Fake News: As a public school teacher, I feel frustrated. Disheartened. Defeated. Let me back up a bit.
Being a relatively new blogger, I’m afraid to get too opinionated in what I write. Nevertheless, this is going to be an opinion piece. It is an opinion that has bubbling inside me for over a year.
Being Teacher Appreciation Week, why not share my opinion about my fellow teachers now?
This past Saturday, I invited my students to join me in the Annual Milwaukee Riverkeeper Spring Cleanup. I get some sort of weird satisfaction from picking litter up with my grabber tool. Looking for a central site safely away from busy traffic, I stumbled upon the Kinnickinnic Trail.
Like many educators, I have deep concerns for my students when they get older. What legacy are the generations before them leaving behind?
Our world is on fire and our planet is melting. Is it too late to affect real change?
Standardized testing plays a momentous role in our Nation’s education. The goal is to provide a measure to evaluate student performance across state, national and even global standards.
However, does our far-reaching focus on standardized test scores actually meet this lofty educational goal? This modern educational practice has ignited a national debate about the effectiveness of testing and how well they truly measure student achievement.
School reopenings are occurring more and more each day. Our school district has been 100% virtual since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I type, students are finishing up spring break and preparing to head back to in-person school for the first time this year.
I would be lying to you if I told you I didn’t have any misgivings. I’m convinced the general public has little idea as to what hoops schools need to leap through in order to raise the façade of normalcy for its families. I also believe many students will be coming back with the mindset that school might look close to what it was like before March, 2020.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting my educational undertakings over this past year. It is hard to believe one year has already come and gone for Grumble Services!
Since March 2020, I have updated and created many learning resources and Montessori materials in order to share them with the world. My goal was to have them available for both teachers and families by the beginning of the new school year. I’m happy to report I accomplished what I had set out to do.
Unschooling Movement is an informal learning approach encouraging learner-chosen activities over adult-chosen ones. It was inspired by John Holt, widely regarded as the ‘father of unschooling.’ He served in the military during WWII. As a civilian, he served as a dissatisfied elementary school teacher.
Coining this term in the 1970s, Holt came to the conclusion reforming the American school system was an impossibility. He began recommending to parents to keep their children at home; to let them decide what to learn and when.
Growth Mindset: How to Nourish your Mindset to Make It Thrive!
Growth mindset is one of two belief systems we might have about our own abilities. Growth mindset has a more stagnant counterpart known as a fixed mindset. Research has shown encouraging different types of behavior might predict a person’s future successes.
Motivation Research has shown that these two mindsets are manifested from a very early age. Our mindset governs our behavior and our relationship with success and failure. This occurs in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately affects our capacity for happiness in life.
Upward social mobility: What is it? In this case, leading researchers have divided the population into five categories or quintiles. If you are born in the bottom 20% (experts refer to this as the bottom quintile), upward social mobility is the chance you have to move up to the top 20% (or the top quintile). Another term commonly used for social mobility is inequality.
According to The Brookings Institution, there are multiple layers at work when it comes to our personal social mobility.
Virtual School: 2020 has ushered in unprecedented learning challenges. It was as if the whole world changed in one day back in March, throwing everything we knew on its head. Dining room tables furnished with tablets and Chromebooks were transformed into stay-at-home classrooms. In an instant, parents and caregivers became distance learning teachers to their children. There was no way to prepare for this.
Then came fall. Teachers were told they would now be teaching very differently. Most of us were thrown into the frying pan with little to no training. Career teachers suddenly felt like they were starting over. All those classroom procedures and lessons they spent perfecting over decades were now useless.