Spring break, in a sense, begins today. Technically, I’m not enjoying any extra time off yet; we get Friday nights and the whole weekend off, just like every other school, and only on Monday do we begin enjoying time in which we would otherwise be working. Unofficially, however, people pad out the break with normal […]
Heh. Someone rummaged up a copy of the 1869 Harvard entrance exam (sometimes mislabeled 1899, the date of archiving), which is making the rounds under headings like “will probably make you feel dumb.†Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Though readers who know me might object that I went to the he-man technical school […]
Heh. Someone rummaged up a copy of the 1869 Harvard entrance exam (sometimes mislabeled 1899, the date of archiving), which is making the rounds under headings like “will probably make you feel dumb.†Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Though readers who know me might object that I went to the he-man technical school […]
I witnessed a student nearly run over today. Fortunately, the driver ahead of me was alert, and traffic surrounding the school at the last bell is slow in any case, but it was still a narrow thing: some kids were horsing around, and one got pushed out into the street. Once the driver had a […]
With characteristic inaccuracy, the radio informed me as I left this morning that we would experience “light showers throughout the day.†Bullpuckie. It was already snowing when I heard the words: heavy, sloppy snow that wouldn’t have been a “light shower†even if it had arrived in liquid form. And the drivers I met on […]
Teachers are a hell of a lot more than baby sitters. Sadly, babysitting is unavoidably some small part of what we do. I had this visibly proven to me when flooding cut off too many roads: too many teachers were unexpectedly late, and, thanks to budget cuts, we didn’t have enough staff to monitor all […]
There’s something that I just can’t wrap my head around concerning the nation-wide assault on public workers’ unions, no matter how hard I try to see things from somebody else’s perspective. I can understand why politicians, especially right-wing politicians, would be eager to cut paychecks in order to balance the budget (or, sadly, to buy […]
Okay, I’ve had it with kids neglecting to bring a pencil to class. They prefer to call it “forgetting,†as in “I forgot we have a quiz every Monday†or “I forgot pencils are useful in school.†I’m not handing out my pencils so they can forget to return them, and I’m certainly not buying […]
Now here’s an interesting little factoid. Among the arguments teabaggers like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker put forward for busting teachers’ unions is that teachers’ unions perpetuate bad teaching, as measured in depressed scores on standardized tests like the SAT. Now, far be it from me to put forward standardized test scores as the measure of […]
My kids are having trouble with determinants. I can sympathize; determinants involve fairly complicated and tedious calculation, and the motivation for handling determinants is not at all obvious. They get used later, of course! Not much point in teaching a technique that won’t be used. But, apart from some minor immediate applications that take more […]