The importance of culture

Pay attention to culture. At each of the schools where I’ve worked, most of the students have been black and almost all the teachers have been white. I’ve seen teachers struggle to connect with their students because they think they have nothing more to learn about the kids and where they’re coming from. I’ve also seen teachers from all cultures connect brilliantly with students. These are the teachers who are constantly reaching out to connect with their students and their families, and to base their teaching on that understanding. What music are they listening to? Who in the mass media are they paying attention to? You need to ask these questions and pay attention to the answers as you craft your own message.

- Larry Miller

Found on a T-shirt...

I am not slacking off, my code is compiling...

A test on Creative Thinking

Write down as many different uses as you can think of for the following objects:

1. Blanket
2. Brick

If you are reading this, lease participate! Write it as a comment or email.

Racism is reflected in a hierarchy in which beauty, intelligence, worth, and things associated with whiteness are at the top. The school is one site in which this hierarchical arrangement of skin power is confirmed daily. It is also a site where it can be undone.

Anti- Racism is a proactive strategy for dismantling racist structures and building racial justice and equality. It must become a perspective that cuts across all subject areas and institutional practices.

- Enid Lee, in “Anti-Racist Education: Pulling together to close the gaps,” in Beyond Heroes and Holidays.

Quote of the Day by Robert H. Schuller - "Tough times never last, but tough people do."

Education Quotes from Readers' Digest

The mind is not a vesssel that needs filling but a wood that needs igniting
- Plutarch

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
- Sydney J. Harris, Journalist

Education is the progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- Will Durrant

On Reading part 1

The book is the axe by which we break open the frozen seas within us.

- Franz Kafka

I must work on speaking clearly

CHECHE: I reserved the theatre at our complex.
ME: That's great! What are we going to watch?
CHECHE: I don't know yet.
ME: Hey, I have "Two Lovers" I got it from netflix.
CHECHE: What???

The importance of keeping one's own glossary

I have forgotten the word I intend to say, and my thought, unembodied, returns to the realm of shadows.

- O. Mandelstam, Russian Poet

9Now I am glad I sent it, not because it hurt you but because the pain turned you to God. It was a good kind of sorrow you felt, the kind of sorrow God wants his people to have, so that I need not come to you with harshness. 10For God sometimes uses sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek eternal life. We should never regret his sending it..." II Cor 7:9-10 TEV

Forgive yourself for making mistakes: Your first year of teaching will undoubtedly be full of them. Don't be harsher on yourself than you would be on your most trying student.

- Dale Weiss