Don't get too comfortable

From the Star-Trib: Minnesota charter schools are in for a change

This is change I can believe in.

I can definitely see the difference from working with charters in NYC and working with charters here - going from a state with only a handful of charter authorizers to one with dozens, and little oversight of the overseers. Our school barely gets any oversight at all - which is why we're in the fix we are in right now. The article mentioned "shoddy fiscal management and conflicts of interest in school governance" ... I wondered if they were talking about us!

Some good changes:

• In Minnesota, changing the rules about sponsors is a key point. A 2008 legislative auditor's report said the state should increase the authority of charter school sponsors and require the state to approve them.
  
  
• Two state proposals deal with religion, Anderson said. One would bar a house of worship from sponsoring a charter school (none does now). Another would require charter schools to follow a state law that currently applies to district schools, which allows students to attend limited religious instruction but only if it's off campus.

Can you help?

In my humanities class, one of our trios is studying the 1930s and reading The Grapes of Wrath. As they make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections, they can't help but compare the suffering of the 1930s to today. Many of my students' parents are getting laid off, losing their homes, losing their health insurance, losing their pensions. When they came across the word "apocalyptic" in reference to the economic disaster of the '30s, they really got it.

It's in this context that I'm teaching my Life Skills class. Yesterday I had a speaker, a financial planner, who talked to the kids about the cost of life after high school - buying a house, a car, etc. He told me beforehand that he expected that everyone would know at least one millionaire - but only one kid in the class did. I think he was a little taken aback by some of their questions. One student asked about the financial burden of having a child. The speaker said, "That's something you really need to think long and hard about before deciding to do," not knowing that this student's girlfriend had recently given birth to a daughter. Another student asked, "If my parents have tons of debt and they die, will it all get transferred to me?"

It's scary out there - especially for my kids. That's why I hope you can take a look at my proposal on DonorsChoose.org - I am asking for a camcorder to help us practice some financial literacy skills. Even if you can't spare $10 or $25 right now, it would be great if you could pass it along to friends or family members who care about schools or financial literacy.

Thank you!

This is too funny

From the NY Times. The whole article is worth reading. Especially if you have a high school sense of humor like me.

Inauguration Nation

Just finished watching the installment of the HBO John Adams series where both Washington and Adams are inaugurated. Two words: Dork Heaven. Not sure about the accuracy of the portrayal (haven't gotten to that part in the McCullough book yet), but in the series Washington is sworn in before masses of cheering patriots. Adams is sworn in before Congress, and gets his most rousing applause during his inaugural address when he praises Washington.

I read in a New Yorker article that Adams' inaugural address was both "indefinite" (a large percentage of the words in the address were "if") and "cumbrous" (the third to last sentence was over 700 words long).

Meanwhile, if that's not enough inaugural trivia for you, check out these "Quick 10 Facts" about Presidential inaugurations from Mental Floss. My favorite: Andrew Johnson was so drunk he couldn't speak clearly during his inauguration.

Can't wait ...

... to watch the inauguration with my kids on Tuesday during lunch.

What are YOU doing?

How we do it in Minnesota

Article in NY Times today about six of Minnesota's 30 charter schools created to serve specific immigrant communities.

I was definitely struck by this phenomenon when I was first thinking about moving here from New York. I visited several of the schools in the article and was offered a job at another one. This is markedly different from charters in NYC, which tend to center on unique teaching philosophies, despite the many different immigrant communities and strong tradition of advocacy.

I can see why parents feel it is needed though. We have a Liberian student who, his father told us, was being given his last chance at our school. After years of trouble at other schools (bad grades? discipline problems? who knows) the kid was told that if he didn't shape up here, he was being sent back to Liberia.

Weekend Voting Act Introduced

From Why Tuesday? Good news!

What Have You Wasted?

I started teaching my Life Skills class today. It's my favorite class to teach because I usually have mostly seniors and juniors, and the material tends to be more relevant and life-applicable than the material in my other classes. If only I could make history more like Life Skills! Gotta work on that.

Anyway, in honor of Life Skills here is a video from a website I recently came across called Spendster.org, where teens post videos of the outrageous things they've spent money on. It's an offshoot of the National Endowment for Financial Education, which publishes the (free and awesome) High School Financial Planning Program, which I also use in Life Skills.

Teaching with photos

Google has partnered with TIME magazine to provide an incredible primary source: the LIFE photo archive. I've just been sifting through it for one of my classes. Here is one of the more interesting finds:



In this picture a migrant worker from the 1950s Bracero program is meeting with union organizers.

Why?

From another New York Times article, this one reporting on the civilian casualties in Gaza:

... there were several children in another intensive care unit on Tuesday. Among them was Ismael Hamdan, 8, who had severe brain damage as well as two broken legs, according to a doctor there. Earlier that day, two of his sisters, Lama, 5, and Hayya, 12, were killed.

“I prepared them breakfast that day in the garden,” said their mother, Ayda, 36. “They had the tea, bread and thyme. Lama wanted a second pita, but we all teased her saying, ‘Keep it for lunch.’ She told us, ‘Don’t worry, God will provide us with bread.’

“She made all of us laugh,” the mother said. “I cleaned after them and collected the garbage. Ismael volunteered to dump the garbage, but Hayya and Lama joined him. The garbage can is in front of the house, a five-minute walk away. All of a sudden I heard the news from a neighbor, and I ran barefoot to the hospital. A relative collected the bodies of Lama and Hayya on a donkey cart.

“The neighbors ran trying to save Ismael, who was the only one breathing,” she said. “They say my kids flew 40 meters before hitting the ground.”

Ismael died Wednesday night.

It's my Judeo-centrism that calls my attention to the names of these kids; I have no idea what these names mean in Arabic or in the Islamic tradition. To Jews, Ismael, of course, was the son of Abraham who was exiled later to become the father of the Muslim people. Hayya with a hard "H" means "life" or "living being" in Hebrew. And "Lama" means "Why?"

Quagmire in Israel/Palestine

Happy new year, everyone. I have been doing a lot of thinking about Israel and Palestine lately. I tend to look at it from an Israeli perspective since I lived there between high school and college, but with sympathy for the Palestinians because of the human rights involved. Two NY Times pieces by writers/thinkers I admire have provided some food for thought.

