The opposite extreme from Tokyo
ifignow
Declan Murphy
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
Shirley the opposite extreme would be a "one student school" in Japan.
There is bound to be one somewhere, I've read about at least 10 schools
with fewer than 10 students. What is the smallest school in Japan? On an
island in the setonaikai p'raps?
Oh and the article for those without a subscription would be sumthin
like this.....
**********************************************************
In Some Schools, It's One Teacher, One Student
By SAM DILLON
Published: January 19, 2004
ROCK RIVER, Wyo. -- Tucked high up in the snow-swept Laramie Mountains
sits a public school with just one young teacher, Rebecca Rodgers, and
her lone student, Joe Kennedy, a seventh grader.
Cozy Hollow Elementary is the best way Wyoming authorities have found to
educate Joe, whose family owns a hardscrabble cattle ranch. The nearest
larger school lies 40 miles down a gravel road that blizzards often
render impassable.
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"It was awkward at the beginning," Mrs. Rodgers said, so much so that
when classes began last fall Joe was not sure whether to raise his hand
to ask questions or just speak up. Mrs. Rodgers urged the latter.
"Now it feels pretty good," Joe said. "There's nobody else to bug us."
Cozy Hollow Elementary is unusual but not unique, although nobody seems
to track precisely how many single-student schools there are across the
nation. Wyoming has three, Nebraska six, Montana two. North Dakota has one.
The challenges of educating students in rural states from Maine to
Alaska are enormous. They include attracting young teachers to truly
remote places, supervising their work and finding ways to prepare
students like Joe, raised in isolation, for the bustle of college campuses.
The tiny school at Cozy Hollow, about 100 miles northwest of Cheyenne,
is one way educators teach children who live on far-flung ranches and
Indian reservations. Wyoming, America's least populous state, is
experimenting with other strategies, too. Flush with revenues from rich
coal and gas reserves, the state has spent $24 million to install
instructional video cameras in each of its 76 high schools, Trent
Blankenship, Wyoming's superintendent of public instruction, said in an
interview. The state hopes the cameras can help bring advanced courses
like calculus and astronomy to schools that may have only a few dozen
students, Mr. Blankenship said.
But for all the technological advances, flesh-and-blood elementary
teachers like Mrs. Rodgers, 23, are still a critical link in the
educational chain.
Just out of teachers college, she keeps the school day businesslike when
it begins sharply at 8 a.m., after Joe has fed the horses, walked past
the corral to the school and taken his seat. She marches him through a
traditional schedule of 45-minute periods, with the early morning
devoted to the three R's.
Mrs. Rodgers lives with her husband, a graduate student in astronomy, in
a trailer attached to a second trailer that serves as Joe's classroom,
but this is not home schooling. She is a certified public school
teacher; her annual salary is $25,720. Joe must pass the same
standardized tests that bedevil urban students.
In the Albany County No. 1 School District in southeastern Wyoming, the
job of supervising Mrs. Rodgers's work falls to Charles Cashman,
principal of the 120-student Rock River School, who set out the other
day in his 1998 Chevy Blazer for the 40-mile trip to Cozy Hollow. A few
miles down a two-lane blacktop, he turned east onto a gravel road
leading through sagebrush and grasslands rising toward the Laramie
Mountains.
Test scores show that the individual instruction at tiny rural schools
is extremely effective, Mr. Cashman said, eyeing a herd of Black Angus
as a golden eagle soared overhead.
"But you better hope you get a match between the student, teacher and
family, because if you don't, it can be miserable," he said.
At midjourney, Mr. Cashman used a two-way radio to call ahead,
announcing his visit. "KT216 to the Kennedy ranch, Joyce or Gene, can
you hear me?" he asked.
He could not establish contact, and an hour later he pulled into the
ranch and braked to a stop in front of the school. Inside he found Mrs.
Rodgers and her student seated across from each other, engrossed in a
math lesson. Joe correctly calculated the height of a tree, based on the
length of its shadow.
"Good job, that's awesome," Mrs. Rodgers said. "Now let's go for some
geography."
Joe read aloud from a textbook about how experts divide the world into
regions, based on political, linguistic and other criteria. He read
fluidly, but stumbled on the word spiritual, pronouncing it "serpital"
until corrected.
There was time for a lesson on genetics and heredity before Mrs. Rodgers
dismissed Joe for lunch. At the ranch house, he sat at a table where his
father, his mother, his uncle, Mr. Cashman and a reporter were passing
around steaming platters of roast beef, baked potatoes and peas.
Talk turned to the early 1900's, when Joe's great-grandfather
homesteaded the ranch, which now sprawls across 50 square miles.
Children from ranches in the area, including Joe's forebears, have been
educated at Cozy Hollow since the school's founding in the early 1930's.
Joe shared a teacher with older brothers and cousins until fall 2002,
when they moved on to regional high schools.
