Being Different Archives:
Just the other day our local paper featured a report credited to Christopher Connell/The Hechinger Report announcing that “Teacher bonuses don’t help test scores, report says.” In a “scientifically rigorous test”, middle school math teachers were offered salary bonuses contingent on improved test performance by their pupils. In short…it didn’t matter much.
This is news? I [...]
Kids who are motivated to learn…if you could poll every teacher everywhere, and ask all of them to share their fondest dream about their chosen profession, it might be just that. Kids who want to be there, kids who don’t need to be threatened or catechized or shamed or lectured …or bribed…into going through formalized [...]
In my last post I admitted that in the process of becoming an old guy with a white beard, I may have learned a few things about life that could be worth passing on. Here’s one of them…
Everywhere you look (or read, or listen) these days people are talking about educational reform…fixing what’s wrong with [...]
Not so long ago I got a real surprise. I was out spending a warm summer afternoon with friends when the fifteen year old nephew of one of them asked for my opinion. I don’t remember exactly what I told him, but I will not forget how he answered me: “That’s wise advice from a [...]
The just be a regular guy part was especially hard for me to work out. I honestly did not understand some of the things a boy my age was supposed to do without having to think about them. I went off dutifully to day camp that summer already knowing that I’d get teased for things like caring [...]
School has been out for a couple of weeks now, and here in the Pacific Northwest nature’s gift of summer has conquered her lingering stage fright and made an appearance.
Ever since I was a kid, just old enough to appreciate what treasures a quiet summer morning like this one might hold, such times have been magic for [...]
Last Sunday was Father’s Day. As it turns out I am not anybody’s father…that’s something you’ll get to read about when Side Door To Heaven is ready for publication…but there was a lot going on for me anyway. Out at the airport the Olympic Flight Museum has been putting itself together from the ground up over the [...]
What should I write…and why should I write that? Well, there are books and then there are essays and articles and blogs, all of them headed toward the same goal, but leading me along different and varied paths to get there.
Over the past twenty five years or so I have written many, many technical/special interest [...]
What’s that like, being a writer? What does it feel like? People ask me that a lot. As often as not I suspect that what they are actually asking is what do you really do…are you for real…and maybe how do you spend all that time by yourself, without a boss, and not just goof [...]
Where do you live…what place do you call home? For many of us these two questions may demand entirely separate answers. That’s certainly the case for me. It has been thirty seven years just this month that I pulled up my affairs by the roots and as the saying goes, went West. For a long [...]
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