July 2007 - Posts
In the Band Director world, the fourth year in a school district is a special year. When I got my first job, I remember that it was my boss’ fourth year in that school district. Everything at the high school is more special during the fourth year than
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This is my second installment of the weekend wrapup. I wanted to focus on some great articles I saw this week that relate to writing and blogging.
Mystery Teacher has written about the lack of good writing and grammar that has become so common throughout
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I went to the doctor today. It was the first time I’ve been in over a year and a half. I have strep throat. And it’s summer. How lame is that?
Enough with the complaining, As I was sitting here this evening wondering why my visitor numbers were a bit
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Last summer, I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The book radically impacted me and helped me to begin becoming much more organized. This week, I was talking with a friend about his auto repair business. I asked him why he had to be at
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I have spent much of last week and this week with one of the high school band directors thoroughly analyzing our marching fundamentals for the high school band. Though this really doesn’t apply directly to what I do during the school day as a middle school
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I live in a relatively small town that is more than 20 minutes from the next closest smaller town, and more than 2 hours from the next closest larger town.
I try to get involved in the community here, but I also want to maintain my own privacy. As a band
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As the school year looms closer and closer, I am going to establish a blogging routine. The plan is to drastically reduce my blogging from every day as I have over the summer to three times a week. Beginning today, each Monday will feature a “Weekend
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So I wrote Shut Up And Teach! yesterday and have gotten mixed reactions from it. Some have argued that my points were good while others have complained that I am advocating tying the hands and muzzling educators to prevent them from fighting for social
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I get so tired of hearing teachers complaining about No Child Left Behind. I get so tired of hearing teachers complain about administration. I get so tired of hearing teachers complain about parents.
Shut up and teach!
It’s a simple concept, but some
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Once again, one of my articles is featured in this week’s Blog Carnival, hosted on The Education Wonks. Go look at some of the other articles there. Five of my favorites include: If You Can’t Fly, Walk
Wind Power in Malawi, again proving that formal education
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It’s the last half of July, you’re looking for a job, you have no interviews lined up, and school starts in a month or less (or 40 days if you live in Texas). You have all the skills and experience in the world, but simply get no phone calls. The old
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I recently read an article entitled Is Positive Possible? by Samantha on TeacherLingo.com. In the article, she writes in part:
Why are we so depressed? Why do we only feel needed and understood when we are griping together? I think about this a lot. It
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So you have just graduated from college and ready to enter the teaching field. Or maybe you are in the midst of your final days, weeks, or months of college education and want to know where to start. Or maybe you are simply looking for greener pastures.
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This really has nothing to do with education. I wanted to take a chance to stop and address some things that happened this week in my life and the life of this blog. Every day in the past week except for Tuesday, So You Want To Teach? saw more than 50
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Last weekend, I began considering Why do teachers quit? As someone who is very interested in maintaining a strong educational system, and someone who wants to see children get the best education possible, it is an important question to me.
As we continue
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This is the fifth in a series of articles entitled 5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers.
Community Proecdures
How do you interact with your community? I know for many teachers, this is a frightening proposition. Reading some things that other teachers
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This is the fourth in a series of articles entitled 5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers.
Personal Procedures
What are some of the personal habits that are important to me? As I’m sitting here in the middle of the summer writing this, I realize that
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Wow. Today seems like Link To SoYouWantToTeach day in the blog world. Maybe I really should go on vacation more often!
Eric Turner has featured my site as his Wedneday Website #3 for the week.
Some of his comments include:
First of all, the blog is written
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This is just a quick note that my series on Questions That Will Save Your Career from last month has been included in the July 11th Carnival of Education. Hop on over to The Education Wonks and check out some of the other wonderful articles included.
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This is the third in a series of articles entitled 5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers.
Relationship Procedures
in teaching, as in most any businesses — and life in general — relationships will either make you successful, or else make you fail. Our
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This is the second in a series of articles entitled 5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers.
Classroom Procedures
The procedures that you lay out in the classroom are the most outwardly evident procedures that you have in place. For this reason, they are
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This is the first in a series of articles entitled 5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers.
Communication Procedures
Without question, one of the most essential elements of any good relationship is clear and open communication. As a teacher, practically
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I recently read an article written by a newly-hired teacher. She was concerned about the fall and how to establish procedures. My response was for her simply to be patient, ask lots of questions, and hang in there. When I was in her position, that kind
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One of the most popular search queries that has sent people to my blog lately has been “why do teachers quit?” Doing a quick search of my sits tells me that I have a number of articles that reference this idea, but have not yet explored exactly why it
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One of the most popular search queries that has sent people to my blog lately has been “why do teachers quit?” Doing a quick search of my sits tells me that I have a number of articles that reference this idea, but have not yet explored exactly why it
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This is a post that is exclusive to TeacherLingo. If you are interested in getting more visits to your blog or just want to get some ideas, I would be glad to help you out. Just leave a comment to this blog and let me know. After commenting, I'll get
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The name says it all. This is my final post this week in my series of Videos. I hope you’ve enjoyed them. If you didn’t see the ones from Wednesday and Thursday, you really must see those. You should NOT miss these. This is a fun one to close out the
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The world is changing. Are teachers changing with it?
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This is one of the most powerful presentations I’ve seen that pertains to education. If you are interested in being a better teacher, you cannot miss this. It’s an awesome presentation on integrating technology into virtually everything that we do in
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If there’s one thing teachers seem to like complaining about, it’s administrators. I just picked this story up and thought it was powerfully relevant.
It was the best of schools, it was the worst of schools, but it was summer school and Mr. Sandoval was
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I am so glad I don’t teach English.
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I’ve read a lot of people complaining about administrators lately. These guys seem to have a clue.
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I’m sure the transcript of this has made the rounds of educational institutions worldwide, but when I saw it, the passion that Taylor Mali emits during the presentation is awesome.
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Check out the video at the end of this post! It’ll make you feel better. I was reading some over at TeacherLingo.com and came across a post by Howard. In it, he writes: Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 16 years…
Teaching is only as enjoyable as the
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