Word: classrooms
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...district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run. She is attempting to do this through a relentless focus on finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom. This fall, Rhee was asked to meet with both presidential campaigns to discuss school reform. In the last debate, each candidate tried to claim her as his own, with Barack Obama calling her a "wonderful new superintendent...
...emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first. Within two minutes, she had seen enough, and she stalked out to the next classroom...
...union disagree most is on her ability to measure the quality of teachers. Like about half the states, Washington is now tracking whether students' test scores improve over time under a given teacher. Rhee wants to use that data to decide who gets paid more--and, in combination with classroom evaluation, who keeps the job. But many teachers do not trust her to do this fairly, and the union bristles at the idea of giving up tenure, the exceptional job security that teachers enjoy...
...came here expecting creativity, curiosity, and intellectual excitement. I have found it in abundance, but not in the classroom. I have found it in hallways and in basements, on couches and over tables, murmured along sidewalks or shouted in dorm rooms. Time and time again, Harvard students have shown themselves entirely capable of discarding tired academic rhetoric and making their own connections between their reading materials and the world around them. But whatever ingenuity we have seems to get left at the door on the way in to section...
...accessible, why waste mental space on facts like the population of Russia or the circumference of a circle? Humans have limited mental capacity. Even Sherlock Holmes had to purge his mind of random trivia occasionally to make room for more important matters. Rote memorization, long a mainstay of the classroom, is now relegated to Classics concentrators and those people who play online trivia games for fun. For the first time in centuries, humans can store all those pesky facts on Wikipedia and devote their entire minds to thinking...