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Calling Words

A new student came into our program, and the tutors who have worked with him thus far have uniformly reported that although he can read all the words out loud (my colleague, who has worked in more...

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On Gender Bias in the EOGs, for a Change

I realize I talk a lot on this blog about class bias, really to the exclusion of other kinds of bias. I do this generally not because I don't think gender bias is important in education/standardized...

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post SOS

I got back from the SOS march late Sunday afternoon (a lot of driving!) and am now engaged in the final weeks of our summer semester. The SOS march was in some sense really exciting-there really were...

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Content Knowledge Matters For Everyone

A few nights ago, while responding to this post by FedUpMom, I inadvertently hit on a good way to explain the importance of content knowledge in reading comprehension (aided by my girlfriend, who is a...

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video on the importance of background knowledge in reading

Suburban chicken farmer over at Coalition for Kid-Friendly Schools directed me to this video by Dr. Daniel Willingham (a cognitive psychologist who works at the University of Virginia) demonstrating...

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A Class Divided

I just watched this very powerful video that aired on PBS Frontline in the 1980s. It deals with the brown eyed/blue eyed class exercise that a third grade teacher did with her class right after Martin...

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Friday

was a really hard day. We're trying to combine 2 GED subjects into one class, but because some of the students have already taken one of the GEDs involved, they balk or refuse to participate in stuff...

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On "Effective teachers"

I spend a lot of time aware that if I were a public school teacher under the current regime, I would have been fired long ago, unless I had been hired under Teach for America. The reasons I say this...

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Cattle-herding like a Champion; and why this is suddenly necessary

For probably the entire length of my pedagogical-reading life (so about the past two years),Teach like a Champion, by Doug Lemov, has been recommended to me by every book-buying and library searching...

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Oh, I should also say...

That my classroom management problems appear to have been solved, at least temporarily, by my reading my students the riot act on Friday. (According to Lemov, you should not read riot acts because it...

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forensic linguistics

I think I've written here before about the difficulty I've had with getting my students to discuss dialect in a productive way. Considering the truly incredible media deluge that constantly tells them...

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Forking of the Road

The past few months have been a dry spell for my 2 GED classes. I've always had people pass their tests in the relevant subjects within relatively short periods of time, and generally most students...

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Oh, yeah, and it's Yom Kippur, y'all

As thoughts of repentance and food fill Jewish brains all around the world, here are some people who are acting with bravery and passion to remind corporations and government of their moral...

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at the hour of the closing of the gates

One of my students had to go to the hospital for an emergency operation two days ago. It was the kind of thing that if you had insurance, you would have gotten checked out before it got bad, but he...

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Inner City Tragedy

One of my students got arrested. Based on what they're alleging he did, there's a good chance he won't be coming back any time soon. It's pretty awful, and I'm left feeling like he's one of the...

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hidden vocabulary knowledge

My students and I are looking at/for brand names that are actually words in not-directly-related-to-their-products ways. An example is Pampers, which my students were convinced actually meant "diapers"...

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back after a long hiatus

I haven't felt like posting here in a long time-maybe because I haven't been feeling great about the job I'm doing as a teacher. Maybe because of my mixed feelings of hopefulness/hopelessness about the...

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A concrete quandary about ebooks on phones

A new conundrum-most of my students, like many low income folks (and probably teens especially), access the internet through their cell phones. I mentioned to a couple of them that they could get...

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The New GED

I'm sure this isn't on the radar of anyone who's not an adult educator, but a new GED is being unveiled in 2014. The reason? Essentially that a new company has purchased the right to provide it (I...

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Reading for Pleasure

Had a conversation with a colleague today about a new student, who she was setting up in our Pre-GED program. She said the student had chosen a book that might be a bit below her reading level, but...

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