Well, it’s not exactly a John Edwards mistrial, but the verdict is still a little murky. Or at least the sentencing phase. The results are back from the 8th-graders’ spring exams. The passing rate on the English test fell from 71 to 64 percent. In math, the rate fell from 67 to 64 percent. These [...]
Archive for the ‘teaching’ Category
The jury is in
Posted in reform, students, teaching, Uncategorized on June 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
ECA ethics
Posted in commitment, teaching on May 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Science teachers at the high school my daughter will attend next fall are under investigation for cheating on statewide exams. All Indiana students must take a test when they have completed biology — a test written by the state and administered on computer. As a former high school biology teacher, I can attest to the [...]
Outdoor strife
Posted in teaching, Uncategorized on May 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Took the students outside on Tuesday. It may have been the year’s most agonizing lesson. The weather was perfect, sunny and mild. The woods beside the school were lush (even if the understory was mostly honeysuckle arching over random trash, we walked in the shadows of sycamores, maples, shagbark hickory and several other kinds of [...]
Final push
Posted in students, teaching, Uncategorized on May 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Nine days to go. Still a little teaching to do, still plenty of wondering about next year (no results yet from our ISTEP scores, all that stand between us and state takeover) and a lot of “classroom management” to balance my students’ waning interest with the need to keep them engaged in something productive even [...]
Friday night
Posted in teaching on April 21, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
In journalism, Fridays meant a death march of editing enough material for the next three editions — not just Saturday, but Sunday and Monday, too. In teaching, as in most jobs, Friday is much more of a finish line. A short run in the rain, a little Amy Winehouse (and Paul Weller? Who knew!). All [...]
What a difference a year makes
Posted in Cool science, teaching on April 14, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I am reading “1493,” a fascinating account of the dramatic global ecological change unleashed when Europeans reached the New World. So far, I’ve learned that a period of global cooling may have been ushered in by the sudden collapse of native populations in North and South America (credit European diseases for much of that), earthworms [...]
Camp Learnsalot
Posted in good living, teaching on April 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
My first experience teaching anything to people younger than me came through summers spent as a Boy Scout camp counselor. I loved camp and I loved being part of the team that worked so hard to make each week a memorable experience for our visitors. When I signed up to help chaperone my middle daughter’s [...]
All work before play
Posted in teaching on March 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Spring Break hits and most teachers leave almost as fast as the students. The reprieve is long anticipated and well deserved, so the speed of departure is no measure of teacher quality (well, you could argue that the smarter teachers leave fastest, but I digress). But I weighed the options — do I hit the [...]
Sometimes you just crash
Posted in teaching on March 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
We got behind in planning with two days to go before Spring Break and paid for it today. The line between a great lesson and a pretty lame one can be pretty thin sometimes, and this was one of those times … my science co-teacher and I tried something neither of us had done before, [...]
And today in science …
Posted in teaching on March 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Yes, I really have been impersonating Ira Glass in science all week. Not that I have explained it to my students, but I have begun each class by announcing that we have a theme, what the theme is, the number of acts to be presented on that theme … and then I get going. Up [...]
