'education' Category
Learning to Fall
For the record, I am not a good skier. I learned to ski with cross country skis on a frozen lake after I moved to Fairbanks, when I was 30 years old. I did a lot of stumbling and shuffling before I began to approximate the fluid motions of the more expert skiers I saw [...]
Meme: Passion Quilt
Social Justice
“All for the Common Good, each according to their abilities…”
Miss Proffe linked to me from her passion quilt meme post. I don’t always respond to these things, but I liked hers so much that I decided to join it.
The caption appears with the photo on flickr, but in Portuguese, and I discovered [...]Teaching Reading in the Contact Zone
I’m not sure whether this qualifies for Miguel’s passion quilt meme, but my son and daughter have turned our yard into a terrain park. I’m not sure about the meme business because this isn’t something that I am passionate for kids to learn about. It’s their passion. I’m just the observer/promoter. The project began [...]
On Reading Skills and Strategies
Skills is a word that gets a regular workout in discussions about education. I used it in my previous post about reading instruction, making a distinction between skills and strategies. I listed what I saw as examples of each in order to amplify this statement: “Good assessment techniques provide information about the skills and strategies [...]
Reading Teacher Mojo
Since I may be one of the “smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks” Garrison Keillor mentioned in his wrongheaded critique of reading teachers, I’ll go along with Ken Goodman, who says, “NCLB is not about reforming schools. It’s about making public education look like a failed ideal.”
Rather than dwell on that discussion, though, we should talk [...]Multiple Ways of Knowing
In my former life as a ne’er-do-well (during my 20’s when I had a variety of jobs) I worked on a couple of small fishing boats off the Oregon coast. We fished mostly within 50 miles of the beach, far enough out to lose sight of land, and I was grateful for the navigational equipment [...]
Classroom Collaborative Give and Take
Graham calls it a grassroots collaboration. And that, it is. He set up a wiki last August called Spin the Globe. It’s a web space where his class and mine can hopefully learn from each other about our respective far-flung parts of the world. Graham gave it a fair review, but I haven’t had a [...]
Report Card Reform
For people interested in technological change in educational settings, we’re going through one here. The last one on this scale was about 15 years ago when the School District gave us all email accounts. At Wednesday’s staff meeting we got a peek at the next big deal. It’s PowerSchool time now. System-wide change begins with [...]
Seed Time
Time to stir the embers of this sleeping blog. It’s the first day of the new year, a turning point of sorts, and a time for taking stock of things. Amid the catching up with the family, and time away from the classroom and such, I’ve also had some time to wander through a local [...]
Sustainability and Science Education
It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mainly due to hassles managing a classroom full of 12-year-olds full of holiday cheer bent on early celebration. It’s exhausting to maintain a focus right now. We have another week to go, right up to Dec. 21. And despite pressure to join the merriment, I push [...]
