Rorysm

Honestly, I think programs like No Child Left Behind should be scrapped after a while and something else brought along. All the good teachers will keep the best parts of the old system anyway and learn something new along the way. It can be frustraiting as a teacher to have to put up with wave after wave of change to what we do, but if we can take the best practices and incorporate them into our teaching system the kids can benifit. So I won't shed a tear when NCLB become extinct, but I will take some emphasis of it with me through the next wave of reform. And yeah, if special ed kids were

"My classes were discussion-based. We had assigned reading, then we discussed it the next day." This is a painful experience in non AP classes (and in AP classes too nowadays!). Student's just don't do the assigned readings. You wind up making the handful of kids who did read have to carry the entire conversation while the others tune out. I remember my AP class in high school being predominately note based, then outside readings required, then a movie maybe once a month and a discussion. Then of course we had to practice Document-based-questions. I know every AP teacher in the school pulls

Mainstreaming also helps reduce the need for special ed teachers, which are the hardest to find. You know, I don't want to start anything but from my point of view, the ADHD label is slapped on way too many kids. It's to the point where you can really tell a difference between those who have it and those who are labeled with it wrongly. (Or maybe there are different levels of it and that explains it). The problem is that once a kid is labeled with it, it can be hard to shake it. I had a kid one time that in his IEP it was noted that he was last tested as a fourth grader and had ADHD. You kno

Now I want to add my two cents on the side conversation of technology in schools, etc. You know what you can't do in a high school classroom anymore... give lectures. Every principal I know has pretty much stuck to the rule of "Don't give notes that take more then 1 minute per year of age of your student." That means Freshmen should get no more then what, 14 minutes of notes. Now that includes the 5 minutes of interuptions, the five minutes of explaining, and the four minutes of waiting for everyone to write down the notes in awkward pauses after every line. Ugh. As soon as the notes are ove

My Two Cents: I am a high school teacher in Kentucky. What's more, I was a high schooler in the 90's when Kentucky lost a lawsuit about how they fund schools. When told the usual way of funding schools wasn't legal (basically, the counties with coal were getting more money as part of the coal severance pay--where the counties that have to put up with the problems--ie. road damage, noise, sinkholes, etc got more money and Louisville and Lexington wanted more money as they had more students) the state switched to state standardized testing. Guess what? Education improved greatly. Kentucky w

Wait from the talk early in this thread, did the fan's cover cd not get finished? I kind of left the forum about the time it was gettting put together and didn't find out how it turned out.

They're now going for less then 30 bucks at half.com http://product.half.ebay.com/Billy-Bragg-Wilco-Man-in-the-Sand_W0QQtgZinfoQQprZ3345174