Tag: teaching
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Memoir: Some education things I left behind (1994-2021)
My friend Laura, who still teaches at the school where I served the last 27 years of my career, texted. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in the $30/hour job of supervising exams. Test administration was the worst part of my job, the part called “summative assessment” that really meant “Son we’re gonna…
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Memoir: Caught professionally off-guard (1987)
My first year of high school teaching was in the all-boys Fenwick, where I taught English and coached the Speech and Debate teams. I’d brought speakers from the community to my classes –war veterans, businessmen, and controversially, an atheist and a communist–to broaden the boys’ minds about the outside world. While the Fenwick fathers indulged…
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Reflection: on having left the Ed-Tech party too soon
This morning I was helping my neighbor, a recently immigrated Spanish-speaking man, prepare for an upcoming licensing exam. To find specific information about his job site, I suggested he call a colleague. He kept the phone on speaker and I heard her advice: “Just Google it,” she told him, explaining that Chat GPT had gotten…
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Memoir: Lessons learned about delivering lessons (1986-88)
Yesterday I conversed with a young teacher at the start of her first year teaching high school French, something I did many years ago, before I switched to just English. She asked, “What have you learned about how to teach adolescents? Any insights, or ‘lessons learned?’” I shook my head and told her how embarrassed…
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Memoir: What’s in my closet, part 2 (2023)
These shirts and other swag were a pathetically big part of my payment for several years. And in retrospect they were a long time coming.
The Wikiness 