Author Archives: admin

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.

May 1st

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I think I like having a top-secret blog. I may have to reveal its location to someone but I’ll get around to that later. In the meantime, science fair work is almost over. Zombieland has zombie rules. I think I’ll create some Science Fair rules:

1) No forcing food into the blindfolded student’s mouth.
2) Be gentle when putting clothespins on noses.
3) Don’t even think of trying to open the spotty petri dish.
4) Try not to leave what you are supposed to observe in the classroom over the weekend. Some things rot.
5) If you are supposed to bake cookies, do not bring Soft Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies.
6) If I have to microwave the Soft Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies, you have to eat them. We have to do something to these cookies so you can write up your “experiment.”
7) You can’t have a sharp knife at school. Cut the apples at home. If you don’t, don’t whine about the plastic, serrated butter knife.
8) If you test the effect of a hot and cold room on classwork performance, you have to remember which assignment you gave on the cold day and which assignment you gave on the hot day. It’s important.
9) I will explain and re-explain this mysterious thing “the conclusion,” but at a certain point you just have to wing it.

An average ACT score that plumbs the depths

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I am told the average ACT score for the high school in the district where I work is 15.2.  Ummm… I think you get twelve just for breathing. So many bodies parked in so many desks for so many years  — What went wrong?

This is where the blog begins. It started on another site and has just been moved during this summer of 2013 to its own website. I have blogged mostly for stress relief without regard for an audience. It’s time to share, though. It’s a mess out here. I believe I may be watching the beginning of an educational apocalypse.

That said, if any reader decided to start at the beginning of this blog, I’ll note that some posts that follow are actually rather funny. Teaching is often funny. Teaching is often fun. I live teaching. I only think about the lurching bodies of mindless students in the dark of  night, mostly after another administrative demand sucked still more of my students’ lives away.

Eduhonesty: After a decade of furious government intervention, we have screwed up America’s schools so thoroughly that the whole Marvel League of Superheroes probably cannot rescue us.