Squishy Not Slick

This is the first place I’ve been where they respect what you can do rather than concentrate on what you can’t.

— Bruce Bowen on the San Antonio Spurs #ThisHasSomethingToDoWithTeaching

This has something to do with teaching.

Consider how your museum could be ‘a bowl’, rather than ‘a box’. A tumble of objects rather than a grid.

— 

Seb Chan on “institutional wabi-sabi,” via Rob.

Just swap “museum” for “classroom,” and you should be set.

So this (“students’ deficiencies in written and oral English”) is at least a 100-year old problem, eh?

[source]

this has something to do with teaching

What this reveals more than anything is that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not. In their blindness they’re reaching for the lowest form of control a manager can assert: Ensuring butts in seats for eight hours between 9-5+. Though while they can make people come to the office under the threat of termination, they most certainly cannot make those same people motivated to do great work.

– David at 37 Signals about remote work ending for Yahoo!

Dan Meyer, way back in the day, on writing’s superiority over math. 

ateachersdesk:

this is a teacher’s desktop - @lukeneff

a list of poems I use for the poem of the day in class

There should be 180, but there’s something like 191. So I need to cut eleven. But then again, I probably forgot some really important ones, so please let me know which ones. And then I can figure out how many more I need to cut. So really, I need your help. Which to keep? Which to cut? Which to add? Please email or tweet and let me know. Or tin-can-with-string. Whatever works. Most of these are from Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 and 180 More and from Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems.

