Meta-Blahghe

I just discovered the Ideas blog on the NY Times website while procrastinating the inevitable: completion of “Element K” a series of technology tutorials and assessments all teachers must complete for a teaching credential.  It’s estimated the tutorials and assessments amount to approximately 14 hours of un-fun screen time.   
I love the randomness of “Ideas.” [...]

I Never Thought I Could Love an Economist

Talk about love at first sight.  
Listen to Mr. Fryer’s words.  
The achievement gap is the number one civil rights issue in this country.  
AND the man is funny–he schools Colbert!  Beautiful.  Please watch this.  
Roland Fryer on The Colbert Report
I’m in love.

More links to learn more about Fryer and his project to address the [...]

THIS PAST WEEK

Written December 5, 20008.  Published December 9, 2008.
This post is in regards to November 28-December 5
Note to my readers:
I have been reticent up to this point on the blog to 1) say I am married 2) say I have a husband 3) explicitly identify with a gender. It is time to come out of [...]

Where is the Rockridge Life?

These days there isn’t a lot of life being led in the Rockridge sense.  Saddleshoos is busy at Mills College and at a middle school in Alameda, and shuttling between the two along High Street.
Several course meals have been replaced by readers, midterms, and lesson plans.  The questions are why teach?  how to teach?  what [...]

It’s More Than a Decimal System

I’m spending a lot of time with John Dewey these days.  While I had read about him in text books many times before, now is the first time I am becoming acquainted with the man through his own words.  It’s a pleasure.  I’m reading “Experience and Education.”

I also appreciate the man for his use of [...]

2 W’s, 1 H

Why, What and How You Teach
Why do I teach?  I teach to learn.  I became a teacher because I am a life-long student.  My goal, for the rest of my life, is to be a part of a community of learners.  I have a picture of this learning community in my mind.  This community is [...]

Don’t you want to know why I want to be a teacher? Part II: REVISED

Reading and writing are important because they are the roots of power in the modern world.  We as individuals and communities can use reading and writing to obtain power for ourselves and to challenge power structures that are currently in place.  Reading and writing are the major tasks of the discipline of English and Language [...]

Hare or Hair -Brained?

When I was writing “Smells Kind of Fish-y,”  and characterizing Stanley Fish as “hare-brained,” I had to look up the word harebrained, because I don’t really know it.  If “knowing” is to have the capacity to use a term to create meaning, then I, in this sense did not know “harebrained.”  It was not because I [...]

It smells kind of Fish-y

Squeezed in between the radio’s incessant squeaking about Palin, Fannie, and Freddie, (barf, barf, barf), Neal Conan gave Stanley Fish air time on Talk of the Nation to promote his new book: “Save the World on Your Own Time,” and an opportunity for him to tout his devil-may-care devil’s advocacy.  On the show he argues [...]

Tonight

I read 3 lengthy articles, all with scintillating titles:
“Cultural Literacy”
“Critical Literacy”
“Literacy in Three Metaphors”
When grad school gets you down, blahghe!
But really, titles aside, these are important pieces of writing that debate questions that determine our American experience.  What should children know?  What is literacy?  Who gets to decide what is important to know?  
Deborah Meier [...]