Posts Tagged ‘teach 4 real’
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Lost Art of the Handshake
For many years now I have been conducting a social experiment in the doorway of my classroom. The subjects of my experiment have been all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some limp, others drool, many of them have trouble writing down the correct day of [...]
One From the Vault: Teaching Against Culture
As I'm ramping up to start blogging full time again, I came across this one in the Teach4Real vault. I don't know why I didn't run it in April, it probably had something to do with STAR testing and wanting to pluck out my eyes with all the number [...]
Weaving Together Valentine’s Day and Shakespeare
Valentine’s Day was a disaster. In all fairness, it’s a disaster every year. All the extra hormones flying through the air really affect a high school campus. Satisfied girls walk around with roses and teddy bears to the detriment of those [...]
Teaching: The Profession I Will Eventually Leave
“Teaching is not a profession. It is a never-ending entry-level vocation, divorced from foundational understandings of training, accountability, and advancement. If we are to enact meaningful reform, we must rescue teaching from its status as [...]
First Person: Teaching In An Inner-City School
By Lisa ChottinerThe day I got my job as a first grade teacher two remarkable things happened. One: a tornado hit the city. Two: I got my wisdom teeth out. So I guess you could say it was a disaster from the start, and I had no clue what was [...]