Rising gas prices change the school experience

For students, a new school year means adapting to new things—a new grade, new teachers, new classrooms, and new subjects. But this year, there could be one more thing to learn to deal with: the elimination of school fieldtrips.

Like peanut butter sandwiches in lunch bags, school fieldtrips are going the way of the dodo. However, the death of fieldtrips has nothing to do with food allergies or even with the safety of students. School boards across the US are considering banning—or have already banned—fieldtrips due to rising gas prices.

For most schools districts, a virtual fleet of yellow school buses are involved in transporting students to and from the classroom. Schools have a hard enough time coping with funding issues and budget problems without an even bigger portion of their meager budgets going to cover the cost of school buses for extracurricular fieldtrips.

Funding issues have already hit schools hard resulting in decreased numbers of teachers, lower salaries, and crowded classrooms. As well, athletics and extracurricular programs are getting the axe.

A survey of school boards by the American Association of School Administrators shows that ninety-nine percent of schools surveyed felt that rising gas prices had an impact on their school.

Some school boards are even considering switching to a four-day school week to help deal with the rising cost of fuel. A shorter school week would decrease fuel costs associated with transportation, heating and cooling, and energy consumption.

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Are wired classrooms changing the way that students learn?

Chalkboards, one room school houses, apples for the teacher, walking to school, using both sides of the paper, desks with flip open tops, writing with pencils right down to the nub…there is something in the air during back to school time that prompts nostalgic thoughts of academia.

All those images of schooldays persist as icons of academia, even though not a single one of the items in the list above is used in a modern classroom—they are nothing more than relics, quaint memories from educational history.

My, how education has changed! Now the chalkboard is nothing more than a relic of classrooms past. Today’s classrooms are wired, interactive, and media-rich. Gone are the chalkboards and the notebooks; in their places are digital displays and laptops.

But have these new technological teaching tools helped or hindered the way that kids learn in the classroom? Multi-media visual tools have certainly improved the scope of a teacher’s lesson preparation and delivery. Teachers can teach a lesson all while showing resources, three-dimensional mind maps, color images, video clips and every possible resource available to help drive home the message of the lesson. But, has technology in the classroom limited the scope of how far a student’s brain has to stretch to understand that lesson?

Is too much technology doing the hard work for students—the visualizing, the imagining? Is it making it so that students don’t have to rely on their brains to make the necessary connections? They don’t have to fill in the gaps or do the mental legwork to understand so that they can have the “A-Ha!” moments of true understanding. They don’t have to extend their mental capacities beyond what they see in front of them, because it was all there for them, all laid out in full-color and pretty pictures. Why remember the answer when you can just Google it?

Consider classrooms of the past: with little or no high tech tools, great thinkers made important intellectual leaps using nothing but brain power…no word processors to fill in words as they typed great dissertations, no spell check, no computers to help them fill in the gaps. If they could accomplish these tasks with no help, shouldn’t today’s students be able to as well?

The irony here is that chalkboards, in their day, actually revolutionized the classroom. They made it possible for the teacher to teach multiple students at once using visual aids. It was the first time teachers could write a message and have all students see it.

Chalkboards haven’t disappeared from classrooms just yet. They are still there at the front of many classrooms—sometimes hidden behind projector screens—a quaint reminder of the way things used to be.

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Oxford Learning students are helping children in Uganda tell malaria-infected mosquitoes to buzz off by raising funds for BUY-A-NET, a charitable organization that supplies bed netting and medicines to families in Africa.

BUY-A-NET is a volunteer organization based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada that provides World Health Organization (WHO) approved mosquito nets to families in Uganda. For many children in Africa, the basic comforts of life are a luxury. Millions of families live in such extreme conditions of poverty that they are unable to purchase to a simple bed net to prevent to prevent infected insects from biting.

Malaria is a life-threatening parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes. It kills an African child every 30 seconds. Those who don’t die form the illness can have lasting learning impairments. (WHO: Roll Back Malaria) Yet, Malaria is highly treatable and preventable.

Oxford Learning students have been raising funds for BUY-A-NET by participating in read-a-thons and other fundraisers such as art auctions.

So far Oxford Learning has provided the funds to purchase enough bedding nets to supply multiple villages!

If you would like to support BUY-A-NET with a donation, please visit BUY-A-NET’s website.

Oxford Learning students in Kingston, ON raise funds for
BUY-A-NET with an art action.

