When I think back on my school days, my most vivid memories happened on the playground. I remember jumping off the see saw so my friend would fall to the ground. I remember climbing to the top of the jungle
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Our Glory. Our Darkness.
“You need to put more effort into your math,” directed the flustered fifth-grade teacher to the chatterbox student – who just happened to be me – and who was not chattering about math. In response to the lack of impact
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Taken By Surprise
One joy of parenthood is a surprise from your children. More than once I have come home to a miraculously clean kitchen, or a “restaurant” in my honor. I love it when my kids make big plans behind closed doors.
Read MoreDo Common Core Advocates Lack Historical Context?
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Winston Churchill How can the creators and advocates of the Common Core rationalize locking the profession into years more of high stakes testing, complete with the attendant bullet list of
Read MoreThe Emergency Room
I work in an emergency room. There are no doctors here, no ambulances, and rarely nurses of any kind. I am an educator that finds myself struggling to triage my students’ most basic human needs of food,
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Make Teacher Retention a Ripple Effect
Have you seen or read something lately that engaged you in a ripple effect? So much movement,change and action, all stemming from one “drop.” That ripple effect happend to me after reading this post by fellow blogger Donnie Dicus &
Read MoreChasing our Proverbial Tails
This has been a difficult post to sit down and write. Not because I cannot think of topics or policies to address, but because I have so many that I want to address. I have found myself
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Grit Vs. The Virtue of Giving Up
Bill Ferriter, In a recent Tempered Radical post, The Poisonous Mythology of Grittiness, relates a recent conversation about grit that he had with John Spenser. The crux of their discussion was that grit is too often defined as working through set-backs and “buckling down and
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