Bird Droppings January 13, 2016 Trying to find a way back to normal “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio. Gotta get down to it soldiers are cutting us down should have been done long ago. What if you knew her and…

Bird Droppings January 12, 2016 We have to try and care So far for this year and the tail end of last year all the snow, sleet and ice predicted have never showed up just cold, fog, wet and nasty. It has been unseasonably colder than normal with scatterings of warm weather still only a…

Bird Droppings January 11, 2016 Learning is a journey strewn with boulders “In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we…

Bird Droppings January 8, 2016 Walking and listening among the Cotton Woods I awoke very early to a vivid dream and walked outside briefly as I do many mornings listening observing trying to understand this reality I am walking about in. The sky was covered in clouds and raining as I stood on my porch.…

Bird Droppings January 7, 2016 Can we say true heroism and humility are spelled the same? Even though I am one of the worst spellers in this local area, I know heroism and humility are technically spelled differently. I will concede to using words to come up with a perhaps catchy title for my daily…

Bird Droppings January 6, 2016 Caring is a very precious commodity in life And some thoughts from Maxine Greene As I am pondering my early hours today before heading to school an article dealing with charter schools and how they exclude many students. The air temperature is chilly outside and we are under a slight…

Bird Droppings January 5, 2016 Horses and Trains and learning It has been many years since I last rode on a train. I mean a serious train going more than the distance between concourses at an airport. Years ago when I lived in the Philadelphia area, we all used mass transit to commute, to go…

Bird Droppings January 6, 2016 The fragility of life Early this morning I was awakened a bit early our dog and we both needed to take a potty break. Hearing what I thought was rain and a teenager I assume tearing out of our subdivision about two in the morning did not help my sleep…

Bird Droppings January 3, 2016 Building Sandcastles drip by drip It was nearly fifteen years ago when I was physically attending classes in graduate school nearly every day and before switching to Internet classes and WebCT. This took some getting used to going to school and then going to teach school. I was teaching from…

Bird Droppings December 30, 2015 Setting an example is such a simple lesson plan “We taught our children by both example and instruction, but with an emphasis on example, because all learning is a dead language to one who gets it second hand.” Kent Nerburn, The Wisdom of the Native Americans I have over the…