As a high school English teacher, I read The Great Gatsby about twice every year. Sometimes it becomes a bit tiring, but then, as R. Clifton Sargo describes, the many layers and the ambiguity of this novel almost allows me to uncover something new, something that makes me think of it in a different light. Sargo … Continue reading
Filed under Education …
The Problem with Remediation
Reading articles like this one by Kyle Spencer makes me question how I teach. In fifteen minutes, I will have ten students who did not score proficient on the Literature section of the Keystones (Pennsylvania’s new state exam) come to my room for remediation. We will review prefixes, affixes, and root words. Characterization. Point of … Continue reading
Banning the Term “Illegal Immigrant”
The Associated Press no longer tolerates the phrase “illegal immigrant.” Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll argues that “illegal” should refer to an action and not a person because these types of words end up “pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone’s life to become … Continue reading
“Let’s Go Back to Grouping Students by Ability”
“The efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have eliminated the achievement gap by eliminating achievement.” This statement appears in Barry Garelick’s essay “Let’s Go Back to Grouping Students by Ability,” in which he details the history of “tracking” students in primary and secondary schools. He writes, Over the past generation, public schools have done … Continue reading
There’s a war? And other information students don’t know
The recent trend in education and standardized testing is to focus on skills and not content or knowledge. I am supposed to teach my students, for example, how to recognize figures of speech and not merely have them memorize the dates or titles of Emily Dickinson poems. This makes sense to me. Students can apply … Continue reading
Required Viewing – Spread the Word to End the Word “Retard”
Words hurt. They have the power to change how people perceive themselves and others and the power to change how people behave. That’s why Soeren Palumbo and Tom Shriver, Jr. co-founded Spread the Word to End the Word. Their goal is not to ban words like “retard” but to educate people on the harmful discrimination that … Continue reading
Required Reading – We Need Schools… Not Factories
Sugata Mitra’s article discusses how the world needs to embrace a less standardized and more individualized approach to education: Like most things designed by the Victorians, it was a robust system. It worked. Schools, in a sense, manufactured generations of workers for an industrial age. But what got us here, won’t get us there. Schools … Continue reading
Required Reading – Teacher Job Satisfaction Hits 25-Year Low
Emily Richmond writes, Only 39 percent of teachers described themselves as very satisfied with their jobs on the latest survey. That’s a 23-percentage point plummet since 2008, and a drop of five percentage points just over the past year. Factors contributing to lower job satisfaction included working in schools where the budgets, opportunities for professional development, … Continue reading
What Alana Found 