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What is wrong with schools today? Nothing that a little play could not solve.
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Category Archives: Life in the Classroom
Meme:Five Important Things Policymakers Ought to Know About My Class–Tom’s Take
1. My students are working harder than they’ll ever work for the rest of their lives. Think about it. A middle-aged man, easily twice your size, gives you something difficult to do first thing in the morning. You struggle with it, finally figure out how to do it, and then he takes it away from you and gives you something else that’s difficult to do. This goes on all day. And he promises to keep making the work harder every day until mid-June. How many of us would tolerate a job like that?
Thank God for those Onerous Teacher Certification Laws
By Tom
What do you need to know in order to teach kindergarten? Probably the alphabet and some basic phonics, right? And some numbers, at least up to about twenty. You’d also have to know some science, I guess. Like where rain comes from and why dogs can’t talk. And then there’s social studies. Someone might ask you about police and fire officers, so you should probably understand those jobs, at least in principle.
So on the whole, most people over the age of about seven have probably mastered the content knowledge required to teach kindergarten. But does that mean they could teach kindergarten?
adminiSTRAYtion
Disclaimer to all administrators past, present, and future: I am sure you are all wonderful people. Work hard, care about students. Just wonderful. Smiley folks. Perhaps even a bit jollier than the average person. Smarter, too, I reckon. However, a colleague of mine just started his administration program and I have to admit, I felt a bit of sadness.
How I Use my Training as a Prisoner of War Interrogator in my 9th-grade English Classroom
Posted for CSTP blogger KIM:
In one of my previous lives, I really was a Russian language prisoner-of-war interrogator. Forget everything you ever learned in the movies about interrogating POW’s; it’s really nothing like that. Interrogation involves the art and skill of reading body language and using basic psychology to get the information we need. Two “techniques” are Fear Up and Fear Down. Simply translated, this means that I 
either build up their fear or dispel it to achieve the desired effect of cooperation.
At the outset, 9th graders might seem a little different than your basic Soviet soldiers, but really, they’re all just teenagers or young adults who aren’t quite in as much control of their lives as they would like to be.
Because the word “interrogation” has negative connotations, it might seem out of place in the public school classroom. Why would there be a need to interrogate or question an adolescent?
Sam I Am Meets the Teacher
by Tom
I’ve always believed that preparation is the best way to compensate for an inability to improvise. Improvising in the classroom scares me. Which is exactly why I tend to be somewhat extreme in regards to lesson preparation. I still engineer every lesson to the minute, even after twenty-four years on the job.
That includes our 30-minute silent reading time. I carefully teach my students how to select books from different genres at their independent reading level. I make sure they have time to share and tell about their books, I make sure to give them lessons on decoding and comprehension strategies. I do everything I’ve heard I’m supposed to do to make the most of this 30 minute time. And it works pretty well.
Well, almost…
An Invitation
As a writing teacher I work with seventh graders all year to help them find their voice as writers. I actually ordered a custom quote from Wallwords™ that says Find Your Voice to post in my classroom. Every day when I walk to school, those words in matte brick red, greet me. The words remind me that before my students learn any of the ins and outs of language they must first understand they have unique experiences, thoughts and ideas to share with the world.
Clean Out Your Teaching!
I read a book recently that dealt with Lean Production, a Toyota Production System, where one of the goals is to take useless or wasted items out of the manufacturing system. The Japanese have a term for that cluttered refrigerator and the teaching for which the metaphor stands. Muda (無駄) is the Japanese term for any activity that is wasteful and does not add any value to what you are doing. I encourage you to use this summer and take out the muda in your teaching.
Intro to Humor 101
by CSTP blogger KIM:
Everything I needed to know about teaching, I learned as a parent. 
Okay, not really. It was a reciprocal deal. Being a parent helped me become a good teacher, but being a good teacher helped me become a better parent. Mine was a mid-life career change (“early” mid-life, hopefully). My first year of teaching (9th-grade English) was the year my daughter was a 9th grader. I remember the first time I told a student, “That might work with your other teachers, but it won’t work with me. I’ve got one of you at home, and I know that trick!” She and the rest of the class laughed with me.