Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Howard Zinn died today of a heart attack. He was 87. The AP published a short biography in memorium.
Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although [...]
Thursday, January 7, 2010
The Public School in Los Angeles is a school with no curriculum. Someone proposes a class, and when enough interest builds, a teacher is found to teach whoever signed up. The school isn’t accredited; there are no degree programs. It’s a project of Telic Arts Exchange, an organization that “emphasizes social exchange, interactivity and public [...]
Today was a professional development day, and as these things go, it wasn’t bad. One thing that helped, I suspect, is that the school district curriculum department piggy-backed onto the Alaska State Literacy Association 2009 conference, so we were able to take advantage of some fresh ideas that weren’t part of the local institutional orthodoxy. [...]
Thursday, October 1, 2009
This post is tangential to a series of posts that Tom Hoffman has done recently, in which he eviscerates the new Common Core(porate) English Language Arts Standards. I don’t see category links on his blog, so maybe the best place to look for them all at this point is in the monthly archive. He [...]
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 [...]
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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 [...]
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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 [...]
Competitiveness and excellence are not necessarily related. Competition may lead to excellence, but it may also lead to cheating and lying. Or it may lead to more benign perversions, like data mining and “public relations” initiatives that focus on quality indicators, rather than quality itself. Alfie Kohn’s twitter stream today contained a link [...]
Nonsense from our national school policy leadership is just so much noise – whether naive or disingenuous, I don’t know. It may be both. Tom Hoffman is right – Arne Duncan will learn some hard lessons of his own before this is all over. In the meantime, it hurts my brain to listen to him [...]
Yet another dire warning about the need for workers who can “thrive in the global economy:”
[T]he Commission concludes that reform in mathematics and science will be possible only if we “do school differently” in ways that emphasize the centrality of math and science to educational improvement and innovation…. As a society, we must commit ourselves [...]
