Pat’s Polemics

An article on Florida’s new requirement for five hours of mental health education a year in high school sounds like a step forward, but the (Continue Reading)

When I tested over a story I would make fresh copies for the test b/c students often wrote the English above the FL words. Besides (Continue Reading)

My son told me about five parents wrote letters to the school telling them of my son’s influence on their children….. all very positive. Now (Continue Reading)

Many years ago I presented at ACTFL and called it 30 Years of Black Culture in the Classroom. My main point was that the information (Continue Reading)

As quick as I can be 🙂 I am assuming you have students of various ethnicities in your classes. Much of what I write here (Continue Reading)

“True–because university fl teaching has been so slow to change, because even methods courses are often not up to date; because textbooks and the way (Continue Reading)

When I entered teaching, I found quickly and sometimes to my chagrin that teachers have a certain profile, part of which is what might be (Continue Reading)

I bring up notebooks in responding to this query only in connection with grading, a recent topic on moretprs. I forgot to mention notebooks as (Continue Reading)

Far from being a scold regarding features of grammar, spelling, and word choice, I welcome innovation in rhetoric and style. More and more, though, I (Continue Reading)

from the Diane Ravitch blog: That is, all too often technology is no panacea to improving learning and often undermines funding that might have gone (Continue Reading)

Reading Susan Pinker’s summary of the research on electronic devices in the classroom as aids to learning, my little heart leapt: let’s quote from p. (Continue Reading)

I’m curious. How many of you have seen a teacher walk off the job, not return. In my 26 years of teaching, I saw it (Continue Reading)

From The Village Effect by Susan Pinker, p. 77: “It was not so much the actors’ gestures that elicited a response, Iacoboni suggests, but the (Continue Reading)

From the Diane Ravitch blog: William Doyle describes an emerging international consensus about the appropriate and limited use of technology in the classroom. Doyle starts (Continue Reading)

To support the use of non-electronic media, II would note that more and more research is catching up to the wildfire-like spread of electronic communication, (Continue Reading)

Francis Fukuyama in Political Order and Political Decay pp. 187-88 is attributing the change in society from ascribed status in part to the printing press (Continue Reading)

This fits in with my plan to put items like this in my “Quotes and Anecdotes” category on my blog. Pithy, I say, pithy. Laurie (Continue Reading)

Sarah Palin used a Russian word in her speech at the anti-Iran deal rally, fortochka. I forget the equivalent she gave it, something like escape (Continue Reading)