Saturday, March 13, 2010

Bill Maher's New Rule: Don't Blame the Teachers

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Bill Maher: "New Rule: Let's Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don't Learn, Let's Fire the Parents." I've been...
Sunday, March 7, 2010

Repost: The Great Failure (April 7, 2008)

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"The persistent weakness of American liberalism is its fixation with rights and procedures at any cost to efficiency and common sense....
Friday, February 26, 2010

God Hates Me.

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Between the fall of 1997 and January 8, 2010, I spent the better part of 12 school years as a New York City teacher. In all that time, if me...
Friday, February 5, 2010

Over the Top

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Two articles in the Daily News in the last couple of days caught my attention: Mom Fumes After Son, 9, Is Busted for Bringing 2-Inch Lon...
Thursday, January 28, 2010

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

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J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and a main character in the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, has died at the age of 91 ...
Sunday, January 24, 2010

Jay - Ee - Tee - Ess ...

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No, I'm not going to pontificate here about if/how/why my perennially heartbreaking, soul-crushing New York Jets are going to beat the m...
Sunday, January 3, 2010

The Gathering Storm

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One more week and it will be over. As my last Christmas/holiday break comes to an end, and I prepare to go into my final week of teaching, I...
1 comment:
Monday, December 21, 2009

A Paragraph About Nothing

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I feel compelled today to cross-post this exercise from my website. The purpose of the exercise is to read the paragraph, a Discussion parag...

Deep, Abiding Frustration

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I'm almost through grading the third of five classes' worth of "critical lens" essays that the students wrote last week af...
2 comments:
Thursday, December 17, 2009

Single Digits

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I have nine teaching days left. At some point I'm going to take the essays on this blog and attempt to compile them into a book, which I...
Tuesday, December 1, 2009

It's gold, Jerry. Gold.

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Today in class we were discussing the passage in Shoeless Joe when Ray Kinsella and J.D. Salinger arrive at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Coo...
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: