Me too! Small world.

I always knew you were a good guy.

I taught in Midland for a couple of years, they offered me a department head job, so I resigned and joined the navy.

I remember so little of the classes we took summer of 06, it was 8+ years ago... I remember a content area reading class that had potential, but ended up being a failure of a course. My class one day descended into a global warming debate. It was bad. People were making personal attacks. Tears were being shed. Another day there was an animal rights girl who was preaching against the circus because it takes animals from their natural habitat. I quieted her with one question "Do you have a dog?" Another student continued berating her for the next 3 hours. After the first assignment, the entire class period was spent by one table telling the professor that they had no idea how he was going to grade assignment. His response, which was inefficient for them, was "I gave you a rubric." The class was so bad that towards the end, my table had started a unifying movement to reunite the class called "hands across the table." We had a logo and made signs and everything. I think we were pretty successful in reducing the stupidity in the class. Did I mention this was suppose to be about content area reading?

I did later implement a content area reading program at my school to help students who were just below ongrade reading. We were targeting them in my science class and another history class. The affects of the class were mitigated by the councilors who had placed mainly students who were reading well above their grade level.

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I taught in Midland for a couple of years, they offered me a department head job, so I resigned and joined the navy.

I remember so little of the classes we took summer of 06, it was 8+ years ago... I remember a content area reading class that had potential, but ended up being a failure of a course. My class one day descended into a global warming debate. It was bad. People were making personal attacks. Tears were being shed. Another day there was an animal rights girl who was preaching against the circus because it takes animals from their natural habitat. I quieted her with one question "Do you have a dog?" Another student continued berating her for the next 3 hours. After the first assignment, the entire class period was spent by one table telling the professor that they had no idea how he was going to grade assignment. His response, which was inefficient for them, was "I gave you a rubric." The class was so bad that towards the end, my table had started a unifying movement to reunite the class called "hands across the table." We had a logo and made signs and everything. I think we were pretty successful in reducing the stupidity in the class. Did I mention this was suppose to be about content area reading?

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That'd make anyone join the Navy

Just realized I hadn't made my picks yet. Only a handful of games left to bet on.

I've got:

40% on UCLA
40% on Oregon State
20% on Nevada


Go big or go home!

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Just realized I hadn't made my picks yet. Only a handful of games left to bet on.

I've got:

40% on UCLA
40% on Oregon State
20% on Nevada


Go big or go home!

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It's so crazy, it just might work!

Nailed the arky upset

That's crazy, PS!

Our social studies group was pretty chill. I do remember how everyone used to try to one-up each other with terrible student stories on those Saturday meetings. One guy won the contest for the year when he told us how one of his students moms propositioned herself to him in order to get him to pass her daughter. There was a moment of silence after he told the story - which I broke by asking the question everyone was wondering: Was she hot? I still email with Dr. Kelly on a monthly basis or so. He wrote me a nice letter of recommendation when I applied to these doctoral programs.

My first teaching assignment came with coaching duties. Ever since then I've had a love/hate relationship with coaching. I love working with my kids, I love being outside, I love the competition, I love being "Coach" to someone; but I hate how much it takes me away from my wife and kid.

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Nailed the arky upset

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Same here.

I remember the propositioning story. The only funny thing I provided was a YouTube video of one of my students getting the crap beat out of him in a bathroom. I was embarrassed, one, because he was too chicken to lean into his punches, two, because I had some sweet take downs in my day as teacher.

Only other people in the cohort I really knew was specmeg who is a story all in herself and I remember the girl who died.

Dr Kelly was cool.

Good luck. If you ever want to talk assessments, I'm your man.

I'd be okay if I never talked about assessments or curriculum design again.

Every principal I've worked for takes a look at my resume and sees that C&I degree and asks or volunteers me to help write assessments or curriculum. That may be the most boring, dull part of being an educator.

I like writing curriculum. My 2nd year, I was writing the curriculum for all the science teachers in my school, except biology (i hate biology).

