About this Blog
lassos, longhorns and literacy
I’ve been wondering for a while if I should unleash here on this ole blog. I worried about the consequences of my carelessness and fretted about the fact that my bosses, my peers and any other curious onlooker could read this and judge it in any way they wanted. But after today, I think it’s necessary.
I believe in my kids. But I do not believe in my school.
My school is in serious trouble. Morale is low. Test scores are lower. And I hate myself for even bringing this up, because Oklahoma state testing is shamefully easy and I do not believe in the NCLB-spurred frenzy of multiple choice mania, narrowed thinking, teaching to the test and then being humiliated when scores have barely budged or, in some cases, lowered (which proves that the test is a good indicator of learning, right? HELL NO. OPEN YOUR EYES, BUSH.) Accountability is…
I NEED IT TO BE SPRING BREAK NOW. If you get a puppy and it chews something up, and then looks at you with sad eyes and puts its tail between its legs, for how long do you yell before you hug it and tell it you love it? If you don’t discipline it, does…
read more »….is the bleakest of months. I tried to think of the most dramatic opener I could, and that’s what I came up with. How’d I do? It’s hard to believe that a mere 20 days ago I was ringing in 2012 at a club in Ann Arbor with my new friend Phil, a 26-year-old…
read more »My Biggest Fear has evolved. It isn’t, surprisingly, early death by manic clowns with vampire fangs (specifically in the showers of the locker room at the PEC on campus in Wooster, Ohio), as it has been for a significant portion of my life. It isn’t even failure, which one would expect from this job. It…
read more »I don’t think I talk about my mom enough. So I’m going to, because she’s the best. She teaches 7th grade at a kind of down-and-out middle school (re: science is cut for reading, music is cut for test prep, etc.) in our hometown, and I happen to be typing this from her desk at…
read more »If I knew then (i.e., this summer, before unit planning) what I know now (haaaa), I would have planned a little differently. My first lessons wouldn’t be characterization and setting and topic sentences and inferences and transitions, as they were. Instead I would have carefully crafted a unit one plan consisting wholly of life skills…
read more »It’s the beginning of the second week of school and I just ate the second to last juice bar in the box (which I bought yesterday) and realized I couldn’t put off blogging any more. Every day I come home with about eight trillion things I want to write/scream/cry/laugh/punch a wall about and somewhere between…
read more »Yesterday a nationally-recognized dust storm swept through Phoenix and then less than 6 hours later (at 5:50 am, mind you) the fire alarm in my dorm went off. Two unrelated events that fit perfectly into the theme of my time here thus far: hella chaotic, slightly illogical and altogether almost laughably challenging. I read a…
read more »This morning, we asked our students to finish this sentence: “I like being a scholar because…” We’ve been talking a lot in our classroom about what it means to be a scholar on the most basic level (i.e. follow the rules) and the higher levels (i.e. solve complicated equations, read long books, graduate from college…
read more »Before I explain why exactly I wanted to grab one of my seventh-graders by the shoulders and shake him all before 9 am today, I’ll fill you in on some logistics of my summer school classroom. Here are the basics (we’re learning to write summaries next week, soooo I’ll fill you in on some key…
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