Dear First Year Teacher…Me, Remember when you said you would NEVER step foot into a classroom and teach? Jokes on you! Your life is going to be forever changed from this moment on. From the moment you step into that classroom, you are a teacher. You’ll wake up every morning, tired from lesson planning and […]
Posted inChild Development
The State of Sex Education in Alabama
In Alabama abstinence is the best form of birth control, except when it is not. Although the teenage pregnancy rate has dramatically decreased in the USA, Alabama remains a state where teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection are actually rising. [bctt tweet=”In Alabama abstinence is the best form of birth control, except when it […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Career Clusters Should Not Limit Students
Like most people who attended school in the ’90s and early 2000s, I fully brought into the college = success, no college = failure ideology. I came to teaching as an aide at the age of 22 and expected to encourage students that they must attend college, no other paths. I learned a hard lesson […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
What Teacher Choice in PD Should Look Like
We all know how it feels to attend a half-hearted PD session we don’t think will be useful in our classrooms. Maybe it’s the content that feels irrelevant or the structure of the session. Whatever the cause, teachers are tired of attending PD that doesn’t fit our personal needs or the needs of our school […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Bringing Climate Change into the E/LA Classroom
English/language arts students have the privilege of being “transported across the globe, back in time or into the future” as they read poems, plays, novels, and articles because classrooms are “spaces of discovery, possibility, and participation where students learn to empathize with experiences of people like and unlike themselves” (Beach et al, 2017). These students […]
Posted inConfessions of a Teacher
Teacher Confession: The Student I’ll Never Forget
I have a teacher confession to make. I failed him. Not “gave him an F” failed him but failed him as a young man. A student with a future ahead of him, someone who could one day be a father, a councilman, or even president. But I failed him. It was my second year as […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
A Delusional Parent Tried to Sue Me
Teachers are well versed in the helicopter parent. The helicopter parent hovers at all times picking at small things, meddling, and is generally over-involved. They will usually try to solve each and every small problem their kid encounters by asking the teacher to get involved or blaming the problem on the teacher. This new type […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
The Impact of the Teacher Shortage
If you are part of #Edutwitter, you see the various educators displaying the great work happening in their classrooms and districts. I may be alone in this, but I occasionally have FOMO when I scroll through. Social media sure knows how to paint a pretty picture of what’s going on. However, if you think critically […]