The teacher becomes the student

I went snowboarding for the first time today! I didn't break anything personally, but we had three casualties among the students. The kids inducted me as a "real Minnesotan" now that I have participated in winter activities. (Even though I spent much of the day on my buttocks.)

Not what I looked like today

Wednesday morning blahs

These kinds of news articles always annoy me because they perpetuate the idea that there is only one kind of "history" and one kind of "literature." That there's this "common core" (hence the organization's name) of knowledge that students must have in order to be well-educated.

Grr.

My little minions

Today in Life Skills class I had my students do my taxes. I gave them copies of my W2's (with certain bits of info redacted, of course) and the 1040EZ worksheet, and had jolly ranchers ready for the first ones who did it correctly.

One student said, "Isn't this something you PAY people to do for you?" Another said "You know that feeling you get when you're going to the dentist? I'm getting that feeling now, doing your taxes."

Turns out I'm going to be getting a $440 refund.


p.s. Filling out tax forms is part of the standard for personal and family resource management ...

Heads up

Not sure how many of you this applies to, but I work in a school where the computers are on a network, and students are using the computers ALL THE TIME.

We discovered yesterday that a few of our, shall we say, more creative students have downloaded a program that will allow them to access desktops of other people on the network. They use the program to do things like turn on their iTunes at full blast right when a teacher walks by, perform inappropriate web image searches, and delete each others' files.

The real problem was when they started doing it to teachers' computers, which contain confidential student information.

So. FYI.

Funny

When it's time to change ...

Here's some historical perspective on the buzzword of the moment: