. Pay for performance, fire the incompetent
- Give teachers the independence to try new things and tailor to individual classrooms. Reward success.

The list continued but I particularly liked the juxtaposition of "pay for performance, fire the incompetent" and "Give teachers the independence to try new things. Reward success." Beyond the obvious (to me, at least) problem of determining teacher competence, how much do you suppose a teacher will innovate and try new things if his paycheck is based on performance, with firing being a instant option for a moronic administrator if that new idea fails?

In all of the pay-for-performance schools I have studied, the one constant factor is that the teachers all retreat into "safe" zones of teaching. Most teachers would rather be assured of a job, thus follow the demands of the administration, teach to the test and be nothing special, rather than go out on a limb and risk it all on a double or nothing bet. The feeling seems to be that it is better to be good than take a wild and unproven chance with your students' education, risking your job. It's sad, really.

There is usually a maverick who bucks this trend but he merely proves the rule - he is unmarried or for some reason doesn't need to be employed at that school. Perhaps he's a certified TIG welder or has an engineering degree with experience.

Unions and union rules allow teachers to innovate, try new things and then adjust them to work better next time. You get "The Creative Feedback Loop Of Teaching"(Thanks to Dan Meyer for the expression, in this post, near the end.), but only if you have the freedom to innovate and aren't locked into a scripted curriculum or stuck in a repressive, vindictive or moronic administrative system.

True innovation comes from those who can afford to try. Trying implies failing occasionally. If you punish failure, you stifle innovation.

Books, Part Deux

Yesterday, I mentioned the books that I have, Part One. Those were the easy-to-read books. I got class sets of those.

The books below are harder to read, with a more limited audience so I only got 3 or 6 of each of them. They are the books a serious math student should have read, so I encourage them to try.

The "Biographies"
These biographies are written for the serious and capable 12th grade student or college student. The writing is very clear and the topic is fascinating for me. My students, not so much. An Imaginary Tale; The Story of i. A funny thing about this one was when I tried to type up the order to present it to the decider-person -- I couldn't type "i" without Word getting all angry at me.
e: The Story of a Number. Maior is a good writer, but not for the faint of brain. Also, try Zero; A Biography of a Dangerous Idea and The The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number .

Of course, there's John Allen Poulos:
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, as well as Mathematician Plays the Stockmarket and the inservice classics: Innumeracy and Beyond Innumeracy. He has some others. Try them if these do good things for you.

Damn Near Impossible for High School Students. (If that's not a challenge, I don't know what is ...)
A Brief History of Time by Hawking. You gotta throw down the gauntlet.

Scheduling's not rocket science but it sure seems that way.

Pissed Off Teacher has a student with a IEP: kid is doing math at a 3rd grade level and his IEP wants him to master math facts "and to be able to work with whole numbers, decimals and fractions." He is enrolled in Algebra.

Joanne Jacobs mentions that bilingual education didn't work ... "California’s bilingual education ban, which was supposed to lead to disaster, worked for Hispanic students ... Hispanic test scores on a range of subjects have risen since Prop. 227 became law."

What's the connection?

Students should master the basic material before moving on to more difficult material. If you shove them into a class they're not ready for and tell the teacher "Individualize the education", then you will ultimately fail.

Better to spend an entire year getting up to speed and then moving on than to struggle for years in half-assed placements.

Football for College Credit.

Everyone seems to be all up in arms about this but I don't agree. I think the football players should be able to legitimately get a credit in football.

One credit. Two. It doesn't really matter.

I got a credits for athletics when I was in college - kayak was 1 and archery was another. We had to have two PE credits. You showed up. You learned a few terms, shot a few flights, took a silly multiple choice exam. It was a nice break from the 18-21 mechanical engineering credits per semester (on top of the ROTC and the stuff for commissioned officers).

What's the big deal? I like it that the rest of the school can have its courses without the lunkheads slowing everything down. They would never have made it to college other than for football, so it's not like they're being deprived of anything. Any players who do have brains will get their education regardless of what the lunkheads do.

With all the people majoring in FillinTheBlank Studies or some other touchy-feely joke, I can't think that 100 football players is going to skew the median all that much.

Emperor Awards have been announced

The Sixteenth Annual Emperor Awards have been announced and, as usual, they've got quite a few well-chosen and oh-so-appropriate barbs. The Distinguished Priorities Cross is awarded to a man who might have worked in my district. Certainly he must have put in time in an inservice or two because all of our cherubs seem to be following his philosophy pretty closely.

Sixteenth annual Emperor Awards

By PETER BERGER - Published: August 20, 2009

Before embarking on the new school term, it's helpful to review the past year's magic education moments. The Emperor Awards annually commemorate the monarch of underwear fame and his devoted admirers so we can profit from their example.

With American math students trailing peers in many industrialized nations, including England, our first award, the Distinguished Priorities Cross, honors an Ivy League professor for his long-standing campaign to stamp out teaching fractions and for recently expanding his hit list to include multiplication and long division. When the American Mathematical Association blasted his approach as "absurd" and one reason American math achievement is "so abysmal," the professor refined his position, suggesting that teaching fractions at least be "delayed until it can be understood, perhaps after a student learns calculus." Apparently unaware that most people find calculus a lot more daunting than dividing a pie into six equal pieces, he also left unexplained how fraction-free students would be able to comprehend calculus, which involves very complicated fractions.

Not that SmartBoard is helping much with fractions.

His British co-honoree is magnanimously doing his bit to keep America competitive. Arguing that math must be more "democratic," he contends that "social responsibility" demands a "total rethink" of British math instruction. He claims students are discouraged by the reality that solutions are either "right or wrong" and proposes that math answers "allow for shades of opinion."

