I once had a discussion online with someone who tried to tell me why she was homeschooling her children – because public schools were so awful with their over-testing and their obsession with data. She made it sound like the schools themselves were to blame and that the adults in public schools embraced these testing Read More >>
I haven’t posted anything new in this space in a while. Maybe it’s been the fact that I have a total of 190 students this year, which is exhausting. Maybe crossing the line past 30 years of teaching – I just received my 30-year pin from my district today – has left me a bit Read More >>
In 2013, in the middle of the summer while taking a dip in my in-law’s pool with my kids, my son and I concocted my favorite holiday series ever. After it ran in the Daytona Beach News-Journal, it also appeared on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post. I also created a book Read More >>
Last week I questioned the unceasing vigilance of the forces of standardization in education. Re-reading it, I had to wonder – why is there such a disconnect between the adults in the system, and in our buildings, who want to standardize everything and those of us who want things to be a bit looser and Read More >>
Back when our district was attempting to “level the playing field” for everyone by having us use the College Board’s SpringBoard canned curriculum, I invited a school board member that I was on good terms with to my classroom. I purposefully invited her on the day my 8th grade classes were reading and discussing Kurt Read More >>
We held Open House at my school on the evening of September 27th, a Tuesday night. The night before Hurricane Ian hit Florida. Given the storm about to arrive, I might have expected a low turnout. Given the storm of activist parents who are reportedly unhappy with public schools for all kinds of reasons, I Read More >>
I started late in the school year my first year of teaching in 1990 – October 8th to be precise. I was hired to trim class sizes for other teachers and take their extra students as part of a program our district had adopted called Writing Enhancement. The program kept each English teacher’s total student Read More >>
I ran this strip today in the wake of having administered Florida’s new standardized literacy test on Thursday, September 8th. The new test is actually the “FAST” test (Florida Assessment of Student Thinking). It’s also being called Progress Monitoring. When the FSA (Florida Standards Assessment) went away, there was great rejoicing. Those of who knew Read More >>
I only became aware of the term Quiet Quitting this week. My wife mentioned it, and I first thought it meant that you silently left your job without making much noise or letting them know why you were quitting. Turns out, it means continuing to do your job but doing the bare minimum. You stay Read More >>
When my wife and I took Florida’s Gifted certification courses several years ago with our (fantastic) district Gifted Specialist, she took the Creativity course one summer. When she finished it, she got the instructor a present: a bumper sticker that said, “Creative people must be stopped!” The sticker, of course, was ironic and satirical, and Read More >>