Blue-Sky Teaching

I'm getting ready to return to school on Monday. I have a lot to write about last semester, but first I'm going to venture further into the question:  how do we help the kids who feel unreachable, the ones who seem driven to cause chaos, pain, and suffering to everyone around them?  For me, this has been a week of learning about the toughest kids we have and it started in an unlikely place:  with witch doctors. I'm often reading four books at any given time:  one adult novel beside my bed, one adult novel on my iPad for reading on the treadmill (in the snowy winter); one book to listen to in the car; and one YA novel as a classroom modeling book.  My in-the-car book is usually nonfiction, sometimes biography (I listened to Michelle Obama's  Becoming  recently); sometimes self-help and motivation (like  Good to Great  by Jim Collins); sometimes something historical like  The Boys in the Boat   by Daniel James Brown.  And som...

[Guess what?  I actually wrote this post a whole year ago.  Then life got messy and I started questioning everything about myself as a teacher, and well, like a kid who thinks the paper they just wrote might be terrible, I just abandoned it.  But tonight, on New Year's Day evening, I opened it up and have decided it's time to share.  I did split it into two posts because it was really long, so the next one will come soon.  Maybe if I can send these out into the Universe, I'll be ready to write again.  Fingers crossed.] As I let the dog outside this morning I noticed that it is still snowing.  It started on Friday about noon and it's now Sunday morning.  I don't know the official total but I do know that my fifty-pound dog is now wading in the snow.  He's too tired to leap around like he did yesterday.  I'm guessing we're close to 20". At about 11:00 yesterday I rallied my three children (age 15, 14, and one month shy of 13) to don ...