(Shout out to Tupac for the quote) A few weeks ago, I found myself in yet another frustratingly familiar place. Sick. I hate being sick. Hate with a capital “H” for “Heck no I don’t have time to be at home in recovery. I have too much to do!” If you know me at all, […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Teaching in the Era of Trump
Why We Need Anti-Bias, Culturally Relevant Teaching Now More Than Ever On Tuesday, November 8th America elected Donald J. Trump, a man who pushed the racist theory that President Obama was born in Kenya, called Mexican immigrants “rapists and drug dealers”, falsely insisted that Muslim citizens were complicit in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, made countless sexist […]
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The Whole Teacher Movement… We Need It Now…
It’s November and right now every teacher I know is in a “funk” where we know Thanksgiving is upon us and very shortly after Winter Break will be peeking its head around the corner. These past four months have been difficult, to say the least. We’ve dealt with: we’ve dealt with the effects of a […]
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What You Need to Know About Brain-Based Learning
The human brain weighs about 3 pounds, and, according to Jensen (2005), is adaptable in nature, has good integration between structures, and is sophisticated. Certainly, something to marvel at, the human brain has the capacity to do things that science has just begun to identify. As teachers, learning more about the brain and how it […]
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Why We Should Teach Meditation in the Classroom
I took a writing class a few years ago with a famous author. We would write for ten minutes then meditate for ten minutes. The process was repeated at least a dozen times over the weekend. I had a little meditation practice but nothing routine. The author was a Zen Buddhist and she talked us […]
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How Response Notebooks Differ From Reading Logs
When I moved from teaching high school to teaching 8th grade English three years ago, I was introduced to an independent reading requirement: each student would read one book of their own choosing each quarter. How we chose to implement this requirement was up to the teacher, but each student had to produce a product […]
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Are SPED Teachers Being Wells Fargoed? How Special Education Resembles the Wells Fargo Scandal
Cross-Posted at maribeeappletree Those that handle our funds have a fiduciary duty to properly handle our hard-earned money, right? Recently our faith was shaken. In order to keep their $12 per hour jobs, low level Wells Fargo employees opened fraudulent bank and credit card accounts in their customers’ names. Top executives pushed managers to […]
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Celebrating Banned Books in the Classroom
Even though Banned Books Week has officially passed, you don’t have to restrict talking about censorship to just one week of the school year. In fact, I would encourage you to discuss censorship and why books might be challenged throughout the school year, not just for a week in September. I actually like to keep banned […]