It’s Step 1 of my Top Secret New Teacher Handbook.  Hope it creates some shortcuts, a machete even, through the education jungle.

-Tweenteacher

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I’m a little frustrated at the message this sends to those of use who have invested in this career.  I mean, I know that we need to recruit new teachers, but a talented person with great ability in their field does not necessarily a good teacher make. Remember, teaching is about two skills that must be mastered: that of content and that of communication.(...)
Read the rest of Am I So Past My Prime? (198 words)

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Post tags: alternative credetials, credential, Ed Tech, ELA, employment, free, fundraising, Language Arts, learning, life long learners, merit pay, middle school, performance pay, teaching, TLN, Writers Project, writing

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So you know when you get your group of kids on the first day, there are those who immediately set off your alarms?  Well, that definitely happened to me on my first day.

I have a student who clearly needs help.  His peers are weary of him already and his confrontational style seems not as intentional as inherent.  The startling comments and “seething anger”, as his last year’s teacher put it only three weeks into the school year, seem uncontrollable.  This same teacher recorded that he asked if her windows were bullet proof.  I wasn’t, of course, given this information up front.  I had to seek it out. 

His first quickwrite of this year centered on cussing out his last teachers and cranking them nightly on the phone.  His pride in his violent video games is apparent.  

Like children with Asperger’s (of which he has not been tested to date), he seems unaware of cues or the goings on around him: calling out with inappropriate comments, walking in front of me while I talk to the class, handing me items while I’m in the middle of instruction.  Annoying, yes, but harmless.  

He also will not make eye contact (could be cultural, but this seems different than others of his ethnicity and nationality) and walks robotically, stiffly, without movement in his shoulders.  Strangely enough, and I’m clearly not a diagnostician (though I play one on TV), the few students in my career who have had symptoms like this seem to also come with apparent sinus problems.  His eyes are puffy with nasal issues, he is sniffy, and I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection.

So I approached the counselors who know me as a real student advocate and as a teacher with a somewhat effective antenna.  I don’t send kids to the office.  I handle my own discipline issues, which are few.  So when I come in, they listen.  The afternoon after the first day of school I walked in and said, “So, what’s up with X?”  They pretty much flopped the file onto the desk, a file the size of our Language of Literature book.(...)
Read the rest of Should a free education be unconditional? (363 words)

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Just as we as educators strive to make books accessible to those who are struggling readers, so too must we add computers to that list, for technology is not just for the elite anymore. The Home Ec and Shop classes of yesteryear are dwindling away and in their place needs to be classes and encouragement in those skills that will be our students’ future blue-collar skills…those in technology.

The statistics of what the kids do with a computer once it’s in the homes can’t derail us from our mission, to educate and prepare. Get those computers in the homes and in the schools. Then we’ll tackle responsible usage. But if we allowed the irresponsible to dictate every generation’s movement towards their future success, TV would have been banned long ago and books would still be in pyres. (...)
Read the rest of Computer Literacy Support should not be Conditional: Joanne Jacobs comment (277 words)

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Post tags: 2008, achievement gap, assessments, charity, computers, Ed Tech, education policy, free, fundraising, k-12, k12, school funding, teaching, Title I

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Just imagine the even wider achievement gap that would occur if schools had to pay for their Internet packages.    

If it’s true, we need to get more media attention on this attempt to stomp out the global communication that we have all come to know, love, and support.  

I can’t say I know a lot about this subject, but it’s definitely worth looking into.  Of course, there’s no way Google’s gonna let this happen, of course.  After all, they’re a juggernaut in the business of universal information access.   

Have you heard any updates on this topic that our Ed Tech community should be aware of?  What steps should we take to ensure that it doesn’t happen?   

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While I understand the argument, I also know that these young teachers have an advantage that I will not have years down the line: energy.  

When I was in my early years of teaching in my mid-twenties, I was hired to teach at an inner city school.  It was, in fact, the under-funded alternative school for those students kicked out of the other schools.  We had broken glass in the halls, police tape from the weekend still strewn over the kindergarten yard come Monday, and no textbooks.  A classic Michelle Pfieffer/Hilary Swank/Morgan Freeman movie in the making.  

I actually jumped into the deep end of the pool, and there wasn’t any filter, so there was moss on the top and calcium deposits coming from the cracks in the bottom, but it was there that I learned to swim.  (...)
Read the rest of Don’t Knock the Less Experienced Teacher (952 words)

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