The Line

I thank The Center for Teaching Quality and Ed Week for making this post possible in about 24 hours, from a pitch I wrote in desperate need to do something concrete to assist educators in the wake of this horrific event. My son is seven. I kissed him, and his nine year old sister, so [...]

This is the first year that I’ve been christened by a student in September, versus christening them. But… Miss Perky? I think the fact that this moniker’s just a shade off from Miss Piggy might be upsetting me subconsciously. However I also wonder if it is a sign of the general tenor of the building [...]

Cheryl Dobbertin and I take on some of the Core in this Ed Week piece, just posted. I think it does a good job of sifting through what I continue to think of as the hot mess of the ELA Common Core: some of it solid and necessary; some of it highly questionable; and all of [...]

Two things surprised me instantly about James Kennedy. First: at ten a.m. on a Sunday morning, after a chock-full weekend at the Rochester Teen Book Festival, we entered the coffee shop where we were to conduct the interview and he ordered, not the weary intellectual’s double espresso latte, but a berry smoothie. Second: on a [...]

The crazy, wonderful book, equal parts Monty Python, Kafka, The Simpsons, Italo Calvino and fever dream: The Order of Odd Fish.  (Download a treasure trove of teacher information about it here.) The crazy, wonderful author, who recently concluded a (fictitious?) feud with Neil Gaiman, to Neil Gaiman’s delight: James Kennedy. The crazy, wonderful thing I never expected [...]

My district has a complete gem in our current professional developer, Cheryl Dobbertin. I mean, honestly. Warm, funny, relevant, challenging, and respectful: the rare kind of educational presenter from whom you actually take, you know, something useful. She was a teacher before she was a trainer, and she has never forgotten it. Her bailiwick is [...]

How do I feel about our state’s recent “agreement” on teacher evaluations? Read this. It explains it more clearly than I ever could. Pushback welcome, as always. I’ll be interested to see what people have to say, particularly any reader who is operating under similar agreements.  

Salon publishes a fire-breathing dragon article this week about superintendents who don’t live in their districts or send their kids to public schools; such people, David Sirota writes, are “…a permanent elite that is removing itself from the rest of the nation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in education — a realm in which this elite [...]

The story is “Slower Than the Rest” (pdf of the text here); the author, Cynthia Rylant, who writes deceptively simple sentences such as Leo was the first one to spot the turtle, so he was the one to keep it… …thereby foreshadowing, in one elegant swipe, the entirety of this story of a disabled boy struggling in [...]

On each of my unit tests (which are rare), I place a direction buried in the text of the explanation. It usually looks something like this: Who is the protagonist in this story? Who is the antagonist? You do not need to write in full sentences for this one, but you must include enough details [...]