The 2008 Nathan Bedford Forrest Prize recognized a California district for holding segregated pep rallies to "inspire students" while "being honest" about ethnic groups' test scores. Forrest 2009 belongs to an Illinois state senator. Concerned about funding for poor school districts and committed to shrinking the achievement gap between white and minority students, he urged minority children to start the year on the right academic foot by boycotting school. His plan was endorsed by Al Sharpton, whose characteristic wisdom earns him an honorable mention.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Silver Star salutes researchers who concluded that kids who spend hours on MySpace aren't really "wasting a lot of time." Among the "contemporary" skills children are developing via laptop and cell phone, experts listed "how to manage a public identity" in a "full-time intimate community" of "friends" who frequently never meet and often don't use their real names. The study cited vital instant messaging exchanges, including the girl who posted, "hey…hm.wut to say? iono lol/well I left you a comment…u sud feel SPECIAL.haha," and the boy who replied, "hello there…umm I don't know what to say, but at least I wrote something."

Gee, Bill. Way to go. If you can't succeed at convincing people that your computers are changing their children's education for the better, simply change the definition of education. There are enough stupid people that a significant fraction will believe anything you say and descend on their schools with demands of "more technology" and let's get every kid in front of a computer. Maybe those flat-panel screens are what they meant by "death panels"?

In a related field, the Academy acknowledges Family Circle's invaluable assistance helping mothers manage household and "school commitments." The editors advise that instead of jotting down grocery lists on paper, moms should "create" the list via computer keyboard and then "send it to your cell phone by text," which you can then download at the supermarket. While this 21st century procedure requires several thousand dollars in equipment and reliable cell phone reception, Family Circle maintains that it simplifies shopping because there's "no notepad needed." For their support of paperless mothers everywhere, we award the June Cleaver Golden Bundt Pan with Silicon Clusters.

21st Century Skills - in a nutshell.

The 2009 Archimedes Eureka Honorarium spotlights Science magazine findings predicting that, despite No Child Left Behind's "universal proficiency" mandate, every American student won't be academically proficient by 2014. Equally breathtaking, researchers revealed that low-income students who don't speak English are less likely to succeed academically than middle-class kids who do speak English.

In a field trip touted to "expose students to French language and culture" and allow them to "use their skills in a real world situation," a New England French class traveled 150 miles to a "French" restaurant where the wait staff doesn't speak French, the menu isn't in French, and the bill of fare features such traditional Gallic favorites as grilled turkey BLT, Maine crab cakes, ravioli of the day, and beer batter fish and chips. School officials' flair for boldly fictional press releases earns them our Phineas T. Barnum Citation. Honorable mention goes to the Maryland principal who distributed 3,600 peppermint candies on testing day because she heard they "increase performance and raise grades."

Yup. I've heard that one, too. Although, to be fair, it was "kids who eat breakfast do better on tests than kids who don't" forgetting that kids who eat breakfast are also more likely to be the ones with a stable home life / caring parent / proper amount of sleep. The doughnut shoved in the face of the bleary-eyed tardy-boy once a year isn't going to do much for his overall achievement.

In the past when students showed up without lunch money, Albuquerque cafeterias served them on credit. However, when many parents of these students, who incidentally were not eligible for free lunch, refused to pay their tabs, the district faced a $300,000 deficit. Rather than bankrupting the lunch program or letting anyone go hungry, officials decided to give kids with unpaid tabs a less expensive cold plate consisting of a sandwich, fruit, and milk. Rather than paying their bills or expressing their gratitude that their children were being fed a nutritious lunch that they weren't paying for and to which they weren't entitled, irate parents chose to complain that their kids weren't getting the same meal as kids whose parents were paying. For their principled refusal to accept a free lunch, we bestow the inaugural Even Greater Generation Entitlement Trophy.

I'm equivocating on this one. I've long been an advocate of schools providing lunch for every kid. I know it's an expense, but a manageable one. Just a thought.

The Order of the Tempest in a Teacup is headed for the Big Apple, which had previously installed safety mats at all its playgrounds. Now advocates are complaining that the mats can get too hot and burn children's bare feet. Playgrounds already post signs advising users to wear shoes and caretakers to make sure their children comply, but protesters aren't satisfied. One advocate wants the city to "do more" to "ensure that the signs are helpful," presumably by dispatching caretakers to read to the caretakers. Another watchdog group demands that the city "pressure the manufacturers to come up with a solution." Since dimming the sun isn't an option, he's proposing the city install canopies over all playgrounds. Similar future projects could include requiring seaside communities to install beach sprinklers for when the sand gets hot.

Pay up, chump. Of course, they'll get hot feet when they walk home down the streets covered with really hot concrete and asphalt ... oh wait, they've got shoes on for that. Give me a minute to figure this out. Yes, this is a very deserving award.

As always competition for the George Orwell Creative Use of Language Award was fierce. Candidates included the new credential "certified lifestyle counselor," which apparently means someone who puts you on a diet and isn't Valerie Bertinelli, and researchers who determined that people with "grit are more likely to succeed in school" because they're "doing something [they] love" and want to do, a problem for anyone who cares about words since grit generally involves persevering at something you don't love or don't want to do. However, we present Orwell 2009 to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and their crusade to start calling fish "sea kittens" in the hope that people will stop eating them if the have a cuter, furrier name, a tactic that's worked wonders when it comes to saving lambs. As part of their campaign, PETA officials contacted the principal of Whitefish High School in Montana to urge him to rename his school Sea Kitten High. Though the principal inexplicably declined, the Academy wishes to honor PETA for its venture into Orwellian territory.

The Academy also wishes to remind us that everybody deserves at least one Emperor for something.

Even you and me.

Except that I'd probably get an Emperor from Poor Elijah for giving out too many awards just so that no felt left out by not receiving an Emperor Award. (Mobius alert.)