When I first started teaching, I taught kindergarten in an urban school, to children who did not have books at home.  I was a teacher who did not yet have a book collection, so I went to the library weekly to pick up books for my classroom.  And from time to time, those books would disappear.  I understood why it was happening, as the children ...

I'm almost finished with my master's degree.  The Capstone Project sounds impressive on paper, but it's actually not all that innovative.  All the ideas are from somebody else (research journals).  Even if it is documented, it somehow feels like cheating.  I've become a collage artist with enough fancy terminology to add glitz ...

Anyone reading this who is already a teacher (I know I have some fledgling teachers reading this blog, as well as some non-teachers) knows what teaching is like.  Teachers are well-acquainted with the experiences of being bombarded by stimuli all day, of needing to think of 100 things at a time, and having to make decisions constantly.  So ...

Alas, it was another difficult morning. Most of the hour I had before school started I was at a tech meeting in the computer lab, where we learned how to do a behavior screener on each child.  I got all mine done — which was good — but only with lots of technical glitches, which was not so good.  Everyone on the staff is ...

Actually, things went okay today, on this, our eighth day of school. On Friday I passed out the Friday folders to the children as I was lining them up to go out in the hall to get their jackets for recess.  They started opening their folders, dropping their papers on the floor, and chatting with each other, and I had a really hard time getting ...