HELP FOR TEACHERS WHO ARE JUST STARTING OUT OR WHO HAVE RUN INTO A SITUATION THEY HAVE NEVER ENCOUNTERED BEFORE.

WE ALL NEED HELP!

I taught full time for fifteen years and am now subbing so that I can finish my novel. I don't have all the answers. None of us do. In fact, even if something works great for me, there is no guarantee it will work for you.
I hope that we will give each other suggestions. I went to all the trainings I could get my principal to approve when I taught full-time. I talked to a lot of teachers. AND I just kept trying things until I found something that worked FOR ME. We can not go against our own nature. Kids can sense that and will test us.
So, don't give up. Keep on trying new things and always know that there is a place to go where you can be anonymous and speak freely.
Best of Luck to all of you. Our children deserve the best that we can offer.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Obama Effect

'Obama Effect' at school: Black parents volunteer, expect more

Barack Obama greets a volunteer at a National Day of Service event in which volunteers wrote letters to the troops on Jan. 19 at Coolidge Senior High School in Washington. African-American parents who say they'll volunteer in their child's school rose to 60% from 23% a year ago.

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
A new survey suggests that President Obama's victory last November had a positive effect not just on the academic expectations of black Americans — it may have raised parents' interests in volunteerism.
The "Obama Effect," documented last winter, showed that Obama's rise during the 2008 presidential election helped improve African Americans' performance on skills tests, which helped narrow a black-white achievement gap.

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In the new findings, African-American parents of children in K-12 schools say they're much more likely to volunteer in a classroom this fall, in effect narrowing a volunteering gap.

The survey, being released today by GreatSchools, a San Francisco non-profit that promotes parental involvement, finds a jump of 37 percentage points in the portion of African-American parents who say they'll volunteer in their child's school — 60% vs. 23% a year ago.

In the same period, the percentage of white parents who plan to volunteer rose six points, from 47% to 53%.

"Clearly, this data is showing that the parent in chief, President Obama, is having an impact on parents' thinking, especially African-American parents' thinking," GreatSchools CEO Bill Jackson says. He notes that in several speeches, Obama has urged parents to turn off the TV, read to their children and attend parent-teacher conferences.

"That jump that we're seeing … is clearly a response to that," he says.

The Internet survey of 1,086 parents has a sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. For the African-American group, the sampling error is much larger — 12.7 percentage points — but the new findings are outside the sampling error.

In January, Vanderbilt University management professor Ray Friedman and a team of researchers found that in a series of online tests, the performance gap between blacks and whites shrank dramatically during two key moments spotlighting Obama in the 2008 campaign.

The findings, dubbed the Obama Effect, offered "compelling evidence of the power that real-world, in-group role models like Obama can have on members of their racial or ethnic community," Friedman said.

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