About admin

First written in 2012(?): Just how old is this thing??? Back then, during a too-short school year, I taught relentlessly. During evenings and week-ends, I graded, called families and planned lessons. I swerved around patches of glass in the parking lot, the first step in my journey up chipped stairs to a classroom covered in eclectic posters that hid patchy, scraped-up walls. I wrote about beloved students, almost all recipients of free breakfasts and lunches, who were entitled to a better education than they were receiving. In this blog, I have documented some of the reasons behind recent educational breakdowns. Sometimes, I just vented. 2017: Retired and subbing, I continue to explore the mystery of how we did so much damage to our schools in only a few decades. Did no one teach the concepts of opportunity costs or time management to US educational reformers? A few courses in child psychology and learning would not have hurt, either. Vygotsky anyone? Piaget? Dripping IV lines are hooked up to saccharine versions of the new Kool-Aid, spread all over the country now; many legislators, educational administrators and, yes, teachers are mainlining that Kool-Aid, spewing pedagogical nonsense that never had any potential for success. Those horrendous post-COVID test score discrepancies? They were absolutely inevitable and this blog helps explain why. A few more questions worth pondering: When ideas don't work, why do we continue using them? Why do we keep giving cruel, useless tests to underperforming students, month after grueling month? How many people have been profiting financially from the Common Core and other new standards? How much does this deluge of testing cost? On a cost/benefit basis, what are we getting for our billions of test dollars? How are Core-related profits shifting the American learning landscape? All across America, districts bought new books, software, and other materials targeted to the new tests based on the new standards. How appropriate were those purchases for our students? Question after question after question... For many of my former students, some dropouts, some merely lost, the answers will come too late. If the answers come at all. I just keep writing. Please read. Please use the search function. Travel back in time with me. I have learned more than I wanted to know along my journey. I truly can cast some light into the darkness.