What do you do and where do you go when you leave a high-stress career that nearly kills you?
If your name is Tom Dunn and you spent 20 years, first as a defense counsel in the Army Trial Defense Service, then stints in Florida, New York State and most recently as head of the nonprofit Georgia Resource Center, you find a less stressful environment in which to indulge your passion.
You teach in a tough middle school in Atlanta, Georgia where “ninety-three percent of students are black and 5 percent Hispanic; some 97 percent qualify for free or reduced …read more

On September 25, 1957, 300 United States Army troops escorted nine black children to Central High School in Little Rock after unruly white crowds had forced them to withdraw.
In 1976, the shooting of a 13-year-old sparked a children’s uprising against apartheid that spread across the country to Cape Town, where students from a mixed-race high school, Salt River, marched in solidarity with black schoolchildren.
September 15, 2009, Seattle schools plan to lower the passing grade from C to D, partly match the rest of the state’s districts and partly to keep their funding by keeping kids in school.
On September 24, 2009, …read more

Remember the old line “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”
It’s not true. Most people who go into teaching do it because they have a true passion—at least when they start.
But passion is hard to sustain when all you hear is that

you are too easy/hard;
you give too much/not enough homework;
you too often receive little-to-no respect from parents, kids, administrators and even your colleagues;
more time is spent on politics …read more

By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.
Some students are just “needy.”  They want you to spoon feed them.  They don’t want to study and learn on their own. They would rather call you or email a question than to look it up on the textbook’s index.  They won’t go to the library to do research for a paper.  Instead, they’ll just do an internet search.  But they won’t do …read more

By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.
On my last post, I wrote about a student who was taking quite a bit of a colleague’s time.  Today, I wanted to write more about that topic.
[Thus starts a multi-part discussion of what today's teachers face and the choices that they make. Miki]
Some students simply require more instructional time than others.
Sometimes they have gaps in their background that you need to fill …read more

CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.
Last week I wrote about what is involved to be a good teacher. What I described takes a lot out of me.  It means that for every hour that I am in lecture, there are several hours outside of lecture associated with the class.  Every now and then, someone in the state legislature points fingers at the college faculty saying that we are overpaid …read more