This piece by historian Benny Morris explains how today's Israelis sort of feel backed into a corner, a familiar sense of being vulnerable from all sides.

This piece by the fabulous David Grossman gives a Gandhi-ish perspective on how Israel should proceed.

Not such a lame duck

NY Times video of Bush getting attacked by shoes here. Shows interesting footage of the perpetrator being "escorted" out of the room.

Here's the video with Bush's response. I gotta say - the man must still have great reflexes and reaction time to dodge both the shoes and the journalists' questions afterwards.

Fiddling

Going back to our racial sensitivity issue, something happened today that made me feel lucky we haven't had a fistfight already.

I noticed today that one student (a white student) had put up a sign at his workstation that said "I was abducted by aliens" and had a picture of someone being carried by people wearing sombreros. I mentioned it to another teacher who was going to ask him to take it down. Before the teacher got a chance, however, I came across another student (a Mexican-American student) who had taken down the sign, crossed out the word "aliens" and written "crackers." I took the sign away saying "neither this sign nor that word is appropriate at school."

Apparently later on in the meeting between the two students and our administrator, the white student made a convincing case that he really didn't understand what was so insensitive about the sign. The Mexican-American student said that at his old school he would have met the other kid after school and beat him up over something like that.

This is why we need some outside help - now. At least our administrators are on the same page (which is an improvement), but our students desperately need - and are asking for - education on how to live in a diverse society. I've given our school leaders many different names of people who specialize in coming into schools and teaching about diversity, but they have done nothing to move forward. What do I do now?

Perspective

Too tired to write a full post now, but I will say that I am gaining a new perspective since I've been elected a teacher representative on the board of our school. I always worked with charter school boards in my other jobs, but it's a different view from the other side of the table.

Competing values

Sometimes I get to see first hand how parents instill exactly the type of xenophobic "American" values in their children, the opposite of which we are trying to teach.

Basically, it's our competition for the kids' hearts and minds.

We are in the middle of college application season, and one college in particular calculates scholarships based on class rank. We do not usually calculate GPA or class rank, but we will do so if a student needs it. A student applying to this college had apparently been #2 as of the end of her junior year, but at the end of the first marking period this year, she dropped down to #3 - effectively disqualifying her from a large scholarship.

One of the students ahead of her is a foreign exchange student. I got a call this morning from the student's mother, very upset. She was ranting about how the exchange student shouldn't be included, my daughter has been worried and crying about this all night, and I'm sorry, but when I was in college there were all these foreigners that got a free ride, but I'm an American and I had to pay my whole way, and it's time for us Americans to get a break.

I calmly told her that I would have an administrator call her back. Glad I am not the bottom line on that one - what would I say?

Namesake

Via: Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day

And:

Popularity of names starting with JULIE

Via: My sister, when she was pregnant with her now 1-year old, Lila

Big sigh

Two articles from the NY Times this week about New York teenagers who went out to attack a "Mexican" and ended up killing an Ecuadorian man.

It hits pretty close to home given what's been going on in my school this year. I don't think I wrote about what happened around Halloween, when one of our students came dressed up as a "Mexican," wearing a sombrero, a fake mustache, and some kind of rug, and the administration didn't have a problem with his costume. We have a few Latino kids in the school, we have first and second generation immigrants from all over the world, and we have a pretty substantial number of students who have said things like "illegal aliens should be executed at the border!"

The issue keeps coming up, and it is becoming more and more clear that it's something we need to deal with as a school. Our students come from families that have been hit hard by the economic downturn, and for a lot of them it is a very appealing narrative that "others" are to blame.

But the part that has been giving me the most ulcers is how other staff members have reacted. I've made my peace with the Spanish teacher who thinks there's nothing wrong with gross racial stereotypes - we have agreed to disagree on this point, but at least the students know we respect one another. The big problem is teachers - and ADMINISTRATORS - who have been pushing the problem onto me, because they don't want to be the bad guy.

These problems aren't going away. Just the other day a Latina kid ran out of my class crying after another student said "the Mexicans are taking our jobs!" There's only so much I can do alone, and the kids have stopped listening to me already. I think it's only a matter of time before something terrible happens like what happened in Long Island.

Thanks DreamBox!

This School of Blogger is just coming up for air after a week of getting grades in, so I finally had a chance to check the School of Blog email account, where I saw that we had been chosen as one of the top 8 education blogs by DreamBox. Thanks for the recognition and the nice write-up!

Why we must vote

From ASCD Inservice: Five Reasons Educators Must Vote.

I would take this a step further and say educators should consider other forms of participation. Voting is just one way to participate; you can also write letters to, or meet with, your elected officials, get involved in local issues you care about, or even run for local office. When your students see you doing these things, they get the message that participation is important, real, necessary, cool, something they might be able to do someday.

Forget that "don't wear political buttons" bullshit. Recently a Federal judge ruled in favor of New York City when it argued that "when a teacher wears a political button in the classroom, it creates an environment of intimidation and hostility toward students who do not share that view." Of course we need to make sure we are not creating that kind of environment in our classrooms. But we have the power to do that, buttons or not. Our politics are always going to make their way into the classroom, no matter how hard we try to stay "neutral." And even with our buttons, we can say, this is my personal view. Here are the other views. Here are the resources whereby you can make your OWN decisions.

I think we MUST wear our buttons. I plan to tell my students that I made 150 phone calls for Al Franken this weekend. But I know, and they know, that I have the kind of classroom where if they tell me they knocked on doors for Michelle Bachmann all weekend, they will get a big smile and an "awesome!" out of me.

Electoral college tool from Google

Paid for by Norm Colemonster?

I should show this to my students when we start talking about campaign advertisements and how they work:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

"I Spend 3 1/2 Hours A Day Online"

My mom, a fourth grade teacher, passed along this video created by students about meeting them where they are. Really relevant for post-secondary educators, but also interesting for 9-12 teachers.

Historical archives from The Onion

The Onion has opened up its archives and reprinted its October 6, 1783 issue. Here is one of the more enlightening articles:

Can't wait ...

... for my reward in heaven.

PeaceJam!

