When I was doing my student teaching, kids would ask all the time, “Are you a real teacher yet? When will you be a real teacher?” I’d usually respond, “What? Because I’ve been faking it so far?” But here’s a better answer: When I started student teaching, I wasn’t as scared of those classes full [...]
Posts Tagged ‘teaching’
When I Became A Real Teacher
Posted in Education, tagged lesson planning, student teaching, teaching on March 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“See What’s Really There”
Posted in Education, Politics and Society, tagged Head Start, Jesse Jackson Jr., phonics, politics, reading, teaching on March 15, 2011 | 5 Comments »
I’m helping teach one of my young children to read, and it’s interesting to see her make the same mistake that the older children made. Just as many children naturally write letters backwards, they also seem inclined to read the first letter or two of a word, and then assume it’s a similar word they’re [...]
Students Cheating On Me
Posted in Education, tagged cheating, personal responsibility, school, teaching on February 22, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Once again, for about the umpteenth time this year, I find myself having to deal with students I’ve caught cheating in my class. It makes me angry, it makes me discouraged, and it makes me feel…cheap. Yes, cheap. Like I’ve been used. Like it wasn’t just my test but me, personally, who was cheated on. [...]
In Praise of Teaching a Mile Wide
Posted in Education, tagged American Literature, effective teaching, teaching on February 14, 2011 | 2 Comments »
One of the favorite tropes of professional education is that teaching an inch wide but a mile deep is better than teaching a mile wide and an inch deep, where the former suggests fairly little content covered in extensive detail, and the latter is the opposite: a curriculum that favors quantity of content over depth. [...]
If the Real World Worked the Way Students and Parents Think School Should Work
Posted in Education, Humor, tagged educational standards, parents, satire, standards, students, teaching, teenagers, work ethic on February 9, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Scene 1 IRS- Tax forms must be submitted by April 15. No exceptions. Citizen A- But I didn’t have time! I had other things to do. IRS – What things got in the way of a priority obligation that comes around ever year? Citizen A – You know, like dances and field trips and clubs [...]
Calvin and Hobbes on Unhappy Educators
Posted in Education, tagged Calvin and Hobbes, teaching on February 3, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I remember attending a department meeting my second year of teaching where several of the veterans complained about the ignorance and laziness of their students. I went home discouraged, not about students, but about my colleagues. Why are they teaching, I thought, if they hate it so much? A decade later, I understand. Those teachers [...]
What This Professor Professes
Posted in Education, tagged Allan Bloom, citizenship, Closing of the American Mind, college, Dorothy Sayers, Educating the Saints, educational reform, Hugh Nibley, teaching, The Lost Tools of Learning on February 3, 2011 | 3 Comments »
A few weeks ago, a former student groused about college tuition on Facebook, to which I cheekily replied with a favorite quote from Good Will Hunting: “You paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the exact same education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the library.” Another commenter [...]
Fall 2010 College Semester Round Up
Posted in Education, tagged teaching, UNLV on December 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Tomorrow starts finals week at UNLV. As I get to catch my breath and wind down from these last three and a half months of night teaching, here are a few thoughts and highlights from Fall 2010: One young woman in my remedial class wrote an essay about how she wasn’t sure if she should [...]
Today’s Rant At School
Posted in Education, tagged attendance, personal responsibility, teaching on December 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »
This morning, I posted the following rant on my school’s email system. This is probably the first of multiple such things I’ll write soon, but I won’t inflict the rest on my poor coworkers–I’ll just bury them here. The feedback on this rant (really, the first such spiel I’ve let loose with at work in a [...]
What’s Wrong–And What’s Right–With Student Writing
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged effective teaching, language, reading, revision, teaching, writing, writing process on November 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Last week I got a reading-response journal from a high school freshman in my honors class, about an excerpt from Plato’s dialogue Crito (which I’ve described and quoted here before); her paper started off like this: From Cristo was written by Plato. This story talks about this guy named Socrates whom was sentenced to presin for [...]
Teaching Like the Temple Teaches
Posted in Religion, tagged discipleship, effective teaching, Hugh Nibley, James E. Talmage, John A. Widstoe, teaching, temple, temple work on November 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
In a classic address, LDS apostle John A. Widstoe summarized the educational value of temple work: Another fact has always appealed to me as a strong internal evidence for the truth of temple work. The endowment and the temple work as revealed by the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith (see also Doctor Talmage’s The House [...]
The Use and Abuse of Parts of Speech, or, Why Basics Are Important
Posted in Education, Humor, Language and Literature, tagged English, parts of speech, teaching, vocabulary, writing on October 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Finished reading example sentences my classes made up for a current unit of vocabulary words today. As usual, many of these sentences are complete nonsense. Don’t get me wrong: I’d say that more than 80% of them were just fine, and even though each class had done plenty of exercises with these words and researched [...]
Teachers as Actors
Posted in Education, tagged acting, effective teaching, teaching on September 20, 2010 | 4 Comments »
It’s around this time each year that a couple of former students, be they upperclassmen, student aides, or simply returning to visit, will come by a class and find me in the middle of a lesson they recognize. Inevitably, some will ask, “Don’t you get tired of doing the same stuff every year?” Sometimes, yes, [...]
Teachers and the Ninety and Nine
Posted in Education, Religion, tagged Bible, Book of Mormon, David O. McKay, educational standards, Matthew 18:12-14, priorities, school reform, teaching on July 13, 2010 | 3 Comments »
I’m haunted by the Biblical story about leaving the ninety and nine sheep safely in the fold to go rescue the one lost sheep: How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which [...]
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