Experienced and certified teachers providing parent engagement resources for schools, ACT test prep classes and private tutoring for students.
Bowling Green, KY
Joined August 2014
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Bluegrass Learning retweeted
My uncle fixed American warships for 41 years.
He was a welder at the US Navy base in Yokosuka. He started at 19. He barely spoke English. He didn't need to. He spoke steel.
Destroyers. Cruisers. An aircraft carrier, more times than he can count. If a ship in the Seventh Fleet had a seam, there's a decent chance my uncle welded it.
He never met most of the sailors who sailed on them. He just knew they came home safe. Because the seams held.
Last spring, he retired.
He expected a cake in the break room. Maybe a certificate.
Instead, when he walked out of the shop on his last day, there were sailors lined up on both sides of the pier. In dress uniform.
A boatswain raised a whistle to his lips.
My uncle had no idea what was happening. Someone had to explain it to him later.
In the US Navy, when a sailor retires after a long career, they "pipe him ashore." Sideboys line up. The whistle sounds. Everyone salutes.
It's an honor the Navy gives its own.
They gave it to a Japanese welder.
My uncle walked between them slowly. Every few steps, he stopped and bowed. They held their salute the entire time.
At the end of the line, the captain shook his hand and said something my uncle didn't understand.
That night, he asked me to translate it.
"Fair winds and following seas."
He made me write it down in Japanese letters, so he could say it right.
Now, every time we leave his house, he walks us to the door and says the only English sentence he knows by heart.
"Fair winds and following seas."
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
If someone asks you how much a single family's life is worth to the United States Navy, tell them the exact price: ten million dollars of steel.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon fell, a tiny two-seat wooden-and-fabric Cessna plane with almost no fuel left circled desperately above the American aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Inside that tiny cockpit, a father named Major Buang-Ly had crammed his wife and five small children, including a baby. He scribbled a note on a map, wrapped it around his pistol so it would not blow into the ocean, and dropped it onto the carrier deck.
A young American sailor picked up the crumpled paper and ran it up to Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The note read: "Can you move these helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child."
The flight deck of the USS Midway was completely jammed from bow to stern with military helicopters. A Cessna has no tailhook to catch carrier wires, and its pilot had never landed on a ship in his life.
By every military regulation, Captain Chambers had been in command for only five weeks. Throwing millions of dollars of U.S. government aircraft into the sea without permission from Washington could end his career in a court-martial.
Chambers looked up at the tiny plane circling in the wind with five children inside. He did not call an accountant in Washington.
"Clear the deck," the captain ordered.
Hundreds of young American sailors in yellow and green jerseys ran to the edge of the ship, put their shoulders against massive Huey helicopters, and shoved ten million dollars worth of machinery straight off the cliff into the South China Sea.
Captain Chambers turned the giant carrier into the wind at twenty-five knots. The tiny Cessna came down, bounced once on the steel runway, and rolled to a safe stop with feet to spare.
When the cockpit door opened and five small children stepped out onto the deck, three thousand American sailors roared so loud it drowned out the engines, and immediately passed around a hat to collect cash for the family's new life in America.
When the math says a child's life is too expensive, an American throws the math into the ocean.
🤖 Made with AI
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
Im not shre people realize how terrible math instruction is right now
No drills. No memorization of math facts. No direct instruction, modeling, or practice
Lots of “curiosity” and “exploration” to build “math confidence”
Essentially, kids are left to just figure it out
100% accurate. I see students who think they’re doing just fine because they “got an A…” in a class they probably should have failed.
Extra credit, endless test retakes or test corrections, bonus points for anything and everything NOT related to mastering the material: We’re finding any way to improve grades… as long as it doesn’t require demonstrating that they’ve learned anything.
We’re lying to our kids and it will catch up to them at some point. Maybe in their next high school class, maybe in a 1st year college class, or maybe in their first job… but they will have to pay the price eventually.
3 years ago I had a student struggling with math. Her grades were great, but she had a low ACT score. That’s a big red flag that she hadn’t actually learned much.
I was seeing her for weekly tutoring and we were making progress. Slow progress, because she was so far behind, but progress none the less.
After months of work on prior years material, her current class, and her ACT, she was beginning to understand how the A’s she had “earned” weren’t an accurate reflection of what she knew… and she wanted to fix it. But the lure of easy ways to improve her grade was too strong.
She emailed one morning, to cancel her tutoring session scheduled later that afternoon. Her exam in “honors algebra II” was the next day. She canceled her MATH tutoring session, the day before a big test, because her MATH teacher was offering extra credit for attending the schools SOCCER game that evening.
She could get 10 extra points on her exam by showing up to an afterschool event. She believed that made more sense than coming to tutoring…. And i can’t say she was wrong.
We might have found her an extra 5 points with one final hour of tutoring before her midterm. Or she could get 10 points by hanging out with her friends that night.
She chose to go to the game and I don’t really blame her. At 17 years old I would have probably made the same decision.
If she chose differently, and came to tutoring, that girl would have gone into the test with a better understanding of the material, and probably ended up with a lower grade.
The incentive structure was broken.
Her math teacher gave her a choice that involved no learning. He sabotaged her opportunity with the promise of an easier path.
I don’t blame her for taking it.
It’s maddening and it needs to stop.
One of the more insidious effects of grade inflation is that it allows students who aren’t doing well to believe the lie that they are.
And it delays the pain of failure so that it happens when the stakes are higher than they are within the walls of the school.
It isn’t compassion to allow a student an inflated sense of self, only for it to come crashing down when they enter the real world where the consequences are real pain and not just a disappointing letter on a piece of paper.
