The Taos Tygers celebrate their success at the New Mexico State Poetry Slam. Top left: Rosamond Gimblet, Zia Pollis, Yoma Wilson, Serena Smith, Savannah Rodriguez, Rivala Garcia, Isahbo Hawley, and Kenna Kesson
-from ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake Continue reading
Who’s that handsome fella?
Time.
Teachers are fiercely protective of theirs, and with good reason: effective instruction requires a lot of time to take place. I’m not talking about the time spanning a single class period, or even a week of class periods. Learning requires months of steady, consistent instruction and study. Continue reading
Thank you for stopping by, and please take a look around!
While this website is still in its infancy, I envision a bright future for it. Here, among other things, you’ll find an ongoing series of posts about the state of education locally and nationally, as well as stories from my classroom, and notices of upcoming events. I hope, also, that it will become a forum for lively discussion of the issues that face students and the schools that serve them.
It will also become a repository of classroom handouts and documents that you and your child can use to stay abreast of what’s happening in class. Continue reading
Biff and the Boyz – Epic Bastards
The Teacher in the Rye Phonies and Bastards Identification Manual – created in honor of Holden Caulfield — is now ready for your contribution! Join me in creating an exhaustive document that will ultimately provide everything we need to know about how to identify and manage those pesky phonies and dastardly bastards! Read more…
I made a huge mistake in my original posting. When I did the math, I assumed that the 3.2 billion was the annual number. It’s actually the weekly number.
If we take Washington Post at face value and assume that the average teacher is putting in a 53 hour week, or 20.5 hours beyond his contract, the calculation should actually look like this:
3,700,000 teachers X 20.5 hrs/week extra X $42.26 per hour X 36 weeks in the school year = 115,395,156,000. $115 Billion…
I fixed the local number as well. Teachers in Taos donate $4,678,000 in unpaid hours annually if we assume there are 150 teachers in Taos and the rest of the numbers stay the same.
Sorry for the mix up.
Fran
Light reading…
We’re just finishing up spring break here in the Taos Municipal School district, and I must say, it has been a good one: celebrated my daughter’s third birthday (she got a ‘big girl bed’), organized the shed, took the kids to the park, enjoyed a couple inches of fresh snow…
… oh yeah, and I graded 56 essays. Continue reading
Even if you aren’t a school employee, you’ve likely heard about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), though perhaps not much more than that they’re just “better” than the standards they’re intended to replace in most states. Continue reading
On Friday night, youth poets gathered at the Metta Theater in Taos for a poetry slam in honor of Valentine’s Day. It was a beautiful night: a packed house, an intimate performance space, and really good writing. See for yourself.
In the spring of 2005 I was enrolled in the UNM School of Education Masters with Licensure program. The alt-rock band, Weezer, had just released their hit single, We Are All On Drugs, and George W. Bush was busy claiming that his victory over John Kerry gave him a mandate.
I also had a mandate: to teach a class of 29 resigned juniors at West Mesa High School in Albuquerque the finer points of American Literature. It was a student-teaching assignment—a little dose of reality to balance the idealism of prospective teachers. Continue reading
This will be the first in a series of posts in which I plan to discuss the various reasons, both legitimate and misbegotten, why people tend to view the schools negatively, and to examine the origins of some of the real and perceived faults of the schools. And, let’s face the truth here, there’s plenty to discuss.
So, do people really hate the public schools? Continue reading