Skip to content

Monthly Archives: March 2006

Writing Across and Against the Curriculum

Thursday, March 30, 2006

A couple of ideas appeared in my email today in advance of National Poetry Month. I now have a poetry resources list for the sites I found potentially useful. While following links for those poetry sites I ran across Altered Books. Remixing digital media has been popular among artists for a long time, but I’ve [...]

Filed in borderland, literacy | | Comments (5)

Kids are Natural Learners

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Kids are natural learners, and it isn’t a big deal to them most of the time. Learning is what kids do. Simple. When I was a kid nobody bothered to keep tabs on what I was learning, and I had a lot of chances to set up little educational projects of my own. Some of [...]

Filed in borderland, education, science | | Comments (4)

The Power to Define

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Wow! I take a day off to snowboard with my family at the ski area down the road, and Miguel goes nuclear, getting quite deep into some complex thinking. Sometimes I think I could make a part time job out of simply responding to what he has to say. What would happen if we ever [...]

Filed in borderland, education, politics | | Comments (5)

I Made a Connection

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

I began the test prep shuffle this week. I’m teaching math topics we haven’t covered that I suspect might be on the tests. Testing is 2 weeks off, but I don’t do any bubble-marking practice until a couple of days ahead of the real deal. I also don’t much care if the kids do a [...]

Filed in borderland, education, literacy | | Comments (2)

Diffusion

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

To those who visited Tell the Raven and left comments for my students, thanks. We were on spring break last week, and the kids were jazzed when they came back and heard that people from far away read their stories and left them comments.
Miguel’s comment about the folks who have “NO CLUE” interested [...]

Filed in borderland, education, technology | | Comments (5)

Tell the Raven, Tell the World

Sunday, March 12, 2006

It’s been about 2 weeks since I got the new tellraven.us domain online for my classroom Community Writing Project. I’m not calling it a classroom blogging site because the kids don’t know what blogging is. They’re writing, though. And how! They’re jazzed to be writing for each other and the few outsiders who’ve left comments.
I’m [...]

Filed in borderland, education, literacy, politics, technology | | Comments (14)

Resources for Copyright Literacy

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

I found out today that this is Copyright Awareness Week. In recognition of this occasion NCTE Inbox [subscribe to NCTE Inbox] newsletter had several links to resources about finding and using online media and information. For teachers whose students use the internet for project work, this seemed like a valuable resource. I’ve collected them in [...]

Filed in borderland, education, literacy, technology | | Comments (1)

I Shared my Bed with Mice

Monday, March 6, 2006

My personal narrative frames the Why that led me to become a teacher. It is linked to my previous post about cultural narratives.
I left the University after my second year there. I quit to work on an oil tanker. I was unfocused, unmotivated, disillusioned, disenchanted, and disengaged. I’d always been a good student, but [...]

Filed in borderland, education | | Comments (0)

Wanted: gods that will serve

Sunday, March 5, 2006

Sometimes a new idea is at once so big, so simple, and so obvious that it seems strange that I’ve never noticed it. After reading Leigh’s post about Neil Postman, an author I’d never read, I picked up a couple of Postman’s books at the library last month. The End of Education [book review] triggered [...]

Filed in borderland, education | | Comments (1)