There will be no meeting this coming Monday, April 2nd. However, there will be a meeting the following Monday. See you all then.
-Seth Pearce

On Friday Feb. 23 Dana, Kathryn, Laura and Noah and I participated in a summit on the high school dropout rate at Baruch college. A lot of interesting ideas were presented about how to reduce the dropout rate in regard to what goes on inside th classroom. Here are a few that I found especially interesting.
These were created in response to a Gates survey which cited boredom as the highest cause of high school drop outs nation wide.

IMPROVING TEACHING
In the business-model for education there is a lot of emphasis on test prep, lectures and mounds of homework. These are important for students to succeed on standardized tests and have been thought to increase graduation rates but as we have seen this is not the case. The negative, isolating effects of these methods could very well be the cause of students feeling that they can’t go on with going to school every day. The issue of making classes more accessible to students is an important part of the Campaign Against Student Apathy.
Some solutions to this problem that were offered at the summit included:
-Interactive Teaching methods
-More project based learning, less test based learning
-more discussion, less lecture
- simulations
-presentations
-learning through experiences (i.e. seeing how what you are learning affects the real world)

AND MY FAVORITE SOLUTION OF ALL:
-Make class time work time: Less reliance on homework.

This way teachers can help students work through problems and ideas and really help teach them how to learn and how to solve problems rather than throwing work on top of them and MAYBE commenting when they are done. I’m a junior getting ready for the English regents and I’ve got to say, I still get really nervous when I have to approach an essay.

This entry has gotten a little dense so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Hopefully dissecting these issues will help us come up with a comprehensive plan for CASA.
More to come on Guidance and extra-curricular solutions to the dropout problem.

–Seth Pearce

Just a reminder that we have a meeting on Monday at 5 at 50 Broadway.
Bring ideas for the Campaign Against Student Apathy. See you on monday.