Reflections on Teaching

I first heard that line from Bill Raspberry opining on Ross Perot as the answer to our presidential needs, but it seems to fit so many situations. In my prior post I talked about Urban Redevelopment and some of the less desirable consequences that resulted from it. Claus von Zutrow, in a comment on Larry [...]

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My friend and fellow Sac City teacher, Larry Ferlazzo, sent me an email the other night saying he was angry about something and wanted to do a post. Larry has a strong sense of justice, but let’s put it this way, he is not one to get hot under the collar quickly (unlike yours truly [...]

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I’ve discovered a new local blog that is focused on my school district, SCUSD Observer, and it is fast becoming my go-to resources for the latest happenings (thank you Larry Ferlazzo for this find). It’s one of the few Blogger blogs not blocked by the district, hmmm.
A recent piece on an application by a charter [...]

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During our recent travels, I was listening to a track off the new Bob Dylan Christmas cd on a podcast, which is so incredibly bad I’m not going to link to it (sorry to all those Dylan fans out there). It was like polka-punk, only not as well executed as Polkacide or Gogol Bordello. So [...]

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Last month I got a flurry of messages with links from Larry Ferlazzo about our mayor, Kevin Johnson, and his fiance, Michelle Rhee. That’s Larry’s subtle way of saying, “Hey Alice, why don’t you write a post on this?” I didn’t bite because now the story is getting big enough that other education bloggers are [...]

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I like to think this blog is pretty ecclectic (although this may be self-delusion on my part). I’ve gotten positive responses to a variety of different posts over the last few weeks from ones where I blogged about brain science and the education of children in poverty (wow, that sounds way too passive — how [...]

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I was going to write a lot more when I did this post, but I got sidetracked by something I read here in the Bracey Report 2009. I was arrested while reading the account of a child who died for want of dental care, but it was the following paragraphs that left me both breathless, [...]

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The title comes from a trope of jokes about the hilarity that results from dissimilar groupings of people (usually a rabbi, a priest, and a minister). Sometimes the joke is how alike they all are and sometimes, the dis-congruity of groupings makes that joke. That’s how I like to think about comparisons between the U.S. [...]

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