More Dangers of Technology

As an educator there is nothing more important to me than transmitting knowledge. The name of the game, essentially, is a transfer of information between individuals. This is not simply a one-way street as I often learn a great deal from my students. The general flow, however, is one from the teacher to the students. Anything that aids that flow is helpful… and anything that hinders it is counter-productive. Great technologies have aided that flow. The printing press enabled the creation of affordable books for the masses. These books transmitted knowledge and thus aided education. While book costs are sometimes … Continue reading →

The Move to Technology

Technology is a good thing. Airplanes fly, e-mail doesn’t require a stamp, and finding information doesn’t require a trip to the library (or even the bookshelf) because of the internet and the computer. In education the move to technology has also brought many improvements and benefits to older ways of doing things (I would not have completed a masters thesis if not for the modern word processor as a typewriter would have driven me mad). There are downsides to technology though. Oftentimes digital presentation software will replace the skill of speaking (both for teacher lectures and student presentations). When I … Continue reading →

Learn from the Source

Many schools and colleges have discovered the advantages in having an author come in for a talk or writing workshop, or maybe a series of workshops. A visiting author can bring new idea and initiatives and processes that the usual class teacher or lecturer may not have thought of purely because they are looking from things from a different perspective. Just as teachers and lecturers have different ways of handling a class so each writer has a unique perspective on the writing process. Because an author has a specialized knowledge of and enthusiasm for their own craft, they can be … Continue reading →

When Begging Doesn’t Help You

Do you remember when you were little and you had told a lie and your parents knew it? It was probably about something small: Did you eat the cookie? Did you leave the back door open? Did you duct tape your brother to the drywall? It was stupid to lie but when you’re little sitting in the corner really feels like a terrible punishment. All of this changes when you are an adult (and should actually act like one). I’ve written about taking responsibility before but today I’m going to write about what happens when you don’t take responsibility. I’m … Continue reading →

Ethics Classes

In NSW, Australia, we have been very fortunate in being able to go into the schools and teach SRE, Special Religious Education over many years. Parents who do not want their children taught SRE, have the option to send a note saying they do not wish them to participate in the class. In this case many will spend the time in the library, on computers, or involved in some other activity. Now another alternative is being proposed. The alternative is ethics classes. In these ethics classes children will apparently be exposed to the ideas of people like John Stuart Mill … Continue reading →

Poetry in Schools

As a poet myself, I have a natural interest in reading poetry as well as writing it. Sadly many teachers seem to do more to turn children and young adults of poetry off than to turn them on to it. By the time they’ve insisted the poem be dissected myriad times, children have lost any joy in the poem. Sometimes poems are simply meant to be enjoyed not analyzed to death. Then let the meaning and all the rest sort of sneak up on the young person, as they think about it. I was fortunate when at school in having … Continue reading →

School Food Fight Leads to Jail Time

When you pack your child’s lunch in the morning the last place you consider it will end up is on the wall of the school cafeteria. Unfortunately, that’s exactly where dozens of lunch items stuck after a huge food fight broke out earlier this month at a Chicago middle school. In the end, tuna sandwiches, which were made into torpedoes and apples used as attack weapons, were spattered all over the cafeteria at the Calumet middle-school campus of Perspectives Charter Schools, in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. Even more disconcerting was the fact that police were called in … Continue reading →

Sexual Innuendo Gets Teacher Fired

I don’t know about you, but when I look at the state of Florida on a map, the last thing I see is a phallic symbol. Of course, I haven’t seen science teacher Ryan Haraughty’s recent depiction of the “Sunshine State.” If I did, I might have a better understanding of why Shawnee Mission school district administrators gave Haraughty the boot a couple of weeks ago. According, to the former Mission Valley Middle School teacher his firing was instigated by a drawing and comment he made about the state of Florida. The Kansas teacher says as part of a lesson … Continue reading →

Should You Teach Your Child to Read Before They Go To School?

Should you teach your child to read before they go to school? It’s a question that people often have differing opinions about. My mother taught me to read when I was four years old. As far as I can see it was one of the best and most loving things she did and she did plenty of other loving things. So when my son was four it seemed only natural to teach him to read. We started over with a combination of phonetics and flash cards. By the time he went to school he could already read well. Fortunately his … Continue reading →

A Dangerous Trend in Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales

Nursery Rhymes and fairy tales help teach children about the world. That’s the view of many experts including June Factor who has spent many years researching childhood and school playground rhymes and writing children’s books. However the trend at present appears to be to try and sanitize nursery rhymes, for example in England the BBC has come under fire for a rewrite of the Humpty Dumpty Nursery rhyme. Now instead of saying ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again,’ the revised rhyme says they,’made Humpty happy again.’ The idea behind this sanitizing of … Continue reading →