What a discouraging week.  The lead master teacher at my school has decided to work elsewhere.  She wants to work at a school with strong leadership and a staff dedicated to improving results for children.  That witch!!!  Seriously though, can you blame her? So I am left contemplating a return to work in the fall, minus [...]

One of my criticisms of NCLB is that it causes too many schools to focus all of their attention on the bottom 25% of a school’s population while ignoring the middle- and upper-level students. Some of the effects of this focus in my school are: fewer upper-level course choices in order to create more lower-level courses, larger [...]

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 [...]

Washington State’s mandatory test, which needs to be passed to receive a diploma, is called the WASL. Recent articles have noted the recent announcement that 91% of the students passed—if you do not count the students who dropped out. By my figuring, this means about 68% of the original class of 2008 passed the state test. [...]

I’m going to use a partner test on Friday with my College in the High School students. I’ve done this before without any trouble. Have you ever done this? How did it go? Did you have to set up special parameters?

I often comment that educational solutions cannot solely be a responsibility of the schools. Communities must take the reigns and help solve many of the dilemmas facing education, and the ETS seems to agree with me that poverty may be the largest obstacle to overcome when creating academic success. Here are some of the highlights from [...]

It’s state testing day number 6 today! Woo-hoo! I’m amazed how much time it takes to give our state test, the WASL. Just reading the scripted introduction and providing the instructions can take ten minutes. Then, the exam itself takes 2-3 hours per test. Yikes! Those poor kids. On the bright side, I love proctoring the WASL. ...

Been to Subway lately? Or Taco Del Mar? If you have, you may have noticed that the workers now wear plastic gloves when preparing food. A woman in line in front of me today was pretty rude to a worker when, while swamped by customers inside and in the drive-thru and working alone, he [...]

A while back I had a student, Davy, reach the final week of his final semester in high school, and he had a 40% in my senior Mythology course while maintaining an attendance rate of 60% (and I think a blood-alcohol level of 2.0 most of the semester). I wouldn’t budge on giving “extra credit” [...]

I came upon another article about class size and student success. According to the article’s author, “Small classes are more engaging places for students because they’re able to have a more personal connection with teachers, simply by virtue of the fact that there are fewer kids in the classroom competing for that teacher’s ...