EducatingMe

The end of the year came and passed. So I can keep myself accountable, this is my theme for next school year, I am going to post my summer to-do list here. In between these nonpaying side jobs I have this summer, (it seems once the word gets out that you are "off work for a few months, you become a hot commodity) I have made a few goals for my summer. I plan to read several books. The first was Kim Bearden's Crash Course. I started this book last year but put it away when I made myself insanely busy building a curriculum. I loved how she used her students' stories to learn some great life lessons that she then shares with the world. It is a very quick read if you are looking for inspiration as well as so great pointers for ways to teach some of your same old content. The plan from here is fiction, then non-fiction and repeat. Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos is up next. Do you want a book review for each book? I am redesigning the inside of my van so the hubs can build it...

To say Sunday night's #oklaed Twitter chat was very upsetting would be putting it lightly. Question 2: To which I answer: A2: 1.)Fatherless Boys, 2.)Parents uninvolved in education, 3.)Bad choices I was not citing resources here. This is my opinion. But there are many sources out there that I could have used to back up my response. We were asked what we thought contributed to the School to Prison Pipeline. Nobody took issue with my response #1 and #3 in the tweet. But I was called out and blasted for being “accusitory” with my “lack of compassion” and “lack of empathy” for my second contributing factor. I said that lack of parental involvement in education was a factor, i.e. parents of students getting into trouble at school and thus being suspended are overwhelmingly less involved in their child's education. Is this matter here being contested as a fact? From this moment and the next 20 minutes, I could hardly stay involved in the actual chat at hand. ...

Ladies and Gentelmen, There has never been a more perfect match for me than my husband Travis Barnes. No, he didn't hijack my laptop. I am truly saying this. The guy is my senior editor. I will let posts fly through the publishing process without him (like this one, because ehe will hate the piece). These unedited version will be many flaws to them, misspellings, un-conjugated, structurally unsound sentences. I am NOT a linguist. He knows the in's and outs of language and is just good at getting his point across. I am a full on Brian Regan stand-up act when I speak or write. So I hand my latest email over to Trav to be edited. He and I watched a lot of Phineus and Ferb when the girls were younger, so I call him my smart-i-nator. He can change my words from Brian Regan to C.S.Lewis...from 4th grade to grad school. I told him today that i was quitting. He makes me feel so dumb so often when he edits my work. He told me to shut up. That if anyone felt dumb it would be h...

I found a new group on the Twitters the other day. It was a group of people talking about complex systems. On a deeper dive a ran into this article about  Teams . Yaneer Bar-Nam identifies teams as a largely useful necessity in the future of the world. I thought that his insights were adept, but I could't help but have a bad taste in my mouth when I think about teams, teamwork, or group work. In college, I was always the one pushing my team through and making sure everyone pulled their weight and ultimately finishing up the slackers work and making it look consistent. In grade school we were placed in pods and had group work...again, I would tend to back off of my ideas for the greater good of just moving with the team and getting the job done. As I read through his first post, I kept thinking I don't agree, but then into the thirst post, I started thinking about the only team I ever fully felt worked and worked well together. It was my team. I have said in the past, but I wi...

Watch it #oklaed. Our youth are watching you. You are their educators. Some of the things I saw intelligent, witty, and honorable people saying yesterday on social media were not intelligent, witty or honorable. If you have an opinion that's fine. If you want to protest thats fine, but please make sure you are keeping your cool and being smart. Stay classy in all you do. Even if you oppose  and despise that fact America must face for the next four years, keep your head. You are smarter than that and you are charged with making sure the youth is following your example. Say you just became the principal of a new building. You wanted that job because in your opinion, and lets face it many of the people in the neighborhood too, you see the school falling apart and its running down your city. You want to get in there and change up the culture. You get the job only to find your teachers are throwing toilet paper down the hallways and flooding the toilets because they wanted someone els...

For all of my readers out there that are red headed and also step children, please know I aim not to offend you. This colloquialism is commonly used and means:   With  red  hair being rare, a  child  born to non  red headed  parents was often assumed to be the  child  of an affair. Thus was treated badly.  Many of you know I work for a charter, a virtual charter at that. I and all enrolled at or working for Epic must therefore be passed over, like the colloquialism suggests, when it comes to anything that matters to anyone. EXCEPT, hello! We matter too. Anyone that attends or works for this school matters like other teachers and students across the state. Just because we are different doesn't mean we are less. Every teacher working for the state of Oklahoma this year just got a survey from the OK Dept of Ed...even Epic teachers. It is a survey that wants to know about teaching methods and all sorts of other things. The first que...

In 2016 I did not set goals for myself. I felt like I wasn't up for setting some lofty version of my self to try to live up to. I wanted to relax last year and just focus on the work in front of me. I had no time for additional goals. Well, then life hit. I had back surgery in January. I was the right decision at the time. I feel so much better these days, but it did not come without loss. I was told I could no longer be a runner anymore. Or a mountain biker, that I was a walker now. I was a swimmer. For those of you that know me, that was a major hit to my hobbies.  In March I attended the most amazing Ed Conference I have ever been to. SXSWEdu is the conference Educators must try to get to at some point in their career. It opened my eyes to the new landscape education is cultivating. This conference showed me that the moving and shaking in education was not happening in administrators offices. It was happening in the classrooms. This was a huge hit to my psyche. I always ...