Good Morning Blog

When I was a student I seldom enjoyed reading. Anything. Don't get me wrong, I was able to read at grade level. I understood what I read. But I wasn't passionate about any of it. I never asked for books for Christmas or my birthday and consequently rarely received them. And that remained true until I got to college. Once I got to college I was forced to spend a considerable amount of time with my face buried in books because it was college and the books were required. They were also really expensive and I figured I shouldn't let that money go to waste. To this day, I have very particular tastes in the books that I read. I don't read mysteries or biographies or novels and books like that. I do have several Mathematics books that I have amassed over the years, some computer programming books, and a rather impressive collection of Theology texts including an inordinate number of books related to the Protestant Reformation. It wasn't that I didn't like reading. I...

It's time I came clean about who I really am. What I'm about to tell you may shock you. It may disgust you. But you deserve to know the truth about me. I'm a Patriots fan. And I'm proud of it. Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T. Belichick is a genius.  In Superbowl LI, the Patriots were playing the Falcons, who had built a substantial 28 - 3 lead by the waning minutes of the 3rd quarter. Things looked bleak. It looked like the haters were going to get their wish.  The usually prolific Patriots offense was sputtering and was ineffective against the Falcon defense. The Patriots punted 4 times during the game, giving the ball back to the team that was already beating them. Fans of the game are already well aware of what I am about to tell you, sometimes it's o.k. to punt. Sometimes punting is the right play. In the end, the 4 punts did not hurt the Patriots as they completed the greatest comeback in Superbowl history to win 34 - 28 in overtime.  Sometimes our studen...

So much talk about how relationships matter. So. Much. Talk. If you're an educator and you've been paying attention lately, you are no doubt familiar with the push to improve relationships between teachers and students. Relationships will get students to behave better, be more engaged, learn more, be more emotionally intelligent, and so much more. I recall a training I was at about a year ago. The training was supposed to be about teaching students who come from poverty. But for a training that was a couple of hours long, the overwhelming majority of the training was about defining poverty, characteristics of students living in poverty, and other things of that nature. At the very end, literally only the last few minutes, it was suggested that the way to reach students from poverty was to build, you guessed it, relationships. The Twitterverse and Blogosphere are much the same. Relationships are everything. They're the future. They'll fix all of your classroo...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the fourth in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Part 2 Recap : I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Part 3 Recap : Being on Twitter introduced me to ideas in education I would not have heard otherwise. My past experience with coding gave me some perspective on the l...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the third in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Part 2 Recap : I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed. I thought I had changed some big things about how my classes operated and was only seeing small changes in the outcomes. But the truth i...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the second in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed. The following August I began the school year using Khan Academy in my Algebra 1 classes. It wasn't the only thing we used, but we used it plenty. While Khan Academy did offer students the opportunity to practice specific skills with instant feedback , ...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning conferences; the South Shore eLearning Conference hosted by School City of Hammond and the eVillage Conference hosted by East Porter County Schools in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the first in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] For years, the underlying structure of each day in my classes was essentially the same; go over questions from the previous assignment, lecture over the new lesson, and give students the next assignment. Lather, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat... And I kept doing it this way for far too long because that was how all of my math classes were when I was in school. That was basically how all of the math teachers I knew taught their classes. Tha...