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Monthly Archives: December 2008

Hauling Water at 40 Below Zero

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

I’m not writing a New Year’s Resolution post. This is, however, an effort to get back into a more regular writing habit by taking advantage of some weather-induced down time. I’ve fallen off the blog bandwagon a little bit, and now I’ve got fifty open tabs on the browser that I could weave into a [...]

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Cold and Dark

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Prompted by Michael Doyle’s Winter Solstice: Living approx. 100 miles from the arctic circle, as I do, this day – winter solstice – is monumental. Or at least significant. I was outside on my snowboard. It was cold, and the light was flat, but it was a good day. I got out. I dreamed. There [...]

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On the Scale of Intervention

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Via Susan Ohanian, a letter to the editor at USA Today about a recent study on poverty and brain development, Stephen Krashen says, Experts quoted in USA TODAY’s article “Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains” seem to think that the solution to poor brain development of children in poverty should consist of “intervention” that includes “focused [...]

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Speaking Math

Saturday, December 13, 2008

I’ve been thinking about our school district’s mathematics pacing guide lately. This past week we gave the required mid-year math assessment to make sure the kids are on track, and I’m seeing the predictable result: Some are; too many are not. So, what now? The pacing guide doesn’t say. It isn’t a teaching tool, you [...]

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Harder vs. Smarter

Monday, December 1, 2008

Bloggers have been all over the Michelle Rhee story, lately. Mike Klonsky: Know-nothing writers like Amanda Ripley kill perfectly good trees to fill pages with crap like this: “The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.” Did you get that? Decades of research? Now instead of weighing school [...]

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