I had planned a follow-up to my recent Power of Positive Technology post… but then life happened. The new school year started on a Wednesday, and Thursday night my father died. He and my mom had been living with us for about five months, waiting to move into their new house. Dad had been sick for a long time, and we knew the end was … Continue reading …and then life happened
One more reason to love project-based learning: as the weather gets warmer and the kids’ minds wander to summer, my students stay focused, working hard to complete projects that are due at the end of the semester. Of course one reason they continue to work so hard in spite of rampant spring fever is that their semester grade depends on their performance on these … Continue reading PBL conquers spring fever
We work hard all year, writing and reading and analyzing and discussing and reading and writing some more. And then, all of our hard work and learning are evaluated and assessed in two days of state exams. Multiple-choice exams, mind you, no writing necessary. So we also work hard to create a testing environment that supports our students. We keep our daily routine the same. … Continue reading They’re kids, not Olympians
Kids today are born with a mouse in their hand, right? They navigate websites intuitively, clicking their way around the Internet with their eyes closed. Their teachers are stuck in the binder-paper-and-#2-pencil routine, while the students go home to blogs, wikis and websites. Our students are the digital natives, while we are the immigrants, relying on pre-teens to show us how to tweet and upload… … Continue reading The Myth of the Digital Native
Our frenzied novel writing was repeatedly interrupted on November 30 as students let out yelps of joy when they met their word count goals. Even I disturbed the quiet when I took a writing break, loaded my novel into the NaNoWriMo word validator, and saw “WINNER!” flash across my screen. “I made it!” I yelled, jumping out of my chair and bowing to my students … Continue reading “A, B, C or D? Really?!?”
The bell rings, my classroom door flies open, and Tony comes hurtling through. “Can we write today, Mrs. Bradley? Please, please tell me we’re gonna write today!” He glances at the white board, sees “writing” on the agenda, and throws his hands up in celebration. “Yes!” In 20 years of teaching, I have never seen students this eager to write. Sure, I have had success … Continue reading “Pleeeeze, can we write today?”
Although I have conveniently forgotten most of my student-teaching experiences (oh, the magnitude of what I did not know that I did not know), there is one critical piece of advice that I have tried to heed each year since: on the first day of school, do something that makes the students want to come back on the second day. Our students might be required … Continue reading Hook ’em on day-one
Sometimes you just gotta’ laugh… Pushing open my classroom door, I sighed at the mess that greeted me. After battling the flu for a week, I had finally returned to my classroom to face the music: as hard as I worked to establish a daily routine for my students and leave detailed lesson plans for my substitute, I knew I would be lucky if a … Continue reading OMG Mrs. B!
Today is the perfect day to take a drive down to San Francisco: the sky is blue, the air is crisp, and a tiny bit of snow (the first in 30 years) dusted the City this morning. But while my friends and colleagues rally today in San Francisco (and across the country) for our fellow workers in Wisconsin, I am at home, working. I would … Continue reading Rallying from the kitchen table
When I met my husband, he was teaching at a small, private school. On more than one occasion I joked that if he wanted to marry me, he had to get a job at a “real” school. There was nothing wrong with his school, but I just didn’t see private schools in our future. I had always assumed that my teacher/coach husband would join me … Continue reading I {heart} public schools!
Laura Bradley 