Wondering when the ton of bricks falls inside my head, and other occupational hazards of teaching
Because of my grading obligations, I haven’t had too much chance to think about Oliver Bernsdorff, a Pinellas County teacher and former USF student who killed his family and then himself Friday morning. That night, I talked with a friend and colleague who also knew him and we went over the obvious questions you’d ask […]
Damn
Pardon my French, but I knew him when he was a student at USF. I have to finish grading, so there probably won’t be any more entries for a few days.
What would Nation X do?
Today, my morning paper had a column by Susan Taylor Martin, Finns set teachers free, with enviable results, discussing the secular, largely-standardized-testing-free Finnish schools that have enviable student outcomes by almost any measure. On the one hand, this argument is extraordinarily tempting: See what the Finns do? We need to do that: provide substantial social […]
Facebook and ethics
Ed Felton has an interesting commentary on Facebook’s Beacon scandal, when Facebook alienated their members by allowing members’ non-Facebook activities to be shown on facebook (think browser cookies). Facebook backed away, but Felton’s observations about organizational behavior are relevant to more than privacy. Let me reword his section on five inappropriate behaviors/tendencesi… Overlawyerization: Organizations see […]
Waiting for the criticism of Winerip
Michael Winerip reports tomorrow on a new ETS report by Paul Barton and Richard Coley, The Family: America’s Smallest School. Shades of Moynihan’s response to Coleman, anyone? (And does anyone else know the reference for that?) I expect the blogs next week will be full of criticisms, at least of Winerip’s reporting if not the […]