Back in the day I wrote a time or two about grades and grading. I'm currently reading a seemingly unrelated book that made me think about grades and grading through a new lens. For whom are we grading? The most common answers seem to be for colleges, for parents, and for students. Perhaps we should take a little time and look at each of those more closely. For Colleges It is certainly true that college admission's officers like them a good GPA. But it's also true that there are quite a few high schools that don't use grades and their students still get into college. So clearly grades aren't re ..read more

If there is anyone out there who is still subscribed to this blog via RSS, which may be unlikely given the dearth of posts in the last year or two, this is just a heads up that I retired from teaching last week so there will likely be no further posts on this blog. I suppose it's possible I will get inspired to write some more about education, or even find an encore job related to education that gives me fodder to write some more here, but I wouldn't count on it. Thanks for all the learning on this blog over the years, and thanks for all the retirement well wishes I've received via Twitter. A ..read more

There has been a lot of discussion in my neck of the woods lately regarding the effect of social media use on our students (I teach in a high school). This is partially due to our own experiences dealing with teens and social media, partially due to some recent tragedies in our community, and partially due to a recent article in The Atlantic. This is an important and necessary conversation to have with our students, and one we should be having all the time, not just when tragedy strikes. But one response that some folks have been advocating concerns me - the idea of having "technology-free" d ..read more

So, I thought I might be done with posts on this blog, but an acquaintance asked a question recently that got me going, so I thought I'd share here as well. The question was, "My child will be 4 years and 9 months at the time Kindergarten starts, should I start Kindergarten 'early' or wait another year?" I, of course, had some thoughts. Here was my response: My wife wrote a long email the other day in response [to the question]. She lays out some of the pros and cons of the different options. We pretty much agree but, not surprisingly, I will state my opinion a little bit more forcefully. Sh ..read more

   Cross-posted at Fisch Financial. Let me be clear up front, I'm passionate about sustainability, particularly the use of sustainable energy, and I believe climate change is a very serious threat. I think everyone should be concerned, not just for themselves, but for their children as well, so I of course think you should go solar. But, even if I didn't believe all of those things, you should still consider going solar for financial reasons. We put solar panels on our roof at the end of 2009. That's only 8 years ago, but there's been tremendous change in the solar energy industry ..read more

Sorry for the departure from education-focused posts, although this is focused on financial education. Introducing Fisch Financial. Financial advice for Colorado educators (and those they love). Absolutely free ..read more

We spend a lot of time in education circles talking about preparing our students for the future. And rightfully so (a large portion of this blog over the years has focused on exactly that). But I think it's important to also realize that we as educators need to be doing more to make sure the future is one our students can live, learn, and thrive in. Most of you are probably aware that former Vice President Al Gore has devoted his post-elected-office life to addressing the issue of Climate Change. What you may not be as aware of is that he has an entire team of folks dedicated to helping him ..read more

Ten years ago this month* (*now last month because I haven't been able to get this written) I wrote about a PowerPoint I showed to the staff at my school during a faculty meeting. I don't have anything really profound to say (never have), but I did think it might be interesting to look at what has changed in those ten years. In a word: everything. And nothing. (Okay, three words.) Here are a few things I've noticed: In 2006 we had No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In 2016 we have Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In 2006 in Colorado we had CSAP and ACT for our mandated state testing. In 2016 we ..read more

I was reminded of something this week that's been bothering me for a while. My school takes attendance, of course, and then parents are required to excuse their student's absences. If a student misses class and isn't excused by their parent, their absence is marked as "unexcused." I imagine that's the way most schools do it, and I don't have a problem with that. We have a legal requirement to keep track of attendance and, more importantly, if a student starts to have unexcused absences it's often a signal that they need extra support (although excessive excused absences are also often a sign o ..read more

Really interesting podcast (first in what is hopefully going to be a series) from Michael Wesch. I'm still processing what I think about the entire podcast (there were certainly parts that made me uncomfortable, which probably means it's something I need to think about more), but I wanted to pull out this quote about what real Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) should look like (about 6:53 mark): And we have to help them achieve all this within a bureaucratic structure that demands that we frame our goals in a few neat bullet points at the top of our syllabus in a section called: Student Learnin ..read more