Full staff inservice

Full staff inservice today at Nome Elementary School downtown. What a nice building. Much better than the Bremerton Junior High.

It started with a native elder giving some words of wisdom and an invocation. It was actually a Christian invocation. He did have a cross on his necklace, yet he was talking about native ways and traditions in the classroom. Years ago, the teachers wouldn't let natives speak anything but English in an attempt to Americanize them. Apparently, they didn't understand the concept of America back then.

Then we had to sit through a presentation by the testing company that Nome Public Schools hired. His technological presentation didn't work several times so that doesn't instill confidence in a new tech system. However, it sounds like a good idea. Test the kids at the beginning of the year to see where the kid is by grade level and reading/language usage/math skills. They have fancy numbers for all of this known as the RIT score from between 150 to 300, then you take that and go find a book within a certain Lexile range (a completely different number but the Lexile is apparently used by Library of Congress, or so I'm told). I'm sure I'll talk about this some other time. The major aspect of it that I like is that I am not relying on very old WASL numbers for student placement. In Bremerton, when teaching ninth and tenth graders, the district was relying on a student's seventh grade WASL score. Not exactly current info.

Funny, I see that the one Isaac Asimov story about the kids getting taught by a robot instructor in their own home, reminiscing about the stories their grandfather told them of actual humans teaching. I could draw a correlation to that with this.

One amazing tidbit that shows we are still on a sort-of frontier is that the district ordered some new computers but they're stuck in Anchorage due to weather conditions. They either have to fly or barge everything in to Nome, Alaska, as NO ROADS LEAD TO NOME. The days of the fog stopped planes for days, and then you get no US Mail either.