I am a teacher.  Everybody loves me. I became a teacher so I wouldn't have to work that hard and would get ''summers off''.  I always wanted to become a teacher so I could promote my own personal agenda and indoctrinate the students who are trapped in my classroom. I vote democratic and only support candidates that raise taxes.  Once I got a job ...

August 22nd marks the start of the 2012-2013 school year for Albemarle County Schools and after seven excruciating days...It's On.  Can you sense our excitement?  Because we really are excited to finally have the chance to do what we do. Like the great Ric Flair, we can hardly contain our excitement. (How did it take this long for our first Ric ...

Governor Kasich signed SB 316 into law on Monday. Here is the original text of the bill as submitted to Kasich….all 592 pages of it. This beautiful annotation of the Legislative Service Commission’s comparative analysis highlights the most important aspect of the legislation, and this “Fiscal Note & Local Impact Statement” zooms in on the ...

You may have heard about the amendments to SB 316–the delay of the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and the new report card system.  I’m busy reading the actual legislation because as much as I love eye-crossing, long, and laborious legalese, I want to know what it actually says rather than what everyone tells me it says. Consider this your post ...

On Tuesday morning, January 24,  we drove to Richmond to meet with other Virginia wildlife educators, zoo directors, animal rescues, wildlife veterinarians, and small business owners who will all be negatively impacted if Virginia Senate Bill No. 477 and/or House Bill No. 1242 are passed.  We also spent time meeting with senators and house members ...

The school year is just getting swinging.  You have been given the task of hiring and hosting this year’s school assemblies.  You have finished hiring your performers – now it’s time to get ready for the show. Step One:  Choosing the Right Location for the Show A variety of factors make up a good school assembly performance space. Availability ...

Sticking with the current events theme of some recent posts, there continues to be a great deal of conversation about the Occupy Wall Street movement.  More of that in a second. The TU was at the annual ''Making Connections'' conference held by our division at one of our local High Schools. We indeed connected with our fellow educators and  in an ...

Populations are made up of individuals.  The wise teacher figures out quickly each class is full of individual kids.  Likewise schools are composed of individual teachers. When you start treating individual teachers as unimportant, then ultimately schools will become unimportant. I can't escape the reality that such an Orwellian reality has ...

So your first weeks of teaching are wrapping up.  At times you've struggled to recall why you became a teacher.  But in the past few weeks no doubt you and your students have learned a great deal already.  Still nothing could ever have prepared you for the past month.  The lessons learned are too numerous to recount.  So the TU will recount ones ...

Photo Credit: http://www.glasbergen.com/ We have a lot of teachers doing a lot of wonderful things in education right now.  As I’ve said before, through all the muck, we are making some amazing strides for our children. Particularly in the realm of technology, where so many teachers are taking risks, learning new ways to teach content, and ...