Category: Education Reformation

  • Can We Escape the Matrix?

    Many people are talking about what’s right and wrong with education; Luba Vangelova’s Steve Hargadon: Escaping the Education Matrix is a thought provoking position. Hargadon’s idea that we are in an “education matrix” of which many of us aren’t aware clarified my confusion over why people aren’t rebelling against this new wave of mandates. Why are…

  • Why are children crying about school?

    If you have a child who enjoys school, count your blessings. I don’t. I have a child who cries almost every night. He cries while we are working on his homework; it is too hard and too much for him. He cries before bedtime; he doesn’t want to go to school because he feels unable…

  • New York Principals’ Letter of Concern

    One year ago today, over 1500 New York State principals signed a letter that outlined their concerns over the new legislation for the evaluations of teachers and principals. Their three main concerns: Educational research and researchers strongly caution against teacher evaluation approaches like New York State’s APPR Legislation. Students will be adversely affected by New…

  • Animal Farm Lessons

    I love teaching Orwell’s Animal Farm to my high-school freshmen. It is an incredible allegory that illustrates Karl Marx’s well-meaning Communism, how it prompted the people to overthrow the autocracy of Czar Nicholas II, and ultimately how Joseph Stalin used those very principles against the people who thought they were fighting for their equality. The…

  • 8 Ways Parents Can Be Proactive in Education

    What can parents do to help their children be successful in school? I wrote a list of 32 things parents can do at home as part of raising their children in a previous post. However, there are also ways parents can be proactive for their children within the school and instruments of change in their school…

  • The Three Mistakes Parents Make

    In my last post I wrote about my perspective as a teacher and a parent. I ended with the question: What are parents doing that might contribute to the gaps in their children’s education? Here is my answer:

  • Parents in Education

    If parents really want to make a difference in their children’s education, they have the power to do so. Parents can truly be the biggest change agent at their schools. They can bring about change quicker than teachers and administrators combined. How do I know this? I have seen parents use

  • To Be or Not To Be…A Teacher: The Architecture of the Classroom

    In my last Education Reformation post about Teachers’ Roles, I defined teachers as guides or facilitators to students’ acquisition of knowledge. Truly, what else can we be? Teachers don’t have all the knowledge anymore. Back before the internet age, teachers were expected to be the experts of their content. In conjunction with the textbooks, teachers dispersed…

  • To Be, or not To Be…a Teacher: Teachers’ Roles

    I truly hate the present trend of teacher bashing: The belief that all the problems in our country are because teachers have failed us. I hope my past posts on education show that teachers are teaching in a broken system; the system needs to be fixed so that teachers can provide their students what they…

  • High School Reformation

    In my last post I discussed the experiential learning taking place in my journalism class. I believe this type of class is necessary at the middle-school and high-school level, but I am not suggesting that it’s the only type of class students will take. Students will continue to get traditional instruction in other classes, but by…