Uncooperative Crickets

King of All of the World

Have you ever known a song that seemed really plain at first, but then you found that there were little gems buried inside of it? I have.

Skye, AVC, and I went to a teacher educator conference in Rhode Island yesterday. We had a great discussion on the way back about how useful these conferences are. Here was the basic format: we broke out into small interest groups for 70 minutes, had all of the interest groups report back their findings, and then listened to a speaker. The speaker was very good, a math educator who spoke about her research. An example of an interest group was "training pre-service elementary school teachers," which is the one I attended ("pre-service" means they aren't teachers yet. Basically, this means teaching college students who want to be teachers) . Here is what we discussed (and later reported): it is hard to train pre-service teachers because we don't have much time, there are many people have attitudes that counter our goals, and no one has done much assessment of these programs. This is not new news, and this is why we were questioning the value of the conference.

On the other hand, I met some people who are interested in the same thing that I am, and I can contact them if I need help.. Also, I got invited to apply for a job (it would be a great job, except that the geography is all wrong).

What is the best way to make progress on an issue? Talking about it only accomplishes so much. Speaking of which, I am going to wrap up soon, since I should really continue writing my textbook for pre-service elementary school teachers.

Happy birthday to the female Dr. Yeti. Congratulations to the Twins, who beat the Braves last night. I followed it a little too closely on the internet.

I'm excited because this "junkyard wars" project I am involved in decided to have the students build a windmill out of junk. This was decided by a subcommittee, of which I was half.

Now I'm on my way up north
All it's gonna do is rain
And I'm gonna want to go back to the world
Where I was the king of all of the world

posted by Dirk Awesome @ 12:07 PM