Cabin trip

Some good friends of ours invited us to come up to a cabin in Island Park this past weekend. There were six of us, lots of food, a massive TV, and a Wii. Good times. (Pictures below.)

2008-02-26 Cabin

Lunar Eclipse

For some reason (spiritual aspirations perhaps?), I have always been fascinated with space. So, naturally, when a total lunar eclipse comes along I will see it. Regardless of midterms or Rexburg cold. It was a sweet eclipse. My favorite part is always when the sunlight is just escaping or just starting to return to the Moon. As always, I pulled out the telescope (thanks Bob!) and got some amazing views of both the Moon and Saturn. And, naturally, I took a picture of it. (The bright dot to the bottom left is Saturn.)

Snowboarding/Skiing

We went skiing/snowboarding with some friends the last two Saturdays. Christy is surprisingly good at skiing (for a So-Cal girl...) I don't think she fell at all last Saturday. I, on the other hand, had some pretty spectacular crashes. For ten terrible seconds, I thought all my left ribs were busted until I could finally breath again. Good times. Here's a picture taken on the lift (why is it that the British word has remained when it comes to skiing?).

NCLB

It has come to my attention over the last year or so that a lot of people have no idea what "No Child Left Behind" really is. I didn't either, until in one of my classes we took an in-depth look at it. So, in my desires to make the world a better place, I thought you would like to know a brief (very brief) summary of NCLB. NCLB consists of 4 main points:

1. High quality teacher in every classroom (defined by each state). In Idaho, that means in order to become a teacher, among other things, I have to pass a couple tests in my content area showing that I actually have the content knowledge behind what I would like to teach.
2. Research based instructional practices. This just means that teachers are going to teach their students using strategies that are known to work. For example, it has been shown that students perform and learn better when a teacher uses all levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, as opposed to a teacher giving her students a test and expecting them to know everything without ever reading a book or being taught anything.
3. Assessment through testing or in other words, data-driven instruction. Students are assessed at the beginning and end of each school year, and based on the test scores the teacher is responsible to plan her lessons accordingly. For example, if a Geography teacher sees that her 7th period class on average scored poorly in measurement, she should plan to review measurement and create measuring activities in Geography class to help the students understand that concept.
4. Schools will be held accountable for the performance of all students. If a school falls below the requirements set by the state in the performance of their students, they get put on a probation of sorts. If after an increase in funding, etc. for I think it's 8 years the school still doesn't show improvement, the parents can choose to send their students to another school district, and eventually the school district can be shut down.

While there is A LOT more to NCLB, this is a brief summary and now you can hopefully create an opinion of NCLB based on facts.

Note: this information was based on discussions in my ED410 class taken Summer 2007, and a book explaining NCLB though the exact title has left my memory...