Finally getting around to posting about the PeaceJam Global Call to Action Conference that 4 of my students + myself went to on Sept. 11-13 in Los Angeles.

It was AWESOME.

First of all, if you are not familiar with PeaceJam, check out their website -- it is a great organization, and an awesome thing for kids to be involved in. Nobel Peace Laureates work with youth on service learning projects, and there is an excellent curriculum for the adult educators to help the kids develop their projects.

In their written reflections after the conference, my students said the most memorable part for them was seeing how other teenagers have developed projects to meet needs in their own communities. There were kids there from all over the world doing awesome things, and getting so much love from peace activist superstars.

Two videos about The Machine

Kicking back.

Week 1 down. Already it has been SOOOOOOO much better than last year. And already I had a conflict with another teacher, and resolved it using our schoolwide restorative justice process, which I believe in deeply, and I am so happy that I can now say to kids "It works -- I know from personal experience."

Meanwhile, I am running out the door to school again, even though it's Saturday. ACT prep class waits for no man, woman, or anxious teenager!

p.s. Though I will never volunteer to do the schedule for the whole-school orientation again, I am glad that I scheduled in a schoolwide game of kickball.

Reality check

Have been having an experience at school that makes me feel sort of isolated and crazy. Meanwhile Chris has the RNC going on in the background which is sort of amplifying the effect.

Last year we had a few students who thought it was funny to draw pictures on the whiteboards of "Mexican" people wearing sombreros and mustaches, and in one case standing behind a barbed wire fence. When I would ask the kids to erase these pictures, and later write them up for it, I got very little support from the other staff members. They would say things like, "Well, personally I don't find it offensive, but if Julie does then we shouldn't have it in our school."

On Friday, I noticed that our Spanish teacher had hung up a poster outside her classroom with a drawing of a chili pepper wearing a sombrero and a mustache, saying "Ole!" Long story short, I am basically the only teacher in the school who finds this culturally insensitive. I am getting no back up from our school leaders, one of whom actually told the Spanish teacher not to take it down so that it could be used as a teaching tool.

What do I do? Am I crazy that this is insensitive and doesn't belong in a school?

The truth about cats and dogs

We have a new exchange student from Azerbaijan, which has gotten me into this blog from a teacher in that country.

Leigh has a really interesting recent post about how dogs and cats are viewed in Azerbaijan. Very different from how we view them (almost as children), and also quite different from what I observed in Bolivia, where nearly every household has at least one dog for guarding purposes. Dogs are also rarely spayed or neutered, so they have the same hordes of stray dogs roaming around as what Leigh is talking about.

Promises to keep

Sarah Vowell has a really nice homage to Ted Kennedy and the Democrats, the party of Pell Grants, in yesterday's NY Times. I particularly enjoyed her interpretation of Obama's vision of the "promise" of the U.S.:

Picture this: a wind-powered public school classroom of 19 multiracial 8-year-olds reading above grade level and answering the questions of their engaging, inspirational teacher before going home to a cancer-free (or in remission) parent or parents who have to work only eight hours a day in a country at war solely with the people who make war on us, where maybe Exxon Mobil can settle for, oh, $8 billion in quarterly profits instead of $11 billion, and the federal government’s point man for Biblical natural disasters is someone who knows more about emergency management than how to put on a horse show.

The second year

... already I can tell is going to be so much better than the first year.

School of Bolivia

Hello from La Paz, the world's highest capital. The School of Bloggers have been in Cochabamba, Bolivia for a couple of weeks (following two weeks in and around Guadalajara, Mexico, where Chris's sister got married), and are now in La Paz for a little bit of business and mostly pleasure.

Now on to the interesting stuff: Bolivia has been in a familiar state of discontent recently in the weeks leading up to a referendum on the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. In the past week or so there have been a lot of road blocks, protests, and strikes over the pension system.

In the Cochabamba department, the urban and rural teachers' unions have been on strike for about a week now. All of the strike days will be made up at the end of the school year, like snow days, but that hasn't prevented government officials from making nasty statements that sound all too familiar. A representative from the Department of Education said something the other day like, "We ask that the teachers have a little more respect for their students."

Hmm. Just like in the U.S., if teachers think about their own livelihoods, they are being selfish.

Anyway, we are having a great time, and I will post another update when I can.

Love it or fix it

I don't often click on web ads, but today I did and came across GOOD Magazine. I was particularly excited about their slogan "Love it or fix it."

I have a lot of students who have a "Love it or leave it" attitude when it comes to being critical of the U.S. I'm excited about having a catchy new blurb to use as a teaching tool this fall.

The Gap

As an SAT prep instructor for several years, and now as a high school career advisor, I have always made it a point to encourage any kid who will listen to take a year off after graduating high school to do something totally random before continuing down their career path.

It seems like the editors of the New York Times are of the same mind. Every now and then they'll publish a story about students who take a "gap year" in Ghana before going on to Princeton or Yale to study nanotechnology or microfinance.

I'm being snarky, but I really do believe that taking a year off before college was the best thing I ever did for my post-secondary education and my career. My instant best friend in college (and still one of my closest friends) had taken a year off to live in France. We were both just a little more mature, and a little more ready to get on with the whole college thing.

When I bring up The Gap to parents, they typically look at me like I'm crazy. But once I explain the benefits -- that you're likely to get more out of college when you're more mature, that it gives you another year to save for college, that you can apply for college now and defer your admission -- they tend to warm up to the idea.

History repeating

Is it me, or does this initiative to reduce the amount of time IT workers spend on unnecessary (work-related) emails seem a bit ... Taylorish?

Testing testing

I'd be really interested in seeing the Georgia statewide middle school social studies test that was so hard, 70 to 80 percent of students failed, and the state had to throw out the results. (Via ASCD Inservice)

What was so hard about the test? I'm curious. Not just because I'm a social studies teacher, but also because I grew up in Georgia and took plenty of standardized tests there.

Meanwhile, Georgia's lucky that they can throw out social studies scores, since social studies tests are not mandated by NCLB (yet), but they have also "questioned the validity" of the math tests, which are required. What do you do about that in the NCLB era?

Should have, would have, etc.

