Kristin Kipp, national online teacher of the year, talks about teaching high school English online.
Life’s a carnival
September 14, 2011 By
Bellringers is hosting the Meet the Teacher edition of the Education Buzz Carnival.
Darren wonders if official collaboration time is overdone.
Mister Teacher could use help with the new math curriculum, which chews up most of his class time trying to get reluctant third graders to perform High Level Tasks.
Notes from a Homeschooling Mom is hosting this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.
A 9/11 vow: I will become a teacher
September 9, 2011 By
On Sept. 10, 2001, Marilyn Anderson Rhames flew home to New York City, pas the Twin Towers. The next day, as she interviewed the grief-stricken for her newspaper, she decided to become a teacher, she writes in Ed Week.
. . . the shock and devastation of the terrorist attacks exposed the shallowness of everybody’s excuses for not pursuing their passions. . . . When I die, I remember thinking, I want to be around the people I love, doing the work that I love.
She returned to Chicago, earned a master’s degree in education and began her second career as a science teacher.
As we near the 10-year commemoration of the terrorist attacks, I am reminded of all those loved ones who died too soon, many still waiting to achieve their dreams. . . . I teach because I love children. I teach because I want to serve my country. I teach because I want my fragile, little life to somehow continue to have meaning when I am dead.
In shaping the minds of the next generation, “I honor the victims of the terror attacks each day I enter the classroom.”
Confessions of a bad teacher
September 1, 2011 By
In Confessions of a bad teacher in Salon, publishing executive John Owens recounts his foray into teaching English at a small New York City school.
Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.
It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.
And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”
In other words, I was a bad teacher.
Told to control the class “with the force of your personality,” he told his eighth graders to quiet down or stay after school. After less than 10 minutes standing in the doorway, the principal intervened. She “reported the incident to the police and the Department of Education as ‘corporal punishment’.” He survived a disciplinary hearing, thanks to a union representative, but the principal put a letter in his file saying he’d “barricaded” the students in the room, endangering their safety.
Offered a job in publishing, Owens quit in mid-February.
He sees himself as a victim of “Crazy Boss Syndrome” in a system that gives principals the power to crush new teachers.
Houston: Cheating is OK
August 11, 2011 By
Go ahead and cheat on state tests is the Houston school board’s new policy, complains Greg on Rhymes With Right.
Erica Carmouche will not be fired for helping students cheat on the state exam.
A split Houston school board has overruled Superintendent Terry Grier’s recommendation to fire a Lockhart Elementary teacher accused of helping students cheat on state exams in April.
. . . An external investigation had concluded “on balance” that Carmouche helped students on the high-stakes Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exams. Several fifth-graders reported that she pointed out wrong answers to them.
Grier pledged in July that teachers who cheated would “not be in Houston classrooms this fall.” The school board, however, has the power to accept or reject his proposed terminations.
Thousands of Texas teachers have been laid off, Greg points out. “Surely there is an honest one who can take the place of this cheater.”
Would you teach? 'No way'
June 30, 2011 By
Hilary Lustick’s New York City students say they respect black and brown teachers but act up when teachers are suburban whites. But they don’t want to become the teachers they’d like to have, she writes on Gotham Schools.
Two students help with teaching in her sixth-period class.
They reinforce my routines with more precision than I do, insisting on total silence before they will call on a student and flat-out berating any out-of-turn or disrespectful comments. . . . These young women agree they have the organizational skills and classroom presence of natural educators, but neither would ever consider teaching high school. Alissa, who is blunt and would probably make a kick-butt high school teacher, says flatly, “No way. I see how we treat you guys.”
Students rarely see teachers who grew up in their communities and returned to teach, “infusing the structures they need to succeed with the cultural tones and signals that will make them feel self-edifying and not submissive to the white man,” Lustick writes.
Because she doesn’t see strong teacher role models like herself, Alissa dismisses the entire profession as one unworthy of respect, one undeserving of her intelligence and effort.
It sounds like Alissa thinks teaching in the inner city is a very difficult job. Which it is.
