Yo Mista!

There's something about blowing my kids' minds that makes me feel pretty awesome. What makes me feel even more awesome (if possible)? Finding out that my kids are teaching each other my tricks and lessons outside of class time. That's a special feeling. Warm and gooey. At a transfer high school, such as the one I teach at, the skill levels of students vary significantly. A student with fifth grade math skills could be sitting directly right next to a student with eleventh grade math skills in my Algebra class. With that kind of variety, it's very important I provide some side-challenges to the students bored out of their minds with my class, particularly those who passed the NY State Regents Examinations and just need the class credit to move on. So last week as a side-challenge, I brought a calculator over to Jamie, a new student sitting in the front row and said, "Okay, once you finish the problems on the board, figure out how I did this." I showed he...

During the last three months, I haven't been as happy as I normally am on the job. I attribute this unhappiness to a variety of factors. Lack of proper school leadership and management is definitely number one. A low teacher morale is another, probably because of the politics that are currently in play . And finally, the icing on the cake: the lack of effort to put forth a solution to our school's attendance problem. At this point, I'm sure even you, the reader, is sick of me whining, bitching, and moaning about attendance. This country's lack of logic in terms of education is bad enough, but then to have to come to school the next morning and deal with having no students show up for your first and last classes of the day? That's too much. A silver lining presented itself recently in the form of new recruits. I don't know what the fuck happened, but my school somehow managed to recruit some pretty intelligent and motivated students for the trimester. In fact...

If you haven't already done so, check out high school teacher William Johnson's confession in the New York Times. It's a straight-from-the-gut piece written from the teachers' perspective regarding current Department of Education policy, particularly rating and evaluating teachers. Teacher evaluations are a big issue in NYC (and now other U.S. cities), as teacher evaluation data has been released to the public . Charter school teacher data was soon released after that, with some of the ratings quite embarrassing . Forgetting the controversy of this data being public for just a second, let's focus on the formula that's used to evaluate teachers. Significant research has proved the results of this formula are completely unreliable, but honestly, we didn't need people with doctorates to tell us the formula created by people with doctorates is bullshit. Any evaluation methodology that incorporates standardized testing is bullshit. If you think not, then...

As a teacher, I have no fucking idea what the day is going to bring me. I usually expect something good, bad, funny, and a pile of shit all together at least once everyday. What I didn't ever expect was this: getting accused of being a member of a secret organization that's plotting to take over the world. Beyond shock though, I felt sorry. I felt sorry my kids had to equate me with some ridiculous conspiracy theory to justify their own trajectory in life. During some free time in class, several students were grouped around a classroom computer. They had finished their work and so I rewarded them by allowing them to do whatever they want. It's a nice and easy system that works. "Make time to waste time" - something I believe in and preach. As I walked around collecting papers and tidying up my classroom, I noticed my students looking up Illuminati articles, researching Illuminati symbols and reading articles and gossip columns that accuse incredibly rich...