My husband’s grandmother was born and died in a tiny coal mining town called Athens, Tennessee. She lived there her whole life. The one and only time she ever left that town was when she took a bus to Texas to visit her grandkids. Back in those days, for folks like her, their whole world was the county…
I’ve been a student for a very long time now. My first degree was in psychology – very very interesting – but not practical no matter how many boyfriends I tried to ‘analyze’. (There’s a reason I didn’t become a psychologist – I barely understand dog behavior.) I went to one of the top teacher’…
This blog post has been lingering in the ‘draft phase’ for the past 3 weeks. I don’t know why, but it’s been one of the hardest topics for me to put my thoughts into words. However, our course deadline looms ever so near, and so I decided that even though my thoughts on the topic…
I took a big risk today with our fourth grade students. I gave them my gmail account name and password. Ok, not my main one, but a new account I create for them so they could access their new class Flickr account. But let me backtrack to the reason. Yesterday, for the second year in…
“How do you think you would react if the school called us in for a meeting because our daughter had been caught engaging in cyber-bulling behavior and they were threatening to suspend her?” My husband blinked. “Theoretically, right? She’s only in kindergarten.” “Of course I replied. “Ok. Answer this instead: Would you blame her, yourself, or the…
The more I read about the perils of existing in the cyberworld, the more I’m glad all this tech didn’t exist while I was going through the ‘reckless’ phase of my youth. Digital cameras, ubiquitous Internet access, and Facebook were not available (yes I am that old) the night I spent on a Russian merchant…
Our grade 5 students study the US government to give an introduction to the topic and to serve as a comparison to communism, dictatorship, socialism and monarchy. In my role as ESL teacher for grades 4 and 5, I often co-plan & co-teach the social studies lessons since these often have the most difficult vocabulary…