I love summer break’s gift of decompression. It is during the weeks from mid-June to mid-August that my brain defrags the preceding school year’s experiences, condensing them into a more manageable series of memories, lessons, and principles. What are we about? One principle that I began examining in the Fall of 2011 is that of […]
Highest Frequency Words in the CCSS for ELA & Literacy
Inspired by Partner in Education’s Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Wordle, I plugged the standards document into Tagxedo to see which words dominate the standards. See the results below:
Common Core R.CCR.4 Explained
R.CCR.4 — that’s the fourth College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Reading strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy — reads as follows: Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. This standard […]
Why Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe is Worth Reading
In the summer of 2011, I spent some time with Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe. This beautiful book (which, by the way, is mentioned in Appendix A of the CCSS!) takes a serious look at postsecondary schooling, finds it disjointed and its students disoriented, and concludes that the only way for students to find sanity in academia is […]
Vacation; Decompression
With the 2011-2012 school year over, I’ve got three objectives for the remainder of June, and I aim to tackle them in this order: Take my brothers (class of 2012 and 2013) and my hijo (Pablo, who returns to Mexico at the end of the month) and my brother-in-law on a ten-day road trip out […]