Mining For Hidden Gems

Let me first give my reasons as to why teachers are  like doctors: Uneducated individuals are a burden to the rest of the society, as much as or more than unhealthy ones. The effects of good and bad teaching are life-long and consequential, much like the results of good and bad medicine. A good teacher must "diagnose" every student in order to be able to teach him or her in the most effective way possible.  This is not an easy task because many times the student cannot articulate his or her difficulty, or the teacher does not have all the resources to perform an accurate assessment of the learning problem.  In addition, one teacher usually has to manage twenty or more "patients" simultaneously and single handedly. Now, if we agree that the job of the teacher is just as valuable as a medical doctor's, then we must: Treat teachers with the same professionalism as doctors and consider them "specialists" in their fields Have educators set the standard...

Years ago I read a book by Leon Dash called Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America .  It is the biography of a drug addicted, AIDS infected grandmother on welfare as well as  the story of her children.  Well written and gripping, Dash writes about how six of Rosa's eight children lived a similar life of poverty, illiteracy and crime, whereas two of them were able to escape that cycle.  One of them  started along the same path, but was arrested for robbery at a very early age.  The experience was enough to scare him straight.  But the part of this story that I keep retelling is the reason why the eighth child broke away and was able to make a middle class life for himself. It turns out that because he was a good natured, quiet child he would get invited to classmates' homes to play and he would notice that not everyone lived as he did.  He had caught a glimpse into another world and it was enough to convince him that there was a differe...

I am reading Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson of the  Three Cups of Tea fame, and came across these statistics:  "In the impoverished hinterlands of the western Himalayas, $20 is enough to educate a first grader for an entire year, $340 can send a girl to four years of high school on a full-ride scholarship, $50,000 is sufficient to build and outfit an eight-room schoolhouse and endow the teachers' salaries for the first five years."  I know these numbers do not compare to the cost of education in the U.S., but I do know one thing:  It costs a whole lot less to educate a child than to rehabilitate an adult, no matter where we are in this world.  The same source also cites World Bank studies that show how one year of primary school can result in an income bump of 10 to 20 percent for women later in life.  Where girls are educated infant mortality rates drop significantly after one generation, as does population growth. So whenever there is a choice we...

So I went to my first Texas Computer Education Association's annual conference last week and like most of these things it was hit and miss. But I am glad to say that most of my time was spent in hit sessions. I wanted to jot down here those things that I thought I would definitely want to explore further, as a reminder to actually do them!!! The Good 1. This blog right here is the first thing I learned from Tammy Worcester (http://www.tammyworcester.com). She knows that if things aren't easy, we won't do them for very long. She showed how you can set up a blog in 2 minutes (if you don't get too picky about fonts and layouts) and keep it updated from your phone or e-mail account. She also showed how to make your own maps on http://maps.google.com, write your lesson plans on https://docs.google.com and link them to your blog, keep one calendar of events, activities and to dos on Google Calendar and even do a live podcast on http://www.justin.tv. 2. I also ...

Two years ago I started a blog and I got as far as naming it!  I got so bogged down with all the mechanical details of it that I forgot the reason I wanted to have a blog in the first place.  This week I spent two days at the Texas Computer Education Association's annual conference in Austin and one of the first sessions I attended was on blogging.  It got me excited all over again and it gave me some real cool tools to make it a manageable task.  So here I go again! This will be my space to rant and rave, vent and vex about education, my passion.  I am calling it "Mining for Hidden Gems" because of the following quote: "Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value.  Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures."  -Bahá'u'lláh As a teacher, my job is to look for those gems.  The real valuable ones are not usually on the surface.  You have to dig deep to find them. I am also borrowing from Katherine Bomer's wonderfu...