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.
Category: Braindroppings
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Like lots of teachers, I am burnt to a crisp mentally by the time June arrives. Some years, this happens sooner – usually those are the years that can be identified as curriculum change years. This year has been a particular challenge. You see, this year, everything was new again. I have been teaching for a…
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About six weeks ago, I found an article in the Washington Post that caught my attention: School Lunch Can Be A Teachable Moment. Does the institutional nature of school lunch periods make a difference to kids? The idea that using place settings to create a more civilized lunch period sent me straight to Home Goods…
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Recently I happened upon a video of Steve Jobs giving the 2005 Commencement address at Stanford University. Having sat through a number of such addresses – and well aware of how rare is the speech that is remembered 30 minutes afterwards – I was curious what, beside the celebrity of the speech-maker, might be the…
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Yesterday, we – my class and I – wrapped up our standardized state testing for 2013. What a long, strange, trip it has been. Starting last March with our Reading MCAS test, my students have been demonstrating their knowledge of third grade skills. That’s right, last March, when we were 7 months into our academic…
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Their uncle called them “losers”. What can make a difference in the life of a youth whose behaviors are at once destructive to humanity and self-destructive? We hope and wait for answers to the “why” of the Marathon tragedy; those answers may never materialize. Why was there such a disconnect to the rest of humankind?…
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It has been a hellish week, this vacation week that so many of us in Massachusetts looked forward to. Today we are about and around in sunny, but unseasonably cool spring weather. The grass has finally decided to green up, daffodils feel safe poking up from the damp earth. Most of our routines have returned…
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I know that I have only one voice. But I have one, and I am determined to use it. On the four month anniversary of Sandy Hook, we are reminded that nothing has been done to prevent yet another shooting of this nature. Listen to the family members of the victims in this tragedy. They…
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My students started their state testing yesterday. While it continues to aggravate me that my kids are getting tested as if it were the end of the school year (which, believe me it is not!), the test is here and we need to deal with it. By the way, did I mention the test is…
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I live in the Center of an Old New England town. The wide stone walls that used to mark property lines or separate fields from farmhouses still stand in this part of town. This wall still marks a border and delineates our property on nearly 2 sides. Unlike the more roughly made stone walls that…
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Teachers have taken it on the chin for quite a number of years. If the media are to be believed, we are a collective bunch of incompetents who need to be whipped into shape. And then Newtowne happened. A curtain lifted on the noblest of colleagues, who placed their own safety and protection secondary to…
After An Educator's Journey 