Let’s say you catch a fish. We’ll designate this particular fish as being a westslope cutthroat trout (as seen in the photo) because I am a trout fanatic and they are beautiful fish, but it really doesn’t matter what kind of fish you’re seeing in your head. You’ve caught it. It’s a mature fish. It’s…
Continuing Education
This Year’s Must-Read Series
Another year, another popular series of books for young students. Whether it’s Harry or Katniss, Percy or Artemis, each school year seems to bring about another series of books some readers simply gobble up. And I have found that readers in Massachusetts may have fallen for a different collection than readers in Oregon or North…
Longer and Longer
Thanks to a substantial grant, several school districts in the US are extending their academic calendars. Why? To accommodate all the extra learning required to meet new standards. In districts spanning socioeconomic groups, the effort is being coordinated by the National Center on Time and Learning and the Ford Foundation and is being paid for…
The Common Core Pickle
Is there any better feeling than the one you get when, after struggling with a difficult or unusual task, someone says, “Hey, how are you doing?” Like when you’ve wrestled with a pickle jar, straining your wrist, feeling veins bulging on your forehead and disks bulging in your back, and you finally get that blasted…
What’s Your Learning Style?
When do you stop learning? At the end of the day, when you’ve left your classroom and set aside the last papers to be graded, are you done learning? Or maybe you consider yourself an autodidact—a self-taught person forever searching out new things to learn, new things to know, new concepts to understand, new philosophies…
Classroom Visitor Hits and Misses
Sometimes I think I can understand what it must be like to be the chief of programming for a major television network. You just never know for certain how the audience will react to a new television show. What appears to be a surefire hit might sink like a stone in cement. The show you’re…
My Idea for Rating Teacher Effectiveness
Gathered around the teachers’ dining table, you could feel the anxiety some of us had. To others, the impending event was like water off a duck’s back. It was time for classroom observations. The first time the principal told me she was coming to observe my classroom was almost enough to keep me awake nights….
Write? Right!
October 20, 2012, is the National Day on Writing, sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and recognized by US Senate Resolution 565. I thought you’d like to know about it. NCTE has plenty of information about the day on their website, and getting your students to be a part is easy….
Singing the Common Core Blues?
Was I destined to end up working for The Mailbox? That’s hard to say. Destiny is a difficult subject. Are teachers destined to always have to create their own supplemental materials? If I lingered around my blog for a few minutes, I bet I’d be able to make out many grumblings. With the emergence of…
A Different Kind of School Supply
Last week I touched upon my anxiety at the beginning of the school year about never having the right amount of the necessary supplies for my classroom—specifically: tissues, which seem to disappear in January faster than raindrops in the Mojave in August. But have you ever found yourself buying a jacket for a student to…