Sunday, February 28, 2010
The title of this post is taken from Chapter 2 of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life, which I was reminded of while reading Larry Cuban’s blog about Great Teachers:
For the past quarter-century, however, policymakers and politicians have chopped, grated, and mixed together the goals of schooling into a concoction seeking to make education [...]
Friday, February 26, 2010
“Teaching really is not a job. I don’t teach; I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher. That’s who I am.”
… but, obviously, it’s a hell of a long way from Wall Street:
Mr. Dimon said he did not know whether he would have taken the $25 billion that the government lent to JPMorgan during the 2008 [...]
Thursday, February 25, 2010
-Marc Dean Millot:
This last post is not about This Week in Education editor Alexander Russo’s decision to pull “Three Data Points. Unconnected Dots or a Warning” because Andrew Rotherham suggested a colleague at Scholastic should make it so. It’s simply a list of my reflections on reactions to this series.
Thank You. I must thank five [...]
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Monday, December 21, 2009
There’s not much sunlight in the interior of Alaska these days. Today is the winter solstice, and we have just about three and a half hours of daylight to work with. At this latitude the sun barely climbs above the horizon at mid-day, and it has virtually no warmth. Bit still, it’s reassuring to see [...]
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Reading Wendell Berry’s Citizenship Papers, I see that Berry’s “agrarian argument” might also serve to counter the corporate ethos which has dominated the rhetoric of education reform for several decades, and which is now being carried forward by the Obama administration. The agrarian argument asserts the responsibility everyone has to care for that which everyone [...]
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
It’s an old story:
If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
