snow day!
I wish I could say that I also worked out at some point, but the truth is that I spent the entire day in sweatpants sitting in a comfy chair with the computer balancing on my legs. What a great day off of work.
January 2009
4 posts
I wish I could say that I also worked out at some point, but the truth is that I spent the entire day in sweatpants sitting in a comfy chair with the computer balancing on my legs. What a great day off of work.
Creativity Redux
Sometimes when I think my job is hard and requires too much patience, creativity and willingness to do something over and over again, I find things like this that remind me that there are more creative, patient, wonderful people in the world who work way harder than I do.
Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.
(please note that this is a new interpretation of my singing animal love!)
An adequate response
I had to write this poem today. I received some work from a student that did not meet the requirements of any assignment I have assigned this year, but it did show that he is thinking about the world, thinking about writing and thinking about himself in context of the other two. I found myself enjoying his writing but thinking “there just isn’t a place in my gradebook for this.” My response reminded me very much of a talk on TED that I watched yesterday that addressed a very similar issue. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? I couldn’t help but see a connection between the dilemma I was in with my student and the little girl he describes in his talk. So, I decided to type up the response that was already forming in my head.
There’s no room in my gradebook for casual Eliot,
for listless Whitman, for Anonymous, for easy-goin’ Michelangelo
There’s no room in my gradebook for “here, for what it’s worth”
for appreciation, for the “real” moment you “realize”, for hands that can’t sit still
There’s no room in my gradebook for song bringing
for just listening, for the space between words, for dancing
There’s no room in my gradebook for your ghostly spirit,
for your tragedies, for your rolled up paper, for your pen
In my gradebook there are numbers
and lines, and grades and spaces
In my gradebook there are names (of real people),
And quantifiable improvements, and calls home, and percentages
In my gradebook there is a very short alphabet,
and a very heavy scale, and a calendar and a gavel
In my gradebook there is just not room for much else,
for much you, for much me.
I thought casually that I would like to also mention NCLB as a major source of my frustration when I came across this article today by Ken Robinson entitlted “Transform Education, yes We Must” that made it very clear to me that my problem is not so much how to assess my particular student but how to assess my chosen career and the expectations on teachers everywhere. Here is an excerpt from Robinson’s article that I like:
Actually there are three flawed premises. First, NCLB promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability. The result is a terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students. Second, it confuses standards with standardizing. The result is that schools across the country are becoming dreary and homogenized. And third, it assumes that education can be improved without the professional creativity and personal passion of teachers. The result is that too many good teachers are streaming out of the very schools that urgently need them to stay. All of this is holding America back in a world that’s moving faster than ever.
