Apr
30
Four Years to Graduate Or No Goal?
April 30, 2007 | 1 Comment
At the conference I attended on Friday, I was very pleased to hear Chancellor Bennett’s response to my inquiry about cohort outcomes after four years of school and cohort outcomes after five years of school. Chancellor Bennett’s response to my question was extremely positive and in favor of the idea that it’s okay to take [...]
Apr
30
Cosmic Forces At Work
April 30, 2007 | 3 Comments
Any time I change this presentation, like I have recently with the Tarski presentation, I experience problems. James Farmer at Edublogs is working on this theme, but G-Town Readers’ comments have shown up on the wrong posts. So here I am, back with my original theme. The other presentation afforded me some features I don’t [...]
Apr
28
Let’s Ban Students Too
April 28, 2007 | 3 Comments
I absolutely cannot believe that a kid in my class would have been able to use an MP3 player during a test to cheat. Maybe in the schools where cheating is happening with electronic devices they have much larger classes than I ever did.
So here we go again. Instead of doing our due diligence, teaching our kids [...]
Apr
27
My Own Learning
April 27, 2007 | 1 Comment
The last thing I wanted to do this morning was attend a conference sixty miles away in Niagara Falls.
I was pre-registered and my Title VII friends had paid for my registration fee so I felt obligated to attend. I called my colleague in the middle school who assured me he would handle any “emergencies” and [...]
Apr
25
Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This
April 25, 2007 | 1 Comment
It’s nearing the end of a long day in the midst of a longer week. Thank goodness my mother in law is preparing dinner for us at 7:00. I can look forward to a nice meal with my family. I have no explanation for those weeks when we walk around saying, “when it rains, it pours” [...]
Apr
24
G-Town Readers Rock
April 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Thank you to the 46 53 67 (and counting, think we’ll let this experiment ride a while) readers who responded to the referers/readers survey! I’ll give it a couple of days to be sure everyone has responded who wanted to, and then post a summary of who YOU are–and James said you wouldn’t comment if asked. [...]
Apr
23
Focused On Learning. . . Please
April 23, 2007 | 3 Comments
Here’s the thing about working with kids. It’s not like managing employees where we can talk about separating one’s personal life from one’s professional life. It’s all mixed in together and sometimes it’s messy.
Take today for example. It’s only Monday and I spent a good portion of the day talking to students and parents about [...]
Apr
20
Reader/Referer Experiment
April 20, 2007 | 67 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Jeff Archer, who’s doing an article about this blog for Education Week. One of the things that Jeff and I talked about was the number of “referers” to the blog each day. This is the way stats are shown on edublogs.
Jeff’s colleague, Jeanne, contacted James Farmer at edublogs.org [...]
Apr
18
Positive Energy
April 18, 2007 | 2 Comments
So about fifteen minutes after my arrival today, a colleague saw me about an issue on which he was clearly unhappy. Normally, I may have reacted to him differently, but today I just looked at him and thought “how unfortunate that he’s this upset.” I didn’t take in any of his negative energy, didn’t react, just calmly [...]
Apr
17
Blog Becomes Travelogue
April 17, 2007 | 5 Comments
I’ve been putting things away, doing laundry, and cleaning up all day long. Well, not all day, I just woke up from a brief nap, which was much needed. Our flight from Philadelphia to Buffalo was cancelled, but we did get on a later flight. I hit my bed at 12:45 this morning, after about [...]