Teacher Voices I

Are You the Teacher Who Gives Parents Homework?

*If keeping this style we will need to update the piece below. It has formatting and spelling typos from the transfer.

by CAROLE CHIN

EVERYONE knows what it means to be the parent of a fourth grader at this school:

It means the beginning of new things. It means that there's a bus ride every day and you wonder whether your child will be safe. It means it is both an exciting and scary time. It means he [your child} has made the transition from a small school to a school twice the size of the primary school. He is reunited with old friends...

Paradise Lost: Introducing Students to Climate Change Through Story

“This country has been the basis of my being. And when it’s no longer there, you know, it’s unthinkable.”

Ueantabo Mackenzie’s haunting words in the PBS NOW documentary Paradise Lost shook me. I knew I wanted to teach a unit on global warming, especially after participating in the Portland-area Rethinking Schools curriculum group, Earth in Crisis. I didn’t have to be convinced that students need to learn about global warming. It’s one of the defining issues of our time. But Mackenzie’s message startled me: Global warming is here, right...

Skeletons Out of the Closet: The Case of the Missing 162%

By: Bob Pressnall
Publication: The Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3
Date: Summer 1995


Summary: A Quarterly article often reveals a teacher's mind at work, providing readers a ringside seat as the teacher observes, changes, rearranges, and fine-tunes classroom practice. In this article from 1995, Bob Pressnall engages in all these things. We watch him as he keeps revising his efforts to teach revision, telling students pointed stories, drawing cartoons, and finally devising a "skeleton." It is this last strategy that moves students closer to an understanding of...