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Advertising Rate: 2009 Introductory Promo

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:54:00 +0000

2009 Introductory Price:

For a limited period, we are giving out advertisements all for free!

The introductory rate was lowered but we got crazy and now you can have them at no cost! Imagine how much you can save!

You may opt to donate any amount ($1.00++) to support this website.

If you are interested send your email to director@ischoolbulletin.com or respond to this post.

Advertise Here

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:17:00 +0000

International School Bulletin has dynamic web advertising properties, it helps advertisers produce spectacular results from campaign related sponsorships, video promotion, creative banner advertising, promotions, contests and others.

Our website attracts users in International School community and your advertisement will be posted in different sections of our website.

We are offering free advertisement placement for a limited period of time only. If you are interested email director@ischoolbulletin.com.

You may opt to donate any amount ($1.00++) to support this website.

For future reference you may check our advertising rate at by folowing the link.

Be Our Guest Writer

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:07:00 +0000

In the past four years of my teaching career, I've met people with beautiful minds. They are the ones who inspired me to make this website. If you have these skills, want to inspire people and want to be heard, we are inviting you to write a guest article on International School Bulletin. Let our readers see your views and be part of our International School community. Read more about us.

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Showcase your talent and get additional guest blogging opportunities.

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Focus your topic - We talk everything about International School topic. Your professional experience, personal life as a teacher, as a parent or a student, anything!
Original unique content - not published on your blog or any other blog in original or any modified form.
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Your article will be reviewed, revised to suit the taste of our website and will go live within 1-3 days upon approval.

You may send your article to director@ischoolbulletin.com.

World Math Day makes learning fun

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:42:00 +0000

James A. Jones Jr.,
East Manatee editor

Just out of curiosity, I logged onto the World Math Day Web site Friday and was surprised to see that nine of the top 10 teams in the world were from Malaysia, and six of the nine top Malaysian teams were from Cempaka International School, an elite, private school.

The only other team to crack the top 10 was one from Turkey.

Then, I clicked onto the top students from around the world, expecting maybe to see China, Japan, Germany, and possibly a team from the United States. But, on the contrary, the top 10 students, in order, came from Australia, Turkey, Jordan, Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Australia and Indonesia.

Earlier in the week, I had dropped by Braden River Elementary School, and talked to several teachers and students. I found a lot of enthusiasm there for World Math Day.

Students logged onto worldmathday.com, and sought to be the fastest on the draw with math answers. They were competing on the Internet with students from more than 100 countries. And they were having fun doing it. Teachers reported vast improvement in a number of students to get ready for the competition.

I asked Joe MacNaughton, mathematics curriculum specialist for the Manatee County School District, to give me his off-the-cuff analysis late Friday.

MacNaughton zoomed in on so many of the top teams being from Cempaka International School, and wondered how much time teachers had spent getting their students ready.

A Bradenton Herald staff member familiar with Cempaka said that many of the students come from wealthy families or from diplomat families stationed in Malaysia.

So, precisely, what does World Math Day prove? Schools or students that scored at the top come away with some bragging rights, maybe.

But the bottom line is that the event injected fun and enthusiasm into an academic subject that’s not exactly known for engendering either.

And it came locally on top of a week that included Read Across Manatee and final preparations for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests that begin next week.

MacNaughton, a Palmetto native who majored in math in college, says that math can and should be fun.

There are lots of programs to combat illiteracy, the inability to read. There is also something to be said for combating the inability to add, subtract, divide and multiply.

“The worst thing a parent can do is say to their child, ‘Oh, I hate math.’ It builds in an excuse right away,” MacNaughton said.

MacNaughton’s parents weren’t sure why their children had the gift. Joe’s brother is an engineer.

“They always blamed it on the Legos,” MacNaughton said.

Schools adding foreign languages to curriculum

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:29:00 +0000

by: Arab News
Date Posted: March 6, 2009

RIYADH: The incorporation of foreign languages into the curriculum of schools and educational institutions across the Kingdom has increased following parents’ calls for better education for their children.

While the Ministry of Education continues to ban Saudis from joining international schools in the Kingdom, many parents opt to enroll their children in private schools that offer foreign language courses, particularly French and English.

Although everybody agrees on the importance of learning foreign languages and its pivotal role in people’s future and careers, there is disagreement over which age a child should start learning a second language.

