Posts Tagged ‘matt amaral’
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 [...]
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. [...]
It’s Not All About the Subject You Teach
Over the last couple of years I’ve heard a discussion at my school about teaching Math on a block day. Here at my High Poverty school, we have a modified 6 period day. On Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, the kids go to all 6 classes. On Wednesday they [...]
Analyzing Ignorance: Confronting Students With the Meaning Behind Music and Writing
One thing about urban education is we are always struck by what the students don’t know. Some teachers take it immediately to heart and quickly dismiss the students themselves—write them off in the first few weeks as lost cases and spend their [...]
An Overdue Letter to Parents
Dear Parents,We’ve had this conversation before, so this time I wanted to write it down with the hope that next time you have the same question, I can simply refer you to this letter. It is an important letter because it seems to carry in it [...]
Grade Inflation: Another Way Our Low-Income Kids Get Left Behind
Every year in my sheltered, intervention English class, we read Left Behind (Also known as Two Old Women evidently), a short novel by Velma Wallis about a Native American tribe in Alaska. In the story, which has been passed down by Athabascans for [...]