I have Star Wars on the brain, and this afternoon doing some reading, viewing, and thinking about Star Wars gave me a new insight about education. I recently finished drawing comic strip parodies of Star Wars in my comic strip; I’ve gone to see Episode 7 twice (opening night and the day after Christmas); and today I had a chance to Read More >>
As the march toward censorship moves onward in my district and around my state and country, I found myself thinking about my editor at Scholastic Professional Books, Gloria Pipkin. Gloria “discovered” me when I wrote a piece about writing tests for the Orlando Sentinel. My two books were among the last she edited before she Read More >>
With the state of Florida, the state in which I have taught for over 30 years, headed for universal school vouchers and choice, I felt a need revsit a series I did a few years back about school choice. In my comic strip, Mr. Fitz, I had poked fun the problems of for-profit charter schools, and Read More >>
The above picture is of my classroom library. Well… part of it. I have had some variation of this library in my classroom for about three decades. It is not a library I put together with any particular agenda. Well, that’s not true. I do have an agenda: I want my students to be readers. Read More >>
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 >>