Relationships are complicated, and sometimes changes happen so gradually that we don’t even notice them. I had this experience with a friend at Rangeview.
Bobby was a custodian at Rangeview and had been there almost since the beginning in 1982. He was a fixture, the institutional memory of the school.…
There are a few questions asked by every umpire before a game. One of the most important question is: “Are your players properly equipped?” This is the do your players all have a jockstrap and cup on. This is critical for a few positions and was often a battle for us as coaches.…
Creating cybersecurity classes can be fraught with concerns, as schools and districts often harbor apprehensions about the potential for inadvertently fostering hackers or criminals. It’s essential that these programs incorporate a strong moral component. Fortunately, my experience has shown that many students self-select out once they realize that cybersecurity involves more than just breaching systems.…
The following excerpt is from Seymour Papert’s book Mindstorms, published in 1980, yet its relevance to current classroom practices persists. The book is over forty years old and is still as important today as it was in 1980. The passage below speaks to a project by students using “Turtle” programming to create a holiday sign.…
This is the completion of my official retirement blog. I did exactly what I said I would do. I have a story for every student contact day. I will be branching out a little bit because I still have many stories to share.…
One of the hallmarks of my business classes was bringing them real-world situations. I told a lot of stories about me and my friends and so I had a series of law stories based on Lakewood. This was not my idea.…
The Beach Boys’ song Graduation Day is fitting for the last week of the school year.
Another good song: Graduation by Vitamin C
My wish for the kids by Lee Ann Womack
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Sometimes we need to serve as monitors for our students. I had a teacher in high school who refused to use my nickname, and his reasoning always made sense. He felt that it was important to honor the student, and using their name instead of a nickname reinforced that idea.…
If you know my daughter, please don’t tell her I wrote this story about her in high school. All children lie to their parents a little. No matter how virtuous they are there is a fib here and there. My child is no different.…
People need refuge on occasion. I am an introvert at heart and can spend hours just in quiet or with my music. I know my facade is as an extrovert but that is what I do to teach and be in the world.…
I am going to start doing some stories from our part of exchanges at Rangeview. Bud Blauer & Patrice Dovas-Hudson had very strong programs. Bud had a school in Kazakhstan to support the Russian language program. I loved having the students in my classroom every year and as a result, I received one of the most prized souvenirs of my teaching career.…
St. Valentines Day. A day of love, fun, and romance. The single most important romantic advice I give to students is: “Your future spouse is not currently attending Rangeview!” The hope was that students understand that the vast majority of high school romances end and that there is more out in the world other than Rangeview.…
CyberPatriot changed my career in many ways. That first group was an amazing year. None of us knew what we were doing. The students, mentor, and I were not sure how to train. We did it every Wednesday afternoon for a couple of hours.…
A little advice from James Brown in 1967.
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BRING TOILET PAPER AND HAND WARMERS. It is not often that you see a headline like this. In 2009 we had a group of students attending the Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC. The trip had been planned for many months without regard to who the winner would be.…
Rangeview has been good to me for over 20 years and I live by the motto “Once a Raider, Always a Raider.” We are a Raider family. Dawn, my wife, works in the Special Ed. department and my daughter graduated from here in 2010.…
Kids are much more observant than we sometimes give them credit for. I have a short story but the picture tells the whole story. This was not one of my students. I happened to be walking by this young man during finals week on his way to class.…
This story happened to Ingrid from my department but it is too good not to include. When I first started at Rangeview we taught computer applications which was the Office Suite. We also taught keyboarding. At this time we also had a graduation requirement of Practical Arts and our department counted for that.…
Today is my birthday post. With that in mind, let’s talk trash. One of the joys of teaching is seeing the artistic skills of some students. I casually was speaking of how the big new trash cans we got were bland.…
My daughter was a captain of the girl’s swim team in her junior and senior years. She was the one to greet the opposing team and captains before the meet. Her favorite story was to tell the other team that they were swimming in thirty-year-old water.…
The sights and sounds of a high school are sometimes the most amazing sounds you can hear. I live in the community where Rangeview is located. From my bathroom window, I can see the school. One of my most vivid memories during the summers was the Marching Band.…
342 is an important number to Rangeview and almost everyone who passes by the sign has no idea what it means. The number changed how the building and external amenities were placed on our site. Rangeview has one of the smallest land footprints in the state for a 5A high school.…
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. holiday so I have a short week. One of the great mysteries at Rangeview is
the white dots on the walls on the first floor. Most people go through their entire 4 years as a student and don’t know they are even there.…
I am a strong believer in our commitment to diversity at Rangeview. We have been a No Place For Hate designated school by the ADL for many years. One of our added pieces is the Diversity Week we have every year.…
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.…
When I started spending more time in Computer Science I spent a lot of time with another colleague in our department. Tom Fox had a programming background and taught our most advanced courses. I was lucky enough to take several professional development classes using Java when the AP CSA class moved from C++ to Java.…
Another department member was very influential and generous. Cindy Hope was a character and allowed me to do my first traditional business class with Management and Entrepreneurship. She ran the PACE class which allowed students to get credit for working. It wasn’t just a blow-off where you just had to turn in pay stubs.…
One of the great pleasures I have had at Rangeview is coaching baseball. There will be many stories later about our baseball escapades. The colleague that I am thankful for is our head coach Mike Hamilton. Our field for the lower levels were separate from the varsity and JV field and we liked it that way.…
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.…
It is Thanksgiving week and I thought it was time for a couple of inspirational stories. Today and tomorrow will be stories that still bring tears to my eyes because of the inspiring story of students. I remember my first couple of years and some of the kids we had.…
This is one of my favorite stories. This one is about someone else but is well worth sharing. Different people have different takes on things. I don’t put bumper stickers on my car because I keep those opinions to myself most of the time.…
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.…
One of the joys of teaching high school is the fun of putting students into real world settings. I got my first lesson when I had the Management & Entrepreneurship class. A third quarter assignment was to go through the process of creating a business.…
[su_image_carousel source=”media: 1213,1214,1212,1211″ controls_style=”light” crop=”none” align=”left” max_width=”400″ image_size=”medium”] 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.…
Building improvements and retrofits are common in schools. Over the years we have had several additions and some remodeling. The two biggest have been additions and wiring retrofits. The wiring is the most important to me as a computer and business teacher.…
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.…
Today I landed in Orlando, Florida getting ready to present at the PLTW Summit for the next three days. I have been to many conferences in the last 30 years. This weekend will be the last one as an APS teacher.…
I am a big fan of planning. There exists a group of people that spend money like there is no end and that they will always have money. The other piece is that people often look at the new shiny toy and feel the need to have it.…
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.…
This one is special for Homecoming Week. Once a Raider, Always a Raider!
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This is a message I wish I could get across to all students. It does speak about teachers and school at the beginning but the full message is in the chorus.
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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.…