If schools like Cozy Hollow are a rich part of Wyoming history, the
state appears likely to rely on technology in the future to help educate
rural students.
The other day John Tinnin, a math teacher based at the Kaycee High
School in north central Wyoming, was teaching calculus to seven students
there. Also participating -- listening and watching on video monitors and
occasionally asking questions -- were 10 students at three high schools
separated by hundreds of miles of mountain roads.
Mr. Tinnin congratulated Jim Harlan, a Kaycee student, for using an
unorthodox approach to solve a calculus problem involving what are known
as the Fibonacci numbers. A moment later, he urged a student at Lyman
High School, 360 miles to the southwest, to pay attention.
"Jenn, you look bored to death," Mr. Tinnin said, to the chuckles of
students spread across western Wyoming.
Cozy Hollow Elementary has no video hookup, but it is not primitive. A
satellite dish provides a high-speed Internet connection, and after his
return from lunch, Joe took a seat to practice touch-typing on a new
Apple PowerBook.
The school has no science laboratory, however. For a biology exercise
last fall, Joe collected a horse hair and a fleck of manure from the
ranch yard, and Mrs. Rodgers arranged a visit to Rock River so he could
view them under a microscope.
One reason for making the trip, Mrs. Rodgers said, was to give Joe time
with other students.
"So far my best friends are cows," he said, only half joking. On a visit
to Rock River in his sixth-grade year, he said, he met a nice
fifth-grade girl. He looked for her eagerly during his most recent visit
to the school, but she was gone.
"I'm thinking she moved to Laramie," he said. "I was kind of hoping she
wouldn't. I wish I had her phone number."
When the school day ended at 3 p.m., Joe joined the men in the corral,
where they were slaughtering a cow in a freezing wind. He drove a
tractor with a front-end loader across a pasture to deposit the cow's
entrails on a bone pile.
Mrs. Rodgers lingered for a time in her classroom.
"I like the one-on-one thing," she said. "I get to know what Joe finds
hard and what's easy. But being isolated out here is a big wake-up call.
There are no other teachers to talk to."
--
I am not who I think I am
I am not who you think I am
I am who I think you think I am
...or some such shite.
Fabian
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
Care to tell us what that's about for those of us who don't want to
provide any details to Uncle Sam? Bet you didn't know that it is now
legal for the FBI to take a list of who has been visiting that site (or
any US based site). True, you say, you can give false details, but there
is still the ip address.
I refuse to give any data to the Bush administration. If you want any
discussion about that, tell us what it is. I believe cut and paste of a
single article for academic discussion is within the bounds of fair use.
--
--
Fabian
Visit my website often and for long periods!
http://www.lajzar.co.uk
ifignow
"Fabian" <laj...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:bufsf1$h5psh$1...@ID-174912.news.uni-berlin.de...
> ifignow hu kiteb:
> Care to tell us what that's about for those of us who don't want to
> provide any details to Uncle Sam? Bet you didn't know that it is now
> legal for the FBI to take a list of who has been visiting that site (or
> any US based site). True, you say, you can give false details, but there
> is still the ip address.
How do you know they aren't already listening to your phone conversations?
>I refuse to give any data to the Bush administration. If you want any
discussion about that, tell us what it is.
I could, but then I'd have to kill your entire family first.
Fabian
> "Fabian" <laj...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:bufsf1$h5psh$1...@ID-174912.news.uni-berlin.de...
>> ifignow hu kiteb:
>> Care to tell us what that's about for those of us who don't want to
>> provide any details to Uncle Sam? Bet you didn't know that it is now
>> legal for the FBI to take a list of who has been visiting that site
>> (or any US based site). True, you say, you can give false details,
>> but there is still the ip address.
>
> How do you know they aren't already listening to your phone
> conversations?
They don't yet have a law specifically permitting that action. Not that
that is proof against such a thing of course, but at least it is still
recognised that it would be illegal for them to do that.
> I could, but then I'd have to kill your entire family first.
Declan gave the info for a better price - your entire family.
Thanks again, Declan.
Declan Murphy
> Declan gave the info for a better price - your entire family.
>
> Thanks again, Declan.
Dou itashimasite. I'll even forget to send you my usual invoice for
services rendered if you can let me know of a good Maltese beer (well,
even if it sucks to be honest) that I will try to stock (assuming its
available in Japan) in my bar if I can lay my hands on the bloody thing.
Brett Robson
>
>ifignow wrote:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
>
>Shirley the opposite extreme would be a "one student school" in Japan.
>There is bound to be one somewhere, I've read about at least 10 schools
>with fewer than 10 students. What is the smallest school in Japan? On an
>island in the setonaikai p'raps?
>
Most classes here are 40.
(Benefits of the JET Programme)
.