The last day of school was on Friday, which was also D-Day. Slate.com has a great series of photos from that time period that I wish I could have used for my contemporary U.S. history class. Sigh.

So I'm done with my first year. All of my seniors were able to walk at graduation, though some will be attending summer school before they can get their diplomas. My grades are entered, and I've taken the college posters down from the career office so they can paint the walls. I've sent reams of paper to the recycling bin. I even had time to sign a few yearbooks.

Now all I can do is reflect on what happened in 07-08, and what I can do differently in 08-09. I feel like as a social studies teacher, I should be scurrying around trying to plan curriculum to take advantage of this historic presidential election year.

But ... that can wait a day or two, can't it?

"Well you give HIM some trouble."

The Department of Ed is now giving my school trouble about the fact that I don't have my Minnesota license. The reason I don't have my license is that the Department of Ed wouldn't give it to me. So it goes ...

I still get emails on my NYU account about social studies job openings at all of these wonderful New York City schools, including both schools where I student taught, for which I would be perfectly licensed and certified. I don't know why I even bother opening those emails.

Meanwhile I'm working on proving that I am qualified to teach social studies in Minnesota. Luckily my school is supporting me throughout this process. But what happens if the state comes down on my school with more than just a slap on the wrist? With their budget they can't afford to keep someone on staff who legally can't teach, and they wouldn't risk having to pay fines or lose funding over it.

Students being historians

My contemporary U.S. history students today conducted their oral history interviews. Two groups went to the senior apartment complex next door and came back really excited about the people they'd interviewed, one of whom was a soldier during World War II under General Patton. The Cold War group interviewed one of our school leaders, who told them about being a child in Iowa when Khrushchev made the "We will bury you" speech from an Iowa cornfield.

We'll see tomorrow how much they got out of it. This oral history project has been a huge challenge and a huge learning experience for me ... hopefully the kids have learned a thing or too as well.

UPDATE: Obviously I meant to write a thing or two. And obviously I have been hanging out with teenagers and reading their writing too, too much. They presented their interview data today -- pretty interesting! More in a post to come.

Summer, summer. I love the summer.

Hard to believe I'm coming up on the last week of my first year of teaching. I have a lot of mixed, confused feelings about it all. But most of all I'm ready for a good long break. The School of Bloggers are making travel arrangements for a trip to Guadalajara for Chris's sister's wedding, then on to Bolivia for the rest of the summer. We'll be there long enough to see the Urkupiña festival in mid-August, then get back just in time for staff development before school starts again!

Graduation's on Monday. I think I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief to see my seniors walking across that stage.

Fashion police

One of my students said to me today, "Do you even think about your outfits before you put them on?" I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Like on Friday, you were wearing these khaki-ish pants, a green shirt, and a blue sweater. It just really didn't work."

I invited her to come to my house every day at 6 a.m. and be my personal wardrobe adviser.

Seriously though, it's amazing what kids notice.

I had another couple of students -- seniors -- in my office today talking to me about an issue they were having with another teacher. Right before they had to leave to go to class, they looked at each other conspiratorially and asked, "This may be a personal question, but are you okay? We have noticed that you've been sort of sad recently."

I was touched that they had noticed and that they'd said asked about it. It's nice to have little reminders every now and then of why I keep chugging along.

Chug chug chug

Minnesota's giving me a hard time with my teaching license. It's a pain but apparently it's something of an unofficial policy: making it hard for out of state teachers to get certified in Minnesota. The line they're drawing in the sand for me is the fact that my undergraduate major was Urban Studies and not history, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science or geography.

Oh well, just keep on chugging. This week the kids in my contemporary U.S. history class will write their interview questions for their oral history project, and hopefully we'll have two guest speakers: a student's great uncle who was a scout in World War II, and a member of the Minnesota Eight.

Why did Humpty Dumpty have a great fall?

To make up for a horribly depressing spring. Last week we had our staff development week in which we started planning for next year. There was something so energizing about taking a break from thinking about all of my "failures" from this year and starting over, learning from my mistakes.

One of my many hats is as the advisor for the senior projects, which the seniors have been working on all year. The students will be presenting these this week, so I'm excited and nervous to see how they will turn out.

Funny

Uncle Globey & Friends | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Not quite this bad, but close

Economic Stimulus Check Burned For Warmth

HELENA, MT—Saying the extra bit of kindling material couldn't have come at a better time, 43-year-old school teacher Tim Donaldson received his...

The dumps, and being down in them

The other day in my reading and writing lab we went over subject/verb agreement, and then as an informal assessment of the students' understanding I asked them to write a little story in which they played around with the S/V rule by using it both correctly and incorrectly. When I was grading them this morning I saw that one student had written this:

This IS such a boring class. July [sic] IS just about the worst teacher in the school.

I don't know if it's just first-year-teacher syndrome, or if it's just me. But if today hadn't been a professional development day I probably would have gone home sick at that point and never come back.

Zombie Prom

My usual Friday Night Syndrome is being too exhausted after a week of teaching to move very far from the couch. Tonight, however, I am finishing up my job as prom coordinator. A job I will NEVER DO AGAIN.

Puppets

The NY Times has a great expose today about how the Pentagon controlled TV news analysis of the Iraq war by using retired military officers with ties to government contractors:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

I'd love to use this somehow in a critical thinking skills lesson. Any ideas?

On a similar note, I want to do a lesson tomorrow where kids learn how to think critically about textbooks -- who writes textbooks and why, what biases they might have, etc. One of the essential questions in my Contemporary U.S. history class is "is there one 'true' version of history?" And a lot of kids have been saying, "sure, the version that's in the textbook." So I want to disabuse them of that notion.

Has anyone done a lesson like this before?


A few more years of the Bush administration and we'd all be studying this ...

Ladies' Night

Chris is off in Boston presenting a paper at the American Association of Geographers conference, so this weekend it's just me, myself, and an APARTMENT FULL OF LADYBUGS.


Massage circle

Ladybug exoskeleton shards on my sheets

My apartment is infested with ladybugs.

It is not the cutest infestation ever.

Apparently this is:

Proud

Yesterday I had so many occasions to be proud of my students. Wish I'd told them at the time, but I will tell them today.

