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Teaching and life are simply feeding wolves.
Bird Droppings March 12, 2025Teaching and life are simply feeding wolves. When I opened my computer this morning, the news stories were depressing. It has been about five years since numerous news stories and jokes addressed the college guidance company that was busted for getting wealthy kids into college for money. Today we are faced…
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Why is it when putting a puzzle together, a piece is always left behind?
Bird Droppings March 10, 2025Why is it when putting a puzzle together, a piece is always left behind? “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!” Gail Sheehy, American journalist, author…
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A morning meandering while the rain keeps coming down
Bird Droppings March 10, 2025A morning meandering while the rain keeps coming down Almost ten years ago, after tutoring in an after-school program with a student who needs constant repetition of material to remember, I read through several old emails from my doctoral and graduate cohort friends as some are defending their dissertations in the…
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The inability of surmounting learning difficulties
Bird Droppings March 9, 2025The inability of surmounting learning difficulties I will borrow from old droppings and share them again when the message is important to me. In one of my last IEP meetings, my student was reaffirmed, yes, you do have a deficit in math according to state testing. However, choosing not to do…
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Children are being taught as they live.
Bird Droppings March 8, 2025Children are being taught as they live. It is a beautiful spring day outside and quiet after a crazy couple of days of severe weather. It seems the solitude of the country has changed rapidly over the past years. A developer bought our subdivision and has put up thirty more houses.…
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Quietly listening to Bob Dylan and pondering the word inspiration.
Bird Droppings March 7, 2025Quietly listening to Bob Dylan and pondering the word inspiration. My mind wandered back fifteen years or more to a county-wide teacher kick-off meeting. I thought back to 2020 and many teachers still monitoring lessons from computers but not in the classroom. Many communities banned gatherings of fifty or more. With…
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Is there a difference between progressive and traditional teachers?
Bird Droppings March 6, 2025Is there a difference between progressive and traditional teachers? In a ninth-grade literature class I co-teach many years ago, I was introduced to the book, Freedom Writers Diary, and the film based on the book. In some ways, the story is similar to the story of Foxfire. Erin Gruell, a first-year…
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Our teaching can make a difference every day.
Bird Droppings March 5, 2025Our teaching can make a difference every day. I recall one day that I was looking through data as I sat through a special education training session. This is an interesting situation. I was reviewing data from a recent benchmark test in biology. It is an extremely poorly made and designed…
The daily meanderings of a teacher 