Well-Swept Yard

Eleventh grade. A tough one. Acne. So on. Eleventh grade: English and PE classes and other classes I don't remember at the moment. English class was into verb conjugation. PE class was not into exercise because it was my turn for locker room duty--caged room with baskets to hold student stuff. So. Back to English. We had a book with lots of examples of conjugations. Each example was presented in two columns, one singulars and one plurals. Hour after hour I stared at all the examples and tried to learn the conjugations. Memorizing all the examples was tough. I would stare, close my eyes and try to remember what the conjugations looked like, and then open my eyes to check. I wrote the examples over and over. I was making progress. But. Test. An English test over these conjugations was coming up. In fact, on the particular day I am remembering the test was later that day. While protecting the PE baskets I kept pouring over the illustrations and I knew that I was making progress

Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant? - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education : "I wouldn’t worry about community colleges. Although two-year schools sometimes show little interest in theory, they have been ahead of the rest of us in using new technologies, at least in pedagogy." That is a comment by Henry_Adams on Pannapacker's post in the Chronicle. The comment is right on target. I made the same observation when I was directing a tech center for faculty (some years ago--during that fuzzy time between Web 1 and Web 2). The two-year faculty had pedagogical question but mostly they had questions about how to stretch capabilities of common software--from presentation media to web work. As Blackboard made its appearance at the four-year campus, the community college regulars asked for accounts. I gave permission and even assisted in moving content from their WebCT LMS to our Blackboard system. The reasons? I find them embedded in the post a

The weatherman predicted freezing temperatures for the region, a swath of land in the impoverished black-belt. My friend teaches in a consolidated school for the region. He said to me, "We will have a full house tomorrow; the school is warm; and the students will get something to eat."

Back when. OK? Back when. Back when I was in grade school I dutifully walked the five or so blocks from home to school, passing each day the house known to all students to be the residence of a man who was evil because that's just the way he looked. At school I settled into the routine. One room. One teacher. All day. We got marks of some sort. I'm sure of that. The marks might have been OK, Needs Improvement....I do not remember exactly. But I know that we got marks. I also know that we moved from first grade through sixth grade based I suppose on some computation from OKs and Needs Improvements. Somehow that never seemed to much matter. Now I find myself thinking of standardized tests because standardized test are all the rage today and I am trying to remember if I took standardized test when I was in grade school. Maybe we took standardized tests. Maybe I forgot. Maybe I was absent that day. Maybe standardized tests just were not all that important--no nearly so impo