Where's Chris Rock when you need him ...

I was just perusing the unsolicited emails I've gotten recently at theschoolofblog AT gmail DOT com, and one in particular stood out: an advertisement for a character ed program marketed toward homeschoolers. The spokesperson for this program is a little being named Cracker the Crab.

Something tells me that there weren't too many kids in the homeschool focus group who knew the other meaning of the crab's name.

NY Times: "U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula"

Boring as it may sound, this is actually really good news (and it's about time). As someone who's had to deal with a lot of graduation and dropout data, I know there are a lot of schools and families who are going to benefit from this.

From the article: The requirement would be one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary, experts said, because it would affect the official statistics issued by all 50 states and each of the nation’s 14,000 public high schools.

Margaret Spellings: Much Better than Rod Paige.

Spring break

It's finally sinking in that it is, in fact, spring break. Yeehaw.

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:

"Your military"

I feel like I will keep coming back to this question again and again: What is my moral obligation as a career advisor to expose kids to military options? What is my moral obligation as someone who opposes the war in Iraq to advise kids against joining the military?

Yesterday I had a wonderful speaker - who also happens to be a parent - come in to hold a session at lunchtime. He had been an Army National Guard recruiter for many years, but now works in the private sector, so he had no (blatant, anyway) ulterior motives behind the information he gave to the students. My student who seems like he's been brainwashed by his recruiter sat down with the speaker and got some really excellent advice.

Afterwards I was talking about it with an administrator who said, a little disapprovingly, "When are you going to bring someone in from the other side?" I hadn't thought about that, but my gut reaction was, would that be helpful to me as a career advisor? Will I lose all credibility with the students who are planning to go to the military if I bring in a peace activist? Would they just choose to ignore all my previous advice and find themselves in a more dangerous situation?

Meanwhile, what message does it send to the rest of the school if I bring in a speaker who talks to the students about "Your Army," "Your Navy," "Your Coast Guard," etc., and don't bring in, for example, a soldier who has been to Iraq and come back totally disillusioned with the system?

Geography

This video has been going around Chris's geography department. I think I'll show it to my students tomorrow.

Value

This blog used to be ALL ABOUT education policy, and then I became a teacher and stopped having the energy to follow it. But I really need to respond to what's going on in NYC with the teacher-level test score analysis.

First of all, we knew this was the direction they were heading a while back when they started assigning individual ID numbers to each student, the kind that can be used for value-added assessment. However, in order for that to work, the students need to be taking the type of test that was designed for value-added assessment, such as the TerraNova. The New York State tests, to my knowledge at least, were not designed for value-added assessment. They weren't even really designed to show gains from one year to the next for each individual student, though that's what the city would like to do with the data.

I'm not opposed to analyzing and publicizing "value-added" data, given the appropriate measuring tool. But I think whatever experiment they're cooking up right now could not possibly provide meaningful insight into whether this is a system that can work in NYC. It's like using a teaspoon to judge a 100-meter dash.

Energy

Yesterday was one of those days. You know what I mean. The energy I was projecting combined with the energy I got back from the kids resulting in a neverending day from hell.

Now it's 6:30 a.m. and I'm not sure I have the energy to go back to school ...

Maybe I should just do what the kids do and get a couple of these ...

The Zone

We're going into week 3 of reading Guns, Germs and Steel with our Global Studies class, and the kids are amazing me every day.

Today I'm grading the journals they've been keeping as they read the book. Here are some excerpts [Warning: objectionable content ahead. Keep in mind, they are teenagers, and I always tell them that while I might not agree with everything they say, I respect their right to say it]:

In my opinion it could be possible to say that a less developed civilization stayed less developed because a more developed civilization held them down. However this is an effect not a cause. What factors made the "superior" civilization? What made them able to hold others down or enslave them.

If we relate the content we just read, he is saying the New Guineans are more smart and intelligent than white Europeans. If we see today's world the writer is totally wrong. Our present world show who is more smart and who is not and it's obvious from the observation that white people are smart.

While I was reading today, the thought popped into my head about when we went to the race exhibit last year. There was a moniter that showed the spread of of the human population. Humans started in Africa, then moved to other eastern countries that have people that are not white. From this information, I think that I can answer why white people had more "cargo." I think that darker skinned people evolved first, so they may have less of a drive to create new things. Although there may be less products that they get from the land, so they can't make the products that were brought over.

The explanations that the author comes up with for how societies ended up so different are insane. The possibility that it is because of the climate is crazy to me, but highly possible. Does it have anything to do with genetics? Does asking these questions really make a difference because are we honestly ever going to know for sure?

What I'm finding as the kids are struggling through the text (and we are still just finishing up the Prologue!) is that maybe what they said in grad school was true: kids will stretch up to their "zone of proximal development." We gave the kids a book that was too hard, but did a lot of preparation, and somehow they're getting it. A lot of them are actually REALLY getting into it.

I think teaching that way is like walking on hot coals. Until you've actually seen it happen, it sounds like a myth or an impossibility. If I weren't team-teaching this class with an experienced teacher, I don't think I would have had the guts to do it. It makes so much more sense to teach to the bottom than to to the top, or at least to the middle. But kids need more of our guts than that.

Wow

Sorry, that last post was a bit irritable. I do want to do the whole New Years' Resolution thing; I'm just not feeling quite as refreshed and ready to go back to school as I thought I would be after winter break! Okay, I'm resolving to come up with some resolutions. Or revolutions. And to tide us over, here's a picture from winter break: three of my sisters engaging in one particular form of revolution:

Has this become a blog about weather?

When the day began, I was in sunny, 50 degree Atlanta, enjoying the outdoors and life in general. Moments ago I fell onto my butt while trying to mitten-shovel snow six inches deep off of my windshield so that I can get to school tomorrow morning. Did I mention it was 4 degrees?

Screaming meme

Thanks for the tag, Ms. Friz. Okay, think think think ....

