The dreaded email arrives at night. We are having an emergency faculty meeting before school tomorrow. Your heart immediately sinks. You have already heard the whispers. You know something terrible has happened. You rush to school. The meeting has started. It sucks. Everyone is crying or awkwardly standing around. The proverbial black cloud has arrived and will not leave anytime soon. You hear the words being said by your leader yet it all seems surreal. How do we process when terrible things happen to young people? There is no silver lining. No circle of life justification that makes it ..read more

This weekend I saw reality bend to an individual. This is not hyperbole, embellishment, or exaggeration. The idea was sparked years ago through multiple conversations, arguments, debates, and dissension around people’s hatred of icebreakers. The smoke came first. Wisping through the air like an engine on fire in the distance of a traffic jam. The smoke arrived in the form of disbelief that teachers honestly didn’t enjoy human interaction with each other. With each exchange, I could see the idea being formed through the wavy lines of the increasing heat. “How can I create human interactions tha ..read more

This was a great way of rethinking our curriculum. drowningintheshallow I dislike the guiding principles of ‘broad‘ and ‘balanced‘ when it comes to thinking about the PE curriculum and the selection of activities and sports within it. They are vague, they don’t help the design process and they don’t really apply to an individual subject but to a school curriculum (for a nice critical perspective read Colin Richard’s Impact magazine article Broad? Balanced? Curriculum?). However in attempting to remove these principles from people’s thinking I have been met with strong resistance. They a ..read more

The whirlwind of SHAPENJ’s 103rdconference is over for me. It started early on Super Bowl Sunday. A handful of dedicated people showed up before the convention in order to get the registration booth organized, set up the convention hall, and do the other million things that need to be done at the last minute.  Once this was done we were able to breathe and get ready for the Super Bowl! The game was awesome and the people were even better. A crooked pool table wasn’t going to ruin the night for us!! Once the game was over it was time to get ready!  Monday morning came way too quickly ..read more

Whenever people talk about what is the most important thing in education you always hear relationships. Relationships matter. The three R’s. Relationships. Relationships. Relationships. Everyone agrees relationships are important. The value of relationships to me cannot be overstated. It would be like trying to describe how great pizza is. How underrated putting mayonnaise on the outside of a grilled cheese sandwich is. (Thanks Christina Torres Cawdery) Or just how much fun Wordle is. We simply can’t exaggerate how powerful each of those things really are. Once I realized how important relatio ..read more

This post was written by Andy Milne. He is the 2017 National Health Teacher of the Year and all around amazing individual. He is always looking at the world through the lens of equity. Take a read. The quadrennial behemoth that is the Olympic Games is the sporting celebration that can be everything to everyone. Depending on the lens through which you view the Games, you’ll notice things, have different views and experience the event in ways different to others consuming exactly the same events. If you’re a traditionalist, like me, you view the Olympics through an Ancient Grecian lens, admiring ..read more

Today June 14, 2021 was the final day of the marathon school year that will forever be known to me as the CoVid Years. To separate the last two years would be like asking what would Pinky be like without Brain? Who would Ben be without Jerry? What would peanut butter do if it had never met chocolate those many years ago? The years will be lumped together forever much like the blizzard years of 2006 and 2007 that created the wildest winter experiences of my childhood. This was an extraordinary time that honestly pulled me toward my limits. We can safely say that most of the world experienced an ..read more

There is nothing better in the world than learning. Connecting new information to old information is one of the greatest gifts we have as human beings. My newest dive into learning was created by the New Jersey Principals & Supervisors Association. I was extremely interested in the law surrounding LGBT+ students and their rights. David Nash, Esq., LEGAL ONE Director, was running the show in the morning in conjunction with Robyn Gigl, Esq. Together they created a calm efficient way to disseminate the information. If you are involved in the NJ education system I would highly recommend you at ..read more

This blog post was a collaboration between Justin Schleider and Doug Timm. We are good friends as well as accountability partner. We both believe in and are actively working towards Collective Liberation.  Together we, Doug and Justin, (his name goes first because of alphabetical order not because he did more work or is more important although we let him think that) feel a drive and commitment to offer our voices and ideas to issues we feel are important.  Based on the growing evidence from the insurrection and reporting with primary source video from the insurrectionists themselves ..read more

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a movie on Netflix. It is Chadwick Boseman’s final movie ever. That is literally all I knew about the film when it came out. Truthfully, what else do you need to know? I round up my people and ask them if they want to do a Netflix party (now Teleparty) and watch it together. We watched the movie typing away in the chat box. The movie ended and I was left wondering just what exactly I was feeling. So to fill in a couple of blanks without giving the story away Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is an adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play. Ma Rainey is a big blues/jazz si ..read more