Posts Tagged ‘Inner-City Teaching’
One From the Vault: STAR Testing: The Farce Begins Anew
With STAR testing going on this month across the nation, I thought I'd bring back last year's post about the insanity of high stakes testing, and how in fact, there is nothing at stake for the students taking the tests.Today teachers in my [...]
Suzy Lee Weiss and White People Problems
This week in the news a high school senior named Suzy Lee Weiss wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal satirizing the college admissions process of Ivy League colleges. She was upset that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rejected her application and [...]
Teaching for Real- The Book
Some of you may have noticed the volume of my blog postings has fallen off dramatically in the last few months. There is a very good reason for this. Part of it is the two-year old at home, part of it is that I am a full time teacher, and the last [...]
The Beauty of Service Learning: What Are You Doing?
One of the new buzz terms, especially in the emerging world of charter schools, is the idea of Service Learning Projects. SLPs are generally projects undertaken by students where they identify a need in the community and address it through community [...]
New Year’s Resolution: Start Beef With PhDs
One of the cool things about being a teacher who has been around for awhile is just before Winter Break, all your former students who are now in college stop by and pay you a visit. It is always amazing how grown up they seem and they strut in with [...]
A Teacher’s Thoughts on Connecticut
I’ve given myself some time to sit and let it all sink in. This is hard to do when every channel, every person, every waking moment seems to be inundated with close-up coverage of the Connecticut tragedy. They want every angle, they want every [...]
Powerball Parent Outreach
Everyone involved in education, myself included, constantly harps on the importance of reaching out to parents, and how education is in their hands more so than even our schools. We talk and talk about needing better parent outreach, we imagine a [...]
A Non-Finnomenon: A Real Teacher’s Review of The Finland Phenomenon
I finally got around to watching The Finland Phenomenon, the documentary by Tony Wagner, an Innovation Education Fellow at Harvard University, about the cold Scandinavian country that has blown away worldwide education with a snowstorm of success. [...]
The Real Reason More Teachers Are Needed
Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney say they are advocates for hiring more teachers. While anyone paying close attention knows that not only does Romney’s plan call for cutting teachers drastically, he also believes smaller class sizes don’t [...]
My First Letter for a Dreamer
Last week a student walked into my room whom I hadn’t seen in two years. He came in with a big smile, gave me a real handshake, and asked about my wife and kid. He looked good, healthy, he had a coffee in his hand. He was confident.Then his [...]