It All Starts With A Sentence

   That right up there is a working representation of how I feel about giving out grades and evaluating students. In a lot of ways I feel like grades in the way that they are traditionally structured violate all the teacher/student agreements that we try to set up in our classrooms to make the environment more hospitable and establish the kind of trust and respect there needs to be in order to really work together. Reading Christensen's take on grading particularly takes away some of that fear and pressure that I feel about not wanting be the dictator that I know many teachers, even the most well meaning ones, can sometimes turn into when it comes to grades. I know what my intent is with evaluating work, but the student may at times take criticism as a personal affront and that's something that needs to be addressed because there are plenty of factors that go into those walls that students put up about being judged.  As a writer, I know that I'm not w...

           I really enjoyed the readings for this week for a number of reasons. It's particularly fun and fascinating to talk about using artifacts in the classroom and REAL instruction. I know that personally I needed to have things taught to me in a way that I could use my senses to puzzle it out. I think that's why I never took to math. History, art, science, reading, and writing were all things that felt accessible to me where numbers never felt real and I would have to draw out the problem in order for it to make sense. We're English people though, so it comes as no surprise that we are capable of loving things that are figments of someone else's imagination. However, even in the most fantastical books, there is some type of connecting thread that binds a story to reality. It mirrors and even surpasses the limited scope of reality to find the humanity in any situation.          I really fell in love with this book that wa...

          Danny Martinez's story and by extension the story of his parents, is really interesting and moving, because it is reflective of what so many people experience going through American public schools. When Martinez describes his mother's leaving WHS, he said that she was "pushed out," instead of saying that she dropped out. I liked that he reframed it this way, because that's what it really is. Shoving a student out the door when more effort is needed to help them. Going from being mocked for having an accent and called a wetback to being a teacher in the space of a generation is a remarkable achievement. Even more so because it was at the school that Martinez's parents where considered outcasts at.         There are so many powerful statements to be found in that reading, but possibly the most powerful is Martinez saying, "I observed youth attempting to make personal and contextual connections with literature only to be dismisse...