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Thirty seven years ago, I student taught in a classroom at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago. I immediately fell in love with the school and I knew that teaching was my calling. I have taught from then until now - and I hope to continue to teach and to learn through this site.
I used to have a website, AwayToTeach - it was centered on the idea of teaching through technology - the name has oh so subtly changed - I do not offer the given Way, or the only Way, or even the best Way to teach. It is only one way to teach - but it is mine (though learned from the many generous and brilliant teachers, friends, and students over the years) - and I do think that it worked, for me and for my students. I have incorporated Remote Learning into this website as well - so the old Away to Teach lives on as well.
The Reason for AwaytoTeach
The Reason for AwaytoTeach
Well - I had to keep busy after I retired, right? But seriously I felt it was important to still try and make a positive difference in Education, though I was no longer actively teaching. I agree with one of my heroes, Peggy O'Brien, that the most important work being done in the world - is being done by teachers. And - well - if I can't be one of those any more, perhaps I can help them along the way. At least I'd like to think so. Elsewhere on this site, I talk about the idea that we, as an educational community, keep trying the same approaches to ease student anxiety, stress, and depression - but in fact, we are just making it worse. Homework is all but outlawed and high expectations have a bad name. But I honestly believe that those high expectations, and a faith that students can do work (because nothing is possible without work - hence the horror of AI) is key to both improving teaching outcomes and improving students' well being. It is, at the very least, a conversation worth having.
Pages with More information on this Site
Pages with More information on this Site
Early Progress
Early Progress
Before I can start putting my lessons up, I need to put them in some kind of order - that means both physical & digital. I began by organizing (mostly) my binders. For every class that I've taught - I've always kept a binder with the handouts, quizzes, reading materials that went with that unit (author/time period). The first year that I taught I lost everything that I had done - I've always felt that was a good and necessary thing to happen. It forced me to rethink my teaching, my lessons. I've almost always revised a lesson - very rarely leaving it untouched from the year before - students change, time changes, reading change (less often). It make sense to change my lessons, handouts, group works, etc.
1/27/2024 Again the process begins - just tidying up and working on navigation and a few blog posts.
7/7/2022 - I am transferring my files from my external harddrive onto my home computer. There are hundreds of folders and thousands of files (there is lot done in three years) - I am not (sadly) meticulous about making backups - and some of the files/folders are corrupted, which may turn out to be bad news indeed. But as far as I can tell it is 3 folders and one very large folder.
7/8/2022 I have been able to find two of the folders that were corrupted - the other two are either lost or I need to dig deeper.
7/15/2022 Starting to add content, beginning with the Google Classroom images from the past few years. Not an actual working Google Classroom, but they do give a good idea of the structure of the class. There are two versions - an IMAGE and a PDF - the PDF is especially useful for showing the questions and assignments, while the IMAGES show some of the extra content like video and audio, better.
2/2/2023 Time to come back - I knew I would know when - and I did. I do. I needed a breather - some distances so I could step back and see what I did, what I believe, and what I want to do.
2/6/2023 Fixing the "To Know We're Not Alone" quote - putting the intro stuff seen at the top of the page here...
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