Monday, April 21, 2014

4-21-14 Curmudgucation

CURMUDGUCATION:









Why Should I Study This, Anyway?
Never once during a football game so athletes stop chasing the ball, lie down on their backs, and compete to bench press the most weight. And yet all those football players spend hour after hour in the weight room.You probably aren't going to marry that woman you're dating right now, so what's the point in trying to learn how to talk to her or how to work out the finer points of your relationship.

CCSS Politics Make the Daily Beast Sad
Nobody can accuse the Daily Beast of being unclear about its position. "The Incredibly Stupid War on the Common Core" says the headline, followed by the subheading, "An unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions threatens to derail the most promising education reform in decades." So right off the bat, we know where Charles Upton Sahm is headed.The lead graph

Why Are Teachers So Quiet?

Some recent comments on this blog took teachers to task. A parent activist noted her own work against the current reformy regime and then added "and teachers as a profession and individually refused/refuse to step up and do their share of push back - paychecks were/are more important than the principles at stake and our children's wellbeing."Recently, Susan Ohanian, a respected voice in
4-20-13 Curmudgucation : How To Do Real Teacher Evaluation
CURMUDGUCATION: How To Do Real Teacher Evaluation: How To Do Real Teacher EvaluationThe fans of Reformy Stuff are not wrong about everything. For example, they are correct that the general state of teacher evaluation in this country was pretty useless. Their mistake was replacing Inertly Useless with Actively Destructive. The old system was a simple two step process (1- check for teacher pulse; 2-