Planning ahead

If you're planning to go to this year's robolympics at Hartnell College this Saturday, be prepared for a treat: the Hartnell Rockets and Robotics club students will be demonstrating robot-sumo and its protagonists, sumo-bots. Like in sumo, the robots in robot-sumo try to push one another out of a circle.
But the real competition will take place among six high schools -- Soledad, King City, Alisal, Salinas, North Salinas, and Everett Alvarez High. From 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., students will face off in two robotics competition. And maybe next year, they'll design their own sumobot.

For more information about the event, check out the Olympics website here.

Also coming up soon, the English as a Second Language Department will hold an open house from 6 to 8 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 6. at the college's Marina Education Center, 289 12th Street, Marina. With help with registration for all students, bilingual counselors available.

For more information contact the MPC Marina Ed Center at 646-4850.

Of giving and receiving

Thanks to the big heart of 13-year-old Kylie Lemaire, The Hope Center at the McGowan’s House will receive a $2,500 grant from Nickelodeon Big Help grants. Kylie found the grant, applied for it, and said she wants to use the money to keep the Hope Center's food pantry stocked with enough groceries, toiletries and household cleaning items to help local Monterey families in need.
Don't be deceived by Monterey's glitzy reputation. One in nine people in the Peninsula go hungry, and one in ten children are on the subsidized lunch program -- according to the Hope Center. So they need help to help the needy.

And speaking of receiving... these days of budget uncertainty, the only way schools seem to be getting money is through grants, and three local districts plus the Monterey County Office of Education were recently awarded some of those federal funds everyone seems to be fighting for.
The California Department of Education announced that Monterey Peninsula Unified, North Monterey County Unified, and Soledad Unified will share in the $36 million pot with $250,000 for MPUSD, and $50,000 for each North Monterey, Soledad, and the county office.
The Enhancing Through Technology grants will be used to buy and upkeep data to improve high school graduation rates, a big piece of Obama's education plan to reform schools.

More on grading the teachers

The Brookings Institute, an influential Washington DC based think-tank, is jumping on the teachers evaluation fray with the new report Evaluating Teachers: the Important Role of Value-Added. I'll confess: I haven't read the full report (it was just released yesterday, just found it today, so have mercy on me). But it's not too long, and its conclusion may be something that pleases most. From the executive summary: "We conclude that value-added data has an important role to play in teacher evaluation systems, but that there is much to be learned about how best to use value-added information in human resource decisions."

The study looks at value-added, or the evaluation of teachers based on the contribution they make to the learning of their students, from four points of view: how is value-added used? what are the consequences (for teachers and students) for classifying or misclassifying teachers as effective or ineffective? How reliable are these types of tests? How reliable are evaluation methods between those that use value-added and those that don't?

There seems to be some momentum building up towards some type of standardized testing for teachers, so the more we know, the better off we'll be.