We had a lot of students transfer within the district during the year. Students who were taking the exact same class, but would be entire months off of my schedule. We didn't have a district science coordinator, so I tried getting the other science teachers in the district organized to have a common curriculum, or at least to follow the same schedule. It failed when the district brought in cscope. I reviewed the curriculum, said it could be implemented but was pretty sad. District bought it and noone used it.

If I go back into education, I want to be writing curriculum.

Assessments, I feel we are just failing. I wrote a proposal to my principal to revamp the entire district grading policy, including the report card. She wanted to pursue it, but then I resigned and she got a job at the district office dealing with tracking the statistics for the standardized tests, those things we were wanting to take on, at least at a local level.

I heard Thomas Guskey from Kentucky speak once on assessment. I feel in love with his thoughts and modeled my proposal on some of his work. I even wrote him. Not wanting him to think I was just some 2nd year teacher, I signed my letter Pro Sandy, M.Ed And you know what? I got a personal response from him. My principal who I sent a CC of the letter to said "Nice street cred."

I got plenty of stories of helping a to read. Stories of a kid who had straight As in my class while failing everything else and spending time in and out of jail because we could connect. (He also gave a talk one day in class about what jail was like. It was probably the best lesson some of the students ever got.) Stories of a kid who took my regular level class but I encouraged to take honors and graduated with distinction. But hey, my favorite stories are taking down kids after school by the bus stop. When I chased a kid the 2nd week of school, it did wonders for class room management. It spread like wildfire. "Did you hear Pro Sandy tackled a kid?" "Did you hear Pro Sandy punched a kid in the face?" Don't quell rumors like that. But then later, when i actually had to tackle a kid while taking a punch, my legend was cemented. Another day two rival groups were going to fight outside. They had crowded around the two leaders and were bucking up as the police officer was headed in with the pepper spray. I jumped in with another teacher and we began encouraging them to punch each other. They both accused each other of being to chicken to fight and walked away. I had active classroom management where necessary (we had some rough clientele), but was relaxed where I could be. Fair, even handed, but didn't put up with much. If you make chewing gum in class and dress code a big thing, they don't have a chance to actually do big tings. I enjoyed working with GT kids when I had the rare chance because I was a GT kid and knew I could give a lot of slack in discipline. But I handled things in my class and had the highest grades on the district EOC test (this was before the state EOC).

My favorite kids though, were some other kids just like me, Special Education. I had all the special ed kids in my classes. I loved working with them because they had never been in a science class before. I didn't worry that their IEP said they needed to be on grade level, these kids had never seen science before. They needed wonder and excitement first, then we could worry about getting to grade level.

I love what I do now, but I enjoyed teaching too.

Enough of that, so what are your plans to fix teacher attraction?

This tread has become too cerebral. I'm lost.

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Enough of that, so what are your plans to fix teacher attraction?

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Well, first of all, I'm glad there are people out there who enjoy writing curriculum - I wrote the WH curriculum for my previous school district and that process almost drove me to quit. I don't mind writing assessments as much; mainly because of how terrible most of the assessments generated by others are. I mean, how hard is it to make sure that there really is only one right choice to a question? Or that you are testing over the material that was to be covered in class? Or that everything is spelled correctly?! Or that your graphics and charts are actual readable?!?!

I'm referred to by most kids in my class as the meanest teacher I school. And by meanest, they mean I make them sit in assigned seats, I don't let them eat in class, I don't let them play on their cell phone all period, I don't let them leave whenever they want and I get on their case when they're late, I don't let them cuss in class and I tell them not to be afraid of people actually thinking they like to learn. That makes me mean. I've had three kids say they wanted to fight me so far this year. I told all three of them they could hit me first, but that they'd better knock me out. None swung (thankfully).

My plan to help urban districts like Houston ISD attract high quality teachers but more importantly retain them in the classroom is multi-faceted. First, wr need to focus our efforts on recruiting teachers with ties to our Houston communities. We can lure top teaching candidates (as well as those from other disciplines) by offering full-year 12 month contracts instead of the 10 month contracts teacher currently get. This extra pay would bump the yearly salary to about $70k and would also allow districts stable groups of staff for summer school teaching, curriculum development, continued staff development and campus-community relationship building efforts. I would also advocate teamed teaching the first year at campuses where staff turnover is particularly high (many campuses in HISD face rates as high as 50% every summer).

