While I enjoy seeing kids and adults in cute Halloween costumes, I abhor the TREAT factor of Halloween. As an ignorant child, teen and then younger adult, I went trick or treating, wore costumes and went to Halloween Parties. As a teacher and an adult, I was Richard Nixon more than once on Halloween, and one time in the late 1970s I was Aunt Jemima with black face paint—that would probably be politically incorrect today but there were no complaints in the 70s.
However, the last time we gave out treats, they were small boxes of sweet, organic raisins. Then a few weeks later, a neighbor accused me of being cheap because we did not hand out treats drenched with processed sugar. I’m talking about those bulk bags full of miniature Snickers, Twix, M&M’s, Juicy Fruits, Tootsie Rolls, Oh Henry!, Butterfinger, Starbursts, Hershey’s, Reese’s, Skittles, Kit Kat, Milky Way…
My wife and I walked to town today and saw the new Alex Cross movie with Tyler Perry. We enjoyed it and recommend it but consider reading the novels first.
James Patterson is the author of the Alex Cross series and I have read several. The novels featuring his character Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist who works as a private psychologist and government consultant, are his most popular and the top-selling U.S. detective series in the past ten years. Patterson has written 71 novels in 33 years. He has had 19 consecutive #1 New York Times bestselling novels, and holds The New York Times record for most bestselling hardcover fiction titles by a single author, a total of 63. James Patterson’s books have sold an estimated 260 million copies worldwide; in recent years his novels have sold more copies than those of Stephen King, John Grisham and Dan Brown combined.
Patterson says, “It’s our responsibility as parents to get our kids to read. This one is big. Huge! We can’t wait for teachers or librarians or their peers to do it. It’s our job to get our kids to read—not the teacher. We need to show them that it is fun and that it is cool. And give them books that will excite them.”
Patterson’s advice works. It wasn’t a teacher that motivated me to enjoy reading. It was my mother. After I fell in love with reading, there was no turning back.
When Patterson’s son was age eight, he and his wife told their child he had to read. His son didn’t like reading at first. By the end of that summer, he had read about seven books and loved most of them.
Watch the embedded video. Listen to what Patterson has to say. If you expect teachers to do the parent’s job when it comes to reading, then the child may be a loser for the rest of his or her life.
We already ask America’s public school teachers to do much more than just teach and demanding that they also do a parent’s job is ridiculous.
“My greatest skill in life was wanting but little.”
–Henry David Thoreau
Here’s an old journal entry I wrote when I was student-teaching in a second grade class with Mehrnoosh Watson, a master teacher who had a profound influence on me. I’ve been reflecting more recently on the value of children’s play (something I do a lot) and it seems to me that play is not only a cognitive imperative but a moral one, too.
Reflections from a Second Grade Classroom
How do teachers integrate moral lessons in daily teaching practice? Many teachers ignore the subject altogether, arguing that it has little role in the academic life of a child. Other teachers focus their moral teachings on fair play on the playground or teaching children to take turns. Sometimes a holiday or assembly comes up and there is a brief flurry of activity around moral issues. In the school…
When I write about the thirty years I taught in the public schools, I often focus on the problem students, the lack of parental support, and political pressures that seem to come from all sides, but there was a positive note to teaching that made up for the long hours and challenges that walked in the classroom each school day.
In the 1990s and into the 21st century, I was co-advisor of the Campus Chess Club and Environmental Club. Chess was easy. Students interested in playing chess came to my classroom at lunch. There were no field trips or fund raisers, and playing chess helped take my mind off my job.
During those years, my last class of the day was journalism so every day ended on a positive note. There is very little that is comparable to a classroom full of motivated, often incredible students.
The Environmental Club was another positive note. Neil, the co-advisor, was the primary organizer although most of the work and organizing was done by students. There were monthly weekend hikes where me, Neil, Marshal (now gone due to complications during his battle to beat leukemia),and sometimes a few other teachers/parents chaperoned students on hikes in the San Gabriel Mountains.
Eventually, district administration stopped giving permission for the hikes due to increased insurance/liability issues.
However, one of the hikes went up Ice House Canyon (starts at 5,500 foot elevation) to the Saddle (7,500 feet) where several trails branched out to Cucamonga Peak (8,858 feet) and the three T’s: Timber Mountain (8,303 feet), Telegraph Peak (8,986 feet) and Thunder Mountain (8,587 feet). I understand it is possible to hike all three peaks in one day.
The single-track to Icehouse Saddle climbs over 3.6 miles and is an exceptional hike.
I was the advisor/teacher for journalism and many of the students that were in the chess club and the environmental club were also in my journalism class, and we spent a lot of time together sometimes as late as 11:00 PM and as early as 6:00 AM.
The hikes through Ice House Canyon to the Saddle are fondly remembered because my journalism students started a tradition of water gun fights near the end of that day-long hike, and I was often the target: journalism students versus Lloyd. My small squirt gun was not up to the task of dealing with several students ganging up on me each with a squirt gun.
To level the playing field, I bought a squirt-pump machinegun with a gallon water tank, and it had a range of maybe 20 yards and it fit in my backpack so no one knew about my secret weapon.