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A look at multitasking from both sides of the coin…

What is multitasking anyway? Is multitasking good or bad for us? Multitasking is one of those topics that we never seem to be able to decide on. Is it a positive attribute to boast about on resumes, or is it a risky habit that is harmful to those with attention issues? Is there areas in life—at home, in the office, in the classroom—where multitasking is OK, and others areas where it is not? Sure, multitasking can help us accomplish multiple items on a to-do list, but does doing multiple things at the same time affect our ability to do those tasks well?

And what about where students are concerned? Doing multiple tasks at a time must influence how they learn and the information that they retain…or does it?

Let’s take a look at multitasking from a pro-con approach:

The PROs of Multitasking:

1. It is easy to switch mental focus when doing simple tasks, allowing people to do multiple things at once. For example: at home, talking on the phone while making dinner and sweeping the floor; At work, listening to radio, writing an email, talking on the phones.
2. Multitasking can help you learn how to deal with distractions and interruptions—because life doesn’t stop happening just because you are busy.
3. Multitasking allows progress on multiple tasks, even if the progress is minimal. Helps move several projects/chores/assignments toward a single deadline.
4. Multitasking helps you develop the ability to cope when there is lots of commotion going on around you. It helps develop the ability to filter out the excess.
5. Society is continually more and more technologically wired. The ability to use multiple technologies simultaneously will keep people of all ages with adaptable, relevant, and employable.
6. When deadlines loom at the office and in the classroom, it is better to complete portions of all tasks, than to only complete one. In the classroom, part marks add up to better grades than no marks at all.

The CONs Of Multitasking:

1. Tasks that require deeper concentration are more difficult to switch between. Research shows that the actual act of switching between two things actually takes longer mentally. That’s because our brain assigns rules to how we do something, and switching between tasks means closing one set of rules and opening another.
2. Interruptions—a ringing phone, the chime of an instant message—can disrupt train of thought making it difficult to return to the original task.
3. Multitasking often results in busywork—doing a lot, but accomplishing nothing. Whether in the office or in the classroom multitasking creates a drop in efficiency.
4. Constant distractions can lead to frustration and loss of attention. Instead of accomplishing much, very little gets done. Interruptions are especially difficult for children who have attention deficiencies and are only just learning how to activate their internal filtering mechanisms.
5. The more technologically savvy we become, the less we tend to use basic, old-fashioned social skills. Some companies are even a taking an anti-technology stance and implementing email-free days to force employees to develop improved problem solving and teamwork.
6. Instead of using technology as tool to multitask, it is used as a distraction. What would appear to be multitasking is really procrastination. Ideally, multi-tasking should accomplish many tasks simultaneously but instead many projects end up half complete.
7. The brain is the ultimate multitasker. It computes millions of message from neurons at a single time. But just like any other muscle, it can be taxed and get tired. Known as executive function, the brain’s ability to make multiple decisions can easily tire it out thus making it a less-effective decision maker.

This list is by no means complete, but, at this point, it seems that the cons of multitasking are just a little bit more heavily-weighted than the pros. As educators, Oxford Learning advocates that students, especially those with attention issues focus on a single thing at a time—at least until they develop the ability to filter out distractions and learn how to focus.

What do you think?

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A list in fives

5 things to do for your BODY this summer:

1. Climb a tree
2. Swim in a lake
3. Go for a hike
4. Ride a bike
5. Get a good night’s sleep every night

Five things to do for your BRAIN this summer:

1. Read a classic novel
2. Learn five new words and use them as often as possible
3. Play games that challenge your mind
4. Keep a scrapbook of your daily activities and wildlife observations
5. Start a short story and add a new paragraph every day

5 things to learn and do TOGETHER as a family:

1. Learn the names of trees in your area
2. Start a collection of rocks or seashells or anything that you can collect together
3. Identify birds that you commonly see
4. Learn how to tie a knot
5. Take a hike at a new trail

5 things to do this summer to Get Ready for the next school year:

1. Establish a back-to-school routine. Begin following school day bedtimes and morning routines well in advance of back to school for an easy transition back to the classroom.
2. Turn off the TV. Research has shown that watching TV before bed over-stimulates the brain and prevents sleep.
3. Get organized. Time management is a learned skill, not acquired one. Use a family calendar to stay on top of appointments and schedules all summer long.
4. Keep reading. Reading continually improves reading comprehension skills and develops vocabulary.
5. Don’t run on autopilot. With school closed for the summer, kids can easily fall behind. To prevent this, kids should engage in some sort of learning or other mentally stimulating activity throughout the summer to keep their minds sharp and always ready to learn.

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