I want to offer teachers campus loyalty incentive programs in order to slow the attrition rates. Small amounts of money but I think districts could recoup much of the costs from these programs through savings gained in not having to continually hire and retrain new teachers every year. I want to redesign the advancement paths available to teachers to make it more feasible for our most motivated and best teachers to not leave the classroom to become administrators or curriculum developers, as is the pattern now. Creation of a class of "master teacher" who is devoted to strengthening the structure of their campus as a community center year-round would fill that role, I think.

That's the "short version." Written on my phone, I have no idea if it makes sense. I presented many of these ideas along with research backing up the need for change to my HR team including the chief HR officer and a couple of assistant superintendents back in October. They liked what they heard and are trying to get funding for a couple of pilot programs next fall. I'd love to work with them if that happens, but I've kind of realized that in order to get somebody to really listen to me, I'm going to need some more education and research on what's been or being tried around the nation. Hence he trying to get into grad school again.

ddp

I think we are probably quite a like in our teaching philosophy.

Speaking of that, I once took a girl on a date who was a professor at the local community college. I asked her what her educational philosophy was, you know, small talk. She said she didn't understand, so I shared mine. It includes my thoughts on assessment and how we just assign random number to students and call it good. I finished, turn to her, and she said "Well first off, I don't give students a grade, they earn it." It just went down from there. We finished the date with a trip to the waffle house that included an awkward moment of me being chewed out while holding my fork with a piece of waffle in my mouth. She said I didn't talk enough while eating. So I dropped her off. I didn't even ask her number. The next girl I met was my now wife.

I hear your ideas, but the biggest feedback you will hear is where does the money come from? But you know that.

I did team teaching my second year. I had a co-teacher who was the special education teacher while I covered science. It worked well. We had some obstacles to overcome in dynamics, but we united over our shared love of Bob Marley music and worked great together. But with her, the money was special ed money. We couldn't have done it with two science teachers.

But good luck with your endeavors. I think if you can show that your plan will work and that the money already exists, it just needs to be better allocated, you can change the world. Put me down for buying your first book.

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Enough of that, so what are your plans to fix teacher attraction?

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Hire hotter teachers and relax the dress code.

Wait. We are talking physical attraction, aren't we?

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Wait. We are talking physical attraction, aren't we?

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Nailed it. That's why I quit teaching, too ugly.

If you taught at my school, you'd get to meet a whole crop of new, young teachers every year.

I keep getting older but the teachers stay the same age. Amiright?

Alright, alright, alright.

And this is why I love this thread.

Saw Dumb & Dumber To last night my brother and my dad. Definitely several notches below the original, but it had several scenes in which I laughed way harder than I laughed at anything in the original.

I thought I was gonna bust a gut when Butthole the cat met Billy the blind kid's exotic birds.

I'm curious about the movie but the previews have been awful... It's gonna be a Redbox for me.

Your autocorrect scared me. I thought you were saying the original movie was bad. I was about to e-fight you.

ACK. Sorry about that.

I know, you feel downtrodden. You are low on money. You betted the milk money and your baby is starving. But don't give up hope!

Look at the graph!



Ok, well, maybe just give up hope.

This week, not much movement. Pro Sandy is creeping towards the century club while CDub tries to creep out.

Nick militaryed mid90, so mid gave him room. Will mid reload? (whoop?)

Get out there this week! Raid your wife's rainy day fund! There is money to be won, but you can't win if you don't bet. You also can't lose, but we're Aggies! True to each other! If we see an Ag in need of money, we give it to him, one football game at a time!

And that's exactly what we're going to do to them, Aggies!

Still not last place.

So two more weeks? Then we bet on bowls the same way?

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So two more weeks? Then we bet on bowls the same way?

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Nope. We just quit at the end of the regular season. No post season for us. We suck too bad.

Sounds like bowl season is your chance to show whoever runs the TexAgs pick'em that you can do it better than they can!

Rule #1 2.0 Pick'Em!

I honestly thought I couldn't get any lower.

Be thankful.