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.
Tag: management
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It’s a good news/bad news thing….. At the end of the school year, there was a rumor that our ratty carpeting would be replaced by tile. Good news: the carpets are gone! Bad news: the replacement required some serious sanding before the new tiles could be laid. Everything in my classroom is covered with a…
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I find that the longer I am a teacher, the more I am blown away by the intelligence and thoughtfulness of colleagues across the US. Here is a blog I recently came upon Two Writing Teachers. Even though the two bloggers teach grade levels higher than my current teaching assignment, the process and their craft…
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Like many teachers in urban districts, many of my students come from backgrounds that are less than idyllic. This year has been no exception and in many ways, it has been worse. Is it the economic upheaval? Is it the learned selfishness of our society? A social scientist may have answers – all I know…
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Yesterday, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Scholastic Warehouse Sale. Armed with a listing of my newly reorganized Leveled Library inventory, I forced myself away from the picture books and materials more suitable to second grade independent readers in order to focus on increasing nonfiction texts. 20 year old buying habits are not easy…
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The calendar may be telling me that we “only” have 36 school days left, but this week we celebrated a new year — at least a new year as far as our classroom library is concerned. The book baskets have been labeled and, when needed there are level reminders on the baskets. On Monday, we…
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This week I spent most of a “day off” in school sorting through the books that had been labeled and logged and organizing them into color coded baskets – red for fiction, green for nonfiction, blue for poetry and yellow for special collections. Using both the small nesting baskets from Really Good Stuff and the…
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With about 400 books that were previously unleveled now identified by genre and reading level, I was feeling pretty good about the progress in the classroom library. Machine-like, I’ve been able to go through 2 or 3 boxes of books on the white book shelves each morning. Last night, however, as I was checking on…
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The lists of books that need to be leveled has been completed! That would, under normal circumstances be something to celebrate; however, right now things feel pretty overwhelming. The nightly task of typing a book title into, first Scholastic Book Wizard, and then one or more of the other databases is quite tedious. Many of…
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So, I am getting close(r) to the end of my teaching career — I’m old enough to be looking wistfully as my colleagues begin to retire, but not ready to admit I should be quitting. I was looking around at the disheveled mess in my room – especially the book libraries – and began thinking…
After An Educator's Journey 