We worked yesterday on our goals for the year. My two goals (as a teacher) for the year:
1. Carefully and closely documenting the work with students in ways that will allow others to use and draw upon it and allow me to improve my practice.
3. Publicly finishing projects together. I want to make sure that each of the projects has as an authentic conclusion with as large an impact as possible.
Faked my way through the door; could have used a jig or corner clamps but didn’t. Dug through the trash doors to find mismatched brass hinges. Found a knob that we mistakenly bought for kitchen cabinets long ago.
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.
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.
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.
