Jul

10

Summer School Starts

July 10, 2007 | 1 Comment

Anyone who thinks “kids today just don’t care about anything” should come to our summer school. It’s our first time offering summer school and I met with each class as it began today. Eight classes, six different teachers, 47 students enrolled in the morning session and 66 enrolled in the PM session. 92 degrees with [...]

Jun

10

Senior Pranks, Part 3

June 10, 2007 | 1 Comment

Amazing as it may sound, there are some things about this week’s senior pranks that made me very happy.
Partially because we have good relationships with our students and partially because the seniors really want to have a picnic on Monday, we know who pulled the pranks and they are receiving consequences. How do we know?
Students told [...]

Jun

10

Senior Pranks, Part 2

June 10, 2007 | 1 Comment

Yesterday, I wrote about senior pranks, how I feel about them, and two that we endured this week. There’s more to this story.
I’ve been around the block a couple of time with senior classes. Both as a teacher who advised seniors and as a high school principal of five years. 99% of the time I still opt [...]

Jun

9

Senior Pranks

June 9, 2007 | 6 Comments

I hate senior pranks. Because I take personal responsibility for everything that happens in our school, I also take senior pranks personally. And as a person who’s dedicated the last seventeen years of my life to making schools better for kids, I find senior pranks to be disrespectful and ungrateful, selfish acts.
The single thing about [...]

May

28

Trust Isn’t Given Away Freely

May 28, 2007 | 2 Comments

I recently attended a planning session at our local BOCES for alternative education. I was invited by the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction. She had challenged her alternative ed principal, faculty and staff to create a new program. They were given model programs to consider and evaluate and then began the arduous task of [...]

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

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

3

Wait A Minute Please

April 3, 2007 | 2 Comments

Cross Posted On LeaderTalk
Largely because it’s the last week of school before spring break which can be a bit crazy, I signed on to bloglines for the first time in days and found 20 posts to LeaderTalk that I haven’t read. Consequently, I missed the whole April Fool’s Day joke on Chris’ post. This turned [...]

Mar

27

Potential New Hires

March 27, 2007 | 4 Comments

I spent this evening at a local university speaking with graduate students in education on the topic of the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at Gowanda. I had the privilege of joining Marvin L. Henchbarger, Executive Director of the Gay & Lesbian Youth Services of Western New York.
Readers may remember earlier posts on G-Town Talks about the evolution [...]

Mar

21

Faculty Meeting Excitement, “Not”

March 21, 2007 | 4 Comments

Why is it that my teachers say so little at our faculty meetings? I try to keep them to 30 minutes max and limit agenda items to discussion items, taking care of the smaller, informational items via email.
Today’s agenda had what I thought were some pretty hefty items: 

Student Presentation on suggested alternatives to “That’s so [...]

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