Archive for January, 2006
Herding Goats
From her blog Artichoke released a tunnel of goats into the edu-blog o’ verse, and now I’m off trying to round them up so that we can sort the lost children from the beasts.
I need to digress here briefly to comment on the apparent limitless supply of fantastic characters that appear in Artichoke’s blog. [...]Ice Fog and Student Publishing
update 2/27/06: Edited the URL to my students’ writing project so it points to a new domain I set up for them.
It’s been challenging ’round here the last several days with temperatures in the minus 40’s and predicted to get colder for several more days. Negative temperatures are not unusual this far north, and [...]The Achievement Gap
There’s a term that’s been insinuating itself into the language, mainly through its commonplace usage in popular media. You know it. Like ’sunsets’, ‘blood relatives’, ‘from the bottom of my heart’, and other colorful but misleading idioms, it’s taken on its own little bundle of taken-for-granted meanings. I’m thinking about it because it was an [...]
Rethinking Curriculum
Early last summer I began getting professionally developed as a science educator. What I developed was an appreciation for the power of inquiry to stimulate thinking. In the spirit of becoming an inquirer, I began wondering what inquiry might look like in the context of reading instruction. I wondered what process skills for literacy might [...]
The Olden Days
I was going to call this blog entry “The Old Days” but then I realized that wasn’t the way it would have been pronounced back then. ‘Olden’ is the old way we said it. So that’s how I’ll say it now because I am going to demonstrate that
I’m old.
I’m not smart.The way I’m going to [...]
DIBELS and the Seductive Lure of Snake Oil
It’s snake oil time. I started to write this last month when I heard they’d be coming around again, but I couldn’t find the link to the DIBELS homepage. Thanks to Doug Johnson for pointing the way. Things are more interesting today. This morning I read Doug’s call for more testing.
Doug also recently [...]Comment at Dinner
Succinct commentary from an avid reader: My sixth grader reports, “I hate reading comprehension; it completely spoils the book.”
This is now my favorite critique of how reading is conventionally taught.Walking the Dogs
What do thank you notes and walking the dog have in common?
What?
They both need to be done in a timely manner.
The dogs wait for me to finish with the many incomprehensible things I waste perfectly good daylight hours doing. They wonder about my ability to remain motionless and stare fixedly at static objects - the [...]Bloggers Rights, Reinvention, and….Who Knows What?
I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and pasted a badge in Borderland’s sidebar below the blogroll, above the ‘Activism’ section. I can’t turn the computer on and get any work done these days. I get spun around so quickly by the stuff I’m reading that I never get where I was headed. I still have [...]
Recursion
Today, clearing off the workbench, I found my old maul. To be precise, I found the maul head (the heavy wedge-shaped part) and the maul handle (wooden) that I bought to replace the one that broke in September when it started getting cold this fall and we began splitting wood again. The other [...]
