It seems every few years, educators are urged to adopt the latest and greatest teaching method, writes high-school English teacher Nicholas Provenzano. In this blog post, he writes that while teachers should be open to better methods of instruction, he cautions them against succumbing to pressure to disregard other approaches. Instead, he writes about the advice a veteran teacher once gave him: “Teach to the students in your class and you will always be right.”
The 7-11s replacing supermarkets is a perfect metaphor for what will happen to public schools if legislatures, boards, and voters endorse the notion that unregulated private enterprise can solve the problems of schooling. The for-profit 7-11 charters will offer bare bones curricula while the full-service suburban schools will provide a wide range of offerings…. Blaming teachers for low performing students is like blaming the 7-11 clerk for bad nutrition in the community.
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Wayne Gersen commenting on Nancy Flanagan’s post First World Education Problems in Detroit (Part I) - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher(via adventuresinlearning) |
Is this the best GIF of the millennium? We think, YES.
If this is a big part of the job description, I have renewed faith in my ability to be Secretary of State someday.
How does this not have 75,000 reblogs yet? P.S. Our Anne Gearan is in Africa with the semi-booty-dropping secretary.
Reblogging for Hillz.
Awesome:)
On one side: boycott everything whose owner you have a philosophical or religious disagreement with on a personal level. But really do it. Sure it’s easy enough to shun fast food, but enough research will likely prove that our American dream to be comfortable far outweighs our attention span. (Please excuse my cynicism, and please let me know if any of you are successful in this endeavor. I’ll tip my hat to you.)
Of course, it cuts both ways. Extremism comes in a variety of political preferences, so I’ll throw this out there as well:No, there is not a “war on religion” in the United States.
Language like that is offensive on a lot of levels. First of all, it is insulting to those engaging — and dying in —actual war, genocide, and ethnic conflict. Secondly, there are real, egregious violations of religious freedom throughout the world that we Americans — as we pass by more flavors of churches than fried chicken chains on Main Street — find difficult to fathom.
Today, the State Department released its 2011 International Religious Freedom Report. It lists the continued imprisonment of Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran, the crackdown on house churches and Tibetan self-immolations in China, and the targeting of churches in Syria’s attacks against its own people.
“… too many people live under governments that abuse or restrict freedom of religion. People awaken, work, suffer, celebrate, raise children, and mourn unable to follow the dictates of their faith or conscience,” the report reads.
These violations of religious freedom are about life and death — not fried chicken.
