This looks interesting, but I’m still considering the uses it might have in a classroom or home school. What do you think?

Amazing how many times people who haven’t read Shakespeare quote him.

These inexpensive little reference tools can make a teacher’s life much easier. This has been the most popular of all the charts, but they are available for reading comprehension, primary sources, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, RTI, multiple intelligences, scientific method and more. See them all at Quick Flip Activity Books

See a more complete review here.  Prices are discounted with even larger volume discounts for assorted titles. 

It’s too bad teachers aren’t given the help they really need — consistent administrative support and realistic training. Only a couple of my education classes were useful. And my administrators were inconsistently supportive. One actually cared and was backed me up as I struggled to maintain order in a class of ESEA students, many of whom had no respect for any sort of authority, including the law. The other vice president had a reputation among the students for never “doing anything,” and only warned students not to repeat their offending behavior.

That was over forty years ago. Chewing gum and talking out of turn were still deemed problems, along with having tobacco in one’s possession on campus. We didn’t see weapons in the classroom back then, drug use was rare, and although a teacher’s tires might be slashed, no teachers were raped or shot at or stabbed. I can’t even imagine what inner city teachers have to face on a daily basis today. I hope their training is better than what I received in college.

My tests and measurements professor was a realist. I only I really remember two things he said. First he told us that if we want to change the system we had to conform to it very well until we had tenure, at which point we could begin to make waves.  Second, he told us that true-false-tests were the worst measurements of student learning. You guessed it. He gave all true-false tests. A great example to follow, I don’t think. 

I had one professor I saw for two classes — The History and Philosophy of Education, and General Methods, — for a total of six hours a week.  He never even learned to pronounce my name and I continued as the only one whose first name was used in roll call until the end of the semester. Yet when I taught in a private school part time, every student in grades K-12 pronounced it perfectly. Pronouncing my name properly won’t solve the problems of the earth, but when a PhD in education doesn’t even care enough to learn a student’s name, his attitude isn’t setting much of an example. 

The only useful class I had was Secondary English Methods. My professor taught us practical ways to  help students learn. I had the feeling he had actually been in a high school classroom. My master teachers were also pros, who taught by example, as well as by helping me learn how to do better. They taught me more than all my professors put together. 

With conditions in classrooms, especially secondary classroom, being so much worse than they were forty years ago, I’d like to think new teachers are getting better preparation than we got in my day in our state college’s graduate program. If they aren’t it’s no wonder they are discouraged.

goingbackin:

It sounds like she’s ready to give up.

Night after night, she comes home with stories about her crazy class, her unsupportive principal, and the general frustrations that come with being a classroom teacher in 2012. And I feel for her, I really do.

I want to tell her that she should stick with…

I’ve always loved the simplicity of visual timelines. They beg to be read.

austinkleon:

Illustrated Shakespeare study guide for NYC public schools by David Heatley

This is our daughter after we had visited the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park, We were staying at a cabin at Lake Vallecito in Colorado, and after dinner the kids went back outside. Jason, as usual, started chatting with the neighbors. We weren’t paying a lot of attention, since there was not much trouble they could get into. Later, Sarah called us out to see what she had made. She was about twelve. No one asked her to to this, or even suggested it. But the experience in the park and the visit to the dioramas in the museum afterwards had “lit a fire.” This was the result.