viscousmemories
10-12-2006, 04:15 AM
I've been doing a temp job this week working on 'correlations' for a publishing company (of sorts). Basically, it works like this:
Company A decides that want to market a textbook to American public schools, so they create an outline of their textbook broken down into lesson plans, each of which is broken down into "focus questions". Then they hire Company B (where I'm working) to correlate each of the hundreds of focus questions with the relevant national and/or state educational standard.
So for example, a Language Arts lesson plan might be "American Novels: The Great Gatsby" and the focus question might be "How were the effects of America's new-found wealth in the 1920s expressed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby?"
Now, say I'm currently working on the state of Idaho (which I was today). I would go to the sheet of educational standards for Idaho, and find something that at least roughly correlates with the above lesson plan and enter the code in the database. For example, this actual standard:
Idaho Language Arts - ID-752.02.c
Interpret the social, cultural, and historical significance of a text: Ancient Literature; British Literature; American Literature; World Literature.
So, as you can imagine with a few hundred focus questions, upwards of 50 states* and vastly diverse standards (Pennsylvania's Social Studies standards are about 10 times longer than Lousiana's, for example), that's quite a lot of correlations to make.
On the bright side, the correlations for this particular project were already done previously. Unfortunately they were done very badly. Hence a group of folks at the company went through all the states and highlighted the ones that didn't have correlations, had duplicates or really bad correlations, and they brought in a gang of us temps (10 in all - Tue thru Fri) to fix the mistakes.
Anyhoo, the work is pretty monotonous but it's interesting to me on multiple levels. For one thing, learning a little about how things work in the educational publishing industry is interesting. It's also pretty appalling to learn that we have such widely divergent, apparently arbitrary educational standards at the state level. Some of the states (like Pennsylvania) have literally dozens of detailed American political history requirements, and other states have one or two.
It's also interesting how some states' Language Arts standards are much more heavily focused on critical thinking and analysis of non-fiction, and others much more on creativity and appreciation of classic fiction. There are other interesting things, but I'm even boring myself now!
Thank the gods I happen to post on these fora and be reading A People's History of the Supreme Court right now! These correlations would be considerably more difficult for a drop-out like me if not for the fora education I've received. I've only had to use Wikipedia two or three times.
*As funny as it sounds, Iowa has no standards.
Company A decides that want to market a textbook to American public schools, so they create an outline of their textbook broken down into lesson plans, each of which is broken down into "focus questions". Then they hire Company B (where I'm working) to correlate each of the hundreds of focus questions with the relevant national and/or state educational standard.
So for example, a Language Arts lesson plan might be "American Novels: The Great Gatsby" and the focus question might be "How were the effects of America's new-found wealth in the 1920s expressed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby?"
Now, say I'm currently working on the state of Idaho (which I was today). I would go to the sheet of educational standards for Idaho, and find something that at least roughly correlates with the above lesson plan and enter the code in the database. For example, this actual standard:
Idaho Language Arts - ID-752.02.c
Interpret the social, cultural, and historical significance of a text: Ancient Literature; British Literature; American Literature; World Literature.
So, as you can imagine with a few hundred focus questions, upwards of 50 states* and vastly diverse standards (Pennsylvania's Social Studies standards are about 10 times longer than Lousiana's, for example), that's quite a lot of correlations to make.
On the bright side, the correlations for this particular project were already done previously. Unfortunately they were done very badly. Hence a group of folks at the company went through all the states and highlighted the ones that didn't have correlations, had duplicates or really bad correlations, and they brought in a gang of us temps (10 in all - Tue thru Fri) to fix the mistakes.
Anyhoo, the work is pretty monotonous but it's interesting to me on multiple levels. For one thing, learning a little about how things work in the educational publishing industry is interesting. It's also pretty appalling to learn that we have such widely divergent, apparently arbitrary educational standards at the state level. Some of the states (like Pennsylvania) have literally dozens of detailed American political history requirements, and other states have one or two.
It's also interesting how some states' Language Arts standards are much more heavily focused on critical thinking and analysis of non-fiction, and others much more on creativity and appreciation of classic fiction. There are other interesting things, but I'm even boring myself now!
Thank the gods I happen to post on these fora and be reading A People's History of the Supreme Court right now! These correlations would be considerably more difficult for a drop-out like me if not for the fora education I've received. I've only had to use Wikipedia two or three times.
*As funny as it sounds, Iowa has no standards.