We’re going to do this with the sophomores. I went into the basement, found an old plant stand of my father’s, pulled whatever scrap wood I could find, and knocked together this prototype.

Punchlist:
1. Need to caulk all the way around.
2. Need to do something clever with the roof part.
(both of these have to do with waterproofing, which will be a huge design challenge. Flat roof? Not so smart…)
3. Need to stain the same color as the plant stand.
4. Need to figure out second floor and signage. Either a simple A-Frame roof or some funky triangle.
5. Need to figure out what to do about the door.

I hold no rights to this letter or photograph. But I wanted to have it somewhere that I could find it and then share with my students.

Beautiful…

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Saul Bellow

Review of the book also excellent…

This one is everywhere. It has a deep single root that can be difficult to pull.

After extensive research (looking at google for 2-3 minutes), I believe this is Purslane. Apparently it’s edible! Considering that this weed is everywhere — the raised beds, the sidewalk, the tree pits — that might kind of good news…

Particularly liked this quote:

America is two countries now—the country of its narrative and the country of its numbers, with the latter sitting in judgment of the former. In the stories we tell ourselves, we are nearly always too good: too soft on criminals, too easy on terrorists, too lenient with immigrants, too kind to animals. In the stories told by our numbers, we imprison, we drone, we deport, and we euthanize with an easy conscience and an avenging zeal.

Full article here

Tim Judah, writing on Ukraine, but with a line that seems to be true of much modern life and politics:

“To borrow a phrase from the name of the book by Samantha Power, Ukraine is the new problem from hell, and it is not going away so that everyone else can have an easier life in which they don’t have to make hard, risky, and unpleasant decisions.”

Replace Ukraine with poverty, inequality, crime, Gaza…take your pick.

Update: running this morning after posting and remembered this front cover from The Onion.

As a teacher educator, I had the troubling experience last night when my students and I looked over the Common Core Standards and the PA State Standards together. It was the opposite of the glorious moments when someone reads or encounters something for the first time; instead it was a “we have to actually pay attention to this stuff? Really?” moment…

I went looking to collect the smart things I’ve read about standards and will continue to add them to this entry…

Joanne Yatvin (hero of the minority report, a scathing dissent on the NRP) going point by point through the ELA standards.

Mercedes Schneider has done the legwork on who is paying for the CCS in several lengthy and well-documented blog posts.

Diane Ravitch’s speech here is very well-done and does offer significant context for the CCS. Still, (this remains unforgivable.)

Solid article here by a teacher that covers a lot of ground. None of these issues are as simple as they seem and claiming that somehow teacher tenure produces inequality is illogical and a misreading of how schools actually operate.

I had never heard this before:

But U.S. education spending data includes teacher pensions, and teachers don’t get Social Security, so our pensions aren’t actually as generous as they seem.

Is that true? Really?

Update: Some California teachers do not pay into social security and therefore do not receive these benefits.

This is an amazing article.

This quote is money:

“The people who say poverty is no excuse for low performance are now using teacher accountability as an excuse for doing nothing about poverty.”

(David Berliner has been singing this song for a long time, having first published The Manufactured Crisis in 1996 !?!)

The only thing that bothered me, even if didn’t surprise me, was that a school like this could be poked and prodded by so many different individuals and have so many different individuals miss the cheating.

Part of summer vacation is visiting used bookstores. Found this place two years ago and returned today:

*Solid education section, with good histories as well as a number of good teacher books. I bought a $4 copy of Louis Menand’s book on universities (Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

*Good literary criticism and poetry sections too. I liked his novels so for $4 I bought this hardback collection of essays: 1. J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999 (New York: Viking Adult, 2001).

Many fine dictionaries in good shape that I would buy for school if I didn’t have to drive them home and lots of fiction. If I lived here all summer, I’d be in and out of this store.