Students are expected to go to school to learn how to read and multiply. They are expected to learn about the human body, gravity and Colonial America. They are reminded daily to write sentences beginning with a capital letter and ending with the proper punctuation. Those are all “givens” in the teaching profession. What about making friends? I didn’t go to college to learn how to teach my students about making friends. I think back to when my daughter, Katie, now a freshman at Dunedin High School, was in the third grade. She was out at PE and it was time to choose a partner for square …
What is it really like to be a kid in 2011? They don’t walk two miles barefoot in the snow. Don’t ask for help to fix your 8-track or Walkman. They text friends and download music. Goodbye, Duran Duran and Kenny Rogers. Hello, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. Girls' shorts keep getting shorter, and boys’ pants keep getting baggier. I aged a few years when it hit me that some of my San Jose Elementary fifth-graders had never heard of a typewriter or cassette player. The students of today have not been without cellphones and MP3 players during their lifetimes. As school years come and go, I am …
Halloween was here, and now it’s gone. Halloween on a school night is a punishment laid out on the parents and teachers around the world. Monday my students received my annual lecture: Have fun, be safe, don’t stay up too late, and please control your candy intake — and — if I find candy at school, you will soon find it in my tummy (especially Twix and Almond Joys!). When you ask your 10-year-old students in late October, to write what’s on their minds, you find that they write about the ONLY thing on their minds: Halloween! Many of my students love to write poetry. The short, precise …
As I picked up Friday’s St. Petersburg Times, the first image that I saw was a bloodied corpse of Libya’s dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The byline described the brutal last moments of his life. Also on the front page were articles about a Florida senator’s racial slurs and a Hillsborough County sheriff who was shot three times. Now, with online media in the forefront, there is a news story out there for everyone which can be accessed by anyone — even our children. As an elementary educator for the last 19 years, the last three teaching fifth grade at Dunedin's hidden gem San Jose Elementary, I …
