'borderland' Category
Putting it Together
It’s the last day of school, the kids are gone for the summer, and I’m writing a little book review here. This book was not recommended to me. I found it almost by accident at the library when I was there on an errand. It was written nearly 60 years ago, and the fact that [...]
Intelligence Training
People tend to think of intelligence as a static quality, something that some people have more of than others. Yet we know that our brains are developed through experience, by stimulating neuronal connections. Yet, all experience isn’t equally valuable. And some experiences may even inhibit intellectual growth. Our goal as teachers should be to stimulate [...]
The Mountains are High
The Forum for Education and Democracy released a report last week, Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Role in Education [pdf], to commemorate the release of the landmark A Nation at Risk report, issued 25 years ago by the Reagan administration. A Nation at Risk claimed that “the educational foundations of our [...]
E18 Error Report
The last three weeks (time since my previous post) have been more or less an extended insult. I don’t know if things are improving or not at the moment. It snowed throughout the month of April - right up to yesterday, when we got yet another 2 inches of slop. Throw in some agonizing and [...]
Word of Mouth
Seems like I spend half my time in the classroom keeping the noise level down, and the rest of the time getting someone besides the regulars to speak up. This post is about the talking part of student presentations, and helping kids to develop an actual public speaking voice. I discovered last week, by accident, [...]
When Worlds Don’t Collide
Once upon a time I looked forward to seeing mainline literacy journals take an interest in blogging. So, it was good to see an article in this month’s Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy on using of blogs for literature study, Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class [...]
What now?
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 [...]Migrating Del.icio.us to Diigo
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 [...]
Accommodating Student Weirdness
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.
Fault Lines
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, [...]