Saudi educators encourage learning languages at a young age, saying children have a unique ability to acquire language skills and build first-rate verbal processing skills. Others, however, feel differently, arguing that learning several languages at once may impact a child’s ability to learn their mother tongue.

Abu Ibrahim, a private school owner, supports the teaching of foreign languages to young children, especially if the language is English, which he said is an international language. He considers age six to be the prime time for learning languages, as children possess strong learning abilities and are able to achieve fluency at such an age.

He, however, feels it is not absolute that a child who learns a second language would forget Arabic or become less committed to his or her identity and culture. He added that speaking multiple languages could ease communication between people of different background, especially in the work environment, which often comprises people of different cultures.

Mohammed Al-Otaibi, a teacher at the Ministry of Education, believes second languages should only be taught in high schools. “This would allow children to have time to learn their mother tongue, culture and Islamic principles — which is more important at this age,” he said.

Saleh Al-Thebity, a specialist in children’s literature, said learning another language does not mean giving up Arabic, especially if the curriculum is balanced.

He explained that the reason many schools in the Kingdom have incorporated foreign languages in their curricula is that Saudis in general have a weak grasp of English. He added that this poses as a problem for Saudi students wanting to go to study abroad, as they are unable to take the English proficiency test, which is a basic requirement for admission.

Fahad Al-Motairy, a father, thinks teaching foreign languages to children is important as long as it is taught according to the child’s age and ability. He added that there is a need to teach foreign languages in schools rather than later in life, which can be very expensive.

Turned away at the school gates

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:25:00 +0000

This week thousands of children were denied places in their first choice secondary school. Here, a teacher argues that our education system is as crisis-ridden as our banks.

By Francis Gilbert, Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 7:58AM GMT 07 Mar 2009

Thousands of children have been denied places in their first choice secondary schools Photo: GETTY

The parent sobbed openly at the reception of the secondary school where I teach: "But it's not fair! You have to let her in!" Our secretary had to ask our caretakers to escort her off the premises. But she wasn't surprised. Every year, she gets hundreds of calls from panic-stricken parents wanting to know why their child didn't get into our over-subscribed comprehensive. Every year, she says the same thing: read the instructions in the admissions booklet very, very carefully. There's no way she can explain such a complex process over the phone. If she did, she'd never go home.

I teach in a very popular, co-educational comprehensive in outer London which gains some of the best results in the country. In common with many similar institutions, every year, over 400 applicants don't get an offer of a place. Much as we would like to take them, we have only one place for every three children applying. This year was no different: there were hundreds of bitterly disappointed families.

It's little consolation, but they might comfort themselves with the knowledge that they are not alone. On National Offer Day earlier this week, where parents discovered whether their child had been successful in applying for a place at secondary school, one fifth of parents didn't get their child into the school of their choice. In counties such as Kent, nearly a third of parents failed to get their preferred school.

It's no wonder thousands of parents are furious. A report from the London School of Economics published this week suggests that the whole system is in a state of chaos, with schools flagrantly flouting the rules – asking parents for personal information including marital status, occupation and even children's hobbies – and parents themselves being bamboozled by the arcane bureaucracy involved.

As a parent, teacher and writer who has researched this subject for years, I can only concur with the LSE's report. The central problem is that there is no consistency in the system: the rules or "admissions criteria" by which schools admit their pupils differ from school to school. There are a host of different rules when applying to grammar schools, academies, faith-schools, specialist schools and plain-old bog standard comprehensives.

If you're applying to a faith school, you usually have to prove you've attended church regularly for a number of years, live within the parish and have a glowing reference from your local vicar or priest. If you're going for a specialist school, you'll get preferential treatment if you can prove your child has an "aptitude" in that specialism. For example, schools that specialise in sports will often need to see references from coaches and team leaders. For grammar schools, you'll need to pay for a private tutor so that your child will excel in the 11-plus exam. And if you're going for a good local comp, you might have to consider selling your house and moving closer to the school – or lying about your address, which increasingly parents are doing.

But even moving near a good school can backfire. Take Katie, who moved house so she could be near the only popular school in her area, a faith-based school which specialised in languages. She thought she had everything covered – the attendance at church, the vicar's references, the proof that her son has an aptitude for languages – only to find that in the year of her application her local authority switched to a lottery system: all the schools were allocated randomly. As a result, her application failed. She is now faced with the absurd prospect of having to drive her son miles away to a sink school, despite the fact that she lives next door to an excellent one. All her hard work was for nothing. "This Government has ruined my family's life," she told me, trying to hold back the tears.

