I am going to recycle a post I did several years ago. It is a post about tragedy but also about why I teach and accept the good and the bad.
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We were given the question at an in-service about the day that we wanted to quit teaching.
I am going to recycle a post I did several years ago. It is a post about tragedy but also about why I teach and accept the good and the bad.
…
We were given the question at an in-service about the day that we wanted to quit teaching.
The story for today isn’t about my time at Rangeview. It is about my time at Vivian Elementary in Lakewood growing up. As we pass into the year 2023 I am reminded of how far away the year 2000 is. It is as far from my high school graduation as the year 2000 and I remember thinking about how far off that was.…
Last day before break. This is a bittersweet day. I am tired and need the break but I know that after three days I will be chomping at the bit. Vacations are a time to evaluate and prepare. The one lesson I have learned in thirty years is that no matter the planning, there will be things that change it and shuffle things.…
This is a thank you and one a secret about our building. In Aurora, we have been lucky with the community passing bonds for school improvements. In my tenure in APS we have passed them all. I will later tell some stories about being on the committees that passed these bonds.…
Being a computer teacher has its advantages. I often will get things before anyone else and get to try them out for others. Earlier in the blog, I spoke about the introduction of laptops to our itinerant staff and how we were unprepared for them as a district.…
Today is the 81st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing to force the US into the Second World War. With that in mind, I will do my favorite veteran. This person is not a staff member at Rangeview but was as important a part of my work as most of my faculty colleagues.…
If I am going to be honest, there is one person that I have spent many hours with that has been a big influence. Tammy Strouse has been a steady force at Rangeview for the entire time I have been there.…
Every now and then you run across a storyteller with exceptional skills. Rob Schurich was one of these in the Business Department when I got to Rangeview. His favorite courses were his law classes and a class he did for Intersession.…
We have just completed the Thanksgiving weekend and I will take this time between this and the winter break to be thankful for colleagues. I am a strong advocate of focusing on the students but colleagues build your environment and create or destroy a happy workplace.…
Yesterday I told a story of inspiration from a student at Rangeview. Today I will tell the story of one of my students. We had a wheelchair-bound student with a deteriorating muscular disease. He was interested in art and graphic design.…
Our employee number is used for an immense amount of record keeping. The most telling is when we use it during employee meetings for staff development. When I give mine I am usually met with: “No honey, the 5 or 6 digit number you use for payroll.”…
A teacher has a lot of choice in their environment. I did cause a little problem my first couple of years when I moved my room. The class was all in rows with the computer facing the front of the room.…
Intersession! This was one of the greatest ideas we ever had at Rangeview. Our principal felt that we needed something to spice things up a bit. It was also at a time when the first semester ended in January. It was a strange three weeks.…
One of the joys of working at Rangeview was the Business Department team. Cindy, Rob, Tom, and Ingrid were a joy to work with. We had fun and still were leaders in the building. None of us took ourselves too seriously and enjoyed the relationships with the students.…
I have been near-sighted for as long as I can remember. It was discovered in junior high school by a wonderful English teacher. John Glover discovered that when I sit in the back I just goofed off and was a class clown.…
Starting at Rangeview was a new start and a new challenge. I was working with a new staff and learning new systems. The first thing I discovered was that a staff of almost 150 is very different from an elementary school.…
Yesterday I talked about meeting Marc Stine at my Aunt Dorothy’s funeral and the winding way I put in for a transfer. Today is about the interview process. I had mentioned to my principal at Montview that I might not even get an interview.…
I am moving into high school. I will still do an elementary story now and then but it is time to transfer to Rangeview High School. I will be using my experience in several areas as the basis for these stories.…
I have a few thoughts on teaching elementary that I want to share. This is my last post for my elementary years and I still have a ton of stories. I want to say that teaching for nine years in elementary was the best prelude to teaching high school.…
Welcome back from Fall Break.
