'politics' Category
Accommodating Student Weirdness
Susan Ohanian:
The important things a student gets from school are elusive. The so-called value added system does not and cannot measure the things I value as a teacher. Instead of spending their time trying to measure corporate imperatives, teachers need to learn how to accommodate student weirdness.This is my job, plainly put.
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 [...]Oil and Anger
Sometimes an intersection of possibilities comes along for teaching a lesson, and this one has dredged up a lot of painful memories for me.
There was a hearing today in the US Supreme Court about whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill in 1989, nearly 20 years ago. I also [...]
The Right Way to Teach
This little bit of personal history is inspired by Alice Mercer’s post about scripted reading instruction, which sounds to me like a relatively simple way for school districts to train teaching personnel instead of promoting real professional learning opportunities. I like Alice’s recommendation: “Be clear in what the program is doing, what you are doing, [...]
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 [...]
From Stewards to Shareholders
A small item in the paper earlier this week quietly announced the death of Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of the Eyak language. Eyak is one of nearly 20 Alaskan Native languages, and the first to become extinct.
Jones was chief of the Eyak Nation, a people whose ancestral homeland runs along [...]Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs on King’s Legacy of Change:
In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a [...]The Larger Question
Gerald Bracey asks 3 questions that might interest education technology bloggers.
The first two:
The immediate questions that come to mind — or certainly should come to mind — are “What constitutes a 21st century skill?” and then “Who gets to define such a skill?” The answer to the first question is “nobody knows” and the answer [...]Limitations
It’s getting dark here. Not just kind of dark. But real winter-dark. As in, I took a picture of the sunset yesterday at 3:00 while everyone was getting their coats on to leave school.
Strangely, it’s not real cold yet, and we’ve only got just a lousy couple inches of leaf-covered snow in the [...]Herd Poisoning
Graham Wegner points out some problems that cropped up in the comments of a couple of education blogs. He comments on the perils of taking up heartfelt issues in blog comments, and assuming we’ll be understood.
Neil Postman’s Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk has an excerpted chapter, Propaganda [pdf], in which he argues that propaganda [...]