The hike I think of most was the one where we went up to the saddle a few days after a weeklong blizzard that blanketed the San Gabriel Mountains in snow. We arrived early on a Saturday morning with several teachers and cars loaded with students to discover the trail was covered in virgin snow—no one had been up the trail since the blizzard and in some spots where the trail had snow melt running over it, the water had frozen into black ice.
Fortunate for us there was a Forest Ranger ready to hike up to a campground beyond the Ice House Canyon Saddle because several campers had weathered the storm there. The only way to reach that campground was on the trails you will see in the embedded video I found on YouTube. That means the campers carried all their gear and food up that trail to the campground higher than the Saddle.
Banned Books Week is currently celebrating its 36th anniversary! This year’s theme, “Banning Books Silences Stories,” is a reminder that everyone needs to speak out against the tide of censorship.
Did you know that some of the best works of all time, and very often the ones you’ll have studied in school, have at one time or another been censored from the public? Did you know that the practice of censorship in literature still goes on today?
Yup, somewhere out there, a blinkered individual could actually be pondering at this very moment the dangers of a mind raised on an “occultist” story like Bridge to Terabithia, while someone of the same mindset argues that the bildungsroman The Perks of Being a Wallflower is “unsuited to a teenage audience.” Seriously.
And it’s not all Sex, by Madonna, Gossip Girl and l8r, g8r that are considered poised to corrupt our…
I watched about fifteen minutes of the first debate then turned it off. I didn’t want to waste any more of my time. I had better things to do.
Instead, I waited for the fact checkers and the analysts to examine the claims made by Obama and Romney during the debate.
The morning after the debate, I learned that the perception was that Obama lost the first debate by a WIDE margin.
Further reading revealed that President Obama lost because he wasn’t as aggressive as Romney or should I say he only exaggerated and made half as many false claims as Romney did and many of Romney’s exaggerations were WHOPPERS.
For example: inflating the unemployment numbers from 12.5 million to 23 million compared to Obama inflating the number of jobs created to 5 million from the actual number of 4.63 million.
There is a HUGE difference between 370,000 jobs and…
If you are a teacher or a serious parent more concerned about his or her child’s future as a working adult than a child having fun and/or being entertained all of the time, then this may be a teachable moment.
But first, 43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy lived below the poverty line, as opposed to 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy.
In addition, in 2010, the unemployment rate for adults that did not have a high school diploma was almost 16%. However, for adults with a Bachelors degree or higher (that means a college education), that unemployed rate was 5%.
In addition, since 1992, the unemployment rate for workers with a BA or better averaged 3.31%, but for high school dropouts the average was 8.84%. The lowest unemployment rate for college graduates was in 2001 at 1.5%, but it was 6% for high school dropouts the same year.
After I bought a copy of “Gifted Hands” at Costco recently, we watched the Ben Carson story. It was a film based on the life of a real person and the mother that made a difference in his life. Not once in the film was it suggested that it was the responsibility of any of Carson’s teachers to turn off the TV in Carson’s home and for his mother to tell him he had to visit the library and read books instead of watching TV.
In fact, the teachable moment may be to watch the film “Gifted Hands” (the entire film is embedded—second video—in this post and it has Spanish subtitles), then discuss who and what made the difference in Ben Carson’s life. Then have the child write a one page essay about what he or she learned about the importance of reading instead of watching TV.
Ben Carson’s mother had a third grade education and she got married at age 14 to later discover that her husband was a bigamist. For me, the teachable moment was when Carson’s mother turned off the TV and told her two sons that they were going to check books out of the library, read them, and then write a report of each book to be read out loud to the mother. She could not read but she could listen.
Ben Carson: An extraordinary Life – Conversations from Penn State
In the previous embedded video, at 6:32 minutes, Carson says once he started doing a lot of reading, he stopped hating poverty and realized that he didn’t have to stay in that lifestyle. He could change his life to anything he wanted it to be by working for it.
Note: I love using the word WORK to describe what we do as adults to earn money legally.
In one scene, Carson is being given an award for being the top student in his mostly white school and a teacher embarrasses him when she tells all of the white students in the room that they allowed themselves to be beaten by a fatherless black student living in poverty.
What that teacher did was uncalled for—it was cruel and racist. However, she told the white students they were lazy and could have easily beaten Carson for the academic honor he earned. She should have criticized the parents of those white students for letting their children watch too much TV.
The message I learned from this film pointed out exactly how to encourage students to learn to read and work hard in school to earn an education—not more laws that hold only public school teachers responsible for the education of a child.
Studies show that the average American child talks to his or her parents less than five minutes a day and spends more than 10 hours a day outside of school watching too much TV (on average three hours a day outside of school) in addition to playing video games, listening to music, social networking on the Internet, hanging out with friends, sending text messages, etc.
You may be able to watch the movie here. I found this link on You Tube, and it has Spanish subtitles.
There was another scene in the movie with a science teacher. When Carson was the only student in the class to answer a question, the teacher kept Carson after school, because when most teachers see an opportunity to help a motivated student, he or she does help. Teachers can only help students that help themselves and it is up to the parents to do the rest.
Carson’s mother had a third grade education but her son’s went to college. Today Benjamin S. Carson is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John Hopkins Children’s Center. His brother is an engineer. Through reading and an education, this family left poverty and the high risk of unemployment behind.
Answer this question: If Carson’s mother had left that TV on, do you honestly believe he would be where he is today?
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 