This past weekend, as I was decompressing from the work week, it felt strange to recognize that even though I’d taught for six full days of the nascent fall semester, I had yet to teach a full week. Colleges set their schedules differently — I’m still getting used to the much longer winter breaks here in Wisconsin, presumably to keep us all inside for most of January, when the cold weather and roads can be incredibly dangerous — and state law requires that we start…
No Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created by Amateurs (tultican.com) It’s impossible to research the history of minority schooling in America without repeatedly coming face-to-face with how the reality of that schooling was far worse than even the popular misconceptions of it. Despite the “separate but equal” litmus test established in Plessy v. Ferguson in the nineteenth century, what few schools that did exist for African-Americans in the south were often so neglected that they were barely worth having at all. The idea that Brown v.…
When I set up the schedules for my classes before the start of each semester, I always try to paint my plans with the broadest brush strokes possible. I have a few set activities I always do at the start of every semester to help acclimate students to my classes (and college life in general), and setting due dates for major assignments ahead of time is always a necessity, but I’ve always tried to be as improvisational of a teacher as possible, adapting to the…
Texas Parent Rips Off Teacher’s Mask in School Altercation (Newsweek via msn.com) Today is three years to the day that I left Colorado for Wisconsin, and I didn’t need one of my social media apps to remind me of that fact this morning, since this day on the calendar is always going to be special to me for that reason. What I did need reminding of, though, was that it was on this day last year that I asked my friends on that social media…
Fire and Smoke Map (airnow.gov) I didn’t require my students in my online classes last year to turn their video cameras on, not only because I don’t have a webcam (I left my old one behind in Colorado) and didn’t want to force students to do something I wasn’t doing myself, but because I’m a firm believer in students’ rights to privacy, especially in their own homes. Some of my students may have just logged into Zoom and gone off to another room to play…