Thursday, November 19, 2009

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

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I am always amused by students who actually still believe that they are somehow hurting me by refusing to do their work. Some of them are si...
1 comment:
Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Revealing

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It amazes me sometimes how much some of these children reveal about themselves without intending or realizing it. Here is last night's h...
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Reflections on My Last Open School

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Open School evening and afternoon passed without any over-the-top melodrama and no unreasonable complaints. Other than a few encores from pa...
Friday, October 23, 2009

Silly Season

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Once again, for emphasis, from Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary: en·abler ( i-'nA-b(&-)l&r) noun : one who enables ...
Saturday, October 17, 2009

Stupid Is as Stupid Does, Part II

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Well, here's a new one. Thursday I gave my first final-essay exam of the semester. Naturally, a lot of students did not show up to take ...
Friday, October 16, 2009

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

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I had an interesting conversation with a parent this morning. He dropped by to ask about his daughter's progress and the topic of homewo...
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Homework, Re-revisited

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From Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary: en·abler ( i-'nA-b(&-)l&r) noun : one who enables another to persist in self...
4 comments:
Friday, September 18, 2009

Homework, Revisited

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I am assigning homework this year for the first time since at least 2004. The reasons why I have not given homework, I discussed earlier th...
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

A-B-C, Easy as...

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After suffering through 10 weeks of studying for, and then taking, the New York and New Jersey Bar exams, I spent the last two weeks of the ...
1 comment:
Friday, June 19, 2009

Feigned Helplessness

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One thing I cannot and will not ever accept is when a student responds to a quotation or a reading by saying, "I don't understand t...
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

15 Minutes of What?

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To follow up on "The Spanish Inquisition," it seems the Grand High Inquisitor after he left my classroom last week declared to my ...
1 comment:
Friday, May 15, 2009

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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Well, the Quality Review has come and gone. And the result, like the Monty Python sketch from which I draw the title of this post, is absolu...
1 comment:
Thursday, May 7, 2009

Five Years Gone, Never Forgotten

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Five years ago tonight, 17-year-old Craig Grumet of Roslyn Heights died in a car accident on Wheatley Road. I had known Craig since he was 1...
1 comment:
Monday, May 4, 2009

Where have you gone, Emily Post?

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Here's a new one. I take it almost as a given now that most teenagers know nothing of good manners, let alone make any effort to learn o...
Thursday, April 30, 2009

An Assault on My Conscience

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There's something I've been needing to get off my chest. Last week, I went out to dinner after class with three of my very dearest f...
6 comments:
Thursday, March 19, 2009

One Step Up and Two Steps Back

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Another thing that occurred to me recently about "differentiated instruction" (which I've decided to refer to from now on as ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Differentiation vs. Discrimination

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One thing I would like to ask the Grand High Inquisitors when they come here for the Quality Review later this term is: What is the differen...
Monday, March 16, 2009

Race to the Bottom

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Here's the official meme from the Grand High Inquisitors with respect to the tragicomedy they call "differentiated instruction....
2 comments:
Saturday, March 7, 2009

It's Official: Education Is Dead

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I've been reporting here on the slow, gradual, painful death of American secondary education for almost two years now. Its demise has be...
3 comments:
Thursday, January 29, 2009

Regents Week Ruminations

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It's Regents week and I've got a couple of things on my mind. A couple of years ago, my school changed its policy on how to handle S...