Last week, I decided to start a TED talk challenge. I love to use TED talks in my classes—and I also love learning from them myself. But I rarely make time to watch them. So my new goal is to watch one new TED talk per week. I started the challenge off with a bang…
In Common Core news, Arne Duncan made yet another bone-headed statement, insulting “white suburban moms” everywhere. Paul Thomas has a must-read follow-up post that examines “the politics of white outrage.” And if you haven’t watched the powerful anti-CCSS speech from the Tennessee student, I recommend it. I never really thought about the benefits of pens over pencils…
I’m going to be traveling all day tomorrow and won’t have time to put together my regular Sunday feature, but I know it’s my mom’s favorite thing on my blog, so I decided to give her a thrill and post it today. A few stories from #opened13: The Digital Hechinger Report critiqued Andrew Ng’s opening…
I’m at #OpenEd13 this week, which is one reason why I haven’t been blogging. (Also, #NaNoWriMo.) But I did want to write a quick post to share a couple of thoughts about Audrey Watters’s provocative keynote on “The Education Apocalypse,” which she has published (along with awesome slides!) at her blog. Watters traced the “end times”…
(Methods students, please note the “Thugging It Up” tagged beside Hope. I chose this photo just for you! Go forth, and thug it up with hope.) Yesterday I wrote about new teachers and disillusionment and shared my belief that hope is the foundation of professional happiness. The new teachers I work with don’t need to…
This week in Methods class, I’m going to read aloud one of my favorite picture books, Russell Hoban’s The Little Brute Family. The Brutes are a horrible family–crabby and cranky, they fight over everything and they are never content with what they have. They live in misery, until one day when Baby Brute finds “a…
YA author James Preller shares some brilliant thoughts about why we need stories and why it is so important to be yourself. Maybe Cathy Davidson’s MOOC will finally break my streak of not finishing MOOCS. I’m definitely signing up for History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Ed. This post on teaching the Common Core makes a…
Stacey Shubitz at Two Writing Teachers has an excellent post on Creating a Consistent and Meaningful Writing Life. Cathy Day has some useful ideas for involving students in blogging about what happens in class. Jenny Maehara explains why she launches her writing workshop with poetry. I haven’t been following Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts’s blog-o-thon…
(Thanks to The Styling Librarian, I just made my first quote poster using ReciteThis!) This Oscar Wilde quote popped into my head this morning as I was reflecting on part of last night’s discussion in Methods class. There we were talking about how to transform our students’ lives through literacy, how to help them view…
I have written before about my naivete as a first-year high school English teacher. I truly thought that my good intentions would be enough to carry the day. I loved English, so my students would too. Because we all know that the teacher’s enthusiasm is all that’s needed to motivate students to learn, right? I…
