A Teacher's Writes

Recently the governor of South Dakota, Dennis Daugaard, publicized a plan he is proposing for reforming pieces of the education system. Some of the details are available at the Argus Leader’s website, but the three big basics go like this: $5,000 bonuses each year to the top 20 percent of teachers in each district. $3,500 … Continue reading »

We had barely removed our third child from the hospital’s bakery warmer before someone first asked us the question: “Are you done?” It became the stock question, following on the heels of “What’s his name?” and “How old is he?” We naturally developed a stock answer: if we did have another child, we’d probably adopt. … Continue reading »

On a Friday afternoon few things can cure the sunken feeling of a long week like time with my family can. Tonight we made popcorn and cauliflower for dinner, eating the cauliflower at the kitchen counter and then reconvening in the living room for popcorn and the original version of The Parent Trap. Our three … Continue reading »

For a couple years now I have slowly inputted a kind of writing workshop in my classroom. It wasn’t a full-fledged workshop, mostly because I had other non-workshop things I had to accomplish, but I liked to give students the ability to choose what writing assignment they were going to work on during a given … Continue reading »

I found myself praying over Ramen noodles this weekend. The act itself is not strange, I suppose. We say grace before eating, so it’s not like praying over food is strange. In fact, the content of my prayer might not have even been that strange. If Ramen could tell me the kinds of prayers typically … Continue reading »

Sometimes I think I clutter my students’ experience more than I help it. If I could leave well enough alone and simply show them a few examples of what I want them to do, they could probably achieve the result better by my stepping out of the way. Take the scene I witnessed the other … Continue reading »

The first article I ever wrote for the web spun on the topic of relevance. Is education relevant? My students protested on these grounds so frequently that I crafted a response and posted it to my classroom website. Relevance is a strange term to discuss in education, one that begets conversations ranging from the need … Continue reading »

I imagine Bill Gates’s recent article in the Washington Post generated a lot of talk this week. It’s not a perfect article and certainly leaves some areas for questioning. My colleague pointed out that if we are to assert that “Over the past four decades,the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than … Continue reading »

I hated my English classes in seventh and eighth grade. If my memory is anywhere near accurate, I wanted to write, and Mrs. Dussault wanted us to learn to diagram sentences, and I was too short-sighted to see how the two related. In a wonderful stroke of poetic-justice, Mrs. Dussault had a baby half-way through … Continue reading »

I used to have my students write an essay every year called “Odysseus and Me” in which they pulled out characteristics of Odysseus and explained when they also had shown those character traits. It was an exceptionally easy essay to write, as Odysseus reveals enough traits that even the dullest of readers can recognize a … Continue reading »

Though I liked the reviews I’d read of James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, I did not think I’d be interested in reading it. Ultimately I have always thought the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s work to be a bit of a bore–a sidetrack to my study of the plays. As a teacher, … Continue reading »