Joann's blog

Last summer, I spent some time with upper-elementary and middle school-aged students who were involved in a week-long art camp. The focus was portraiture, and the students could not have been less excited. The instructor immediately captured their attention, however, by discussing the types of portraits found in Harry Potter, with their subjects possessing the ability to move and to visit their other paintings elsewhere in the world.

In my last column, I gave a brief overview of our Achievement Standards Network, or the ASN. The ASN is a vast (and ever-growing) repository of educational and professional standards that are described using rich metadata. The ASN uses concept terms with controlled vocabularies in order to maintain accuracy and consistency, and brings a host of other advantages for researchers and developers. That’s all fine and dandy (and it really is – believe me!) but let’s cut to the chase: How does using the ASN benefit educators and librarians who just really want to locate relevant academic standards quickly and efficiently?

In the mid-1990s, standards-based education in the U.S. was enacted under the Clinton administration, and further refined under President George W. Bush. The legislation sought to improve American student performance by instituting more rigorous testing, and by holding schools accountable for student performance on these tests. However, since each state had its own process for creating and implementing educational standards, the content that students were expected to learn in one state was sometimes vastly different from the expectations in another state.

Students sometimes wonder when they’ll use certain information that they learn in school. They may not reap immediate benefits from reading Herman Melville or learning the laws of stoichiometry, but they usually take the teachers at their word that such knowledge is never wasted – it’s all part of the process of becoming educated citizens. In math, however, the benefits of learning ratio and proportion are instantly recognizable. People use ratios every day in all sorts of situations, and are often even unaware that they’re doing so. Ratio and proportion are so prevalent in daily life that their use has become reflexive.

In 2007, a report on the state of reading in the U.S. was published by the National Endowment for the Arts. The study found that, not only were Americans reading less, but that reading comprehension skills were also steadily eroding. The findings for students were also troubling: more than 50% of college students engaged in little or no pleasure reading, and less than a third of 13 year-olds read daily. The report concluded that the decline in reading was likely to result in grave economic, social, cultural, and civic consequences.

It’s November, and the store circulars and holiday flyers are full of familiar Thanksgiving-themed images. Happy plump Pilgrims, holding a variety of foodstuffs ranging from roast turkey to pumpkins to ears of corn, stand alongside pink-cheeked Native Americans, ready to celebrate the first Thanksgiving in the bountiful New World. The reality, of course, was much different.

Last June, during the final weeks of school, some local classrooms made field trips to a nearby zoo and horticultural center to see a particular flower. The students were puzzled: Why take a field trip to see a single flower? Needless to say, the kids were not chuffed. The teachers explained that they were to witness a rare event: the flowering of Amorphophallus titanium, which occurs once every 15 years, and lasts for only two days. The bloom stands about five feet tall, and is more commonly known as the “corpse flower.” Beyond that information, the teachers wouldn't say anything more.

You’d be hard-pressed to travel through any town in the nation without seeing at least one public monument. Most monuments commemorate a local hero or seminal event from the past, or – if you’re actor Sylvester Stallone – yourself, in the guise of a movie character. Some monuments, such as the Statue of Liberty in New York or the Taj Mahal in India, are instantly recognizable by a global audience. In fact, monuments such as these are so distinctive that they have come to symbolize an entire nation. What purpose do monuments serve in society today, and what do they tell us?