I need to find out more about ProComp, the merit-pay plan. But a mere $150 or so a month after taxes for teaching in quote-unquote ‘high poverty schools’ (warning, code words!) is pretty sad.
‘Denver teachers voted 3-1 to approve a three-year contract with the Denver Public Schools Tuesday. “It was the best deal we could get for our members,” said Kim Ursetta, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association of the contract. … The vote was 77.5 percent to accept the agreement and 22.5 percent to reject it. A total …

My new digs at the elementary school are really nice and I’m very happy with the room (and everything else). The staff is wonderful, the administration/office is great, and the atmosphere is a breath of fresh air.
I’ve spent a week working on the room. I was delayed getting started a day, when a broken pipe flooded our three fifth grade classrooms. Mine was furthest away from the water, and it was cleaned and dried over night, but my partner teacher had to have entirely new flooring and won’t be able …

The Big Read is ‘an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest.’
The Big Read ‘answers a big need. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, found that not only is literary reading in America declining rapidly among all groups, but that the rate of …

‘The public schools have always been the friends of the people, and no other system has ever accomplished the good that they have. The different legislatures in the several states have long since decided this, in establishing public schools, that the rich and the poor, side by side, might attend, and receive the self-same instruction, which is for the betterment of each generation. In a republican form of government, general education is considered of paramount importance, hence the public schools. Cite me in a community, a town, or a city …

I stumbled across Eric Zorn’s «50 things learned in 50 years» via «MetaFilter» and I may try to transmit some of the more important lessons to my students soon. My favorites:

‘2. Promptness shows respect.
3. You can’t avoid offending people from time to time. When you don’t mean it, apologize. When you do mean it, accept the consequences.
6. The most valuable thing to have is a good reputation, and it’s neither hard nor expensive to acquire one: Be fair. Be honest. Be trustworthy. Be generous. Respect others.
7. Prejudice and bigotry is …

The Boston Globe «weighs in» on closing the achievement gap between socioeconomic haves and have-nots. Their conclusion:

‘“Teach everything” should be a motto: academics, time management, study skills, and the value of a positive attitude. Instead of laboring for hours over opaque material, students should be trained to ask for help early and often. … Achievement isn’t about genes or race. It’s just making a choice to work hard. Good schools give students a personal map and the tools to do that work.’
—Boston Globe

Would that it were so pat and easy.
The …

I accepted a job today in a district a couple of cities away. It came out of the blue, all of a sudden. Starting 21-Aug, I’ll be a sixth grade math and science teacher at a junior high school. It’s an interesting, unique, and potentially very beneficial opportunity, and I’m grateful to have a chance at it.
The principal called this morning as I was getting ready for yet another doctor’s appointment and asked if I were still available. We arranged an interview for 13:00. The interview last about 30 minutes …

In a post titled, «Time for Regime Change in Education», Dan Brown says there is a single question to be asked:

‘A single question cuts to the heart of America’s education dilemma:
’1. spend all of their class time on only reading and math test preparation?
’2. study a balanced diet of subjects including reading, writing, math, science, social studies and civics, music, the arts, health, and physical education?’
—The Huffington Post

He further writes, ‘Unfortunately where we stand now, No Child Left Behind and its attendant logic of fixating on standardized test scores have …

Janet Ewell, a high school teacher in Orange County, wrote a wonderful opinion piece called «Test-Takers, Not Students» in the L.A. Times on May 26. I almost missed it. It certainly deserves wider exposure:

Test madness and centralized curriculum control squeeze creativity out of the classroom
‘It is popular to blame the federal No Child Left Behind Act for California’s educational woes, but our misery is largely homegrown and predates the 2001 law. A friend who teaches at a prestigious suburban school recently told me that she was on leave and didn’t …

I love «this letter» in the Rocky Mountain News Letters to the Editor section:

‘Teachers not well-paid
‘Where does Betsy Hart get her information? In her column of Dec. 11, “This year, I’ll be celebrating a low- key Christmas,” she stated, “I really like my kids’ teachers, but they are well-compensated and I’m just not going to add to the 25 gift cards they’ll have trouble using anyway.”
‘I can assure Hart that teachers are not well-compensated and will most likely use those “25 gift cards” to purchase classroom supplies not furnished by …

«Excellent visual for the classroom!»

