It’s summertime and, as a teacher, that means I am home with my two boys for the next two-and-a-half months. Most people assume this means I have oodles of free time to just sit and kick it on my back deck with a book.
While I do have more time now than I did when my days were 7:30am-5:00pm, I still have a lot of “teacherly” things going on.… [Read more]
It seems I can’t win. Apparently if I am not screwing up education as a teacher, I’m doing it by being a working mom.
This past week, in a forum hosted by The Washington Post, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant announced that all the problems in education can be tracked back to women joining the work force.… [Read more]
I think I’ve mentioned before that I teach in a pretty diverse school district; it’s one that is most definitely not one of the wealthier districts in the state of Michigan.
I wouldn’t say we under-perform, but we do have our struggles. Our staff has been diligently working on literacy and increasing thinking and problem solving skills in our students.… [Read more]
With four weeks left in the school year, I am constantly getting e-mails from administration that remind us, the staff, that final walk-throughs will be done in the next couple of weeks and, after grades are posted, our final evaluations will be ready for us to view. We receive reminders to enter in our “evidence” that we have been working toward the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year.… [Read more]
Don’t worry, ‘Merca. You’ll still get your mail on Saturdays. For now, anyway.
About a month ago I turned on my local news like I always do while I made dinner for my family. They were reporting on the controversy over whether or not the United States Postal Service would end Saturday delivery to save money.… [Read more]
So Facebook has come out with a phone…or at least Facebook Home that can be downloaded on select Android phones. Or you can buy the HTC First for AT&T.
Or you can just not get the phone like the rest of us.
This past week I got into a conversation about the phone and Home on Facebook (the irony is not lost on me).… [Read more]
Dear Supreme Court Justices of the United States of America,
I consider myself to be a pretty average American mother of a typical American family. My husband and I are married and live in a small town in the Midwest. We have two small boys ages three and one. Both my husband and I have college degrees and we work outside the home.… [Read more]
I’m a HUGE supporter of the separation of church and state. Huge.
But as a public school teacher, that doesn’t mean I can’t teach about religion. It just means I can’t tell my students that one or any religion is the RIGHT religion.
As a high school American literature teacher, it is absolutely impossible for me to teach any of the books in my curriculum without my students having some working knowledge of the Bible.… [Read more]
I’m really not sure how much the non-teacher public know about the Common Core State Standards Initiative that has been brewing over the past few years and has gone into effect this school year.
The idea behind the Common Core is that instead of every state making up their own public school standards and benchmarks for grades K-12 and then giving their own state test to check on the progress of those standards, all the states will have the same…ahem…COMMON…set of standards for each grade level.… [Read more]
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), almost a quarter of adult Americans suffer some type of diagnosable mental illness in a given year.
They also state that mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the US and Canada.
And that 45% of people with a mental disorder suffer from more than one mental illness at a time.… [Read more]
Dear Marissa Mayer,
Ok, I don’t know anything about business. I have never worked from home other than making a little bit of money here and there with my writing, so to be honest, I have found myself agreeing with both sides that write about your managerial decisions you have decided to enforce at Yahoo!.
But really, this letter isn’t about your decisions to tell your employees what they can and can’t do.… [Read more]
There it is again. The comparison of teaching salaries of the United States to those around the world.
We are at the top of the list for hours teachers spend working, yet almost at the bottom of the list for pay. The rest of the countries are much more evenly matched with hours worked versus how much pay teachers get.… [Read more]
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about allowing my three-and-a-half-year old have access to many different screens and how we monitor it.… [Read more]
I love award shows. Love them. I love the red carpet, the fashion, the gossip, the shots of celebrities when they don’t know they are on TV at that exact moment. I love that even with the delays and memos about dress codes, no one is ever really sure what loose cannon celebrity is going to do the next stupid thing.… [Read more]
The United States Public Education System needs work.
This is not a secret, or even an opinion. It’s a complete fact. There are major problems with the public system that is in place from curriculum, to policy, to standards…the whole thing needs an overhaul.
For years politicians have been slapping bandaids on the problems hoping that it will hobble along enough until it falls into the hands of the next poor schmuck who needs to “deal” with it.… [Read more]
My son is three and a half years old. He has used my husband’s tablet, my Nook, both of our phones, a laptop, and the wii. He has his own Leap Frog and a V-tech tablet. Yet, he spends most of his day having tea parties or playing trains or running around outside.
Some people are horrified at the number of “screens” my son can manipulate and use.… [Read more]
I was born to a middle-class, white, married couple in 1978 in a safe, conservative town in Michigan. My parents are still married almost forty years later, and they still live in the home I grew up in, and they still have good jobs – and because they are smart with their money, they are comfortable.… [Read more]
Let me start by saying that I very much support those who choose to homeschool their children. I have friends who homeschool and they do such outstanding things, sometimes I secretly wish my boys could be homeschooled…by them!
That being said, I always find it interesting to talk to people who homeschool. I am just interested, especially as a public school teacher, why they choose to homeschool.… [Read more]
A new year means resolutions, right? I have to admit that January 1st might be the official start to the new year, but I’ve been on academic years since I was in kindergarten, so it feels like a this is just the halfway point of my year.
But with a nice big break in the action of the school year, it does give me pause to think about ways I could change it up for the rest of the year.… [Read more]
“This is what happens when you take God out of the classroom.”
I saw this posted on Facebook, Twitter, opinion pages, and online articles all week – and I still don’t understand it. Most people who stated it really didn’t explain what they meant by it.
I inferred that they meant we (The United States) would not see violence in schools if we taught “God” there.… [Read more]
