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Category Archives: borderland

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Hills to Climb

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Summer is over, and so is my unplanned break from blogging. Last week we had the kick-off welcome back session and we met our new superintendent. We had the introductions for new staff, brief recounts of summer highlights, and school-wide planning, planning, planning. Monday there will be more planning (presumably) and a meet-and-greet for teachers [...]

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On Getting Back to Normal

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I’m on vacation, busy with summer for a month already, spending time outside biking, hiking, and hacking away at the woods with a chainsaw. I got a pin for 25 years of service at our last day’s assembly, which made me stop and think just a bit. How could it be that I’ve stayed with [...]

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Lost Offshore Oil Rig Blues

Sunday, May 30, 2010

We hear, now, there are giant plumes of oil rolling around beneath the surface of the Gulf, and that BP, not the Coast Guard, is running the show. We’ve also learned that we can expect it to get worse in the near term, despite the best efforts of BP and the Obama administration to reassure [...]

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Standing Up for Common Sense

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Every once in a while, there is good news: Alaska opts out of Race to the Top school grants TOO MUCH CHANGE: State leery after failures of the No Child Left Behind Act. By Jeremy Hsieh The Associated Press While many states have accepted an educational reform challenge in the federal Race to the Top [...]

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Black Waves

Sunday, May 2, 2010

It’s not just beaches and birds. VALDEZ, Alaska — The toll of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a sadly familiar one: 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals–all victims of the oil tanker that ran over a reef late one April night and drained 11 million gallons of oil into Prince [...]

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Heartbreaking

Saturday, May 1, 2010

This brings back some painful memories. Yesterday, AKMuckracker wrote about the problem of accounting for the true price of oil, and published some information about the drill rig that exploded and sank in The Gulf. It was regarded as “state of the art.” The rig belongs to Transocean, the world’s biggest offshore drilling contractor. The [...]

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Rethinking School Reading

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

With a little over 2 weeks of school left, we are finalizing things, making ready for the grand summer release. Today I asked my sixth graders to reflect on their growth as readers, and to write about what they’d learned (if anything) about themselves or books, based on what they read in school this year. [...]

Also filed in curriculum, literacy, reading workshop, teacher research | | Comments (3)

It’s the News Media, Stupid (again)

Monday, April 26, 2010

When I first heard Glenn Beck on the truck radio (following Barack Obama’s election) I thought I was listening to a ridiculous caricature of a revolutionary. Here was this obviously white, pin-headed fear monger, using a national broadcast medium to pretend that he was a threatened underdog. Part comedy, part horror show. And now, since [...]

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Unfinished Business – A Pedagogy for the Planet

Thursday, April 22, 2010

It’s still Earth Day here along the the northern rim of the planet, near the eastern edge of the international date line. Spring is here at last; it is brown and muddy and beautiful without any snow. This was my 30th winter in Alaska, and I still look forward to the regular changes, no matter [...]

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Capitalism : Bottled Water : : Democrats : Education Reform

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Obama administration’s education reform policy is a scam, just like bottled water – a capitalist scheme to manufacture markets through the privatization of public wealth. Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint are education “reform” mechanisms that use test scores to label schools as failing, thereby creating incentives for states to relax charter [...]

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