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Monthly Archives: March 2008

What now?

Monday, March 31, 2008

Maybe I’ll have ‘What now?‘ carved into my tombstone. It’s an ever-relevant question, and someone might even smile at it if they thought it was the last thing some dead guy wanted to know. Which it would be. Now, after Doug Belshaw’s post – maybe even partly because of his question, Is Twitter Bad for [...]

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Migrating Del.icio.us to Diigo

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Ryan Bretag’s post with the Del.icio.us vs. Diigo comparison table caught my attention. I looked at Diigo several months back, and I didn’t see it as substantially better than Del.icio.us, which has a large user base. But I’m rethinking that now, since Diigo has new features. Read about Dean Shareski’s headache (all of it) if [...]

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Accommodating Student Weirdness

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Susan Ohanian: The important things a student gets from school are elusive. The so-called value added system does not and cannot measure the things I value as a teacher. Instead of spending their time trying to measure corporate imperatives, teachers need to learn how to accommodate student weirdness. This is my job, plainly put.

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Fault Lines

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Artichoke’s post about metaphor and education, and creativity, has me thinking about the lines and tensions in teaching. She notes the contradiction for art teachers working in schools with “The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words.” Her post was provocative, [...]

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Opportunistic Teaching

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

UPDATE: WRITING WORKSHOP – There’s a lot going on at once. Thankfully, there are two teachers in the room – one of the best things to come from Title I grant money is that I now enjoy regular backup from a retired English teacher, working as an aide. We conference at random with whoever seems [...]

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Critical Moves

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Because I teach writing, and because my students publish some of their writing to the Internet, I’ve been thinking about the differences between blogging effectively, and simply writing online. This is a question that Bud Hunt explored recently, and he sees hypertext links as the essential difference. But I’m sure that Bud would agree there’s [...]

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The Science of Reading is “like deja vu all over again”

Friday, March 14, 2008

Yogi Berra was right, It’s like deja vu all over again. Marc Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz links to a dogfight between the Fordham Institute, Robert Slavin, and the federal government over a funding cut to the Reading First program, a major mess. See Gary Stager’s summary of the report by the Inspector Generals’ office, in [...]

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Alltop and Blogged

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Angela Maiers put out a notice the other day about Alltop, an new blog listing service, which Guy Kawasaki officially announced today. Guy notified me yesterday by email that Borderland is listed in the education blogs section. Fantastic! Alltop is actually an aggregation site, which Guy compares to an “online magazine rack” for people who [...]

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Learning to Fall

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

For the record, I am not a good skier. I learned to ski with cross country skis on a frozen lake after I moved to Fairbanks, when I was 30 years old. I did a lot of stumbling and shuffling before I began to approximate the fluid motions of the more expert skiers I saw [...]

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Meme: Passion Quilt

Monday, March 10, 2008

Social Justice “All for the Common Good, each according to their abilities…” Miss Proffe linked to me from her passion quilt meme post. I don’t always respond to these things, but I liked hers so much that I decided to join it. The caption appears with the photo on flickr, but in Portuguese, and I [...]

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