Philosophy Without A Home

Wow was I busy last week. I usually had time to stop at home and grab some dinner, but 30 minutes later I was out the door again and not home until at least 8:30. The weekend didn't bring any respite, we drove to Lisle for a marching band competition and picked up a dryer along the way. I was up until 11:30 catching up on laundry, then up again at 5:30 to clean the basement and backyard for a some up coming construction. I did finish by 3 so I could grade papers and go shopping which is good, at least I won't go hungry next week. The problem with such a busy week it that I also had to spend hours on Sunday grading papers. I would rather return the work the day after with notes so we can integrate the feedback into lessons. Come Monday morning most of my students, and myself, will have forgotten what we did on individual days so looking at old papers is hard. You have to remember the assignment and think back to what you were thinking at the time and then try to make sense of

I've been in the education field for almost 20 years, but in the classroom only about 11. Five years ago I took a position as a 7th grade math teacher. For the first few yeas we had no curriculum and were expected to build everything from scratch. Holy smokes starting a new grade after being out of the classroom for 7 years and creating everything from scratch is tough. Especially in a school/district renown for it's constant change. I thought, shoot if we could just get a decent curriculum we'd be great. I should have been more specific. The school choose an opensource curriculum known for it's rigor. Personally I hate it. Not nearly enough concrete work. I struggled each day trying to get through the lesson and keep the students engaged, while they struggled to understand something speaking in a language they can barely understand. So this year I went back to building my own curriculum, not completely from scratch. I will still use the content in places, but st