Time and again, conscientious parents who have fought so hard to get their children into good schools have had their best laid plans smashed by idiotic Labour legislation.

But it isn't only the school admissions system that the Government has broken. It's the exam system as well. Since they arrived in 1997, Labour apparatchiks have done nothing but interfere with exams. Each new initiative has made things worse. The Sats exams for seven, 11 and 14-year-olds have been mired in controversy from the start, with claims from parents and teachers that they are irrelevant and put pupils under unnecessary pressure.

The situation was so bad last summer, when swathes of Sats papers were lost and thousands denied their results, that the Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, abandoned Sats for 14-year-olds and indicated that he was even considering scrapping the exam for all ages – a ghastly admission of defeat.

Even more seriously, A-levels and GCSEs have lost their credibility. The Government trumpets that the number of pupils gaining five A*-C grades at GCSE has risen from 44 per cent to 65 per cent since 1995, but any teacher knows this supposed improvement is nonsense. Recent research by Durham and Cambridge universities shows that the exams have become so dumbed down that these statistics are meaningless and that far from fostering real learning, the exam system has made our children less intelligent than they were in the 1970s, when far less was spent on education.

Meanwhile, the world education rankings run by the respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – the only really trustworthy league table there is – shows Britain slipping from fourth to 14th for reading and from eighth to 24th for Maths. Put simply, most children from Europe and the Far East outperform our pupils every time – even in English.

Our exam system has become such a joke that many schools are giving up on it. Just this week, one of our top independent schools, Manchester Grammar, decided to abandon GCSEs, on the grounds that they were too easy, and to replace them with the International GCSE (IGCSE). In a letter to parents, the head poured scorn on the new GCSEs that the Government is introducing this September, observing that they threaten teachers' abilities to do their jobs well: they are stuffed full of easy questions and coursework.

Quite why the Government is bringing back coursework when its own investigations have uncovered widespread cheating and plagiarism appears a mystery until you realise that coursework significantly boosts results. In other words, the revamp of GCSEs is a cynical ploy to manipulate the statistics. But as any experienced teacher knows, coursework has a corrupting effect upon pupils because it makes them believe they can cheat their way to the top.

A real educational apartheid is developing between the independent schools who are abandoning the government's testing regime and the rest of us in the state sector who are lumbered with it. Clearly, children who take the wrong GCSEs haven't a hope of getting into the top universities because they haven't had the opportunity to gain respected qualifications.

One of the consequences of the Government decimating our exam system is that the process by which students apply for university has become farcical. The fact of the matter is that our best universities have lost faith in GCSEs and A-levels and have introduced their own tests. As a result, students have to fill in a barrage of forms, write a personal statement and take numerous A-level exams before gaining a place, and are also compelled to take exams set by the suspicious universities – particularly for popular courses such as medicine.

To make matters worse, the university admissions procedure is so haphazard that there is no uniformity over when the universities make their offers. So students are required to accept or reject an offer before they've heard back from all the places to which they have applied. Having been tested to the point of extinction, these poor students are frequently forced to sign up for inferior courses, even though they may have gained places on better ones. As with school admissions, one suspects this is a cynical ploy to make sure that the inferior universities are filled with students.

Our education system is failing on all counts: it is shockingly unfair, riddled with incompetence and corruption, and benefits no one but the bureaucrats. But while the pen-pushers enjoy enormous power and over-inflated wages, parents can see no end to their misery. Too many parents have watched helplessly as their children's education has gone down the drain: too many children have endured mediocre schools, taken too many worthless GCSEs, and saddled themselves with crippling debts to gain worthless degrees that lead nowhere but the dole queue.

Despite the phoney propaganda the Government peddles, Labour's incessant meddling, monstrous dumbing down and moronic self-righteousness have consigned our schools to the scrap heap. It pains me to say it, but our education system is as crisis-ridden as our banks.

Sixteen teams for International Schools soccer next week

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:20:00 +0000

Article by: Daily Mirror
Published: 3/7/2009 7

Eleven boys and five girls teams have confirmed their participation for the International Schools Soccer tournament to be conducted by the British School in Colombo from March 11.

