Complaint #163

Our district’s Web Administrator (read: a program searching for keywords in webpages) blocks tons of websites. The obvious is in place: I can’t visit MySpace or YouTube or even Google Video. I can’t visit BoingBoing or Mashable or any site that might interest or excite someone using the internet.
I can’t visit sites [...]

a little explanation

About that last haiku… there are a couple of meanings for me; I wonder if it means anything to you.
Today was a collaboration day for us, and whereas we usually use those days to attend an outlandish number of meetings, or to sit in our classrooms grading papers with other teachers, today’s collaboration day was [...]

And we wonder why our kids can’t read.

Every year we take a little more away from the students, and every year it seems that what we lose is all the more neccessary. A few years ago, we lost our reading program — it was dissolved into the English class, creating Language Arts. That’s nothing new; it’s happened across the country.
The [...]

I am not a service to my students

because I am spending more and more classtime dealing with behaviors between the students. If it’s not the constant bickering between two students (who go so far as to continuously call each other names in class, even in the middle of a lecture, even as the class lets out, and whose relationship has turned [...]

The Great Check Out

If there’s anything I’ve learned through keeping this blog it’s that I’m not alone. There are minutes and hours and days and weeks that we sit in our classrooms thinking no other students across the country perform the same ways our students do, or that no other teachers have the same problems we see. [...]

Thought rethunk

Today the world history teacher and I revised the prject we’d built to align our classrooms. For me the real problems came yesterday with a few of my classes (one in particular). For the world history teacher, he found problems beginning with the second class of the day.
A majority of the students didn’t [...]

Rethinking a thought

The process of research and writing is often difficult, and it’s certainly difficult when the resourcees available to your students are limited. A colleague and I realized this and as we were talking over our future plans for the remainder of the year decidedthat we would share our classes. He — world history [...]

Winding down

We’re getting down to the end of the year, where we’re not focused on isntruction as much as we are on testing and making sure we all spend every waking minute wandering from meeting to meeting. And as much as this is a drain on the teachers we’ve got to remember that we also [...]

Friday Haiku

Frustration Level: Maximum

The other day I saw a post by mrc (at his blog, understanding) entitled: “Trivial Annoyances Add Up”, and I had to leave a comment because I’ve been having the same feelings lately. It’s a short post, and I suggest you check it out, but I will share this snippet that had me nodding [...]