You are not just training our nation’s future workers. You are bringing up the future citizens of the United States of America. Your students will, someday soon, collectively decide the fate of this great nation of ours. Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor (Supreme Civics, 2011) I thought today would be a good day to […]
Isn’t It Time to Pay Attention to Our Gifted Students?
By Gina Kennedy According to the National Association for Gifted Children, there are three to five million gifted students in our public schools today, however rarely will you find two school districts in the United States that service these students in a similar way. Best practices and strategies to teach the gifted are likely based […]
A Little School Privatization History About Memphis
If you think it is just the poor schools that will be turned to charters, think again. Sooner or later they will want to turn your middle class school into one, and my guess is you will pay for it, and you will have no say into how it is run. In the fall of […]
Teacher Hate
TIME Magazine is the latest media outlet to vilify teachers. The Nov. 3rd edition conveniently snipes at teacher tenure, while giving corporations the nod. How much money did they get, you have to wonder, to show the gavel hitting the apple? And gavels should be what they fear. A lot of places are starting to […]
How Corporations Try To Steal the Definition of Personalized Learning
There is confusion, we are told, by the corporations and politicians, as to how to define personalized learning. From Ed. Week…A number of education and technology organizations are seeking to forge a clearer understanding of what this concept really means. They just don’t seem to be able to pull it all together. Perhaps someone should […]
Courses We Once Knew: The Loss of Geography in a Common Core World
How did you learn about your town, state, country, and the world? What did you learn about the cultures of the people living in those places, the physical characteristics of the land, and all the other skills necessary to understand geography? Are today’s students knowledgeable about their world? Specifically, what happened to geography? While the […]
When All You’ve Got is Idealism: Teach for America v. Real Teachers
Once a teacher, suffering from battle fatigue, reaches the tipping point on the depression scale, and there are few if any administrators able, or willing, to provide them with support, it is especially discouraging to hear about the new crop of Teach for America recruits who are arriving in droves with idealism! To hear the […]
Courses We Once Knew: Home Economics, Family and Jobs!
Sometimes, caught up in fighting high-stakes testing and Common Core, we might forget about other insidious ways our public schools have been changed due to harmful standards. We recognize easily the loss of the arts. And serious classes, important to a democracy, like civics, are given short shrift these days. But what about the great […]
Avoid, Conquer or Adapt to Learning Disabilities in Public Schools and Beyond
When I was in high school I played flute in the band. I did pretty well except when I took the occasional written test. I could play notes but I could not name them. It was a mystery of sorts. But it didn’t keep me from making music and the band director didn’t care. So […]
New Kindergarten Testing: Sorry, It’s Not Really Play
Early childhood officials at the U.S. Department of Education, some who should know better, have apparently concluded (as described in this Ed Week article), that they were making little kids do things too over-the-top to be early childhood ready—like giving four-year-olds basic sight word spelling tests and getting them to count to 20 in their […]