To whom it may concern:

Why am I leaving?  Long story short, our current school system and certain administrative practices are not letting me do my job.  I cannot work in an environment where only half of my time can be devoted to the art of teaching.  I retired from the military to become an educator, and I am compelled to go where I can do this more effectively.  Authentic teaching is done free of the restrictive standards, unattainable objectives, and insanely burdensome administrative minutiae that are imposed upon us every day.  I became a teacher to serve the kids and the community, not the greedy, idealistic inexperienced administrators, corporate interests, and politicians who are destroying our beloved profession.  I find myself each day spinning wheels trying to stay ahead of their game, crunching numbers, while our students’ true education suffers.

Year after year, “they” keep piling more and more…

Surely this is animism or some such PC nonsense! Do you have a favourite?

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When Marilyn Monroe learned that the Mocambo, a popular Hollywood night club, would not book Ella Fitzgerald because of segregation, Marilyn phoned the manager and told him that she would reserve a front row table every night that Ella performed there, knowing that her presence would get a lot of press and publicity for the club.  As per usual the colour green shouted louder than any other colour issue and Ella became the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo.

As promised, Marilyn was seated right up front to enjoy her favorite singer.

Did you know that?

“I believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that there’s a stereotypical definition of someone who suffers from depression…That stereotype is completely inaccurate.”

Somebody I know got in touch and asked me to share the below piece they wrote, with the hope that it might resonate with someone; that it might just help someone. It’s candid, and it’s courageous, and it can’t have been easy to write. I’d ask that if it strikes a chord with you, you might share it. And try to remember that no matter how low you feel, how despairing, that chances are, you too have more to give.

Thanks to the writer for entrusting me with his words, which I have reproduced in full below.

“I’ll miss Doggy when I die”….The first words I heard this morning when I walked into my daughter’s bedroom. She was in floods of tears. I comforted her as best I could…

An interesting history and religion resource

In December 1941, when Hungary severed relations with the US following America’s entry into the second world war, Maria Madi, a doctor in Budapest, started keeping a diary for her daughter, who had just immigrated to Louisiana.

Madi did not know if her daughter would ever see her words. But she wrote anyhow. About the war. About the Nazis. About the suffering of Jews. And about the two people she hid in her apartment, at times behind a large mirror when visitors came to call.

By war’s end, Madi, who was not Jewish, had filled 16 notebooks in handwritten English that serve as a grim portrait of the Holocaust in Hungary and of a defiant woman sickened by its cruelty.

“I am going to see, to hear, to witness everything,” Madi wrote, adding later, “it may happen of course that neither myself nor my…

Recently, there have been a number of tech tools that have been created to help enhance teacher productivity and improve assignment workflows in the classroom. Take, for example, the excellent OneNote Class Notebook Creator. It is an ideal app for Office 365 schools who want to quickly distribute materials to a whole class, have students work in a paperless environment, while also providing a collaboration space for the whole class to work in.

Google Apps schools are flocking to Google Classroom – a management tool for teachers who are looking to consolidate and simplify the flow of electronic files. It lets you make a copy of an individual document and distribute it to students with permissions configured automatically so that only the student and the teacher can see the document. There is also a discussion feed for students to communicate inside your Google Classroom.

iPad classrooms are using workflow…

Change. It’s all about change. Let’s talk about change.

Changes:
The world is changing, we are told. Thanks for the heads up! The Irish education system needs to change too. No argument from me there, but anybody who actually teaches teenagers every day will tell you that change is everywhere in schools. Take my classroom: in the twenty years I’ve been dispensing wisdom it’s change a hundred times. The desks have changed, the blackboard became a whiteboard, we got a fire door, and I got technology. When I think about my own secondary education I think chalk and talk and that was still the way when I started but something else clicked for teachers over that time, my methodology has morphed from standing at the blackboard and telling the kids the story, to listening to what they say and letting them do the storytelling. This reform will mean re-placing…