Pause. And begin again.

A New Low

2007-12-17T20:45:00Z

Blogging and gmail chatting during class. I am sick. Both physically sick and just intrinsically sick of school. Need to go home.

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annie are you ok

2007-05-03T13:59:00Z

My freshman year in college, I had a 10 am physics class. Not early, but early enough for college. For williams, it was a big class, 35 or 40 students, and when the clock hit 10 and it was time for class to start, the prof would always push a litt...

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Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

2007-04-28T23:40:00Z

What a b.... The cluster method was what I taught FM after school - it made so much more sense to him than any other way he had learned this stuff before, as I said in my mental math post. Obviously, as the woman says, the textbooks seem a li...

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Mental Math

2007-04-27T08:37:00Z

Very often, I'm amazed at what my kids can't do. The fact that they can't do any sort of mental math has astonished me over and over again, as I wait on things like 30 divided by two or 46 divided by 10. Only today did I realize that even skills l...

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Oreos

2007-04-25T11:55:00Z

When I have a bad day, I have a few different coping mechanisms. One is to work in my garden. Another is to lay on the couch and read. Neither of these are very helpful. A third, more helpful mechanism, is to think about my favorite students and h...

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Infant Deaths Climb in South

2007-04-23T03:29:00Z

NYT on symtoms of poverty in the Delta.

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The Good Things

2007-04-04T09:40:00Z

So, I can't teach 131 students in the cafeteria. Big deal. Some things are going right though. A former student, who was shunted out to pre-algebra, came to my class after school today. He never does anything in that pre-algebra class, and so he c...

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Unconscionable

2007-04-03T09:56:00Z

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat, who voted against New York’s new budget, called it “an unconscionable, discriminatory addition to the school aid formula.” (nyt) Brodsky is from Westchester county, where the median home value is in th...

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Happy Birthday to me

2007-03-27T10:06:00Z

My kids would say I'm blessed. In the past, I would have said I'm lucky. Now, I'm no longer sure what sort of word to use, but whether I attribute it to blind chance and luck or to a higher power, I was born and grew up with a wonderful group of f...

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everywhere is war

2007-03-24T23:19:00Z

So last night, DD and I went to the fair in town. Just like the fairs set up in parking lots of all the other small cities in the country, it was a sea of asphalt filled with a few rides operated by the drug addicts and the mentally ill and hoarde...

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