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]
One could easily believe that our public school educators have a patron saint in the late comedic actor Rodney “No Respect” Dangerfield. We went from treating our trained and dedicated educational professionals as a respected calling involving “starving with dignity,” to tagging them as a gaggle of greedy, selfish, and coddled public dollar freeloaders who allegedly weren’t perfect surrogate parent nannies.… [Read more]
On Tuesday August 4, 2009 Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli gave a speech at the National Conference for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools addressing the issue of truancy in public schools and the need for diverse and unconventional solutions.
Attorney General Holder really drives home to all of us that when we think about law enforcement, we need to think broadly….I know that your goal is education, but schools also play a key role in law enforcement in any number of ways.… [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]
Mark Twain, sage of the 19th century Mississippi that inspired his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, once suggested that when he was a teenager, his own father was so irredeemably stupid that the old man’s mere presence was unbearable ….and how amazing it was that the dumb bastard relic had got a lot smarter by the time Twain passed his 21st birthday.… [Read more]
While the rest of us offered thanks for family and friends on Thanksgiving, one D.C. teacher told a colleague, “I am thankful Obama won, now I can go back to hating him for what he’s doing to public education.” You mean like pumping almost $100 billion in new funds into federal education programs and another $60 billion into saving teacher jobs?… [Read more]
I have been “on the internet” (if you count e-mail) since before most of my students were born.
(Side note: Holy Moses. How can that be true?? I am so youthful! Ahem.)
In college (late 90′s/early 00′s), I had my first website — a sample teaching site I created using DreamWeaver that I thought was amazing (it was not, and I never used it again).… [Read more]
As a high school teacher, I see many types of “authority” figures mostly by way of other teachers and the parents of my students.
Some are paranoid that given an inch, the kids will take a million miles, so they create rules for absolutely everything. If a kid could in some way have a choice about something (taking the stapler from the room for example), there is a posted rule, or a spoken rule, or something.… [Read more]
Next week many voters will breathe a sigh of relief. The political ads that have saturated the airwaves, driving us all insane, will thankfully come to an end. Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, you have my sympathy. Maryland is solidly blue – far from a battleground state – but an epic battle is brewing over a question on the statewide ballot, sparking a $60 million ad war over casino gambling.… [Read more]
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers strike is nationwide news.
My best friend since middle school is one of those thousands of red T-shirted teachers on the picket line. She does not want to be there. She wants to be in her fourth grade classroom. She met her students and then the following week was called to strike.… [Read more]
Yesterday was the first day of school in my district.
I have been too busy building relationships and making my classroom a safe learning environment today to be worrying about anything else in education.
But Monday, for Labor Day, I did take a minute to remind all the people making union jokes, that A) they had the day off because of unions and B) I am a union worker.… [Read more]
Oh boy.
Here we go.
Instead of choosing someone to offset his conservative views, Romney chose someone who is totally as conservative as he is.
Also? It seems as if Paul Ryan would like to see public education privatized as much as the next rich white dude.
Get the rich richer and get rid of that pesky middle class, right?… [Read more]
This is the final post in a five part series on school choices.
Part I is an introduction with statistics.
Part II is about Private Schools.
Part III is on Charter Schools.
Part IV covers Homeschooling.
This final part will talk about public schools in the United States, and hopefully dispel some of the myths surrounding the drawbacks of sending your child(ren) there.… [Read more]
Recently Mitt Romney has decided to promote school vouchers as a way to help fix the “education emergency” we have here in America.
I guess this is ok if his end goal is to get rid of public education.
School vouchers are certificates, issued by the government, that parents can use toward tuition to a private school for their child(ren). … [Read more]
In my first installment of Getting Schooled, I gave you the results of the survey I did about where people were sending their children and why.
In this installment I will be talking about the private school option.
As a follow up to the surveys, I interviewed parents from each of the schooling categories to dig deeper into why they chose the option they did.… [Read more]
Last week I was on the twitters and I found myself bemoaning the abundance of people sending their kids anywhere other than public schools.
I am a public school teacher, after all. And I work in a district that is constantly stereotyped as less than the best because of the kids who go there. I mean, they are not all white kids from affluent families so we must be a “ghetto” school, right? … [Read more]
Dear Senator Santorum,
I have been doing my best to just ignore the Republican primaries. I have. Because really, listening to you all gab on and on makes my head want to explode.
But you were in my state..actually my TOWN…this week trying to bamboozle persuade all the die-hard conservatives around here to cast their vote in the primary next week for you.… [Read more]
