Opinion
1 week 2 days ago
from Peter Brunn
I was on Facebook today and ran across a post by an old friend. I knew once I read it that I needed to share it here. Finnie is somone I have known since we were young soldiers together. He is now a professor at the University of New Mexico, and someone whose thinking I hold in the deepest regard. In his post Finnie writes as a parent who is struggling with what his very young children are taught...
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3 weeks 3 days ago
from Paul Houston
I spent a lot of my school career as a slow leaner. For a variety of reasons I didn’t learn to read until I was in the third grade and my right-brained approach was very out of step in that left-brained world we call school. For those and other reasons I spent a lot of years thinking (and being thought of) as someone who was a day late and dollar short when it came to learning. As I look...
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4 weeks 3 days ago
from Paul Houston
Recently I visited Vietnam and Cambodia. International travel for me has always been an opportunity to see my everyday world through different eyes. Sometimes the only way to get perspective is to get perspective from a distance, to view the world through a distant mirror. So, as I have visited schools in other countries, I have found that I learn a little about them and a lot about us. I also...
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8 weeks 2 days ago
from Isabel McLean
I was chatting with a colleague the other day at a meeting. She described her struggles with a variety of issues she was facing in her district. Issues that, of course, kept her up at night. She purchased the book The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy by Jon Gordon and could not put it down. She stayed up late to read it as it provided her some much-...
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9 weeks 2 days ago
from Paul Houston
I have been very concerned about the school reform movement for several decades now. I have frequently pointed out that “when you lean you ladder against the wrong wall, you paint the wrong house.” By this I mean that if you misdiagnose the problem, you come up with the wrong solutions. Education “reform” is replete with these misdiagnoses that push us in the wrong...
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14 weeks 21 hours ago
from Jackie Jacobs
I’ve been stewing about this for a few weeks now. My son is 2.5 years old and his daycare has started sending “optional” homework packets home. The activities include sorting by color and shape, prewriting skills (a.k.a tracing letters), decorating Xeroxed pictures of pumpkins, and then writing a little story about how this poor pumpkin came to get rice, noodles, and...
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16 weeks 3 days ago
from Paul Houston
I have been in education for over 40 years and have always been struck by the idea that educators don’t feel they should be political. Certainly, it is not appropriate for teachers to drag their own political views into the classroom to indoctrinate their students, but when you look at the broader picture, it is impossible for educators to avoid politics, nor should they try.
I have written...
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18 weeks 1 day ago
from Grady Carson
As someone who has been in education for 15 years, when I hear the word "standards" I shudder. When the thick binder of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) was plopped down on my desk, it was no different. I grudgingly flipped through the standards, grumbling and condemning. One difference this time is that I am no longer in the classroom. While I did not feel the pressure of...
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19 weeks 2 days ago
from Jackie Jacobs
I didn’t realize there was such a thing as “Banned Books Week” until a friend of mine posted the link below on her Facebook page.
Apparently, the American Library Association started Banned Books Week to bring to light the problem of censorship and, as stated on their website, to promote the “freedom to read.” This article brings up many good points and is worth a...
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19 weeks 2 days ago
from Peter Brunn
With a 9-year-old daughter at home it seems as if I am constantly learning new things about the growth of readers. A few weeks ago I wrote about the power Harry Potter had this summer on my daughter's stamina in reading. This week I noticed something else—the power of reading with a peer.
Earlier this month when Karina was struggling to find a new book to read I said, “Karina, let...
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