1. It's my birthday tomorrow!! I will be spending it in the airport.
2. I have read Harry Potter books 1-5 in Spanish. The first one I read was Book 2, the British version, which I bought when I was in Israel.
3. I live with two males. One of them is a box turtle. We know he is a male because he has red eyes.
4. Teaching is something I've wanted to do all my life, but never thought I'd actually do.
5. My uncle is the National Hydrographer.
6. I can do the hustle, the moonwalk, the hora, the audition number from 42nd Street, the merengue, the pas de chat, the cotton eye joe, and the last-day-of-school-before-winter-break dance.
7. I took a year off between high school and college, and take every opportunity I get to advise high schoolers to do the same.

Pass it on, Assorted Stuff, Frum Teacher, History is Elementary, Midwest Teacher, NYC Educator, Ms. Whatsit, and a first year teacher over at EdWize! Here are the rules:

- Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
- Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Dementors Mating ...

... is the only explanation for the weather we're having.

Ice Fog

Woke up this morning to the woman on the radio saying there was "ice fog" going on. I've never heard of such a scary-sounding weather condition.

I feel like I'm in some sort of Super Mario ice world, and ever day is some new strange challenge level. Maybe tomorrow it will be bouncing fireballs.

Joel

Let's say you have a student whose name is Joel. He's the kind of student who doesn't make it easy for you to love him. But you try and you try, and eventually you do love him. He tries back, and finally it's December, and he still may not be turning in all of his assignments, but some of the ones he does turn in are pure gold.

Now, suddenly, his mom gets a new job in another part of town, and he has to switch schools. On his last day of school he is:

a) proud and all smiles, reflecting on how far he's come and saying goodbye to his friends.
b) a total demon from hell, reminiscent of the beginning of the school year.

In my case it's answer b). What happened?? Why, Joel, why?

Cold.

It's alive. Or, Am I really going to eat this?

A coworker gave me a "starter" baggie for "Amish Friendship Bread." There's some kind of yeast or something living in there that froths, and you feed it sugar, flour and milk for ten days, and then you can make it into a babka-like treat.

I'm familiar with the concept of a sourdough starter, and I can basically get the science behind it. But that doesn't really explain how I'm going to leave milky dough sitting out on my counter for ten days and avoid a) a major stink, and b) a foul-tasting end product. Any insights?

Teen depression

I feel awful for the victims of today's mall shooting and also awful for the teen who's suspected of committing it. I feel awful for my students who are so full of scary feelings they don't know what to do, and for the ones who deal with it with drugs and alcohol. I feel awful for the ones who don't have parents around to notice when they're not doing okay. I feel awful for the student who it turns out was suddenly taken off his Zoloft.

There are some things you can't put a positive spin on

Here in the Twin Cities we've gotten around 8-9 inches of snow in the past five days, with more coming tomorrow. Needless to say it has impacted commuters. During the hour I spent in the car on my way home today (a trip that usually takes me 25 minutes), I heard my buddy on Classical Minnesota Public Radio say something like this:

You know, this morning I was out shoveling snow, digging out my car before dawn. It was this really beautiful scene: a sliver of moon in the sky, a few stars, my shovel, and me, on a fine brisk morning. Well, there is going to be more shoveling in store for everyone out there tomorrow.

Call me crazy, but when the temperature is in the single digits, that no longer counts as "brisk."

The Recruit

I've never known anyone who's gotten involved in a cult. But I'm getting that kind of vibe with one of my seniors who is planning to join the military - let's call him Pete. Pete had taken the ACT and was the only one to have also taken the SAT, and was planning to apply to college and study criminal justice, when he got a call from a recruiter. Now he's far more motivated to decrease his time running the mile than increase his chance of getting into college.

My political views aside, I actually support going into the military for some of my students. It is a great way to get job training and money for college. If that's what they want to do, I believe it is my job as the career advisor to help them do it. But something about this situation makes me nervous. Pete's gone from a kid who spends his time writing college admissions essays to one who walks around wearing Army paraphernalia and thinking about where he'd like to be based when he's not in Iraq.

The No Child Left Behind Act tied Title I funding to schools handing over students' information for military recruiting. (You can opt out, and many families do, even in my gung-ho military community.) It would be one thing if that information was going to people whose primary concern was teens' best interest, or even national security. Instead, I've learned, military recruiters get paid for filling certain quotas for certain positions, and they can use some questionable means to do so. One of my students' fathers was an Army recruiter for 30 years, and warned me not to let any student speak with a military recruiter without talking to him first.

I don't know what the recruiters say to my students, but obviously it's much cooler than what I or their parents have to say. There's nothing new about teens not wanting to listen to their parents or teachers. But still I get this cultish feeling. I'm nagged by a story of a former student who was contacted by a recruiter. The recruiter was planning to throw him a big 18th birthday party with all of his friends, but told him not to tell his parents. The idea was that they would have him sign all the papers the minute he turned 18. Long story short, a teacher found out about it and told the parents, who put the kibosh on the idea. The recruiter apparently wigged out on the kid, calling him parts of the female genitalia.

Anyway, I had a parent-teacher conference today with Pete and his dad, during which Pete said there is a "100% chance" he will go to Iraq. The parents are against it but Pete will be 18 in a few months. My concern is not to keep Pete from joining the Army, but to help him make a rational decision that will put him on a good career path and minimize his chances of injury.

Climate change made real

The school of bloggers are back from Atlanta, where we spent Thanksgiving with tons of uncles and aunts and second cousins and so forth. Being in a place with such a threatened water supply left made me acutely aware of how much water I use every hour of the day.

My Uncle Steve (the national hydrographer) and my Uncle Eddie and Aunt Paula, who used to live up there, took a trip up to Lake Lanier. The lake is a major source of water for the northern suburbs, but is said to have less than 80 days worth of water supply left. They took pictures, including this one:



It's sad that this is what it took, but I'm finally forced to think "do I REALLY need to use water right now?" each time I turn on the faucet.

Charter renewal

My school's going through its charter renewal now. Very different from the charter renewal process in New York, which was a yearlong, ulcer-inducing gauntlet for the schools I worked with there.

Our sponsor (or authorizer), the local school district, hired a team of three current and former teachers and administrators to conduct the site visit. Today, Day 1 of their two-day visit, they met with school leaders, students, and parents. After school they met with the teachers (no school leaders) and asked us some general questions about the school model. Tomorrow they will be sitting in on classes.

No one seems too concerned about the charter getting renewed. Stay tuned.

