
One of my favorite bloggers, Mr. Accountable Talk, is a tad cynical over the decision of UFT President Michael Mulgrew to seek authority to declare an impasse. After all, PERB has screwed us before, and more or less nailed us to the wall in [...]


You may remember my post about Lena, the girl who claimed to not like anything in an interview with a classmate. I haven't posted about Lena in a while because I've been concerned about revealing too much about her, but since I choose to keep [...] 


“How old are you?”


If you've been following my blog, you know that the Specialized High School Admissions Test has been a pet peeve of mine from the blog's earliest days. It bothers me that lazy, half-interested kids who happen to be good at taking tests get invited to [...] 
I know that many of my colleagues and readers have had (or currently have) the problem of parents who are, shall we say, too involved in the education of their children, and by this mean involved to the actual detriment of their children. I have not [...]
Maybe you're in the wrong line of work. CNN states that high school teachers have one of the most stressful and poorly paid jobs anywhere. That's certainly not encouraging. It makes you think you aren't half as smart as you thought you were.
Mayor-for-life Michael Bloomberg sees privatization as the key to all our woes. After all, look how well it works in the health insurance field. Look what it's done for our national economy. It's kind of like watching the national GOP. In boom times, they [...]
There's always drama in the air when you're hanging around with a few dozen teenagers. In my beginning ESL class I have a young man with a fairly wicked sense of humor, but alas, insufficient vocabulary to express it. The class is in a semicircle. I like [...]
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is the touching, sad, beautiful story of a young Japanese girl who was dying of leukemia caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. She begins making paper cranes to pass her time in the hospital and hopes to [...] 

Serena is just about everything you could want in a student: she's bright, hardworking, pleasant, respectful, helpful. She comes from a wonderful family that supports her in every way. Most importantly, she's not one to complain gratuitously. So when she told me recently that she had [...] 



It was a crazy day for Miss Eyre, and she just couldn't have lunch with the kiddies. There was too much going on, and she needed some peace and quiet and time to grade a handful of papers. But, as it happened, she also needed to swipe' [...] 
Lena is a very quiet girl. And when I say quiet, I mean too quiet. Like something isn't right.


So the copier over at the Morton School has been having some..."issues." Some of these issues are fictional while others are true. Teachers have been getting copies made any way they can, and, when that's not possible, kids are doing an awful lot of copying. One [...] 



Why is Bloomberg going after Thompson so hard? Conventional wisdom [...]

