Where do social action, art, music, technology, media, pop culture, and most importantly, student needs intersect?
I collaborate twice a week with my PLC. Our first one was fun, and part of our discussion centered around integrating grammar lessons with our literature study. In the ideal world, it would be done based on the literature itself, but working with many LEP, SPED, and at-risk kids, we know the need to introduce grammar in many contexts. One of our newbies, Jo Rohde suggested School House Rock for our counjunction lesson. We began to sing, and to be honest, I didn't know she would know that considering how young she...
Because one of the reasons I continue to teach at an urban comprehensive high school is there is never a dull moment and because some of my previous posts have been just too serious, I have some fun anecdotes to share with you from my first week of teaching freshman and sophmore English. Anecdote 1: Me: How was your summer? Student: Great, Miss. I went to New York. Me: Wow! That is exciting. What did you do? (At this point, I am thnking about what a culturally rich city it is. How I love Manhatten, its diversity...
In my post for Leadership Day 2010 , I wrote about the McTighe ‘Schooling by Design’ model, in which programs, practices, hiring of staff and allocation of resources all rest on the foundation of the mission statement (what we stand for) and learning principles (what we believe about learning.) Our school has a mission statement and, as a PYP school, we have some firm, shared beliefs about how children learn. But, till now, our learning principles were not articulated in a clear, accessible way. Does everyone...
Foreword to Bring It to Class By: Kylene BeersDate: May 2010 Summary: Students' backpacks bulge not just with oversize textbooks, but with paperbacks, graphic novels, street lit, and electronics such as iPods and handheld video games. Bring It to Class is about unpacking those texts to explore previously unexamined assumptions regarding their usefulness to classroom learning. Order Bring It to Class...
I know many of y'all know about Google Sites. I know that you may have made several sites with it, but have you played around with their templates recently? Seriously, go check it out---especially if...
Olga Sanchez Martinez...what a saint. After having cancer, being in a coma, losing parts of her fingers at work in the tortilla factory, being left by her husband for another woman, she still finds the strength to help so many migrants like Enrique. She seeks those injured on their journey to the North to give them medical attention they would not otherwise receive. She spends her life trying to raise money for a clinic. She spends what little money she does have on her mission to help migrants and gathers donations...
Many of you have already seen this clip. It moved me to tears. Many of the reunions happened at schools, and I wondered, "How many of our children are having to do without a father or mother because he or she is serving our country? How many will lag behind, require years to recover the loss, or never get over the separation at all?" We talk about the high divorce rate. The rise in single mothers. But, this is a different phenomenon. We haven't been at war for this long in my memory. We haven't seen this many troops...
According to Sonja Nazario, there are roughly 48, 000 children who enter the US from Central America and Mexico illegally without a parent. Two-thirds of those will succeed past US INS. Counselors in a Texas detention center estimate that of the children they serve, 75% are looking for their mothers.