clair055

So....little Johnny or Susie brings home a teacher prepared worksheet filled with several math problems for homework.  At some point a parent decides to check the answers or at least review  the sheet to see what type of assignment had been given. Some of the problems are troubling: 1. "Each tree had 56 oranges.  If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" 2. "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?" Yes, I'm serious.   This actually happened recently in a Georgia classroom per    this link . I hope you have a problem with these questions.  I certainly do, and I applaud the parents in this situation for complaining. Why would teachers include such insensitive questions within a math assignment? The spokesperson for Gwinnett County Schools advised the teachers were trying to provide students with a cross-curricular activity by incorporating social studies lessons into the math problem...

I've had military memorials on the brain this week.   Perhaps it's because my high school Homecoming was this past weekend.  My last three years of school was spent on a campus heavily laden with military memorials pointing back to the time my school, Woodward Academy, operated as a military school.  Even today there are heavy auras of miltary attitude as you walk across the campus. Most certainly my military mindset derives from a  recent outpouring of support and grief for a local family who lost their son in Afghanistan.  Many citizens of my small town turned out to support the Harper family as they brought their son home.  During the last few days since the touching procession my thoughts turned to how we recognize fallen soldiers and my mind settled on a local park named for an Air Force pilot who lost his life during a bombing mission over Laos during the Vietnam War.  That particular military man, Robert G. "Jerry" Hunter, was a graduate of...

The television show Grey’s Anatomy has made the word seriously a go to word when shocked, surprised, angry, etc. as seen in this video: I’ve even been known to use it myself, so when a friend sent me the following pictures I started thinking about the concept of the word serious and its connotations regarding the field of education. These pictures show a different kind of airline, don’t they? The labeling on the plane reminds me of primary elementary classrooms where the teacher labels everything,and the classroom itself becomes a functional word wall….. desk, chair, television, computer, etc. These are photos of a South African plane belonging to Kulula Airlines …. To say they do things different at Kulula is an understatement. Here are a few statements you might hear if you are a Kulula passenger: On a Kulula flight, (there is no assigned seating, you just sit where you want) passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing, when a flight attendant announced, "People, peop...

Even in an elementary classroom the subject of sex comes up – *Sexual slang is overheard constantly coming out of the mouths of nine and ten year olds. F-this, F-that, she’s a B, he’s a D and so forth. They hear it on television, they hear it from older siblings, and they hear it from parents. Early on in my teaching career I advised a parent his son was using the F-word in my classroom. The father’s response…….”Don’t you have other things to worry about other than my child’s vocabulary?” Sigh….. *Sometimes historical content can lead down a path to sex. Once when instructing students about the Lewis and Clark expedition I decided to show a video from United Streaming. I previewed various sections. It appeared the video was full of visual images ( which I needed), and the content was safe for students to watch. When I showed the video to my first group of students the next day I was appalled to discover a few minutes of the tape discussed the fact that when the explorers m...

This post first ran in January, 2006 on my seventh day of blogging. I guess I thought it very important to establish early on just why history is so important. Enjoy! One reason why history is important it that the past has value to our society. Thousands of people throughout history have gone to great lengths to record history through newspapers, diaries, journals, saved letters, family Bibles, and oral traditions. It is believed that Aborigines of Australia actually managed to hang onto their history for 40,000 years by word of mouth. History is the narrative of mankind . It provides answers as to how people lived as well as provide for us the roots to certain ideas concerning laws, customs, and political ideas. Have you ever wondered where the rude gesture of pointing your middle finger at people you are annoyed at came from? One origin story states it reportedly began at the Battle of Agincourt where the French demanded the surrender of the English longbow men. The French demand ...