Mr. Fitz for March 28th, 2000: the very first strip. Tomorrow marks 15 years since my little comic strip about teaching, Mr. Fitz, began running in the Daytona Beach News-Journal. It’s hard to calculate exactly how many strips I’ve drawn since I have occasionally had to put re-runs in the paper, and at one point (I don’t even recall when) Read More >>
Dear School Board Members, After listening to this week’s school board meeting, I felt a need to write you all. After 28 years teaching in Volusia County Schools, I am still excited about being in the classroom, but this summer that excitement is tempered with the uncertainty of going back to school in the midst Read More >>
For twenty years now, in an attempt to make schools accountable, we have focused entirely on a very narrow set of skills (standards) built by committees, which have then been measured by narrowing them even further and translating them into a very narrow, easy to score format (standardized tests). There are unintended consequences to such Read More >>
It’s been a busy couple of days, so this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and write something. Of course what happened yesterday, on the first day ever of the Florida Standards Assessment, made the news all over Florida. But here’s the scoop from my little corner of the educational world. I Read More >>
I got busy last week – partially school, partially other things. So I need to get you caught up on how Teaching is doing against Testing. I suspect you can guess who’s winning, but it’s the details that make it such an interesting competition. I’ll begin with 6th grade. On Wednesday I handed their essays Read More >>
I missed posting yesterday, so for the record, both yesterday and today were completely dominated by test prep. Yesterday and today were remediation days. We had to set up a remediation plan so show we were “doing something” to raise scores. In the past we have pulled students from PE or Elective to remediate them Read More >>
So today all my classes were taking the district writing exam. I read, outlined, and wrote my own version of the 6th grade essay so I could see what my students had to do, and read and outlined the 7th and 8th grade essays as well. What strikes me about these assessments is how tricky Read More >>
If you have been a teacher any time in the last twenty years, since No Child Left Behind, you have heard – or possibly even heard yourself saying, “Oh – Sarah can’t be in ____ (honors, AVID, Advanced, AP, IB… take your pick) because she’s a 2.” Or “Deandre will be fine in an advanced Read More >>
In this cultural moment, which has lingered longer than might have been expected in our short attention-span culture, I was unsure how to address the issue of persistent racism and police violence against blacks in our society. I draw a comic strip. I am a middle aged white guy. But I have taught students of Read More >>
This has been a strange school year. I said it, even though it doesn’t seem to need saying. Since I didn’t get to say good-bye to them in person, I wrote the following letter to my students and posted it for them as a final act of the 2019-2020 school year. I didn’t get to Read More >>