to remove your child from our school because when the child got in a fight, we suspended him/her. I suspect that being called in to meet about helping your child succeed academically was also a factor. It’s tough when the school cares and wants you to care; it makes parenting a lot more demanding. But [...]
It’s becoming increasingly clear that some of the very troublesome, highly-disruptive behaviors exhibited by one of my students are largely (though perhaps not completely) under the student’s control. The loss of fine motor coordination that seems to be “switched on” when the students wants to show you that s/he can’t do the work, the [...]
to return after a year away and find that the teachers who used my classroom can’t tell me where the LEGOs are in any systematic sort of way, that it is students who remember that half of what we can’t find is stowed away in drawers intended for lab-ware (and labeled as such), that all [...]
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I gave my second I-Check (a.k.a. quiz) this week, and the scores were much better for most classes. What was interesting and a little disturbing was that the range was smaller; my lowest-performing students improved quite a bit, but my highest-performing students in many cases did worse. I will have to look at [...]
Are people at your school talking about the new deal cut between the UFT and the city of NY, the bonus plan & 25/55 plan? What percent of teachers would you say are aware of it? What percent know anything about the details?
If I stick around these parts, I will reach the “25 years of service” mark at age…. 47. I’m already almost 1/3 of the way there. Numbers like this have a weird way of freaking me out, even when I’m not sure how I feel about them. Right now, staying for 25 years seems like [...]
In teaching, anger should be an act, a conscious choice on the part of the teacher to communicate something to students. Acting angry when you’re actually angry is bad news and tends to exacerbate the problem. Those two sentences are easy to write and very hard to live by. We’re all human, and pre-adolescents can [...]
The city of New York and the UFT (our teachers’ union) have agreed on a new bonus program - depending on whom you ask, it may or may not be merit pay - in which schools with a high proportion of needy students who raise the children’s test scores will earn extra money to be [...]
Or, a Weekend Field Trip to Siemens Science Day at Columbia University
I found out about Siemens Science Day on Wednesday night, whipped together a permission slip, gave it out Thursday, selected 10 students on Friday, and met them at a train station near our school this morning. It sounded fun, but part of [...]
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