I never knew that some of our family Christmas traditions were so unusual until I recounted them to some friends and realized we were the only family that had these traditions. During my student teaching experience, I walked into our holiday program and was surrounded by an hour and a half of traditions that I …
It’s Christmastime (oh sorry, I mean holiday break) and many classrooms have a countdown for the number of days left in school on their boards. For some reason this time of year always made me especially reflective (maybe it was all those midyear conferences with evaluators and administrators!). Working in high poverty classrooms, I always …
IN recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a …
Learning to use online forums, be they social network services like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, or wikis is not a sexily contemporary add-on to the curriculum – it’s an essential part of the literacy today’s youth require for the world they inhabit. I hear teachers and parents complain about receiving emails and text message that …
As a Twitter user, I find myself hoping to be retweetable. I hope that I say something or find a resource that someone might find interesting enough to retweet. You might say that’s not the reason to use Twitter and that’s not my main reason for using Twitter by any means. Twitter provides instant, free …
I’m winding down my semester and am faced with the daunting task of preaching as a requirement for my Intro to Preaching class in a week. “It’s just like teaching. You’ll be fine,” are the responses that I’ve gotten from most people. But it’s not like teaching. My personal faith and my personal beliefs about …
The continuing question for teachers is do you cover more less deeply or cover less more deeply? It’s a hard question to answer especially within the context of the high-stakes testing emphasis. Will Richardson is trying to challenge his own thinking in his post What Do We Absolutely Need to “Teach”: [W]e could probably do …
Actually, that’s a myth: ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand! When an ostrich senses danger and cannot run away, it flops to the ground and remains still, with its head and neck flat on the ground in front of it. The ostrich, the largest and heaviest bird, are powerful creatures and yet when they …
But these stories don’t mean anything without someone to tell them to I think Brandi Carlile has it right. The stories of our lives: what we’ve experienced; what we’ve seen don’t mean anything without someone to listen. So here’s to you! Thanks for listening to my stories and my ramblings.
“The challenge we face is nothing less than transforming our schools from assembly-line factories into centres of innovation,” said the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who warns that the US school system is falling behind international rivals. Education is a mirror into where our society is going. As of now, our public schools are saying that …
