Good Morning Blog

If you spend enough time on Twitter or Facebook, you will eventually come across posts that compare teaching to something beautiful and wonderful. Because we all know that teaching is like flowers and rainbows and puppy dogs. All. The. Time. Until it isn't. Sometimes teaching is hard. Sometimes a student gives you a particularly difficult time. Just like rainbows do. Sometimes teaching makes you not want to teach anymore. What then? What do we tell ourselves in the times when teaching isn't like flowers or rainbows or puppy dogs? I am growing increasingly annoyed with sentiments drawing analogies between teaching and something inferior to teaching; the "kitsch" of teaching analogies. Seriously. Google the phrase, "teaching is like" and click on the images. You will get a healthy dose of images with inspirational quotes on them that compare teaching to whatever. Granted, others will attempt to accurately portray teaching in chaotic terms. Often humo...

The high school I teach at went 1:1 a number of years ago by purchasing enough chromebooks for every student, and a few extra, just in case. In addition to the chromebook adoption was the implementation of Google Apps for Education, which is now referred to as GSuite for Education. GSuite was relatively new for everyone because students and staff had previously been using Microsoft Office for pretty much everything. I jumped right in. After a couple of years of being the go-to person for GSuite training in the building I decided to pursue Level 1 Google For Education Certified Teacher status by going through the online training and taking the required exam. I was well versed in most of the GSuite apps so neither the training nor the exam was all that difficult. About a year later I decided to also pursue the Level 2 certification. That did not present any problems. After receiving my Level 2 certification I began looking into the requirements for becoming a certified trainer. Th...

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...