December 27th, 2007 walkere
I haven’t been updating this blog lately because I’ve been busy working on a different project - Babel.
Babel is a general education and technology website. It’s got a growing collection of articles on methods, technology tutorials, and other topics and education and technology.
The best parts, though, are online tools that I coded myself. One is a user-driven lesson plan database. Teachers can log in and share their lesson plans, and they can also browse other people’s lesson plans. That one may take a while to get off the ground, until more people share their lessons.
The second tool is a Web Quest creation script. You can log in, type in some content, and the script creates a Web Quest for you. It comes with a complete interactive menu, and it is hosted for free on the teachbabel.com server.
Go on, check it out. You know you want it. Babel - Bringing Teachers Together.
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September 26th, 2007 walkere
I went to a High Schools That Work network meeting yesterday. It was fairly interesting - three schools shared strategies that they have been using to improve their schools of the past few years.
One of the topics covered was how to improve enrollment in AP courses. The Assistant Superintendent for Mount Olive school district gave a presentation on their new system. Rather than make strict standards for admitting students into honors and AP courses, students can simply request to be in them.
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September 24th, 2007 walkere
I heard a few interesting comments from other teachers today. In all of the comments, the teachers are expressing some level of disgust and or contempt for the administration. I thought it would be interesting to write them down… perhaps I’ll have to keep a log throughout the year.
In the first instance, we had just gotten out of a faculty meeting. The meeting was in the auditorium, which is down a long hallway from the main portion of the building. As you exit the auditorium, there is a set of doors leading directly out into the parking lot. For whatever reason, these two doors were locked (with padlocks). We had to walk down a long series of halls to get back to the front door - probably 3 to 4 minutes of casual walking.
One teacher was clearly annoyed and she started complaining. She said something to the effect that the administrators did whatever they could to make our lives miserable. Then she said, “It’s bad enough we have to be here every day!”
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September 23rd, 2007 walkere
In New Jersey and across the country, politics are roiling over public employee pensions. I just got into the profession, and sometimes I wonder if there will still be an effective pension program in place when I retire in thirty plus years. This is also a reason that I may leave the classroom after a few years, pursue a PhD in education, and stake a place in educational research and teacher education.
With that in mind, it’s time to start thinking about alternative forms of retirement savings. Many school districts offer 403b plans for their employees. Chances are, these are just a waste of your money unless the school actually offers matching contributions.
Check out this overview of different types of investment plans that I wrote on Helium.com. I’ve spent a good amount of time researching the various options, and you should start reading up too. We need to start planning now for the likely possibility that our safety net won’t be intact when it comes time to retire.
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September 23rd, 2007 walkere
My school has implemented a whole school reform model, as per the state’s requirements for Abbott schools. Part of this model is that the school is broken down into small learning communities.
As it is implemented in our school, students are divided into clusters of approximately 100 students. These students share the same Social Studies, Language Arts and Literacy, Math, and Science teachers. These teachers also have a common planning period where they meet each day to perform various duties.
The argument going on in the school now is… should teachers be compensated for this?
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September 22nd, 2007 walkere
Money is generally a problem with education. There’s never enough of it, and there are always too many things that need to be paid for.
So what priorities should we set?
I wrote an article at Helium, arguing that getting basic supplies is more important than paying for teacher training. After all, what good does extensive training do if you have no paper and if you have no functioning computers?
My reasoning here is partly coloured by my experience in my own school. We have no paper freely available, and the only way to get copies is to put a request in at the office. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the copies back within 2-3 days. No chance for spontaneity there.
Computers are equally haphazard. There are no central labs, and the laptop carts contain at most sixteen laptops. Of these, several are generally missing or malfunctioning. The working ones have an old version of Internet Explorer and MS Word and nothing else. The old version of explorer can’t even display many new pages correctly (like pbwiki.com).
What’s the point of spending thousands of dollars on fancy workshops when these basic needs are going unfulfilled? What do you think our priorities should be?
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September 21st, 2007 walkere
Teaching in an urban district, I never thought I’d be in this situation. My class is too small. It has one student.
Originally, I thought it was a scheduling glitch, which it probably is. I figured it would get cleared up. The first day of school, I had no students. Then I had one; but she was a junior, waiting to get transferred into a US II class.
Then one day a girl from another one of my US I courses randomly got transferred into my Period 6 Honors US History class. She wasn’t going anywhere; she needed to take US I. Apparently, no one else was coming in. For the past week, it’s been a one student class.
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September 20th, 2007 walkere
In one of my education courses, we read the book Urban Teaching by Lois Weiner. It was mildly interesting and informative, but it wasn’t terribly great. There is one phrase from the book that I do remember and cling too, though.
She discussed the broken and twisted nature of the administration in most urban districts. The term she used was “sick.” In the metaphor, the administration (and the school as a whole) is like an organism - a leviathan if you will. When it does not function properly, it is sick, malformed, and dysfunctional. This dysfunction, of course, has deleterious effects on the operation of the school as a hole.
Why do I bring this up? Because the administration in my school is hopelessly dysfunctional. It is unbelievably sick.
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September 18th, 2007 walkere
As I looked at my schedule the day before school started, I noticed that one class was titled “US 1 LEP.” I thought “Hmm… LEP? Does that mean what I think it means?”
In my interview, I talked with the vice principal and supervisor about my experience working with students who had poor reading and writing skills. I talked about my experience working with inclusion classes and students with IEPs. Nowhere did I tell them I had any experience working with ELLs… and that’s exactly what I got.
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September 16th, 2007 walkere
In a previous article, I outlined an introductory lesson plan that engaged students in creating a timeline of major events in US I. So what to do if you teach World History or US II?
Here’s a suggestion of ten to twelve major dates for those two courses.
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