Scene from an 8th grade homeroom at the end of the school day, with only a few remaining students waiting to hear their bus numbers announced on the intercom. The female homeroom teacher, up until that point tidying up around the room, pausing to sit with one of her 8th graders who sat with her [...]
Scene from a late afternoon session in an English Language Arts middle school classroom. Early in the lesson as students are quietly working on their opener task, the teacher gets a glimpse of subtle mouth movements from a girl sitting in the front row. She’s minding her own business, but some rule is being broken [...]
Scene from a high school science classroom as the teacher was prepping the students for their homework assignments. A simple worksheet to reinforce the concepts of niches, communities and populations in an ecosystem. The teacher taking a few moments to go down the list of animals to make sure the students had heard of them [...]
It gets lost all too often in the bigger policy discussions in public education reform–the moments of levity in ‘the audience,’ the conversations between teacher and student and the students themselves in all the spaces that develop during and in between instruction. That’s what you get, what the best of us really love most, when [...]
A learned truth from my experience as a classroom teacher and now, frequent observer. Side conversations aren’t always a bad thing. Sure, there are plenty of cases where the opposite is clearly true, but to be fair, you have to listen closely enough, with the eyes and ears in the back of the head kind [...]
A few days before the winter break and a teacher hard at work introducing her freshman students to the world of genetic heredity and Gregor Mendel. A latter part of the class lesson, the teacher asking the kids questions about genetics and reviewing an introductory worksheet on Mendel’s Law of Heredity. Prompting the students with [...]
There’s something about tables filled with food that puts the classroom in a whole other dimension. A shorter day in the city’s schools today, students (and teachers!) waiting to spill out happily into the sunny, temperate weather. Thanksgiving tomorrow and the academic year’s first lengthier long weekend. (Sorry Columbus Day weekend; the extra day, the [...]
Learning about the life cycle of insects should never get old. The magic of metamorphosis, of steady and magical change from one body form to another, captured best with Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Man, that grub could sure eat! And you have to love that relatable diet combination of fruits and the sixth [...]
I read through a number of elementary student writing reflections during one afternoon this past week—ill-gotten products from the five-minute ‘time out’ table. A mix of samples from first to fifth graders, from native speakers to English Language Learners. A kind of sullen, brutally-honest (and unrevised) poetry. I was flicing cubes at people Mr. _____ [...]
A Gathering of Fungi in the Classroom
Sometimes, it’s just bewildering to witness, and even more so to guide, the steady flow of students in and out of your classroom; especially at the middle school level where students are at the cusp of kid-hood and teenage-hood, and where in our city schools, they are often still lined up and accompanied to and [...]