----
someone who wants junk mail
in...@jpat.jp
Fabian
> Fabian wrote:
>
>> Declan gave the info for a better price - your entire family.
>>
>> Thanks again, Declan.
>
> Dou itashimasite. I'll even forget to send you my usual invoice for
> services rendered if you can let me know of a good Maltese beer (well,
> even if it sucks to be honest) that I will try to stock (assuming its
> available in Japan) in my bar if I can lay my hands on the bloody
> thing.
A good Maltese beer? Well, umm, there's only one. I'll leave it to you
as to whether it is a good one or not. The beer is called Cisk
(pronounced /tSIsk/), and it is a golden colour, and quite refreshing on
a hot summer's day, of which Malta has plenty.
http://www.farsonsbeerclub.com/recipes.htm should set you on the right
track.
Eric Takabayashi
> ifignow wrote:
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
>
> Shirley the opposite extreme would be a "one student school" in Japan.
> There is bound to be one somewhere, I've read about at least 10 schools
> with fewer than 10 students. What is the smallest school in Japan? On an
> island in the setonaikai p'raps?
Yes, for one woman on JET working out of the area near Akitsu, Hiroshima in
1993, one school was on an island with one student. When children reach junior
high, they must take the ferry somewhere else. And when that child becomes
junior high age, that school was to be closed down completely. On the JET
Program, my junior high school had directories of public schools in the
prefecture. I looked through it to see how small schools got. I've seen at
least one other school with just one student (don't remember name or where),
one principal, one vice principal (they had teaching duties), and one other
person to make the lunch.
> Oh and the article for those without a subscription would be sumthin
> like this.....
>
> **********************************************************
>
> In Some Schools, It's One Teacher, One Student
> By SAM DILLON
>
> Published: January 19, 2004
>
> ROCK RIVER, Wyo. -- Tucked high up in the snow-swept Laramie Mountains
> sits a public school with just one young teacher, Rebecca Rodgers, and
> her lone student, Joe Kennedy, a seventh grader.
Late last year was the British school advertising for a teacher for a single
pupil, and the stir it caused, postponing class, when a teacher was found.
--
http://www.mercycorps.org/
http://www.mercycorps.org/items/1398/
http://www.mercycorps.org/mercykits.php
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development of economic opportunities and civil society.
Efficiency
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High-Value
Every dollar you give helps us secure $12.71 in donated food and other
supplies.
Eric Takabayashi
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:15:45 +0900, Declan Murphy ...
> >
> >ifignow wrote:
> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
> >
> >Shirley the opposite extreme would be a "one student school" in Japan.
> >There is bound to be one somewhere, I've read about at least 10 schools
> >with fewer than 10 students. What is the smallest school in Japan? On an
> >island in the setonaikai p'raps?
>
> Most classes here are 40.
Where I worked, the local BOE made the upper limit 36, and I hear team
teaching (Japanese teachers sharing duties in a single classroom) is
catching on.
> (Benefits of the JET Programme)
--
Declan Murphy
Grazzi hafna
Declan Murphy
Yeah I figured that. I was thinking more along the lines of
elementary/primary schools in remote areas (my high school in Parramatta
had an average class size of 37, the elementary/primary school in my
mother's hometown has a total enrollment of less than that - since the
population of the entire town is about 35)
Declan Murphy
> Declan Murphy wrote:
>
>>ifignow wrote:
>>
>>>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
>>
>>Shirley the opposite extreme would be a "one student school" in Japan.
>>There is bound to be one somewhere, I've read about at least 10 schools
>>with fewer than 10 students. What is the smallest school in Japan? On an
>>island in the setonaikai p'raps?
>
> Yes, for one woman on JET working out of the area near Akitsu, Hiroshima in
> 1993, one school was on an island with one student. When children reach junior
> high, they must take the ferry somewhere else. And when that child becomes
> junior high age, that school was to be closed down completely. On the JET
> Program, my junior high school had directories of public schools in the
> prefecture. I looked through it to see how small schools got. I've seen at
> least one other school with just one student (don't remember name or where),
> one principal, one vice principal (they had teaching duties), and one other
> person to make the lunch.
For elementary school levels I thinks its appropriate enuff. When the
needs of early childhood are taken into full account the cost to the
taxpayer is more or less irrelevant.
ifignow
> ifignow hu kiteb:
> They don't yet have a law specifically permitting that action. Not that
> that is proof against such a thing of course, but at least it is still
> recognised that it would be illegal for them to do that.
Let the foreign masses think what they want.
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
> ifignow hu kiteb:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
> I refuse to give any data to the Bush administration. If you want any
I'm confused: I thought the NY Times was a Librul paper. Therefore,
you'd be giving data to Hillary, or Howard Dean.
Mike
Fabian
Check out the details in the Patriot act.
