Education Commission Recommends Core Reforms
Forcing teachers to pass a kind of bar exam, like the ones aspiring lawyers and doctors must sit for. Extending the number of hours and days students must spend in school, to break with academic calendars formed in an agrarian age. Consolidating school districts; making schools a hub for health care and social services; and giving 4-year-olds in the state’s poorest areas access to full-day prekindergarten.
Those were among a slate of recommendations that the New York Education Reform Commission outlined in an address to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and cabinet members in the State Capitol on Wednesday.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
“But while she looked like a butterfly, clinging to a blade of grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached with horrible despair.”
(Source: lost-in-words, via teachingliteracy)
I’m having this problematic moment where my advisors are telling me not to use words like “Okay” or “Anyway” when I transition because it’s unprofessional.
My initial reaction is to just tell them I don’t want to because it’s the way I speak.
Their other rationale is that it makes it unclear what I want while teaching.
While I DO want to be clearly understood by my students and so will probably seek to find more effective things to say, I also worry that editing out bits of personality will make it less likely that students will be able to see me as a person. My favorite and most effective teachers were not machines but people who cared deeply about what they taught and let that fuse with their content and teaching style.
This also goes back to a deeper issue that people like Jean Twenge are calling the GEN ME problem: that younger Americans are only focused on themselves. I think a way to address this is to also make it clear that teachers, cops, nurses, etc. are people with personalities too.
Will my “Teacher Voice” turn me into the authoritative enemy? Will it keep students from seeing me as a person worthy of consideration?
“And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
(via teachingliteracy)
You are right here.
(Source: eatmorebikes)
