Is It Finished?   I recently took a step of faith and downloaded the Oblique Application for my iPhone. It seemed intriguing enough. It definitely makes me think.   Use Filters   Just what is Oblique Strategies? Oblique Strategies is essentially a card game.  But it’s so much more than a game. As best as I can tell, each card ...

I believe that every teacher has the potential to reach out and impact the life of every student they have in their class. The key is that it takes a whole lot of dedicated attention and effort. My theory is that it is relativaly easy to positively impact about 60% of the kids in each of [...]

Everybody makes mistakes Everybody has those days Everybody knows what what I’m talkin’ ’bout Everybody gets that way Nobody’s Perfect! I gotta work it! Again and again ’til I get it right Nobody’s Perfect! You live and you learn it! And if I mess it up sometimes, Nobody’s perfect! Oops. I got a ...

Is it just me, or do students seem to get to the end of the year and begin ignoring rules and classroom procedures that have been established all year long? This is my first time at my current middle school and it’s worse than anywhere else I’ve taught before. Already. And TAKS is next week, followed by six weeks of school. I hear ...

Recently, I have come across a number of people writing about rights in the education sense. Some seem to pit parents, teachers, and students all against one another. Some seem to think that parents and students gang up against the poor teachers. Still others throw the wicked old administrators into the mix. It seems most of the bloggers ...

Just in time for March Madness Watch this video Read this article Being a Middle-Aged Nerd is No Excuse for Stupid What did you just learn? How can you relate it to classroom management? Also, I want to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the new “Rate this article” thing at the top of each article now. Go ahead ...

I have found that People   really   don’t   like   As I prepare my bands for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest that is now less than a month away, I have noticed that they seem to have a big problem with rests. For the uninitiated, rests in music represent silence. If I reduce the amount of noise that ...

Everyone’s talking about it. It seems that everyone has been talking about it for nearly seven years now. So I thought it would be kind of interesting to see what various bloggers are saying about the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 (NCLB). My personal opinion is that the law has good intentions, but they go about it entirely ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an experience I had where a student left my classroom crying and went to talk with the counselor. Read about it here. Be sure to read the comments below the article also! Since then, I apologized. I also made the commitment to slow down my teaching style. I wanted to take a chance to revisit that incident and ...

We have our first of four TAKS test days today. They seem to have increased testing security quite a bit this year over last year. In fact, we are supposed to have some monitors from the state coming to our campus at some point during the day to make sure we are doing things correctly. I’m new at this campus, and things are run differently ...