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
> mtfe...@netMAPSONscape.net hu kiteb:
>> Fabian <laj...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> ifignow hu kiteb:
>>
>>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html
>>
>>> I refuse to give any data to the Bush administration. If you want any
>>
>> I'm confused: I thought the NY Times was a Librul paper. Therefore,
>> you'd be giving data to Hillary, or Howard Dean.
> Check out the details in the Patriot act.
OK, checked out. Now, what does that have to do with anything (since you
seem to be taking this much more seriously than necessary)
Mike
Jean-Marc Desperrier
> ifignow hu kiteb:
>>How do you know they aren't already listening to your phone
>>conversations?
>
> They don't yet have a law specifically permitting that action. Not that
> that is proof against such a thing of course, but at least it is still
> recognised that it would be illegal for them to do that.
You mean that whole echelon thingy is illegal ?
ifignow
"Jean-Marc Desperrier" <jmd...@alussinan.org> wrote in message
news:buir17$hak$1...@reader1.imaginet.fr...
> You mean that whole echelon thingy is illegal ?
Of course, Fabian is too ignorant to realize that it is the NSA that spies
on foreigners, not the FBI. The NSA spies on non-Americans, as do Canadian
and British intelligence agencies spy on the USA. Since all agencies
involved are forbidden from spying on their own citizens, they circumvent
the rule by trading information with one another. Behind the scenes, the
NSA has been quite helpful to European law enforcement agencies.
Fabian
> "Jean-Marc Desperrier" <jmd...@alussinan.org> wrote in message
> news:buir17$hak$1...@reader1.imaginet.fr...
>> You mean that whole echelon thingy is illegal ?
>
> Of course, Fabian is too ignorant to realize that it is the NSA that
> spies on foreigners, not the FBI. The NSA spies on non-Americans, as
> do Canadian and British intelligence agencies spy on the USA.
I don't care. It is all part of teh US spy network. I trust you'll note
that I did not specify opposition to giving data the FBI specifically,
but to all US intelligence agencies. In any case, suppose the FBI gets
my data. Are they really going to say oops he's a foreigner. best just
to throw that bit of data away. I doubt it.
> Since
> all agencies involved are forbidden from spying on their own
> citizens,
Blatantly not true for the USA, given the details of Patriot. And I'm
not aware of any other nation ever claiming not to spy on its own
citizens.
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
Nonsense. The US Gummint has contracted out all of this. Microsoft XP does
the spying.
Mike
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
> ifignow hu kiteb:
>> "Jean-Marc Desperrier" <jmd...@alussinan.org> wrote in message
>> news:buir17$hak$1...@reader1.imaginet.fr...
>>> You mean that whole echelon thingy is illegal ?
>>
>> Of course, Fabian is too ignorant to realize that it is the NSA that
>> spies on foreigners, not the FBI. The NSA spies on non-Americans, as
>> do Canadian and British intelligence agencies spy on the USA.
> I don't care. It is all part of teh US spy network. I trust you'll note
> that I did not specify opposition to giving data the FBI specifically,
> but to all US intelligence agencies. In any case, suppose the FBI gets
> my data. Are they really going to say oops he's a foreigner. best just
> to throw that bit of data away. I doubt it.
What makes you think they don't already HAVE all the data you'd enter
on the form?
Mike
ifignow
> ifignow hu kiteb:
> I don't care. It is all part of teh US spy network. I trust you'll note
> that I did not specify opposition to giving data the FBI specifically,
> but to all US intelligence agencies. In any case, suppose the FBI gets
> my data. Are they really going to say oops he's a foreigner. best just
> to throw that bit of data away. I doubt it.
Well then, you should plan your escape routes when they start making mass
arrests of foreigners who read the new york times. (g)
> Blatantly not true for the USA, given the details of Patriot. And I'm
> not aware of any other nation ever claiming not to spy on its own
> citizens.
The Patriot Act merely expanded the domestic powers of the FBI. The NSA
remains forbidden from spying on Americans. But as you say, that is too
sophisticated a point for you.
ifignow
<mtfe...@netMAPSONscape.net> wrote in message
news:bukhns$24c$1...@news.Stanford.EDU...
> Nonsense. The US Gummint has contracted out all of this. Microsoft XP does
> the spying.
That's right, there are little green aliens with your social security number
tattooed on their foreheads, living inside your computer.
ifignow
"SuperOutland" <supero...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:e91ad9af.04020...@posting.google.com...
> The US has been spying on its own people (phone calls and
> computers)for some time now. Apparantly you ahven't heard of project
> echelon. PATRIOT ACT just made it official, but i suppose a godie two
> shoes liek you will say NO THE GOVERNMENT WOUDL ENVER DO THAT THEY ARE
> SO NICE AND BENEVOLENT AND NON CORRUPTIBLE!!!!
Keep going, you're attracting their attention.