Introduction to Poetry - Billy Collins
I Have News for You - Tony Hoagland
A Mown Lawn - Lydia Davis
Selecting a Reader - Ted Kooser
Did I Miss Anything - Tom Wayman
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening - Robert Frost
from SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 - W.H. Auden
Notice - Steve Kowit
Fight - Laurel Blossom
Sunday Morning Early - David Romveldt
To help the monkey cross the river - Thomas Lux
To You by Kenneth Koch
Love Poem With Toast - Miller Williams
Only One of My Deaths - Dean Young
Cartoon Physics, Part I - Nick Flynn
The Kitchen Shears Speak – Christianne Balk
The Planet on the Table - Wallace Stevens
Shorth Is Better than Length - Dr. Seuss
A Martian Sends A Postcard Home - Craig Raine
In The Station of the Metro - Ezra Pound
Of Being – Denise Levertov
Sailing to Byzantium - W.B. Yeats
When we two parted - Lord Byron
Trying to Figure Out if You’re Beautiful - Brian Abbott
Listen - W.S. Merwin
Numbers - Mary Cornish
Dreams - Langston Hughes
Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet - Tony Hoagland
Summer Morning - Charles Simic
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal - Naomi Shihab Nye
The Journey - Mary Oliver
The World is a Beautiful Place – Lawrence Ferlengetti
Block City - Robert Louis Stevenson
Reasons to Survive November - Tony Hoagland
The Vacation - Wendell Berry
Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain - Richard Brautigan
Fourteen Final Lines - J. Allyn Rosser
The Grammar Lesson - Steve Kowit
It’s Raining In Love - Richard Brautigan
Forgetfulness - Billy Collins
A Poetry Reading at West Point - William Matthews
The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball - Thomas Lux
Tour - Carol Snow
After Us - Connie Wanek
Poetry - Don Paterson
The Improvement – John Ashberry
The Fathers - Elizabeth Holmes
Dearborn North Apartments Chicago, Illinois - Lola Haskins
Mother In Law – Adrienne Rich
Having by T.R. Hummer
Snow - David Berman
A Romance for the Wild Turkey - Paul Zimmer
Where You Go When She Sleeps - T.R. Hummer
Grammar - Tony Hoagland
Starlight - Philip Levine
Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden
Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City - Thomas Lux
The Panic Bird - Robert Phillips
Otherwise - Jane Kenyon
Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale - Jane Yolen
June 11 - David Lehman
My Life - Joe Wenderoth
Message: Bottle #32 - J. Allyn Rosser
The Poem of Chalk - Philip Levine
A Wreath to the Fish - Nancy Willard
The Quest - Sharon Olds
In Praise of Bic Pens - David Hilton
Fast Break - Edward Hirsch
Saturday at the Canal - Gary Soto
Doing Without - David Ray
The Death of Santa Claus - Charles Webb
Thanksgiving - Mac Hammond
A Metaphor Crosses the Road - Martha McFerren
Animals - Miller Williams
I Wish in the City of Your Heart - Robley Wilson
The Student Theme - Ronald Wallace
Smell and Envy - Douglas Goetsch
For My Niece Sidney, Age Six by Amy Gerstler
Tuesday 9:00 AM - Denver Butson
Ordinance on Arrival - Naomi Lazard
1-800-HOT-RIBS - Catherine Bowman
I Need To Be More French. Or Japanese. - Beth Ann Fennelly
To Stammering - Kenneth Koch
Bedecked - Victoria Redel
Dinner Out - Christopher Howell
Slow Children at Play - Cecilia Woloch
“Even Ornaments of Speech Are Forms of Deceit.” - Ron Koertge
Acceptance Speech - Lynn Powell
Understudy - Daniel Lusk
Hate Poem - Julie Sheehan
Do You Love Me? - Robert Wrigley
An Apology - F.J. Bergmann
Why It Often Rains In Movies - Lawrence Raab
Slowly - Donna Masini
Valentine - Carol Ann Dufy
Onions - William Matthews
Reading Hemingway - James Cummins
Olive Oil - Paul Suntup
Buddha’s Dogs - Susan Browne
Amnesty - Carl Dennis
Lives of the Poets - Louis Simpson
Shakespearean Sonnet - R.S. Gwynn
The Booksigning - James Tate
Anagrammer - Peter Pereira
Chapter One - Mark Aiello
The Poet - Tom Wayman
I Said Yes But I Meant No - Dean Young
To Roanoke With Johnny Cash - Bob Hicok
Air Larry - Joseph Harrison
Nothing in That Drawer - Ron Padgett
Takeoff - Timothy Steele
If You Don’t - Diane Thiel
Where Did I Leave Off? - Virginia Hamilton Adair
Reading the Obituary Page - Linda Pastan
The First Photograph of Hitler - Wislawa Syzmborska
The End and the Beginning - Wislawa Syzmborska
Grading English 101 Essays - Sam Pierstorff
At Least - Raymond Carver
Otherwise - Jane Keynon
Poem About Morning - William Meredith
Living - Denise Levertov
Routine - Arthur Guiterman
The Life of a Day - Tom Hennen
For My Son, Noah, Ten Years Old - Robert Bly
Dilemma - David Budbill
from Song of Myself (“Who goes there? hankering, gross,mystical” … “I can wait”) - Walt Whitman
New Yorkers - Edward Field
Nightclub - Billy Collins
The Swimming Pool - Thomas Lux
Summer Storm - Dana Gioia
wrist-wrestling father - Orval Lund
Animals - Frank O’Hara
Lending Out Books - Hal Sirowitz
The Changed Man - Robert Phillips
This Is Just to Say - William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say - Erica-Lynn Gambino
The Orange - Wendy Cope
After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries a New Recipe for Hamburger Hot Dish - Leo Dangel
For C.W.B. - Elizabeth Bishop
What I Learned from My Mother - Julia Kasdorf
To be of use - Marge Piercy
No Tool or Rope or Pail - Bob Arnold
Soybeans - Thomas Alan Orr
Landing Pattern - Philip Appleman
A Little Tooth - Thomas Lux
Egg - C.G. Hanzlicek
Rolls-Royce Dreams - Ginger Andrews
My Life Before I Knew It - Lawrence Raab
Sweater Weather - A Love Song to the Language - Sharon Bryan
Courage - Anne Sexton
Leisure - W.H. Davies
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
The Three Goals - David Budbill
Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out - Jimmie Cox
Living in the Body - Joyce Sutphen
The Iceberg Theory - Gerald Locklin
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front - Wendell Berry
from Moby Dick - Herman Melville (“Call me Ishmael” to “to get to sea as soon as I can.”)
where we are - Gerald Locklin
Passengers - Billy Collins
Postscript - Seamus Heaney
in celebration of Surviving - Chuck Miller
Her Long Illness - Donald Hall
Lester Tells of Wanda and the Big Snow - Paul Zimmer
Song to Onions - Roy Blount Jr.
Sunt Leones - Stevie Smith
Titanic - David R. Slavitt
Let Evening Come - Jane Kenyon
A Blessing - James Wright
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry
From Blossoms - Li Young Li
The Lives of the Heart - James Hirshfield
Fishing in the Keep of Silence - Linda Gregg
Rue for A. E. Housman - Marly Youmans
The Last Bestiary - Daniel Bourne
Shine, Perishing Republic - Robinson Jeffers
Song (Is It Dirty) - Frank O’Hara
Elsa is Not a Girl She is a Girl - Angela Veronica Wong
Desks - Don Bogen
Furious Versions - Li-Young Lee
Snowglobe - Tony Hoagland
Some Like Poetry - Wislawa Szymborska
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer - Walt Whitman
Ode to My Socks - Pablo Neruda
The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
If I Should Have a Daughter - Sarah Kay
Under One Small Star - Wislawa Szymborska
from Hiawatha - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Eating Poetry - Mark Strand
In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself - Wislawa Szymborska
Night Hunting - John Casteen

To this day, almost all educational personnel decisions are based on judgments which, according to the research, are only slightly more accurate than they would be if they were based on pure chance.

— Medley and Coker (1987, p. 243)

Do We Know a Successful Teacher When We See One? Experiments in the Identification of Effective Teachers
Abstract:
The authors report on three experiments designed to (a) test under increasingly more favorable conditions whether judges can correctly rate teachers of known ability to raise student achievement, (b) inquire about what criteria judges use when making their evaluations, and (c) determine which criteria are most predictive of a teacher’s effectiveness. All three experiments resulted in high agreement among judges but low ability to identify effective teachers. Certain items on the established measure that are related to instructional behavior did reliably predict teacher effectiveness. The authors conclude that (a) judges, no matter how experienced, are unable to identify successful teachers; (b) certain cognitive operations may be contributing to this outcome; (c) it is desirable and possible to develop a new measure that does produce accurate predictions of a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement test scores.

— source, emphases mine