Central Falls teacher: Why I quit
June 7, 2011 By
A research scientist who became a science teacher at Rhode Island’s troubled Central Falls High, Dale Dearnley explains: Why I Resigned on GoLocalProv. A perennially low-scoring school, Central Falls fired — and then rehired — its teachers as part of a turnaround effort.
Her number one reason for leaving is “the absence of discipline and accountability.” The district approved a behavior system based on “restorative practices,” but failed to implement it consistently.
Chaos is the norm, interruption of education is consistent, and the environment is toxic.
Being sent to the “Restorative Room” is how students are held accountable for infractions from cutting class and disrupting lessons to threatening teachers and assault. I have heard from many students that they enjoy going to the Restorative Room because they can socialize with their friends, joke around with a so-called “behavior specialist, ” and their only academic responsibility is to complete a word search puzzle. If “restorative practices” were working, then students would not resort to extreme vulgarities and hate speech in response to simple directions and the routines of an orderly, productive classroom.
For five years, the high school has had no science curriculum, Dearnley writes. Teachers were promised a chance to develop a curriculum. Instead, they get pre-packed science “kits ” from a contractor.
Teachers are “afraid to speak up because of fear of retribution,” she writes. When a student threatened to kill her, he was assigned to the Restorative Room for the remainder of the day. An administrator told her it wasn’t a police matter and reprimanded her for using the student’s full name in the school’s incident report.
Letting students get away with cursing and threatening teachers is a form of child neglect and abuse, Dearnley argues.
As bullets fly, teacher sings
June 1, 2011 By
As narcos battled near an elementary school in Monterrey, Mexico, kindergarten teacher Martha Rivera Alanis led her class in a duck-and-cover drill and sing-along.
The Nuevo Leon state government honored Rivera a 33-year-old mother of two, for “outstanding civic courage” for keeping the children from panicking.
Five people were killed in the gun battle at a taxi stand.
The teacher posted the video, made on her cell phone, to her Facebook account. It was reproduced on YouTube and went viral.
Learning is ‘persistence through failure’
April 4, 2011 By
As a second-year teacher of fifth-grade special education students, Mark Anderson often feels like a failure. He hasn’t mastered the “pedagogical and content master of all subject areas” or learned how to meet all of his students social and emotional needs. Also, “I’m not Superman.” But that’s OK. “Learning is fundamentally about persistence through failure,” he writes on Gotham Schools.
Anderson was inspired by Rita Smilkstein’s “We Were Born to Learn,” which calls for “making mistakes, correcting mistakes, learning from them, and trying over, again and again.”
He also quotes Deborah Meier, from her book on trust in schools:
There is no way to avoid doing something dumb when you are inexperienced or lacking in knowledge, except by not trying at all, insisting you don’t care or aren’t interested, thinking the task itself is dumb (not you), or trying secretly so no one can catch your mistakes — or offer you useful feedback. Of course, these are the excuses we drive most kids into when they don’t trust us enough to make mistakes in our presence.
As he learns to be a teacher, Anderson makes mistakes. He tells students when he’s made a mistake and what he’s learned from it.
The important part of learning is not that we fail, nor even that we fail over and over again. The important part is that we persist. And with time and the proper support, anyone can get better.
Of course, learning from failure is a skill.
When the teacher is an ex-porn star
March 14, 2011 By
Once a porn star, Tera Myers taught science for four years in St. Louis. She was forced to resign when a student discovered her past.
Tera Myers — a k a Rikki Andersin, the buxom, blond star of such XXX-rated gems as “Tight Ass” — last week was outed by one of her male students at Parkway North HS in St. Louis, where the 38-year-old mom has taught juniors for the past four years.
After a meeting with administrators, she agreed to resign.
Myers was forced out of a teaching job in Kentucky five years ago for the same reason. In an interview on “Dr. Phil,” she said “she’d made the biggest mistake of her life turning to porn 15 years ago when she was broke.”
St. Louis school officials think Myers’ resignation teaches that what goes online stays online. It also teaches that there’s no forgiveness for past mistakes — acting in porn is legal, if sleazy — if sex is involved. I know Myers’ male students would giggle about her for awhile, but should she be hounded out of teaching as a result?
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