In the boys segment, the participating teams will be Leighton Park, Gateway, Colombo, CIS, Colombo, Ikra International, Gateway, Kandy, Lyceum, Nugegoda, Wycherley, Lyceum, Nugegoda, Alethea International, Elizabeth Moir and British School in Colombo.

The five girls teams will be Elizabeth Moir, Lyceum, Nugegoda, Leighton Park, CIS and British School in Colombo.

TPS casts a wide net to find new teachers

noreply@blogger.com (Chelly Blissett) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:02:00 +0000

Recruiting trips help the district locate recent college graduates in Oklahoma and beyond.

Zarrow International School second-grade teacher Sherlane Cintron interacts with students on Friday. Stephen Pingry / Tulsa World

By ANDREA EGER World Staff Writer
Published, Tulsa World: 3/8/2009 4:12 AM
Last Modified: 3/8/2009 4:33 AM

An ever-shrinking pool of teaching candidates has made Tulsa Public Schools exchange its old school ways for corporate recruiting strategies.

Gone are the days of the district sending a representative to a handful of teacher career fairs each spring and principals being totally on their own when it came to filling vacancies over the summer.

Now, TPS seeks applicants year-round, and from smaller Oklahoma colleges and universities, 10 other states and even Puerto Rico.

"If we hadn't stepped up our college recruiting efforts, we would be in really difficult situations," said John Harris, director of recruiting for TPS. "Before we started making changes five years ago, 50 to 120 vacancies would have been typical at the beginning of the school year, as it still is in Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Fort Worth and other large districts in the region. Last year, we were short six teachers out of 3,100."

TPS began by creating a centralized applicant pool in 2003. Every principal in the district was using it within a year's time.

The next change in approach was to reverse the long-standing trend of hiring about 75 percent experienced teachers and 25 percent new teachers.

"We were kind of rotating bad tires with other Tulsa County school districts," Harris said.

That goal led TPS to step up its efforts to attract recent college graduates. Principals, deans and teacher-intern coordinators book speaking engagements and topical workshops at colleges so they can meet local college

and university students before career fairs.

They also take turns going on recruiting trips to historically black colleges in the South and even Puerto Rico in search of minority applicants.

"You absolutely have to do that because not enough of them are coming through Oklahoma," said Bill Nafztger, chief human resource officer for TPS.

At the University of Puerto Rico's Recinto de Rio Piedras campus, an assistant principal from Rogers High School found a December graduate to fill a vacancy in the Spanish immersion program at Zarrow International School, 2714 S. 90th East Ave.

"It was my last day of university, and it was my birthday, the fourth of December. I thought, it's a big opportunity, why do I not take it?" said Sherlane Cintron. "I went home and told my parents that I had signed a contract offer, and my father said, 'Do you even know where Oklahoma is?' "

Zarrow Principal Robin Postier said she and other employees were happy to help Cintron find an apartment, car and furniture and to reassure her parents.

"We are really a family here because I have faculty members from several other foreign countries, such as Honduras, Cuba and Colombia," Postier said. "The students adore Senorita Cintron, and we like to have native speakers for our program because they can teach the culture, not just the language."

In Tulsa, Cintron said she has greater job security than she would have back home — and classroom resources and materials beyond her wildest dreams.

"I have everything!. So many books and a Smart Board. I feel so glad and happy, happy, happy," she said Friday.

District officials have also expanded their search north to states such as Minnesota and Ohio, where teaching positions are scarce.

Ryan Buell, a new math teacher at Whitney Middle School, was recently recruited from Bowling Green State University in northwestern Ohio.

"I first heard about TPS through the career center at Bowling Green. I kind of laughed about it at first because I didn't even know where Tulsa was in Oklahoma. Where I'm from, it's all cowboy hats and spurs when we think about Oklahoma," Buell said.

With his college graduation in December fast approaching, Buell started considering the Tulsa school district's offer of a teaching job that would begin in January, instead of August or September.

"No other school district was going to offer me a job two weeks after I graduated because in Ohio, the education job market is tight," he said.

Buell, who just turned 23, admits that his college buddies back home in Ohio "think I'm crazy," but he's not looking back.

"I didn't know anybody in Tulsa, but everybody has been really great," Buell said. "There's no way I thought I would end up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but I will definitely stay."

Tulsa Public Schools still faces significant challenges in finding teachers who are qualified to teach math, science or specialty foreign languages.

"Right now, recruiting Latin teachers is like panning for gold in the Arkansas River," Naftzger lamented.