Once per month, my immediate family and I all meet at my mom’s house to partake in another of what we call “Haircut Night”. It is a Mysels tradition. My aunt is a hair dresser and we use the first Tuesday of every month to get together, get a trim around the edges, and enjoy a meal. Last month’s Haircut Night was a particularly memorable one.
“So when are you going to work in a real school?”
Topics: Tech & Teaching
In today’s digital world of text-messaging, chatting, hashtagging, and online schooling, many fear the loss of communication skills and the ability to improve those skills.
The fear that young people’s communication skills will suffer in both their social and professional lives is heaviest among educators and parents, but is this fear legitimate?
Do young people’s communication proficiencies suffer because they live in a virtual world? Does “digital” mean lack of proper speaking and writing?
Topics: Tech & Teaching
“In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I’m going to reveal my weaknesses, you say, wow, here’s a chance to grow.” ~ Carol DweckAs we become young adults, many of us are faced with a variety of daily challenges. These challenges provide us ALL with the opportunity to learn and grow individually. From the time we open our eyes in the morning, until the time that we close our eyes at night, we are forced to make choices that will ultimately determine our journey towards individual success. At the Pennsylvania Distance, some of these important choices include attendance in your live learning sessions, participation in these sessions, daily lesson completion, and communication with teachers outside of regularly scheduled sessions.
Topics: Stories, Tech & Teaching
Topics: Tech & Teaching
Topics: Tech & Teaching
In Virginia Woolf’s masterful and strange Orlando: A Biography, Orlando begins writing a long poem, “The Oak Tree,” when she is a young attendant on Queen Elizabeth I. She continues to work on it over the course of her 300+ year life, constantly revising, changing it, transforming it into something new. By the end of the novel, she plans to bury the poem under the oak tree of her youth that inspired the poem. That way, it can continue to transform and grow after she has passed away.
An old adage says that “a poem is never finished; only abandoned.” I prefer to say that a piece of writing is never finished, only ready--to send, to publish, or to turn in! And while publishing a poem or turning in an essay for an English class might be a form of abandonment, it should also be an opportunity for that piece of writing--and the writer who created it--to go on growing like that centuries-old oak tree.
Why, then, do we English teachers so often assign numerical grades to a piece of student writing, then abandon it, along with its writer?
Topics: Tech & Teaching
