This perceptive query about photosynthesis asked in a fifth grade botany class led to one of those moments when curiosity electrified our classroom. When I admitted I didn’t know the answer yet, my students gave me an assignment.
“Will you find out and tell us?” Continue reading
Waldkindergartens, an all-outdoor kindergarten in Switzerland/Rona RIchter
For the typical American kindergartner, unstructured free play during the school day consists of 20 to 30 minutes of recess, and perhaps some time at indoor “stations” — perhaps creating with building blocks, costumes, or musical instruments. But what if there was more? What if the answer to “what did you do in school today?” was, “I climbed a tree, played in the mud, built a fire”?
That is exactly the kind of learning going on in the Swiss Waldkindergartens, or forest kindergartens, where children ages four to seven spend all of their school days playing outdoors, no matter the weather. With no explicit math or literacy taught until first grade, the Swiss have no set goals for kindergartners beyond a few measurements, like using scissors and writing one’s own name. They instead have chosen to focus on the social interaction and emotional well-being found in free play. Continue reading
Students plan to walk out of schools to protest gun violence. They say they won’t return until lawmakers do something to address school shootings.
The students should walk out and never return. Being sitting ducks for gun violence is one reason, but it is far from the only one.
1. Students Are Left Defenseless
It’s not just crazy gunmen students are left defenseless against. Some schools put cops in the school, which sounds like a good idea. But if they aren’t stopping school shootings, they are generally handcuffing non-resistant elementary school students.. Other “resource officers” assault the students, or taze them while the Principal holds them down.
The administrations can’t address the real issues because they are too busy interrogating five-year-olds until they pee their pants. Every day in the news you see another report of a teacher doing something crazy, assaulting, or sexually abusing students. Continue reading
When the sage points at the moon the fool looks at the finger. ~ Zen koan.
Jeff Cooper, a true philosopher of firearms who, among his many achievements in the field, created the color-coded levels of readiness, wrote that men fight with their minds; the tools they use are irrelevant. Rapper Ice-T, who most likely never heard about Cooper, reached the same conclusion when he wrote the lyrics, “My lethal weapon in my mind.”
Nevertheless, the overall reaction of the CFR-controlled presstitutes, brainwashed high school teenagers, bleeding heart liberals and corrupt politicians after the recent shooting at a school in Florida, shows that the anti-gun lobby is focused only in the tools the killers had in their hands, but doesn’t care much about what they had in their minds when they were mercilessly killing their classmates. Continue reading
There are days in this insane world when one is completely uplifted with the gift of life. This marvelous teacher will be a beacon of light across the years for her students. She will be remembered. ~ Ed.
It’s the second year in a row I’ve brought a white dress to school and my students have filled it with their artwork. This is one of my favorite things to do in my class! #thewearyteacher
This is something I’d seen on Pinterest a few years ago and I fell in love with the idea. I think every teacher should do this! It’s a great project and an even better keepsake.
A poll of Tennessee voters shows overwhelming support for more school choice options in the Volunteer State.
The poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy asked 625 Tennesseans if they “support or oppose” allowing parents to use their child’s education tax dollars for a public, charter, or private school. A whopping 65 percent support it. Continue reading
“I’m a math teacher, not a counselor. I’m here to teach math,” one teacher recently told a principal I was working with in an afterschool program. The principal recounted this story while reflecting on an effort to infuse more social-emotional learning into her school.
The concept of having to “add one more thing” to overburdened teachers is nothing new. To overcome this resistance, the education field must not view SEL as a separate curriculum but instead as what it is at its core: a set of skills, competencies, and principles that inform and guide how to interact with students. That is, rather than SEL being what educators teach, it is how they teach. Continue reading
Many educators who succeed at raising test scores also fail at keeping students fulfilled
Is a good teacher one who makes students enjoy class the most or one who is strict and has high standards? And are those two types even at odds?
A new study that tries to quantify this phenomenon finds that on average, teachers who are good at raising test scores are worse at making kids happy in class. Continue reading
ADD and ADHD are both constantly touted by parents and teachers as the reasoning behind why children are unable to focus. And often times, the “cure” seems to be a slew of pharmaceutical medications that numb the children to their surroundings.
