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: Math Education
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How does that saying go? If you’re not green and growing, you’re rip and rotten. One of the key components of the Daily Five – teaching learners to be independent – is not only appealing, but imperative. After some false starts last year (based on my reading of both the D5 and Cafe books), I attended…
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The Massachusetts Common Core Curriculum implementation starts this coming school year. As a District Team, we’ve looked at how the standards are expressed with increased attention to Focus, Coherence, Clarity and Rigor. In Lowell, we began our look at the new standards by defining exactly what these four terms mean. One idea that has stuck…
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It’s going to be a bumpy night.” I love this quote from “All About Eve”; and coming straight from Bette Davis’ mouth – well you can imagine the delivery. The more thinking is done about the implementation of the new mathematics curriculum frameworks – the Common Core – the more it becomes apparent that this…
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Our District has a committee is working on unpacking the Common Core for Pre-K to 8 this summer. I volunteered – begged really – to do this and, lucky for me, I am part of the committee. Even with all of the expertise on this committee, there are struggles as we dig through seemingly simple…
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I don’t remember when I first came across this game — I suspect it was during a Math Solutions Summer workshop week. For certain, it is included in several of the multiplication resources Math Solutions publishes, including the Third Grade Month-by-Month resource. It is empowering to find a game that children can just pick up…
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It is my — and their — nemesis: 3.N.8 Select and use appropriate operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) to solve problems, including those involving money. My students can perform computation into the thousands. We are pretty darn good at it. But toss a word/story problem in their direction and everything falls apart. Why can’t…
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This year I’ve made an attempt to follow the “Sisters” in implementing the Daily Five and the Literacy Cafe. So far, I’m happy with what is starting to take shape. Conferencing is more focused. Tracking those kids who need more than a once a month reading conference, keeping kids accountable through the Literacy Cafe Menu,…
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Some part of the ARRA money allocated to the Lowell Schools is being used to give teachers time to look at assessments and collect data about how our students best learn. Grade level teams and cross-grade level data teams have formed since late summer all with the purpose of methodically looking at our assessment data…
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WNYC – Radiolab: Numbers (October 09, 2009). This broadcast from PRI’s Radio Lab on number is pretty interesting if you can stay with it. If the interviewees are to be believed, I should have taken that Calculus course I failed in high school sometime around age 2. That’s right. The researchers interviewed assert that babies…
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Every year we scour our standardized test scores wondering what we can do so that our students look as good on paper as they appear when we are assessing them day-to-day. I hate that standardized testing, in this case MCAS, is considered the measure for success. I think of some of my colleagues who took…
After An Educator's Journey 