Saturday, February 13, 2010
After noting the disappearance of Marc Dean Millot’s post from Alexander Russo’s TWIE (Scholastic Inc) blog, I got an email from Millot asking if I’d be interested in providing him with some blog space to explain what happened. I said OK, and he says he’ll submit something here in the next few days. In the [...]
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 [...]
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Dina Strasser and I have begun a joint blogging venture, comparing notes on our reading classrooms this year. We set up a project blog called Reading Free, and plan to exchange posts there. I’m interested in this from a couple of different angles, one of them being the use of social media to support collaborative [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
It is no surprise that Gov. Palin wants to sit out the plan to write new national common core education standards. After all, she also wants to turn down $28.6 million in stimulus money for energy cost relief because taking it would require us to adopt energy-efficient building codes, which she says should be [...]
This is testing week, and I’ve been listening to what the kids are hearing about the tests.
“Relax; just do your best.”
“The tests give us information about how we can help you.”
“You will not be held back or get a bad grade on your report card if you don’t do well on the test.”
“Some questions [...]
I’m trying something different this year. I’m not assigning novels and telling everyone which pages to read, having class discussions about the themes, providing background knowledge, making vocabulary lists, or asking “comprehension” questions that I mark for a grade.
This year, everyone in the class reads what they want to read, and they read without [...]
