The Plight of a Red State Teacher

I have watched the direction in which our GOP dominated legislature and governor are leading the state regarding education and I am feeling rather hopeless. It’s not just in my state, but public education is in trouble in every red state in the union.

5 Things I Learned About Effective Schools

For the past two weeks, I attended a Gear Up conference which was designed to help us implement the Common Core Standards, but also help us create a high performance learning environment in our school.  Here are some things I learned: 1.  Schools Are Museums – Technology is advancing at an alarming rate.  It is

How to Produce a School Yearbook Cheaply Through Createspace

I just finished my fourteenth year of teaching English at the high school level and look forward to a fifteenth.  I think back to when I started, and how I was roped in to teaching a yearbook class because I really needed the job and thought that if I took on some electives, it would

The Last Day of School: A Retrospective

I am a high school English teacher with four children attending elementary school.  Two of them are graduating to the middle school next year and the other two will climb the ladder to the fourth and second grades, respectively.  I am currently spending my time updating the inventory of books in my classroom, squaring away

Kristie Colby: Why She Is the Love of My Life

As part of the “A to Z Blogging Challenge” and because this is my 100th post, I could not write about the letter that begins my wife’s name without writing a blog post about her and how she is the inspiration for every female lead in all of my fiction written since the day I

Kid Diplomacy: What We Can All Learn

Something happened to my son at school that made me think about the way that adults and for that matter even nations treat each other and what we can all learn from children. My son had a falling out with his best friend at school Friday.  Something happened on the playground, then words were exchanged,