Or, as my students would probably prefer, Guns, Guns and Guns

The Global Studies class I'm team-teaching is starting to read Guns, Germs and Steel this week. I think a few kids will be okay with the reading level, but the majority will struggle. So I'm looking for some sort of teaching guide for the book -- finding nothing.

Anyone know of anything out there? Anyone ever used this book with high schoolers? Am I crazy?

One thing I did was to prepare students for some of the big themes in the book using an anticipation guide. These were the questions:

Agree/disagree: The way the world is today COULD NOT be any different than it is: history follows a set course.

Agree/disagree: It's possible that things could have worked out differently in history and our world would be a very different place.

Agree/disagree: There couldn't be a world without "winners" and "losers:" someone has to win and someone has to lose.

Agree/disagree: It's possible for the world to exist without "winners" and "losers."

Agree/disagree: A person's or group's success in life depends on genetics.

Agree/disagree: A person's or group's success in life depends on what resources they grow up with.

BTW, I know this book is problematic in many ways. But I think that it's a great entry point for advanced high schoolers into a critical understanding of history, and while the reading level is difficult, it's within their "zone of proximal development." (My, I'm going crazy with the education school lingo today!)

Yes.

Thank you for reading my mind (and posting it on the internet).

Happiness ...

... is taking a mental health day.

Trial update

We put Christopher Columbus on trial this past week. The verdict: Guilty.


Who, me?

Weekending

First of all, I have to recommend the Mill City Museum to my fellow Twin Cities social studies teachers. Small and manageable, the museum does a good job of providing a coherent (if a bit monochromatic) narrative of the city's history. I'd bring students here for examples of material culture and oral history, or for a unit on urban planning and geography.

The School of Bloggers had a lovely day walking around downtown yesterday to the museum from the central library (which I also hope to make into a field trip someday). At the museum, we found ourselves on a double date with a Minnesota Timberwolves player and his (much shorter) female companion.

Hyperbole at the World Series

Last night on FOX I heard the Red Sox announcer call John Williams "the epitome of our culture."

I like John Williams as much as anyone -- I will inevitably like a movie if he is the composer, even if it's The Patriot. But the epitome of our culture?

Sadly, I think if anything is the epitome of our culture it's FOX.

Weirdness

Usually the unsolicited emails we get at theschoolofblog AT gmail DOT com are pretty relevant to our interests. A tip of the hat to the people who troll blogs and manually enter in email addresses to send out press releases on various to-dos.

The most recent one, however, is sort of puzzling and also intriguing:

APWagner.com Announces North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest

APWagner.com, an appliance parts website, announces North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest. Visitors to the site can enter to win $15,000 in Cash and Prizes.

Buffalo, NY October 15, 2007 – APWagner.com announces North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest. Do you know of an old appliance? We want to see it!

...

North America’s Oldest Appliance Contest is a nationwide call to find the oldest appliance, working or not, in the United States or Canada. Contestants wishing to enter should send a 2 minute video of themselves and their appliance to www.apwagner.com .

The contest has six categories and each will have a winner. The grand prize winner with the Absolute Oldest Appliance will win Three Brand New Whirlpool Appliances plus $1,000 in Cash! There will also be winners for the Oldest Refrigerator, Oldest Range, Oldest Dryer and Oldest Washer.

...

For More Information:

Christine Smith

716-961-7142

Csmith@apwagner.com

www.apwagner.com

Even though this is sort of weird and random, I am actually really interested in seeing North America's oldest appliance!

Airport Airblade Air-someness

The bathrooms in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport have gotten a lot of publicity lately. (My favorite was a song Garrison Keillor sang a few weeks ago -- listen to it here, it's right after the shout-outs.)

But what the bathrooms REALLY should be famous for is having the BEST HAND DRYERS OF ALL TIME.

I have never looked forward to using a bathroom hand dryer before. Now I'm considering taking a trip down to the airport just to use it.

Encounter

So in my Early American History class we're putting Columbus on trial. I got the idea from the teacher I worked with last year and also from the book Rethinking Columbus, but I'm still finding myself making everything up from scratch. So any resources you all might have would be very welcome!

Last class I had the defense and prosecution teams come up with a list of witnesses. The jury members each had to come up with an identity (past, present, real, fictional, etc). Before they did that I had them examine these images:






(actually it was a different illustration from this same book)

I had planned to hold the debate ON Columbus Day (which we do not have off), but like everything else that plan ganged aft agley.

P.S., in my insomnia I finally got around to updating my blogroll! Apologies to anyone I've left off.

Pence saved are pence earned

I just bought the new Radiohead album for ₤0.65.

I feel like I'm taking part in a big Econ 1 experiment.

National Anti-Quartering Association

Gotta find some way to work this article into a lesson ...

History alive

I'm team teaching a course in which the students are looking at epidemics in history (bubonic plague, smallpox, TB, etc), leading up to an intensive study of the current AIDS crisis. This was all going to lead up to an event called Peace Jam in the spring, where students would have the opportunity to meet Desmond Tutu.

Now it's not clear if he's going to be able to speak. He's been uninvited from the University of St. Thomas, where Peace Jam is scheduled to take place.

Tutu was uninvited because of this:

The mention of Hitler in the speech comes during a section in which Tutu urged the audience not to assume that the status quo lasts forever, and in which he urged those listening to challenge to “Jewish lobby” in the United States. “People are scared in this country [U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? This is God‘s world. For goodness sake, this is God‘s world. We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end, they bit the dust.”

I'd be REALLY bummed if the students did not get to meet Tutu. But as a Jewish person with extremely conflicted feelings toward Israel, I'm finding this very hard to discuss with my students.

I am in complete agreement with Tutu (aside from his equating the pro-Israel lobby with the "Jewish lobby"). I find it to be a serious problem the way all conversation shuts down the moment it heads toward a certain comparison. I was once at a training session with a horrible organization called "The David Project" whose mission is to teach adults to work with students to reframe Israel as "David" and the Palestinians as "Goliath," rather than the other way around. At the training they went over how to teach students the "red lines" when it comes to discussing Israel, and what to do when another student crosses the line. Needless to say, one of those lines is any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany. I was repulsed and offended by their curriculum.

