Back to School by Dave Pollot
Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call… (after long weekend)
September 3, 2019 by 47 Comments
Volume up.
If only we could celebrate and thank all of our teachers with similar enthusiasm. Bravo Boys.
New Zealand High School Boys Honor Retiring Teacher With Moving Haka. Guidance Counsellor John Adams was a teacher for 30 years. (Story here)
Thanksgiving?
November 22, 2017 by 28 Comments
A student in her uniform balances on stones over sewage water on her way to class in the Cite Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Notes:
- Thanksgiving is a not a statutory declared holiday in Haiti.
- Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP. wsj.com, Nov 21, 2017
Edward Hopper. Third Grade Report Card.
August 8, 2017 by 35 Comments
This image was drawn on the back of Edward Hopper’s third grade report card dated October 23, 1891, when Hopper was nine years old. Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Little Boy Looking at the Sea, n.d., ink on paper, 4.5 x 3.5 in.
Notes:
- Source: Thank you Kurt @ Cultural Offering via Artdaily.org: Edward Hopper House unveils new collection of the American artist’s early years and memorabilia.
- Related Posts: Edward Hopper: Morning Sun
Jimmy
January 22, 2017 by 50 Comments
Tuesday.
I’m leaning back in the chair. The bodies on the teleconference are shifting, their paper shuffling is booming on the mic. The update continues, I’m fading, drifting. I look up at the clock and it tugs me back, way back.
It’s hidden inside, in a dark space, deep in a corner on the edges, frayed but biting.
~ 1967
I was a child. You were a child. A Boy.
The schoolhouse had two classrooms, three grades in each room, one row for each grade, four to six students in each grade. Three rows of heavy steel, four legged desks, each having a pocket for school things. We were in the First Grade.
He was oversize in first grade, having been held back. Tall, thin, with hunger hanging from his bones. His brother was already categorized as a Juve, his Father an alcoholic, in and out of small jobs and a Mother desperately trying to keep it all together, and losing.
Faded jeans, not from stone washing, but from hand me downs from his older brother, or from a flee market sale. Everything wrong-sized, tattered and carrying a whiff of moth balls. Laces on too-big shoes loosely tied. Hair long, unruly and badly in need of a sheer. [Read more…]
You Go Judge! Debate: Cut the Cr*p. Save our Children. All of them.
September 26, 2016 by 15 Comments
“Connecticut State Superior Court Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher threw out the state’s school financing system as unconstitutional, his unsparing 90-page ruling read and resonated like a cry from the heart on the failings of American public education.”
Some excerpts from NYTimes: An F-Minus for America’s Schools From a Fed-Up Judge:
- “Uselessly perfect teacher evaluations” that found “virtually every teacher in the state” proficient or exemplary, while a third of students in many of the poorest communities cannot read even at basic levels.
- He attacked a task force charged with setting meaningful high school graduation requirements for how its “biggest thought on how to fix the problem turned out to be another task force,” and called it “a kind of a spoof.”
- Too many American high school graduates are “let down by patronizing and illusory degrees”
- Too many decisions and too much debate about schools seem, as he wrote, “completely disconnected to the teaching of children.”
- Nearly all high school students in affluent communities like Darien and Westport scored on state tests as “advanced” in math and approached the same level in reading. But one out of three students in nearby Bridgeport and other poor cities did not reach the most basic level in math, and did only slightly better in reading.
- It was a strikingly blunt way of saying what many people feel: The system is broken.
- He added, “Just doing more of the same is unlikely to lead to a different result.”
- The judge called for a radical reimagining that starts with the question of what schools should do: What are the goals for elementary students, or high school graduates? Then, he said, the state should decide how much money schools require so that all students, rich and poor, reach those goals.
- 46 percent of white fourth graders across the country read at or above “proficient,” compared with just 18 percent of their black peers.
- He criticized “uselessly perfect teacher evaluations” as part of a rating system “that is little more than cotton candy in a rainstorm.” He described the state’s efforts to define high school proficiency as “like a sugar cube boat,” adding, “It dissolves before it’s half-launched.”
Read entire article: NYTimes: An F-Minus for America’s Schools From a Fed-Up Judge
Photo: Hartford Courant
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call: At Attention!
February 29, 2016 by 12 Comments
Say Cheese!
Boys dressed up in school uniforms pose with king penguins at the London Zoo, 1953.
Don’t miss other “found” photos from National Geographic archives – some never published before at: Natgeofound
Source: My Modern Met
Hunger.
June 3, 2015 by 8 Comments
If my life weren’t complicated, I wouldn’t be me.
This is triggered by the tail end of the book title by E. Lockhart:
If my life weren’t complicated, I wouldn’t be Ruby Oliver.
Ruby goes on to say:
I can’t forget things, or ignore them–bad things that happen. I’m a lay-it-all-out person, a dwell-on-it person, an obsess-about-it person. If I hold things in and try to forget or pretend, I become a madman and have panic attacks. I have to talk.
Travis Bickle (De Niro/Taxi Driver/1976) pops in: “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking… you talking to me? Well I’m the only one here.”
I can’t forget things, or ignore them? Most certainly Yes.
Not so many bad things happen, and I’m (very) grateful for that.
I’m certainly a lay-it-all-out person (often to much regret),
and boy, can I obsess. Master class here.
As to a madman,
that depends from which side of the desk you are sitting on in evaluation.
And, as to having to talk, not so much.
It’s Tuesday morning.
It’s overcast. It’s drizzling and traffic is snarled.
I’m running late to a 9 am start at a volunteer event at a Food Bank.
There’s a logistics snag.
The Food Bank manager wasn’t expecting us for 3 hours.
There’s frustration etched in her face, but she puts on her game face and scrambles to coordinate activities for two corporate groups, in a space designed for one.
She proceeds with her introduction: [Read more…]
Guess.What.Day.It.Is?
April 29, 2015 by 13 Comments
Notes:
- Photo Source: Richard Bernabe (Thank you Lori)
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again
