"When A Student Dies"I looked across the wrestling mat and saw my curriculum coordinator on the other side. Typically, all practices, whether athletic or academic, are strictly no-enter zones for anyone not directly associated with the team, so I knew that something was wrong. I handed my whistle to an assistant coach and approached him. With red eyes strained from the passed several minutes of hard weeping, he told me.
E had died. I dropped to the ground and wept. "When The Engines Begin to Flame Out"The Boeing 747, first introduced to the public back in 1968, is one of the most prolific and versatile aircraft in the transportation industry. The massive aero-beast is capable of reaching speeds to 545 mph and has an intercontinental range of almost 6,000 miles. The aircraft is powered by four high-bypass turbofan engines, technology that delivers double the power of the previous design at 1/3 of the fuel rate. There is no doubt that the 747 is marvel of human engineering. The most marvelous aspect of the aircraft is that it only requires one engine to maintain enough airspeed velocity to keep the craft airborne in case the remaining three all burnout. The aircraft only requires one operational engine to keep moving forward.
If only teachers were so lucky. Teacher burnout is an ignored epidemic and one that deserves more attention... "O Captain, My Captain!"The passing of Robin Williams was momentous to multiple generations around the world. I had the unique opportunity to be in the great city of Boston at the time of his death, and took my one-year old daughter to the Boston Public Gardens to sit on the iconic bench featured prominently in Good Will Hunting. I was not alone – people gathered around making it a shrine to the great comedian, they wrote quotes from his films along the ground. People laughed through tears as they read long forgotten, but easily recalled quotes from films reaching back 40 years – perfectly reflecting the actor’s career.
Williams’ impact on pop culture has no measure, and his influence on education is the same. Ask an English teacher under the age 45 what made them become a teacher and they will reply either a book, or Dead Poet’s Society... "Caught in the Machine"Somerville High School is one of America’s oldest high schools and sits three miles away from downtown Boston, Massachusetts. The building houses some of the oldest classrooms in the country – built in the 1840’s, the building isn’t actually that old compared to historic buildings in the area, but as far as schools go, it may as well have been built by Druids.
The antiquity of the building and my classroom has a certain charm about it. Many of the classrooms do not have whiteboards, but instead are armed with dusty and useless chalkboards... |
"The Widest Generation Gap in Education History"It was 1992, my sophomore English teacher asked us to write 500 words explaining why Herman Melville was an important figure in American Literature. This assignment required us to spend a day in the library, flipping through the card catalog, writing down Dewey Decimal numbers, and hitting the stacks to find the correct book that would allow us to properly respond to this assignment. We didn’t have the internet or encyclopedias at home. I assign this same assignment in my classroom as a warm-up activity. Ten minutes. 50 words. Tops....
"Closing the Classroom Door on the Millennials"It seems that the world is engulfed in the Millennials; you can’t turn on the television without seeing their scrappy, young faces so full of hope and grandeur selling you oversized headphones, Toyotas, and MacBooks Pros. Logging into any social network is an open invitation to being bombarded with news article postings about Millennials in the Workplace, Campus, Breakroom, Church, or any other place these scrapping young lads and lasses bless with their presence.
The term “Millennial Generation” (also known as the belittle “Y-Generation”) was coined many years ago by two gentlemen named Will Strauss and Neil Howe. Strauss and Howe discussed what they called the “Generation Theory” – a theory that became the anchor to their monumental must-read book Generations: A History of America’s Future... |