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 [...]

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