Tag Archives: teaching

I’m back after a brief hiatus, and we’ve got some catching up to do on the legislative front. Specifically, we can celebrate the fact that Sen. Michael Merrifield has learned once again that doing the same thing over and over again may not be the best approach. I wrote a rather snarky post a few weeks ago about Merrifield’s SB 067, which was functionally identical to last year’s SB 105. Both bills sought to gut tenure reform, performance pay, and merit-based personnel decisions by essentially blowing up strong educator evaluations. In particular, Merrifield was once again attempting to eliminate the requirement that evaluations include multiple measures of student growth. And once again, he failed to do so.

To students like me, teachers are mythical creatures. Sure, I see them every day, but I can’t see behind the proverbial curtain. I don’t know how they judge their success or failure in different areas, how well they are serving their students as a whole, or how they communicate information about their teaching performance to their peers. In the absence of good evaluation systems, that same ambiguity extends to parents and administrators. As Ben Orlin recently pointed out in the Atlantic, teachers are only human. Some great teachers may portray their performance as mediocre or poor, and some less effective teachers may be inclined to exaggerate their success. In either case, it’s clear that some kind of evaluation system is necessary if we want our teachers to be fairly and accurately assessed. Here in Colorado, SB 10-191 ostensibly aims to provide such a system. Among numerous other things, the law requires all Colorado school districts to adopt new yearly performance ratings. These ratings have been in the “practice” phase for the past few years, but are due to be fully implemented in the coming school year. That means that teachers who receive ratings below effective for two consecutive years will […]

When not typing like I do for the blog, I use crayons (especially my favorite colors blue and green) to write in large block letters. On paper, mind you, not walls. I’ve learned that lesson! Anyway, that’s why I found interesting the new article in the Denver Post “Cursive increasingly out of loop in schools”: West Virginia’s largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the third grade. “It doesn’t get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach,” said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools. For Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.” Gulp. Not sure what different Colorado schools do about teaching handwriting, but I’m curious to know. Does anybody out there teach cursive with crayons? Or maybe I can just use one of those “script” fonts here on WordPress. Does anybody know how to do that?