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Monthly Archives: January 2008

Multiple Ways of Knowing

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

In my former life as a ne’er-do-well (during my 20’s when I had a variety of jobs) I worked on a couple of small fishing boats off the Oregon coast. We fished mostly within 50 miles of the beach, far enough out to lose sight of land, and I was grateful for the navigational equipment [...]

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From Stewards to Shareholders

Friday, January 25, 2008

A small item in the paper earlier this week quietly announced the death of Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of the Eyak language. Eyak is one of nearly 20 Alaskan Native languages, and the first to become extinct.
Jones was chief of the Eyak Nation, a people whose ancestral homeland runs along [...]

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A Time to Write

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Yesterday was a professional development day. Kids were home. Teachers met in the school library and talked about the Six Traits writing framework.
Six Traits is an analytical framework for evaluating student writing. It is also useful as an instructional tool which can give us a common language we can use to talk about [...]

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Grace Lee Boggs

Friday, January 18, 2008

Grace Lee Boggs on King’s Legacy of Change:
In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a [...]

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Classroom Collaborative Give and Take

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Graham calls it a grassroots collaboration. And that, it is. He set up a wiki last August called Spin the Globe. It’s a web space where his class and mine can hopefully learn from each other about our respective far-flung parts of the world. Graham gave it a fair review, but I haven’t had a [...]

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Report Card Reform

Friday, January 11, 2008

For people interested in technological change in educational settings, we’re going through one here. The last one on this scale was about 15 years ago when the School District gave us all email accounts. At Wednesday’s staff meeting we got a peek at the next big deal. It’s PowerSchool time now. System-wide change begins with [...]

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Textual Studies

Friday, January 4, 2008

Way, way back in December I followed up on Tom Hoffman’s recommendation and found a copy of Robert Scholes’ Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Since it’s due back at the library now, I want to mention it here before I return it.
The book opened with Scholes’ recommendation for a [...]

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Seed Time

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Time to stir the embers of this sleeping blog. It’s the first day of the new year, a turning point of sorts, and a time for taking stock of things. Amid the catching up with the family, and time away from the classroom and such, I’ve also had some time to wander through a local [...]

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