This is the first in a series of posts in which Dina Strasser, who blogs at The Line, and I correspond about our experiences using a workshop approach to reading instruction:
Dina,
I like your suggestion that we use our blogs to compare notes about teaching in reading workshop classrooms this year. I appreciate your observations [...]
This seems like a good time to call up this video narrated by Alan Watts, Life and Music, which Artichoke posted many, many months ago. I mentioned it to one of the other teachers I work with as an aside during a presentation on RTI at a staff meeting this afternoon. (AIMSweb is a [...]
Daniel Pink, author of the pop socio-psychology book, A Whole New Mind, which celebrates creativity and innovation as part of a supposedly new ethos in business management, takes up the problem of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation in a TED lecture. He describes an experiment exploring the problem of functional fixedness, first performed in 1945. Functional [...]
We’re into the second week of school here this year. I’m still in the early getting-to-know-you period with my class, and we are all more or less on our best behavior, but judging from what I’ve seen so far this is going to be a good year. It’s my 27th in the classroom, and you’d [...]
It’s rained today and yesterday, and the Hard Luck Creek fire has been knocked down. The choking smoke is gone, displaced by a refreshing gray drizzle. What a relief! The fire was mapped at over 13,000 acres, only about 6 miles from where I live (just off the lower right-hand corner of the fire map). [...]
We got back from a fishing trip to Valdez two days ago, driving through fire smoke most of the way. It’s very bad here. There’s a new fire – about 6,000 acres right now – just over the hill, about 10 miles away. They’re calling it the Hardluck Creek Fire, which sounds about [...]
While wildfires burn hundreds of thousands of acres near here, and we choke on the smoke, I’ve been out cutting winter firewood. It makes sense, in a way, since it has to be done before winter, and the smoke makes every other kind of outdoor activity a lot less fun. It’s hot, heavy, work. [...]
My name is Doug.
I'm from the government.
I teach your kids.
