The title of this post is what a student told me today after he finished his first high school exam. He’s right, if he’s not prepared. Finals can be hard for teachers, too, especially when it sometimes feels as though I’m one of the few giving them. Here’s my list of complaints (sorry, but this site [...]

One of the most intelligent students in my school essentially decided not to graduate with his class. I have worked with him one on one for three years, watched him emerge as a phenomenal poet and thinker, and also observed him sabotage his own successes time and again. Poet left himself a credit short [...]

Here is a list of shocking statistics (at least I hope they are shocking) about high school students from the author Betsy Hart: “more than a quarter admitted stealing from a store,” “almost as many [a quarter of the students surveyed] admitted stealing from a relative in the previous year,” “82 percent said they ...

I believe unions should only fight for better benefits, higher wages, and working conditions. These are the only issues I will discuss as a union executive board member, and I don’t believe my union(s) should take moral stands on issues like the Iraq War or abortion or other issues, divisive or not. Also, I don’t expect [...]

Back in September I posted about how my principal canceled Open House without informing the staff first, so we were bombarded with complaints and questions but didn’t know how to answer them. It was a PR nightmare, and we are still paying the price in lost support. Well, disaster may strike twice. A parent asked the principal [...]

My high school is losing an awesome math teacher (I’ll call her Math Genius), and she’ll officially announce her move on Monday. Math Genius is leaving the high school mainly for the unfortunately all-too-often-cited reason of lack of administrative support. She also cited difficulties in getting her department to jump on board with ...

After reading a post by Mrs. Chili regarding the griping of her students when being held accountable for learning, I do have to admit a bit of frustration with one of my classes. Only 19 of my 32 American Literature students bothered to turn in a one-paragraph summary of a short story everyone read. This is [...]

The district agreed to help us bring down class sizes for freshmen and sophomores from 31-32 to 28, which would be great. This would mean a lowering of students per day of 15-20 students for some of the English teachers. 140 students a day sounds much better to me than 160. Just for perspective, when [...]

During an assembly last week a high school student threw a pencil at the back of a teacher’s head but missed. The student had just received news he didn’t like and chucked the pencil. The vice-principal removed him from this teacher’s class, but the receiving teacher did not know why the student was added, and [...]

This morning, during finals mind you, the teaching staff was mandated to attend a staff meeting concluding 15 minutes prior to the first final of the day. We sat down, already grumpy since our time is crunched because of a special schedule we use for finals week, and we received a 20 minute lecture about [...]