I’m a teacher. Three little words that pack a punch when someone asks, “What do you do?” The recipient of those words usually replies with, “Oh, wow! What age group? I can’t imagine.” Along with these words, there is usually
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Dream On: Stressed Students at the End of DACA
Policies, local and national, shape our classroom practices, our instructional decisions and our interactions with students and colleagues. Sometimes, that connection is hard to see, especially when policies create a culture of silence which makes it difficult to track
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Shhh. Don’t Tell Anyone, But I’m a Millennial.
Fine, I will admit it. I am a Millennial. Well, that’s half true. Born in 1983, I actually fall at the end of Generation X and the start of the Millennials. And after researching the qualities and characteristics of both,
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Organized Chaos aka The Prepared Environment
Am I ready? Before students enter the class from the first day of school to the last, it is the goal of most teachers to have the classroom ready and prepared to receive them. In addition to being functional,
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Neighborhood Knowhow: The Story of an Hour
As we climbed into the dusty school van, I wondered what the next sixty minutes held. My assistant principal jumped behind the wheel while my principal settled into the front seat as the new teachers, myself included, climbed into the
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The Slippery Slope of Teacher Certification
I swore I would never teach junior high. Junior high, two swirling years of what, as a student, I experienced as daily hell. I owe all my patient and forgiving junior high teachers a debt of gratitude. By the time
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Playing the Victim
We’ve become a world of 0’s and 1’s, coded for speed in decision making, processing, and response. This is true in a literal sense, with algorithms impacting our daily lives in ways we don’t even realize, but also figuratively. We’re emotionally
Read MoreWhat Does a “President Trump” Mean for Education?
My friends know that two of my major personal and professional interests merged this week, as conversations began about the future of education policy in America after the election. Thus, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about the potential
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Voting for Education is Not Enough
By the time you read this, it is possible that the election will be decided, and the knotted ball of emotion in my stomach will have blossomed into one form or another of wildly flowing feeling. Most of that will
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An Argument For Physics First in AZ
Why in the world do we teach science the way we do? Lets radically change the way we teach STEM in our schools in this state! Like most other states, we teach in a sequence that goes something like this: Freshman-
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