Grade inflation is wrong because it is lying, and lying is wrong, no matter the motives of the person lying.
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
The teacher who gives a failing grade has to explain it to the student, the parents, and the principal.
The teacher who gives everyone an A has a quiet weekend.
Still confused about how grade inflation has gotten so bad?
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
I hand out my reading grade level tests like candy.
Many parents are surprised in a bad way. It only takes a few minutes.
thephonicspage.org/gradeleve…
Same beef with so many writing assignments I see. Every prompt students bring in is full of “how do YOU feel…” “explain how this impacts YOU…” “What would YOU do…” and every paper they write is full of I’s, me’s, and mine’s. It’s narcissistic navel gazing at its finest. Just once I’d like to see a prompt that asks students to step outside themselves and consider the thoughts, opinions, values, positions of others…🤷♂️
I don’t understand so many teachers’ impulse to put into the hands of teenagers only books that explore the thoughts of fictional teenagers who are in circumstances that closely mirror their own.
One of the chief pleasures of literature is being introduced to someone who’s been dead for two hundred years and has something considerably more interesting to say than you do.
We should not encourage kids to think that their own quotidian and provincial thoughts are the pinnacle of what’s important in the world. They should read the masters and realize how small they are, and how large they can aspire to be.
Agreed. There’s a reason Hemingway is considered great. He could convey deep meaning and complex emotion with simple, direct writing. That’s a gift.
My personal pet peeve is reading a “letter from the principal” or other district communication to parents, and it sounds like they pulled it straight from their doctoral dissertation. So many of those could be re-written at a 5th grade level, with no loss meaning, and be much more accessible to their audience.
There’s a time and place for complex language, and a letter home to mom and dad, or an informational post on a district website, isn’t it.
Tina is getting a lot of pushback on this post… but she isn’t wrong. There’s a reason metro Nashville is about to receive a colonoscopy from the TN dept of ed, who has announced a full scale investigation into the districts grading policies.
It’s morally wrong to give a child a higher grade than they’ve earned. A handful of teachers and administrators in Nashville had the courage to step forward and raise the issue, often at great personal cost.
We need more of that courage nationwide. Raising a students grades to keep parents or anyone else happy and silent is an ethical violation. It might make life easier for the adults in the moment, but it’s a a disservice to children and should be seen as wholly unacceptable, if not shameful.
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
The relationship is one of the clearest I've ever seen. Colleges where entering classes have higher SAT/ACT scores have higher completion rates.
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
reasons to read old books:
1. definitely not written by AI
2. written by people who were NOT doomscrolling
3. written for readers who were expected to have long attention spans
4. will give you useful points-of-view that have been forgotten
5. vetted by time
6. will give you access to words, arguments, and ideas that are unavailable in the current discourse
7. will give you a panoramic historical view of what changes across time, and what does not
8. if you're an artist, old books will enrich your set of creative references
9. old books free you from the gravitational pull of the Current Thing
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
Nobody seems to grasp that the college student low math problem requires addressing what's going on for 8-9 year olds.
Absolutely. After working with over a thousand students at our tutoring center in the past 12 years, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen TWO students who have what I would agree is “test anxiety”. Hundreds more who claim it.
The two students had a few things in common. They were anxious about the test WEEKS or even months in advance, almost to the point of being non-functioning.
They also over-prepared, asking for extra practice materials and constantly feeling like they weren’t doing enough to be ready. They would study for hours, 7 days a week.
And they did this because of internal pressures, not because I or their parents were pressuring them to do better. Often just the opposite, where everyone was telling them it wasn’t THAT important.
On test day, those students are experiencing physical reactions like breaking out in a rash or hyperventilating on the drive to the test. They’re a wreck, even though they’ve over prepared.
The vast majority of the other students claiming test anxiety are waking up the morning of the test fully aware they didn’t do what they needed to do to be prepared. Now they’re anxious about the inevitable.
They are NERVOUS because they know a bill is about to come due and realize they can’t avoid it anymore. I wouldn’t call that test anxiety🤷♂️
To clarify: test anxiety is not some new distinct mental condition. It's just your body's natural nervousness. Being nervous before a test is normal. And it's not the reason why students aren't performing well in school or on standardized tests today.
I'm commenting on the trend to use "test anxiety" to excuse poor performance rather than addressing the real issue, which is missing fundamental knowledge and lack of practice.
There are people who really suffer with anxiety, which is why I said "largely" in the first sentence. However, the widespread use of "I'm just not a good test taker" to wave away poor performance is what I'm commenting on.
No, that many student are not "just bad test takers." They have adopted that identity because the adults around them have fed them that nonsensical view rather than truly investigating how they could help the child with their knowledge gaps.
Every time someone is dismissing poor test scores and they say “we shouldn’t test a fish on its ability to climb a tree…”, I want them to define the fish and tree in their scenario: Are you talking about poor rural white kids and reading? Inner city minorities and basic math? Who is the fish in your scenario and what’s this “tree” you think is too difficult for them to climb?
Kids don’t do well on the graduation test? Abolish the test requirement.
This reminds me of a conversation i had a few years ago with a district administrator. He said his students were unable to read an analog clock, but it was ok because they figured out a solution: replace them all, so each classroom had a digital clock.🤦♂️
A certain tech company had such horrible working conditions at a plant in China, the workers were climbing to the roof and jumping off to their deaths. They made sure to inform the press that the problem was fixed: by installing “suicide nets” to catch anyone who tried it again.
These aren’t solutions. It’s abdicating responsibility for the problem and giving up, admitting there’s no willingness (or ability?) to fix the underlying issue.
It’s cowardly. Whatever problem you face today, don’t be a coward.
