Pure Manaʻo

     I wish I took more pictures of my classroom when I was teaching. I would have been able to use that as a reflection of my thinking. What I know after all these years is that if my seats were in tombstone rows, it was the beginning of end of the year (aka testing season and alphabetical memorizing names and training students on my classroom procedures season). If I was in quads, it's facilitation of collaboration season, and if they were in a large U or debate rows, we are performing, fishbowling, sitting on the carpet in the middle or doing independent work. This short article shares one teacher's use of tables, floors, and walls in his high school Spanish classroom. What is Sacred: I think it is always sacred when working teachers take the time to write about their process. Teachers like to learn from teachers. They like to hear about what is working for other practitioners. They like to hear confirmation of what they are already doing in print. I l...

Source:  Foster, L. (2016, August 5). Builidng community with attendance questions. (Web log). Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/building-community-with-attendance-questions-lizanne-foster What is Sacred: I guess I chose to read this because the picture of the Native American boarding schools kind of haunt me and I just wrote about the NMAI. We have the same type of pictures, but I also focused on being present and not absent, which then led me to this attendance article on the Edutopia  blog. This article is about using attendance as a community builder and a way to create a safe environment for students to really learn. This teacher uses an attendance question to create an open space for sharing. It is not connected to curriculum and there are no right or wrong answers. What got me excited was the focus on the word attend. When we trace back the meaning of attend  through Old French ( atendre ) to its Latin root ( attendere ), we can see t...

Source:  Dicicco, M. & Cook, C. (2015, September). Community warming: Creating a climate that engages all students. American Middle Level Educators 3  (2), 24-26.  What is Sacred: I am trying to create my own "book" of resources for my introduction to middle/secondary level education so I am going through my stash of AMLE magazines because they are written like middle school teachers - short, to the point, with useful information that can be implemented tomorrow. There isn't much that is totally new, or that I don't already have in some shape or form in my own teaching toolbox, but I'm not making this for me, but rather for my teacher education students who are going into their second field experience of their journey.  This article is about cooling the classroom, warming the classroom, keeping it warm - in other words it is about how to create relationships, strategies that can help that as well as how to keep it up even when you are doin...

The gondoliers in Venice are eating breakfast as the city floods, and as I go through the pictures on the Time.com photo essay site, I'm always struck by the resiliency of people to just keep keeping on. I think journalism is not just about highlighting the plight of others, I think it's also a way to rile people up, to get them off their bottoms and take action, but really, with the immediacy and visual and aural stimulation of the instant news, I feel more numb than horrified, scared or even motivated to do anything. Living on an island, I've always had that dream that the oceans are so high that we live on the tops of sky scrapers, and the majority of the buildings are under the water. We have to work our way up in order to get to see sunlight, or risk living in the murky grey, green and black of the ocean. So when my husband told me that Venice was flooded last night, I thought of people hanging out on the tops of buildings, jumping off of ledges to get on the boats. ...