The Blue Blog

Last week I went to Meadow Valley Middle School*, an urban 6-8th grade school, to work with sixth-grader Lynn* during Ms. Smith’s* third hour special education math class.  However, Ms. Smith had signed her class up to go to an assembly to celebrate Black History Month, so I attended the assembly with them.  While I [...]

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Erica’s original writing can be found at:
http://ericaphotiades.edublogs.org/2006/02/23/
personal-reading-teachers-and-administrators-2/
This weekend I had the chance to read Erica’s response to an article about a substitute teacher who committed suicide after being manipulated and falsely accused by administrators.  While I think that administrators are generally wonderful people who are giving their all to help students, I am glad that [...]

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The original article by Stacey A. Teicher can be found at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0222/p14s01-legn.html 
After two and a half years at Michigan State University, I have seen a lot of different factors make an impact on the success of students during their time here at MSU.  Physical and mental health, family problems, alcohol or drug use, and all manner [...]

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I was personally very thankful for the topic of this week’s reading because classroom management is one of the things I have always felt very nervous about. I found it very true to life that the authors included a brief mention of the fact that many teachers, at the beginning of their first classroom [...]

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Collaborative Tutoring Plan

Goals
Despite the fact that we will only be in the classrooms at Meadow Valley Middle School* (pseudonym) for a total of six hours this semester, we do have some goals that we hope to accomplish. Here is a list of them:
1. Establish a professional relationship with the student or students.
2. Assist student(s) [...]

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The original article was written by Tracy Jan and can be found at:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/02/12/she_
aims_at_getting_girls_hooked_on_science/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News+%2F+
Education
The last time I watched television for a few minutes to pass the time, there was an ad aired in which a small girl asked her dad why the sky is blue.  He had a cute response for the 6- or 7-year-old girl, [...]

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The original writing by Chris can be found at:
 http://cbauer.edublogs.org/2006/02/08/brophy-class-reading-rebuilding/
I would like to respond to Chris Bauer’s comments on how tracking could be used in schools to separate students by abilities.  While I do think that it is important to challenge each student according to their abilities, I am not sure that using tracking methods with [...]

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Overall, Brophy’s ideas for helping discouraged students are focused on individualizing teaching strategies for effective coping through modeling and classroom practices.  My first thoughts when I read some of his suggestions were about the more difficult nature of putting some of those suggestions into practice in a secondary school setting, where each student has several [...]

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The original article was written by Stacy A. Teicher and can be found at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0208/p15s01-legn.html
The article I read this week discusses the growing amount of students who are taking and passing (a score of 3 or above) Advanced Placement classes in the United States each year. Of course, part of me is overjoyed to [...]

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Motivation has been a topic in education that has always left me at a loss for words.  I always thought that there was no real way to “motivate” students in a classroom setting, but that as a teacher one must hope that students will want to get something out of the material.  I have therefore [...]

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