Rarely is the cure ever to cut down on sugar or to consider that a child’s brain and focus simply isn’t fully developed. And never has the cure been enacting a program that extends the amount of time kids have recess. (Continue to full story…)
Mounting evidence shows children benefit in various ways from delayed entry into school systems.
If you are one of those parents who decided to delay your child’s schooling, or forgo it altogether, you have plenty of company. Continue reading
Prior to passage of America’s first compulsory schooling statute, in Massachusetts in 1852, it was generally accepted that education was a broad societal good and that there could be many ways to be educated: at home, through one’s church, with a tutor, in a class, on your own as an autodidact, as an apprentice in the community–and often all of the above.
Even that first compulsory schooling statute only mandated school attendance for 12 weeks of the year for 8-14 year-olds – hardly the childhood behemoth it has become. Continue reading
“It was as if my long-term students and I were taking a long journey by ship and it was my fault that, in the parlance of the controversial education law, William was being left behind.”
Eugène Delacroix: Demosthenes Declaiming by the Seashore
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. ~ Antione de Saint-Exupery
I couldn’t help smiling as I watched my new student, twelve-year-old William, running laps around the school field, one hand clutching his baggy pants to keep them from slipping inexorably toward his feet. This ten minute run was the energetic beginning of the two-hour class we called main lesson. Continue reading
The following was first published by Kettle Moraine Publications on the Federal Observer on February 26, 2013. It has proven to be timeless – and pointed. There is nothing in this marvelous post that should have changed. It is the SYSTEM that has changed – and forced the teachers to change with it. ~ (Ed.)
To deliberately deprive a child of a good education is a sin against the child and the nation. To abuse a pupil’s trust is despicable. To manipulate history in the classroom as a means to promote a political or religious ideology is diabolically unethical. To throw away teaching methods that work for practices that do more harm than good is a tragedy. To walk out on a classroom of pupils for personal gain is maniacally egocentric. Sadly, this is precisely what is happening to children in public schools today.
Unfortunately, most teachers join a union like the National Education Association, and in so doing new members must agree (pg. 120) to the union’s goals and objectives. In turn the union protects their members no matter how badly the teachers serve the students. Continue reading
It’s a common complaint among teachers as well as parents in the U.S. these days: kindergarten has become the new first grade and the unintended casualty of that is preschool, which has consequently become the new kindergarten. Many early childhood experts consider physical activity and unstructured play the two main pillars for learning and a healthy development for preschoolers. Both are often lacking at American preschools, where play is typically directed by the adults and the students are more likely to be found cooped up indoors, filling out worksheets and tracing letters. Not to mention kindergarten, where students are expected to sit still at their desks for the majority of the day. Continue reading
Children only spend half their waking hours in school during the academic year.
This means that much of the rearing is still done at home.
In fact, research from North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of California, Irvine finds that parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child’s academic success than the qualities of the school itself.
To find out just what parents can do at home to help their kids excel, we asked teachers everywhere to weigh in. Continue reading
Every parent wants the best possible education for their child–one that fits their child’s unique needs, challenges them to grow, and equips them to succeed. But there are so many options–public, private, and charter schools, plus homeschooling and online schooling–that it’s easy for parents to feel overwhelmed and, well, undereducated about the choices. What’s more, while one schooling option may be right for one child, it may be challenging for another. And sometimes the same child will thrive in one environment in elementary school but falter in that same environment in middle school.
What’s a parent to do?
Parenting expert and longtime educator Dr. Kevin Leman can help. In this practical book, he clearly explains the pros and cons of various schooling options so that parents can make an informed choice about the kind of education that will help their child thrive. He shows parents how to stay involved and engaged with their child’s education every step of the way, knowing that the choices they make about school now will reverberate long into that child’s future. Order NOW
My teaching bag of tricks is full of stories, lots of stories— biographies that are a window into history, stories to teach the alphabet, stories that break down the complexity of a math process and metaphoric stories such as parables and fables that spark thinking.
My students are used to stories that take them on a journey that appears to bring them far away from our main theme, into a tale that is not so much a segue as a secret route to the heart of the topic. Continue reading