Overheard in a third grade classroom two weeks before Christmas:

‘Mr. Pollock, is Santa Claus real?’

Uh, go home and ask your parents, kid

«Happy» «Beethoven’s Birthday!»

While it’s true that there is plenty of controversy that can crop up in teaching language arts and social studies, I’m really glad I don’t teach science at times like «this»:

‘The scandal at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) just keeps getting worse. Since the Washington Post published an op-ed I wrote asking if NSTA’s puzzling decision to reject 50,000 free DVDs of Al Gore’s global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth might – just might – have had anything to do with more than six million dollars the organization has …

Are your children or the students in your classroom writing to Santa this year? Be sure it’s addressed correctly to:

Santa Claus
North Polo H0H 0H0
Canada

And be sure and include your return address so he can write you back. (He does, you know, and in your native language, inlcuding Esperanto.)
Or you could just go online; «Canada Post» has a handy page that lets you get Kris Kringle’s immediate attention.
Happy Holidays!

A whisper overheard in a classroom before Thanksgiving:

‘He’s a wrinkled old man!’
 

This has been another edition of Things I Already Knew Thank You Very Much (TIAKTYVM).

To sanitize Thanksgiving in the classroom, or not to sanitize Thanksgiving in the classroom … «that is the question»:

‘… an Associated Press story focusing on how teachers like Morgan (who teaches at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco) are “trying to portray is a different point of view” about Thanksgiving — i.e., a far less fun one.
‘Some think that’s akin to being the grinch who stole Christmas, or a rehash of Indigenous Peoples Day.
‘“He is teaching his students to hate their country,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean …

A reminder of why I love the web so much: «the 25 Funniest Analogies» collected by English teachers:
Some of my favorites:

‘3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. …
’5. She had a deep, throaty, …

This is an AWESOME site for us social studies geeks: «Fantasy Congress».
It’s just like those fantasy/rotisserie baseball leagues, but with congressmen and senators and legislation instead of short stops, home runs and ERA’s.
Would love to try this with a class of students!

I’m still trying to figure this one out:
From an elementary school’s list of Red Ribbon Week activities:

‘Thursday: Discuss grade-appropriate healthy choices. (Lollipops can be given out this day.)’

Ummmmmm …

Via «MetaFilter», comes «this rather interesting take on grades» from a syllabus of Professor John P. Staeck of the College of DuPage Czech American Archaelogical Field School. The professor includes the obligatory disclaimer that this is his opinion and his alone, of course:

‘I hate grades. Letters do not make us who we are and do not, usually, reflect what we know or are capable of. Nonetheless, our society has adopted the use of grades as a measure of success and capability in academic environments. I work in this society and …

Big interview tomorrow for a nice juicy new job. Very excited about the opportunity, hope I do well in the interview, and that they choose me. I need to get back in the real game and have a classroom of my own.
Fingers crossed!

‘Brilliance comes in all colors, strengths in many forms. When we learn to honor the differences and appreciate the mix, we’re on our way.’
—Kelly Ann Rothaus

It appears to be a one-post blog, and that’s too bad, because the Concerned Professor had an interesting and thought-provoking beginning that deserves to be continued. In his one and only post, the Professor «wrote about academic cheating», and I’m not sure if the post itself or the comments it generated are the most interesting and revealing:

‘If collaboration and the open-source methodology are truly the future of the web, how can professors and universities deal with this? While the media and popular culture have spent countless hours extolling the virtues …

I’m in the middle of two days of subbing for a sixth grade class in a different middle school. My first experience with sixth grade confirms what I’ve long suspected: something happens to middle schoolers increasingly as they progress through the three-year period that turns them from sweet and reasonable and cooperative to smart-assed and ridiculous and sullen.
Sixth grade subbing is a joy, eighth grade involves not a small amount of pain.
So what happens? The usual suspects … puberty, top-dog/upper classman cockiness, height/weight gains that put them on par with …