A Totalitarian Power Grab, and What You Can Do

There has been a fair amount of press recently about the rise in challenges and bans of books in libraries and public schools. A recent, high-profile example has been McMinn County, Tennessee, which is near where I live and work. At the end of January 2022, the McMinn County school board released a statement explaining its decision to “remove the graphic novel Maus from McMinn County Schools because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” 

Now, community hysteria and moral panic and desperate pleas to  “PROTECT THE CHILDREN!” are nothing new. Several decades ago, it was the Harry Potter series, and before that, heavy metal. One of my favorite old books is Paths to Perdition, which was published in 1922. It includes a section about the evils of ‘modern dance.’ The modern dance to which the book referred was not the jitterbug or Charleston; it was the Viennese waltz. 

The Potential Benefits of Round Robin Reading

Sharing a book with those you love is a great way to build a love of reading.

Do you remember being read to when you were really little? Can you think of any stories that were your favorites? I don’t have the book anymore, but one of my favorites was from a collection of stories, and it was “The Little Lonely House,” about a house whose family had moved away, and it watched people come and go on the street, and there was lots of description of that. But then, eventually, one of the cars turns, and it comes up the drive, and it stops at the house, and a family gets out and goes inside. And the house was filled with noise, and light, and laughter. I still remember the final sentence: “And the little lonely house wasn’t lonely anymore.”

I want you to think about the feelings that are associated with those memories. Hold onto them for a few moments. 

Learning Loss

At the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, the COVID-19 pandemic had been in full force for a year and a half. Vaccine rates were up and both new cases and death rates were down. And everyone was tired of closures and social distancing and, you know, the effects of an international plague. People wanted to “get back to normal.” 

My school, and many others, opened up fully in-person. But as cases started increasing again, teachers, parents, administrators, and pretty much everyone started noticing that something else wasn’t “normal.” Students didn’t enter their new courses with the same level of academic knowledge and skill that previous cohorts had. Their behavior was different. And their attitudes were different as well. 

The phrase “learning loss” had been trickling through educational discourse all through the previous school year, particularly with regard to the disparity between students from wealthier families, who were more likely to have better access to resources for effective remote instruction and better support, and students from poorer families, who were less likely to have access to those same resources. Educational achievement has always correlated closely with wealth (or the lack of it), and think tanks and pundits were warning that the pandemic was likely to widen that gap.

Pinktober, Representation, and Individuality

Well, it’s October. Has been for awhile. And apparently there are a whole lot of things that we either celebrate, honor, or try to build awareness for during October. Some of them get a lot more coverage than others; for example, until I started putting this video together, I was not aware that October was Squirrel Awareness Month, or even that there was a Squirrel Awareness Month, actually, much less that it’s different from Squirrel Appreciation DAY, which is in January. 

Isn’t it amazing what you can learn from the internet?

Late Work

Missing due dates is a problem that every student faces sooner or later. Different teachers handle it in different ways. Obviously, it’s really important to be aware of an instructor’s late work policy; you can often find it in the course syllabus. This will help you make decisions about how you should prioritize your efforts.

My policy is that I do not deduct any points or credit for work turned in late. It doesn’t matter how late it’s turned in; it still receives full credit.

Persuading vs. Arguing: What’s the Difference?

Hey everybody! Today I’m going to talk to you about a skill we all need to be good at, which is PERSUASION. Basically, that means being able to get what you want. But before we get started, I want to explain the difference between persuasion and manipulation. Persuasion is convincing others to help you get what you want using evidence, logical reasoning, and emotional appeal. Manipulation is convincing others to help you get what you want through deception or intimidation.

Still from Disney’s Treasure Planet: Scroop threatens Jim Hawkins.

Expectations

During the past year and a half of instruction during a global pandemic, there has been lots of discussion about “learning loss,” and to what extent (or even if) we should be worried about it. However, I have seen less about what our expectations of students ought to be, or how we should form those expectations. And that is something that concerns me, especially given that in addition to changes in students’ instructional gains due to the pandemic, I will also be teaching a completely different course load this year, including two courses I’ve never taught before. If I go into these courses with misplaced expectations, I’m setting not only myself up for failure, but my students as well. 

Mandated Testing: What Students Really Need

I’m not anybody all that important. I’m just one public school teacher. One among about three and a half million. I don’t get to be the person who makes the big decisions; I’m the one who gets them handed to me. And, unfortunately, I’ve kind of gotten used to the decision-making folks not listening to me. I dunno; maybe that’s why I’m as opinionated as I am.

I know that the decision-making folks are really, really busy, and they’ve got a lot of people who want to be listened to. 

By the time I release this on my channel, we’ll be a few weeks into the 2021 school year. As I’m sitting here writing this script, it’s Day 7. I have 32 students enrolled in my English II class. It’s during the block when we have lunch, so I’m with these students from 11:25 until 1:40. In less than a week, I knew all their names. 

Part of that is because of a new activity I incorporated this year – the Five-Day Feedback Form, AKA “name tents” – which I’m going to do a video about later on. 

On Monday and Tuesday, I had thirty students present. Yesterday it was sixteen. 

Image: An empty classroom

Judgment

Since I’m writing and filming this just before the school year starts, I’m including my Amazon wishlist at the end of the post. I teach at a school in rural Georgia, so these are things that aren’t so essential that I’m going to get them myself, but that I think would be nice bonuses: multicolored pens and markers, skin-tone crayons and colored pencils, and cooperative games. So, absolutely not essential, but if you do feel like helping out, I would be super grateful!

Image: Haitian-Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka lights the Olympic torch.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 Summer Olympics were pushed back a year. They started on July 23, and will continue until August 8. 

The Olympic Games are completely unique. No other event captures the level of prestige and splendor it carries. And while the events are competitions, the sportsmanship and even cooperation shown by the athletes embodies the “spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play” described in the Olympic Charter. 

The Blue Curtains

Hi everybody! Today we’re going to look at figurative language – specifically, why people choose to use it. I’ll discuss different types, how to recognize them, and how to use them in later posts, but I think that before we get to knowledge and skills, it’s important to reflect on purpose. This will help provide a foundation for understanding the knowledge and skills once we start exploring them.

As always, follows are great, hallelujah, but what I would REALLY love is if you left me a comment. Maybe your favorite example of figurative language and why it’s so interesting or meaningful, or something you don’t understand that you’d like me to explain in a future video. Or further discussion of some of the points that I raise in this one. Or even just a comment to say hello. I love all of that.

The internet is an amazing thing. It gives us access to all kinds of information and enables us to connect with many different people from all over the world. In a lot of ways, that’s fantastic. And in some other ways, it sucks.

A pie chart illustrating “Sturgeon’s Law ” – “ninety percent of everything is crap.”