Yo Mista!

Before I take off for Iceland this week and check out their penis museum (no seriously, check this out), I have to recommend you read The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch.  This book provides an excellent history of the education system in the United States and offers some critical analysis on the new direction reform is taking. Honestly, reading this book was an eye-opener at times: I have seriously begun to question some of the people and things Teach for America supports (Joel Klein for one).  Anyone in the trenches of teaching can appreciate this book's critique of teacher accountability and high stakes testing movements. Ravitch herself admits that she was once on the testing and accountability bandwagon; she then explains why she changed her mind and why she hopes it's not too late for others to do so either. It's a book for both sides of the debate to read.   If you're even interested somewhat in education, get this book....

I know I'm supposed to be on hiatus, but a lot of people have been asking me my opinion on Bloomberg's recently announced Young Men's Initiative (read about it in the New York Times here ). In-depth detail on the initiative and their goals can be found here . To summarize, the program has approximately $130 million to use in a variety of ways to help reduce the " disparities slowing the advancement of black and Latino young men." This targeted strategy wiill include establishing new fatherhood classes, mentoring and literacy services , opening job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes, retraining probation officers to help those who have been incarcerated from repeating criminal offenses, and finally, assessing schools based on black and Latino students' academic progress. Overall, I'm very excited that we're finally not taking a "one size fits all" strategy to fix education.  In my two years of teaching thus far, I probably...

August has to be my favorite month of the summer: it's not too hot, there's always a nice breeze, and fall-time television is right around the corner. And by fall-time television, I'm talking about the upcoming sixth season of Dexter . What am I going to do when this show ends?   What makes August even more significant is that it kicks off "back-to-school" season. I can almost smell it in the air. It reminds of me of carrying around a school supply list at Wal-Mart while my mom pushed a shopping cart full of one-subject notebooks, folders, pens, #2 pencils, markers and of course, a new lunch box that indicated to the world what cartoon I was into at the time. Cowabunga, dude.   In September, I'll start my third year of teaching high school mathematics at a transfer high school serving over-age, under-credited youth. From now until I return to the classroom, I'm going to maximize "me" time. I'm talking Christian Bale in American Psycho styl...