So I support Tutu and oppose his St. Thomas ban on many levels, personal and professional. But when it came up in class today, I became very defensive.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the other day a student at my school called a (non-Jewish) teacher a "fucking Jew," or that the kids have been known to use the phrase "That's so Jewish" (part of the South Park Syndrome). For some unknown reason, this brings out my defensive pro-Israel reflex.

Anyway, this is something I'm going to have to figure out if I am going to be a social studies teacher. Why am I as critical of Israel as can be when I'm among other Jewish people, but defensive and weird when I'm not?

Discipline part II

Thanks, Ms. Frizzle (or Ms. V) for the encouragement!

Last week was exhausting -- I didn't feel good about any of my classes. I felt like I had been teaching my students from one end of a long tunnel and none of it had reached them on the other side. It took me a while to figure out that part of the problem was classroom management. Even though they weren't being blatantly disruptive, the students weren't really paying attention.

So last night I started reading this book my mom gave me, Positive Classroom Discipline. The first couple of chapters are basically a Klutz Guide to classroom management. It goes through, step by step, how to use body language to communicate to students that you "mean business." There are detailed diagrams of teachers in 80s clothing and various serious faces and poses.

I was so relieved to learn that what I'd heard in grad school -- that if your curriculum is good enough, you won't have discipline problems -- is a myth. And it was really illuminating to see how my body language (smiling, averting my eyes, rushing around, etc) has been working against me.

So today I tried an experiment. I was at the door when the kids came into class giving them immediate instructions. I had them rearrange the tables and gave them new seating assignments. I stopped class whenever someone was not paying attention and practiced my serious face. It was EXHAUSTING. But the students in my classes were much more engaged.

They definitely chafed a bit at the new level of structure. We'll see how they react to day 2 of the experiment.

Discipline.

I have a problem with it.

Happy

Ms. Frizzle is back!!

Toolbox

With a week of teaching classes under my belt, I have learned a thing or two. One of the biggest things I learned this week was that, even though I'm tens of thousands of dollars in debt to Citibank, I am still very, very glad I got that master's in teaching. When I decided not to apply for emergency certification programs it was with the knowledge that I am a very, very bad improviser. I am still a very bad improviser. But now, when I don't know what to do, phrases like "sourcing heuristic" and "mentor text" come floating to my brain. I can also pull out some good sound bites from my student teaching cooperating teachers, like "I'm sorry, Kendra, can you repeat what you just said so that Joshua [pointing to inattentive or chatting student] can hear you?" Another thing that comes from student teaching is the assurance that even though things may be frustrating for a while, after some point I will love -- really love -- my students, and everything will just seem so much easier.

A goal for this year is to get better at thinking on my feet, rather than striking a doe-in-headlights pose when something foils my well-laid plans.

Kids and race

This article from The Nation about the "Jena Six," a group of African American students in Louisiana who face trial for retaliating against a student who made a racial slur, comes out at a really interesting time for me. (Disclosure: the writer of this article, Mark Sorkin, is my soon-to-be brother-in-law! He keeps the world up to date on juvenile justice issues on his blog.)

Last year, having only worked with New York City high school kids, I would not have believed teenagers capable of making the racial slurs that prompted the reaction of the Jena Six. After today, I can believe it. I can see something like this happening at my school.

I don't think my white students would ever intentionally make a racial slur against a peer. And I don't think that when they hung nooses from the "white-only tree," the members of the Jena High School rodeo team thought they were being racist. I think they thought they were making a joke.

How did these kids get to the point where they thought this extremely ugly act was an acceptable form of humor? One side of it is what I think of as the South Park Syndrome. Yes, I know how old-fogeyish it sounds, but I think shows like South Park and The Family Guy that make viewers laugh with the shockingly taboo are shaping how many teens in this country think about race -- in a very negative way.

Take a look at this clip from Family Guy, and if you want to be even more depressed, scroll down and take a look at how YouTube viewers responded to it. To me, the leap isn't so far from laughing at Kermit with a shotgun to hanging up nooses on a tree.

The other side of it is the fact that our students know this is supposed to be funny, but they don't really have enough knowledge to understand why it's so shocking. It's on TV, so it's okay to laugh at it. Maybe they have a little twinge of discomfort, like this kid, but they don't understand why this kind of humor is hurtful and harmful.

So the onus is on social studies teachers, I believe, to not only teach kids the historical context for these things, but also to give students the skills and safe space to really be able to think and speak about race.

Now the question is, HOW do we do that?

Tired

First day of classes was today. I learned many things on my first day as a classroom teacher, but probably the biggest (and hardest) lesson was this: teens from the Twin Cities suburbs are very different from teens in New York City.

Love.

Now that we've had new student orientation, whole-school orientation, and a four day whole-school trip to Deep Portage, Monday is the actual "first day" of school as it will be for the rest of the year. This weekend I'm typing up syllabi for my three classes (early American history, reading/writing lab, and global studies) and planning for the first week.

I can't express enough gratitude to the people who set up and contribute to the Teachers Network website. There's a section for new teachers that's full of good, succinct advice. This one has been particularly useful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Commission

I hereby call on Chris to post about his first two weeks teaching undergraduates.

Also, it's his birthday today.

First Days

For those of you whose first day of school is tomorrow, have a wonderful day!!

We had three days of new student orientation last week, but tomorrow is the official first day of school for everyone. I celebrated by reading "The First Days of School" by Harry and Rosemary Wong. The book was given to me by a teacher who said she couldn't stand it and didn't want it on her bookshelf. Other teachers have told me it's the most important book on teaching they've ever read.

As I was just looking up the link on Amazon, I checked out reader comments -- they are similarly bipolar. One five-star review was titled "Don't Walk Into The Classroom Without This Book!," while a one-star review started with "If This Book Is Right, I Want To Be Wong."

Fair

The school of bloggers saw many cool things at the Minnesota State Fair yesterday (including some things we could have lived without seeing, particularly in the "Miracle of Birth" building). But one of the coolest was this sign -- not just the big one, but the little one in the lower left corner. We knew Franken was good, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that "Team Franken" is supporting the striking AFSCME workers at the U of Minnesota.