Posts in Category Teaching
What’s up with June anyway?
Question: According to the calendar there are still two and a half weeks of school left, but according to my students school ended the second the temperature in my classroom reached 90 degrees two weeks ago. I'm usually a laid back teacher who has a very good relationship with her students but at the end of the year they start bouncing off the wall and reverting to behaviors they haven't shown in months. Is there anything I can do about this or should I just suck it up and pray that nothing goes terribly wrong over the next two weeks?- Anonymous Middle School Teacher
Endings are hard. They might be the hardest thing to do well. Don't believe me? Go watch a movie. How many times have...
Posted on Jun 09, 2010 - 07:35 AM by Jonah Canner
The Education Policy Debate
I enjoy reading columns by David Brooks in The New York Times. He's a moderate conservative who promotes a more compassionate, intellectual, and pragmatic form of conservatism than what is often found in politics and the media. Nonetheless, I often disagree with him, and his recent op-ed on education deserves a critical response. He begins by praising Obama's direction on education, saying that Obama is using "federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top." Yet Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program is rewarding $4.5 billion to a limited number of states who receive the most points based on a scoring rubric (PDF) the administration...
Posted on Jun 07, 2010 - 07:26 AM by Dana Bennis
Summer Vacation, ahhhhh
When I am discussing with others my thoughts about how our conventional education system should change, I am sometimes asked, in exasperation, if there Is anything about our existing approach to education that I do agree with. This past week, I have re-encountered one thing that I really do love about schools and their traditions -- and that is the rhythms of the academic year. Work, work, work, break; work, work, work (thinking about break), break. Right now I am in a break between the spring semester and the summer and am fully enjoying it. I just love summer time (not because of the heat, mind you!) and even though I am working and teaching throughout the summer, there's just...
Posted on May 27, 2010 - 09:17 AM by Kristan Morrison
Improv…with Drama
As we all know, one of the casualties of a standards-based curriculum, where THE TEST is the driving force, is the loss of teaching the arts. Performing arts are particularly hard hit. At El Verano School, we are doing what we can to lessen the hit that drama classes have taken. For the past ten years or so, I have been putting on a stage show with the assistance and collaboration of my colleague, Craig Madison. We have not always had the same grade level, in fact, this year he teaches third grade to my fourth grade. But we still get our kids together and put on a show.
The fact that we put on a play is nice, perhaps even astonishing considering how many students are involved, but I...
Posted on May 11, 2010 - 05:41 PM by Tim Curley
‘Cause It’s Like Democracy….
Students began choosing the delivery method for new information at the beginning of the month. I discussed this in "Maybe Kids Should Have a Say in How They Receive Information?"The experiment is going so well that we have increased the control the kids have in the daily lesson planning. Every day there is bell work, but that is the only set event of the class period. I have the day's activities arranged in three or four different orders. The students vote for the arrangement they believe fits their needs. Each option includes the same work, but the order is different.
So how is it going?
From my perspective, pretty good. I am not seeing as many springtime behavioral issues as I have...
Posted on Apr 29, 2010 - 07:02 PM by Alison Bagg Brink
They Literally Threw in the Sink
You know that line we say when someone goes overboard: "He threw in everything but the kitchen sink." Well, some boys at my school wanted to make sure to include the sink into whatever they were mixing because they ripped it out of the wall in one of their bathrooms. What does this have to do with democratic education? It's a clear sign that the type of education they were getting was anything but. I remember reading Ain't No Makin' It by Jay MacLeod and it was in this book that I first learned about how acts of disobedience can sometimes be a way for someone to regain or attain power he/she has lost. This made me look at gum chewing, skipping, cursing, graffiti, and now sink-pulling...
Posted on Apr 18, 2010 - 07:35 PM by Ammerah Saidi
Raining on My Students’ Parades
My graduate students tell me that I am depressing them - that I am the unfunny version of Saturday Night Live's Debbie Downer . Well, they didn't actually call me that, but that's sometimes how I feel. I teach the foundations of education course at my university. This is the class where American education is looked at through a critical lens - comparing the historical, Jeffersonian democratic citizenship purpose of education to the social mobility purposes that seem most paramount in schools today. We explore and critique different philosophies of education, deconstruct our society's current politicization of education, examine the injustices of our education system's funding practices,...
Posted on Apr 12, 2010 - 06:31 AM by Kristan Morrison
Maybe Kids Should Have a Say in How They Receive Information?
How much control should students have in a classroom?How much order should be implemented by a teacher?
What does a student-driven classroom look like?
I think that all teachers that are interested in democracy in the classroom ask these questions on a regular basis. I think that the answers are as different as the individuals involved.
I want students to feel ownership of the class and the material I teach. I want them to recognize their participation is needed if they are too learn. I don't want them to feel that learning is something that happens to them, but instead, something that they choose to do.
Currently I am trying to answer my questions by letting the students select the...
Posted on Apr 08, 2010 - 07:46 PM by Alison Bagg Brink
A Village Under Siege… or What I Did During My Spring Break
Spring Break.Ok, it is only Spring Break for me, not for my children. I thought this would mean I would sleep in past seven and then drop them off at school. Hypothetically, I could have six or so hours to do laundry, clean house, work on the taxes, eat popcorn and watch movies.
Things might have gotten done, had I been able to drop the kids off at school. But once we got to school, I couldn't leave.
The basement of our school had been magically transformed to a kingdom during Europe's Dark Ages. The magic was in fact done by wonderful parents, staff members, and older students... angels, not faeries...
The stage at one end of the room was a king's chambers, there was a mountain...
Posted on Mar 25, 2010 - 01:30 PM by Alison Bagg Brink
Internal Motivation is Like North Dakota
Paul, one of my friends in high school, proclaimed that North Dakota didn't exist. He'd ask, "Have you ever met anyone from North Dakota? What's ever come out of North Dakota? We've read about it--but have you ever been there?" I've never really stopped wondering about North Dakota being a conspiracy to validate South Dakota's existence, but Paul's words have been louder than ever in my head since I've taken on my new teaching job as a literacy intervention teacher.Last semester, I was thrown into a teaching position wherein I had 150 students to tend to--and that experience was more an exercise in control than in instruction or teaching. This semester as explained in my last entry...
Posted on Mar 17, 2010 - 06:01 PM by Ammerah Saidi
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