Being a teacher is rewarding and I enjoy most things about my profession.  But being a teacher in a Christian school always gets people to ask, “Why don’t you work in public school?  You’d make better money.”  First of all, this is true although more money more problems because there’s a lot of politics involved in public schools.  Also, no teacher public/private/parochial decides to go into teaching for the money.  Let’s be honest. At the turn of the twentieth century, this book, Education published that […]

Not coming from a liturgical church community, it’s only been recently that I’ve discovered the other Christian “holidays” outside of Christmas and Easter. Living the Christian Year is a good introduction to the idea of living a year with Christian rhythms and seasons.  In the protestant denomination I grew up in, Advent and Lent were seen as Catholic.  Not something that was bad, just not something that our community participated in.  The downside to this is, that it seems pretty boring to just wait for […]

Sharks.  They are my Achilles heel.  For some reason they are my irrational fear.  Yes, I lived in California, but I’ve never been deep enough into the Pacific to actually be in danger of sharks nor have I seen one in the wild.  Ever since I was a kid though, they have been the one fear I couldn’t explain.  As an adult I’ve just learned to own it.  And I’m not the only one. I was browsing my library’s new arrivals section and meandered over […]

Previously I had read a book by Cathy Vatterott called Rethinking Homework.  Rethinking Grading which is also by Vatterott.  Grading harmonizes a lot with Homework and shares Vatterott’s base philosophy that grades should be grounded in learning objectives, should be as objective as possible, and behavior should be kept separate. For example, some teachers incorporate attendance as one of the categories that factor into the overall grade.  While attendance is important to the educational process, does it relate to how well you wrote an essay?  […]

This summer I had to take a summer class.  It’s the bane of teachers everywhere.  Fortunately, it’s the last one I’ll have to take for the foreseeable future, and the class was relevant to my field.  The book that was required for the class, luckily, was less textbook and more guide to assessing and preparing differentiated instruction.  I was pleasantly surprised by how hands-on it was.  Most books on pedagogy are very philosophical. I fond that the strategies and ready-to-use forms are something that I […]