Reflections on Teaching

Public Libraries in Wyoming have a new campaign featuring the mudflap gal. Now there’s an advocacy campaign! This reminded me of back when I did work advocating for public libraries. Truckers are apparently big library users (they like audio books). For the record, I consider this funny and interesting.

Public Agenda has a new study on parents’ views of math and science education in Missouri and Kansas. Seems they think their kids science and math education is just fine. What’s your answer to this:
1. Is knowledge of Algebra essential to get into college?
2. Is knowledge of higher math (Calculus) essential to get into college?

I quizzed Miguel during a chat at Teachers Teaching Teachers, about his indefatigable blogging. He is one of the most prolific people in my feed reader. He says it’s all on the way to learning. I think it’s his position. He spends a good part of the day online researching for his job, so he can run across things worth sharing. I’m keeping up a very ambitious blogging schedule doing 3 posts a week. Other teachers in the classroom are not even at that level. There’s a reason for this, we’re teaching not surfing during our workday (and this is not to knock Miguel, that is his job). We want teachers in practice to blog, but really, given the U.S. teaching schedule, where is the time? I think you’re more likely to end up in Dy/Dan’s situation where he is working so much perfecting his lessons, it’s getting in the way of his life. Looking at becoming an administrator leaves me scratching my head, because most of the good ones work even longer hours than teachers. The Internet changes some things about time and place, but it can’t make up time out of air.

This is the barber shop across the street from where I work. The workers and owner volunteer in our school. An oft-neglected fact of living in a neighborhood that is a shooting gallery is that not all the folks that get killed when bullets fly are drug dealers who “deserved it”. This was probably a robbery, the young gentleman was closing the shop for the night. What price can you put on the promise of a life like this? That is something that is truly priceless and all the MasterCards in the world ain’t gonna make this right.