Today is one of the ways to break up a staff meeting. Any teacher who has been to a staff meeting understands. Unfortunately, they can’t be leveled like we are asked to do in our classrooms.…
Teaching has given me the good fortune to meet many influential teachers over the last few years. One of my favorites was meeting and talking to Donald Graves. Donald Graves was a leader in the reforming of writing. His books stand out as beacons of light as a way to instruct young writers.…
It is not what you know but who you know. This will be a repeating theme in my story. On September 6 or Day 18, I spoke about getting hired. This is about the interview before getting hired. The first time I encountered this was while getting hired at Montview.…
In the words of that great philosopher Kermit: “It isn’t being green.” Most elementary teachers use themes to enhance their rooms and build the sense of family. My first few years saw me use a frog and green theme. It was at this time that cell phones were starting to become more common.…
Usually, businesses and other organizations make sure not to have spouses working together. In our case at Montview, we were looking to hire a special education teacher. My principal asked me if it was okay to hire my wife away from the private school where she was working at the time.…
One of the important things for a professional is to measure their words. We have all opened our mouths and placed our foot directly in. This is even more important to be aware of if you open your mouth and insert your foot and potentially offend a supervisor.…
I was a member of a small group of innovators that started technology specials in elementary. In our district, we had Carl W, Andy Y, Randy W, and me. It was the opportunity of a lifetime to create something exciting and new.…
I had the joy of starting a technology special at Montview. It was a perfect rotation for a year-round school and kept the specialists on a similar schedule. I had kindergarten through 5th grade all year long. I had to develop lessons and work for every level.…
Names are fun and they can have some humor. One day almost thirty years ago was particularly challenging. A problem that Montview has is the transiency rate of the school. We often had 50 or more kids rotate through our class in any given year.…
I had a cooperating teacher that was very savvy when it came to training me. Student teaching is always stressful but parent-teacher conferences can be the worst. Barb decided I needed to do some of them alone while she sat and watched.
I believe that if you take yourself too seriously, others won’t take you seriously at all. That is a bold statement to take about teachers. Many teachers suffer from the “too seriously” bug. They know that their job is pivotal to the success of a community, state, and country.…
The importance of reading can never be under stated. Today I am going to talk about one of my most stressful and rewarding times as a student and seeing the same in my students. Book orders were one of the best memories I had as a child.…
Working on 9/11 in a school was a difficult undertaking. All of the obvious questions swirled in our heads. Do we tell the children? Do you interrupt teaching to view it? Not every classroom had a projector or TV so do we show them anything?…
Teaching has given me opportunities that others might not have. One of my favorite was serving as an exhibit interpreter for the Imperial Tombs of China at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the mid 1990s. It seized on my desire to learn anything I can.…
Recently I did a post about the cafeteria manager who got teddy bears for students. I want to now tell the story of the “Book Lady” that kids loved. Mrs. Truman lived down the block from Montview and had lived there for many years.…
I have had good luck with serendipity during my career. The first example was how I started working in Aurora. I had an interview with Montview and with Rock Ridge in Castle Rock. Rock Ridge was the school where I student taught.…
I hear from students that they will change their habits when they get into the “real world” but school isn’t as important. I always try to have a discussion with them that they are better off establishing good habits now when it is easier. …
Monday June 15th found us in Strasbourg, France. It is a unique town on the Rhine River and has alternated between France and Germany for centuries. Again we had the chance to ride the trains into France. It was a short hop and didn’t take much time at all.…
I am not Catholic but I coach baseball at a Catholic high school. I have discovered many traditions that I like from the athletes and the school but there is one that I have shared with them. Vespers is traditional nightly prayers or devotions around sunset.
We were given the question at an in-service about the day that we wanted to quit teaching. Every teacher has them and we were asked to keep this private and think about how that might also apply to students and how they feel about school.…
There’s a world where I can go
And tell my secrets to
We grew up with the threat of being sent to our rooms. Even with the threat of our rooms, we used the time as a way to be angry, happy, lovesick, sad, hopeful, and all of the other emotions associated with being a kid.