Our students are faced with planning cultural outings over the course of the year that occasionally turn into full-fledged field trips. While other events are attended by handfuls of students – it is expected that each TALONS class member attends three cultural events – others take on such a pertinent range of learning opportunities, as […]
Read more "Field Trip: Urban Geography & the Canadian Identity"Yesterday I gave my class a brief quiz to assess their knowledge of the parts of speech, as well as sentence parts. Twenty questions, multiple choice, during the grammar unit. This is not, they tell me, fun stuff. And I’ll admit that putting together their quiz the night before, trying to come up with examples […]
Read more "My students giggle during quizzes"This post marks the fiftieth such publication on this blog, a milestone I couldn’t conceive of almost ten months ago when I awkwardly began this endeavor by compiling a (far-too) exhaustive best-of-web installment and publishing it against an all-black backdrop that infuriated many of my early readers. Since then my posts have ranged from the […]
Read more "Blogosphere turns Fifty (posts)!"With a handful of our grade tens offering thoughtful reflective posts on the turning of a new year, I have been thinking the last few days about the dawn of 2010. It seems as though I have been headed here in my mind for some time. I can remember standing on the pool deck at […]
Read more "A New Year (…and my love of teaching grammar)"A huge thanks to Jeff Utecht, Dave Truss, Dean Shareski and Yoon Soo Lim for helping at various times to help crystalize this process. We’re getting there! The following was much simplified and stated in this form by Jeff Utecht, who also supplied the mp3 below. The Mission: Here’s an idea for a wave: In […]
Read more "Don’t Stop Believing (in Santa Claus): Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it"Edit: Wesley Fryer has a great post this week with a variety of digital means of delving into President Obama’s recent speech at West Point (among them Wordle). This past week our socials class made use of its Wikispace’s discussion boards to conduct ranging conversations around major themes in their respective chapters. For the grade […]
Read more "Wordle as Discussion Synthesis"International Musical Collaboration, Anyone? I continually find it interesting which songs become “the Songs” in my Intro to Guitar course. Composed of grades nine-through-eleven students, the class of thirty students represents every walk of life in our suburban highschool: choir and band kids adding to their repotoire of musical genius, athletes and academic high achievers […]
Read more "Don't Stop Believing (in Santa Claus)"My sister showed me a quote from David W. Orr she came across during an Environmental Education course this summer. When study is meaningful, the subject is often not what is learned. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but mastery of one’s person. Subject matter is simply a tool. Much as […]
Read more "David W. Orr's "Goal of Education""This afternoon I was sitting in the wonderfully rustic Minnekhada Lodge, discussing Formative Assessment with my colleagues for our school based professional development day. And as the day drew to a close, and our pro-d hosts encouraged the “continued discussion” of the day’s aims, I thought, “How I wish that everyone at our school used […]
Read more "Twitter Week for BC Educators"More work from (one of) my very talented sister(s), shot this September in Indian Arm, British Columbia.
Read more "Retreat Photos"