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Standards-Based Grading: Never “When”, but “How?”
Is there any value in being a hardass about how students show proficiency? I’m thinking back to a related-rates1 project I had my kids do. They related the immersion of a popular culture character’s name (like, “Jeannie” in the late 1960′s) to the frequency of it as a baby name (Social Security Administration data). Some [...]
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Teaching Pre-Calculus to One Kid All Semester: The Dance of the Sallies
Is Sallies the plural of Sally? It is now. Thank GOD I can write about math again. I’ve come through my blue period (being obsessed with grading reform) and I’m back to actually teaching math. Right now I have one math student; she’s a refugee from the Pre-Calc II class down the hall, and I’ve [...]
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Competency-Based Education: Learn From My Follies
I had a conference with a parent this morning. I love meeting parents and talking with students, and I try to avoid the typical rhetoric that goes along with these interactions in favor of rawness. This student hadn’t really done much towards meeting his competencies. He was a in-and-out kind of student. I called him [...]
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It’s Star Wars Day! Remember Your Tahy D Be
May the fourth be with you. Har. Har. Does it matter if I know the order in which the Star Wars settings are visited in order to assess well as a fan? What is assessment’s use? How can you possible rank me in my first course in biology? These are the questions I struggle with [...]
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Global Physics Department: Stephen Hawking Was Busy
The Global Physics Department has asked me to give a my schtick this Wednesday evening! I’m more than honored and can’t help but worry about underwhelming everyone. The format uses some pretty fancy audio/video integration as well as a shared canvas and an unexplained bowl of fruit sent to your closest 3D printer. Tune in [...]
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Competency-Based Education: Quotes and Notes
Competency-Based education is another opportunity for educators to speak in acronyms. This makes us feel fancy as we retreat to our windowless hovels in the basements of countless 1960′s-era, anti-riot buildings. Seriously, though, CBE is a way of individualizing education by keeping track of individual competencies and allowing for asynchronous projects and learning. Teachers change [...]
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Standards-Based Grading: The Smiley Method
One of my former students just came back to visit. All teachers know that this is usually super fun, rewarding, and mortally terrifying . Young undergrads rarely have enough experience to look back on what I did to them and wonder why I was so negligent. That said, I really try not to be; teaching [...]
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Language Arts SBG Summit Q&A Where I Don’t Actually Attend or Get Asked for my Opinions but I Give Them Anyway
My school is hosting a totally sweet Language Arts Summit tomorrow. I will not be in attendance, but I will be there in spirit. (Pig dissection in full effect) Here are my responses to the initial questions compiled by the attendees (Attendee Questions: My super thought out responses not typed the night before or anything [...]
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Laser Pandas
First, don’t attempt to understand Laser Pandas; the Laser Pandas will choose to understand you. The point of Laser Pandas was to be a bad game. My premise is, and always will be, that teachers take far too much of the cognitive load onto themselves. We get caught up in the minutia of lesson [...]
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Watching Bowling
I usually spend my Sundays watching marginal sports programming. It’s a habit I’ve retained since college. Today, it’s NCAA championship women’s bowling. Humanity has a quality to it that is completely ineffable, but I know that it’s seen in part during sport. You know, getting something done–anything–despite cultural valuation on whether it should be [...]