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Strollerderby
Is this a waste of time?
We all learned cursive in elementary school, right? But, aside from signing your name, when is the last time you wrote in cursive? When is the last time you penned a letter, period? I recently wrote a letter and it was tiring and cumbersome. It felt very quaint, as if I had a feather quill and an ink well. And I printed, I didn’t use cursive. I never use cursive.
Is it important to you that your children learn cursive? It isn’t important anymore in one country. Continue reading »
Will lectures be replaced?
Think of a college physics class, and you’re probably conjuring images of a lecture hall filled with restless students and one very accomplished professor lecturing at the front of the room. Whether you were passing notes in the back of the class or paying rapt attention to his wisdom, lectures probably featured prominently in your college education.
A new study has some bad news for veteran professors: your lectures suck.
At least, they do if the goal is teaching. A traditional lecture can’t compete with a hands-on approach involving in-class quizzes, small discussions and electronic media. The study found that college students learned more from inexperienced graduate assistants using the hands-on method than they did from long-tenured professors.
Is a $15K fine too extreme for a teacher who said a word his high school students likely say themselves?
That’s one large swear jar.
A teacher at Washington Heights in New York City was docked $15,000 for using a single four-letter Spanish swear word in class.
Carlos Garcia teaches at the High School of International Business and Finance and apparently uttered “c—” in front of several students. He denied saying it, but also said it was no big deal.
On the right, my husband in his youth
Months before the September 11th tragedy, my husband signed up for the United States Marine Corps. A dream of his since he was a child. When those planes hit those towers he had no idea. No television or newspapers in boot camp, you are lucky to get your weekly phone call!
Five years serving his country, building a brotherhood, and a sense of honor for being a Marine, my husband seems to be priming our children to follow in his footsteps. Yes, our three year old knows how to march, and on occasion call cadence. Continue reading »
Way back in 2008, students from a New York City teacher’s classroom went home with a neat list of filthy terms for sex acts transcribed into their notebooks.
Health teacher Faith Kramer was suspended from classroom teaching last year after conducting a sex ed class in which she invited students to share with the class all the slang terms they knew for various sex acts.
A 26-year veteran teacher, Kramer has been reinstated to teaching, but is suing the city for what she sees as an unfair suspension.
Probably, you remember being taught to read. Methods vary: children are taught reading by phonics, by memorization of sight words, by Montessori techniques. But pretty much all of us are painstakingly led down the path to literacy by teachers, parents, librarians, and any other adult involved in our early development.
In a new blog at Psychology Today, Peter Gray argues that kids can’t really be taught to read. They learn when they’re ready, in the way that works for them.
People homeschool for lots of reasons, but the biggest commonality seems to be a deep distrust of the educational system as it is.
Andrew O’Hehir has been documenting his wife’s experience homeschooling their twins, who are almost 6, for Salon. He says their reasons are not religious or a wholesale rejection of mainstream culture — but based on this article,a breathtaking sense of superiority does seem to be a pretty strong motivator. I honestly don’t know how he managed to type this lengthy article, since he must have wrenched his arm patting himself on the back with quotes like this, from Susan Engel, a psychologist who runs the teaching program at Williams College: Continue reading »
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