After An Educator's Journey
Out of the classroom & into the universe
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Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
Author: amybisson
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The weather has been unseasonably warm for the last several days. Yesterday was no exception. Even though yesterday was the City of Lights Parade and Holiday Stroll here in Lowell, no one seemed to mind that temperatures were in the 60s — people were dressed in flipflops and shorts while waiting for their moment with Santa. When…
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I am in agreement that we need to give students real responsibility for their environment in school. Kids need to be responsible for picking up after themselves, for noticing when papers are on the floor, for taking care of their commonly shared spaces. I get that. However, I read something in several news sources that…
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Today marks my materal grandfather’s birthday. His name was Palmer Chester Flournoy and he was born in 1889 in Albany, New York. When he was still a baby, his father, a railroad conductor, was killed in a tragic railway accident. My great-grandmother moved her family – my grandfather and his older sister, back to Stanbery,…
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When you have pretty strong convictions about something, they are not always understood or shared by others. For me, one of my thoughts is that creating an environment of order and welcome is of high importance to my students’ frames of mind. With many of my students coming from existences that are not always orderly,…
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Recently, Northern Nevada Writing Projects WritingFix website featured the book Show Don’t Tell by Josephne Nobisso. It caught my eye as this is exactly what I ask my Third Grade Authors to do: use your words to SHOW what happens in your writing. In fact, Googling those words, this seems to be a pretty universal thought…
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This summer was partially spent in aligning Common Core Mathematics curriculum (Massachusetts-style) with the district’s universally available materials and laying out a scope and sequence that makes sense vertically and horizontally. As anyone who has looked at the Common Core in depth can attest, it’s an on-going process full of starts and stops. A particular…
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In case you didn’t hear all the hype we had a bit of a weather event here in the Northeast. When one of my colleagues relayed that the weather prediction for Saturday was 6+ inches of snow, well, naturally I went into high “French Toast Alert” mode. Even bought a special loaf of cinnamon bread…
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I work in a smallish/medium sized urban school district. In recent years, the school budget has been cut so to eliminate instructional technology teachers and the staff holding up the technology infrastructure hangs on by their collective teeth. We are not an affluent community; no PTO is holding a raffle to…
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Maybe this post needs a subtitle: Right hand, please call the left hand! Yesterday my colleagues and I spent the day in training for a new program being used in third and fourth grade – Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading. From what I can see, the program has many merits. And of course, there’s the…
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The local newspaper, the Lowell Sun, seems to just love to stir up the locals by telling about half the story – if that. Normally I don’t read this rag – reading inflammatory and sensationalized news is not how I care to spend my reading time. However, this morning, we were having a discussion about…
After An Educator's Journey 