Philosophy Without A Home

I'd like to introduce you to my first guest blogger, Vanessa Van Petten, creator and of RadicalParenting.com and author. Vanessa wrote her first book at 17 " You're Grounded!: How to Stop Fighting and Make the Teenage Years Easier " She continues her mission to help teens and their parents understand each other with her second book. Reading Student’s Non-Verbal Cues By Vanessa Van Petten, creator of RadicalParenting.com and author of the parenting book, “ Do I Get My Allowance Before or After I’m Grounded ?” Teachers are often the great interpreters of the younger generations—always having to read, converse with and mentor their students. At RadicalParenting.com—a website for adults written by teens and kids to give them a secret view into the minds of teens and tweens we write about how important teachers are in young people’s lives. One of the most important aspects of this teacher-student relationships is reading non-verbal cues. In my book, Do I Get My

Image via Wikipedia I was reading this article , specifically the comments. The author felt that google stuck it to Apple and Microsoft, hence the title, “Larry Paige Just Made Apple and Microsoft Look Like Fools”. The comments however were mostly the exact opposite. Many of the commenters specifically mentioned that Google paid three times the price for three times the patents, or that Motorola, the company Google bought, has a less than stellar reputation lately, not to mention the fact that they are losing money. They point out that Google is probably annoying the other hardware manufacturers that build phones with their Android operating system. I think they are all missing the point. The commenters also point out that Google probably did this for protection from patent lawsuits brought about by Apple. This is the point, but not as the commenters see it. The consensus opinion seems to be that Google will use the patents they bought to hit back at Apple or create their own phones

Tax Increment Financing - TIF is a method to use future gains in taxes to finance current improvements (which theoretically will create the conditions for those future gains). definition from wikipedia as of Aug. 13, 2011. School tax increases in Chicago - Homeowners are being asked to pay, on average, an extra $84 in annual property taxes to help plug Chicago Public Schools' $712 million budget deficit. From Chicago Tribune “ City school tax hike greeted with frustration ” The undereducated American workforce - The United States has been underproducing college-educated workers for decades. The undersupply of postsecondary-educated workers has led to both inefficiency and inequity. from Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce TIF’s are great, except what they do is pull money that would have gone into the general fund for a city and reserve it for a specific area. this sounds great, but what it really does in the end is short change education. Hence t

Have you walked on over to the Bill and Melinda Gates sponsored Measure of Effective Teaching Project ? This is where Gates tries to answer the question: "How can effective teaching be identified and developed?" Some would argue that this should have been the first and main thrust of his education efforts. For without the answer to the first half of this question school reform is doomed to failure. Others might say that the answer is and always will be "it depends". Some of my highlights and comments about the MET Project Preliminary Findings Policy Brief . Our goal is to help build fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and feedback to help teachers improve and administrators make better personnel decisions. From the MET Project Preliminary Findings Policy Brief For this report, we have studied student achievement gains on the state test and the supplemental tests in grades 4 through 8 for five MET districts. (The comment I have is

In education accountability seems to be requiring students to take standardized tests and if the students do not meet the required scores the school is punished. This is supposed to mirror the free market. In the free market if a company makes a bad product losing consumers and eventually going out of business is the punishment. This is the story of my first riding mower. I spent the winter researching quality, price, and size of riding mower for my yard. What I ended up with was a piece of junk that I had to take to the mechanic at least once a year from 2006 to 2009, when they finally replaced the lower part of the engine. It was the next summer I was contacted about a class action lawsuit. The suit was settled just this year (2011) I received a $21 check in the mail and a one-year extension of my manufacturers warranty. I wrote Kohler (engine manufacturer) and told them my tale of woe and asked how I could make a claim on the warranty. Well, it turns out that though my engi

A a middle school teacher I loved the last three minutes of this video. "oh no say parents, oh yes say adolescents " "We shouldn't belittle.... ' "instead of letting them sit passively in class..." "they will be bursting with a desire to learn..."

I started reading this blog post - well watching the videos and I didn't get through the first one before I had something to say. Lessons for teaching: Good teaching then becomes the ability to give students time to slow think, but to be there when they need help. More importantly we need to understand our subject well enough so that when students come up to us with half formed ideas we need to recognize the path that they are traveling on so that we can guide them further along the right path - not our path. Well right path isn’t necessarily the right term because sometimes the wrong path is more important to travel first. Sometimes students come up to me with questions and my best response is not an answer, but a question. Why did you do this? What were you thinking when you did this? What did you want to happen? Why don’t you and Joe work together I think you two are working on similar ideas?

Image via Wikipedia This guy Joe borrows my truck everyday to tow his boat to the lake. He never offers to pay for gas or maintenance on the truck. Once he even drove the truck into a ditch. He walked away and left it there. The next day he came over to borrow the truck and got mad that it wasn't back in my driveway ready to tow his boat. He went to the mechanic and borrowed the truck from there before it was finished being fixed. Then he demanded the mechanic upgrade the tires and rims and add a bit of chrome. Bills have been tough lately. I can't afford to keep filling the truck with gas everyday so Joe can drive to the lake. Actually, he has the truck all the time and only returns it so I can fill the tank. I thought about not filling the tank, or even trading in the truck for a smaller car, but Joe threatened to let my neighbor take rides on his boat instead of me. (not that I've had the time or money to take a ride on the boat in years). I tried to find a second job

Taken from a friends facebook notes I promise I only ask once a year..... by Joe Kvidera on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 5:53pm As most of you know, I work at Turning Point, McHenry County’s only comprehensive domestic violence agency and shelter. Coming up on August 12th & 13th, we’re holding our huge annual fundraiser “Take a Stand for Tuning Point.” It’s a massive event that involves our local radio station Star 105.5, a couple dozen local businesses and service groups, over 100 volunteers and hundreds and hundreds of donors. It’s always a little awe-inspiring to see all the people turn out and pitch in. It’s like the last minutes of “It’s a Wonderful Life” where all the friends and neighbors pitch in with a dollar, or some change- whatever they can spare- to make sure the old Building and Loan survives.  This will be the sixth year we’ve done this event and it never fails to amaze me. People come by to tell us thank you for what Turning Point has done

Image by Getty Images via @daylife This post has been in my brain since I sat and read the Supreme Court decisions concerning desegregation of education during our school law class. This will be my last post on this blog, but please do follow my growth on my personal blog . Just the other day I was listening to the radio (NPR I think but I can't seem to find the recording) and someone was talking about Cuba and segregation. The general gist of the show went like this: In an effort to be equal Cuba banished race in all census forms. Except that ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away. Instead of the free and open society Castro envisioned what he actually got was rampant De Facto discrimination. The speaker went on further to suggest that in the U.S. we had De Jure discrimination. In the U.S. the people had real facts, words, and deeds to fight against and thus the struggle for Civil Rights was born. In Cuba accusations of racism are easily deflected with a shrug of the s