Posts Tagged ‘ Me ’

Rookie Year – 1991 (Part II)

June 8, 2009
By

Our guest artist continues with his glimpse back at mrC’s first real job – teaching independent study stylie – while mrC (his present self)  studies for Saturday’s CTEL test. 1991 – Rich (continued) “Do you have your history homework for me… today?” “I did it. ” It sounds like deed it. “But do you have it? Here? Now? At this place and time?” “I left it at my pad, eh.” Re: His American history homework. He is currently taking (which means he has a copy of the textbook) US History A. The district curriculum guide lists this as a semester-long course. The class is worth 5 credits out of the 225 that are needed to graduate from the high school. The book that he took home a week ago is about 200 pages long, with 44 chapters divided into 8 units, and purports to cover the time period between the pilgrims and the Reconstruction. Each chapter is approximately 3-5 pages long, and is followed by about 2 pages of MC, T/F, and fill-in-the-blank exercises, with some time-line exercises and find-a-word puzzles thrown in for variety. The time-line ones can often be quite entertaining. To introduce the concept, the book shows

Read more »

Shameless Hucksterism (CPS.mrcoward.com)

May 15, 2009
By

I was just reading an article speculating that the era of everything being free on the ‘net might be ending. Record companies can’t make a living because everyone is downloading for free. Television networks are trying to figure out how to make money from free tv on the ‘net. Why have cable for tv when you can get tv from your net connection? Newspapers are folding because everyone (including them) posts their content for free.  Why subscribe to the NY Times when you can read it for free on the ‘net? Travel agents? Booking trips is freebie online. Etc. Etc. But. Nobody’s making money, and sooner rather than later says this article, things will have to change. YouTube loses millions of dollars a month. Facebook? Ditto. MySpace. Please. And don’t even start about Twitter. They all lose millions of dollars monthly. Ads don’t even come close to paying for the costs of these sites. The only sites that make money are the ones that charge for something. Not necessarily everything. They give content away, but charge for the premium stuff. Like the Wall Street Journal or CraigsList. Yeah, that’s me, like the Wall Street Journal. Anyway, all the lessons and

Read more »

A True Blast from the Past (Vacation Filler)

April 16, 2009
By

Every time I smell a Sharpie, I flash back to the summer between seventh and eighth grade. I spent many an hour in my closet that summer with the smell of felt pens and burning hair. No, it’s not what you think. (What WERE you thinking, anyway?) That was the summer I dug out my dad’s 8mm movie camera, and invested almost $20 (a fortune for me in 1974) in film and developing, and made a couple of movies. One was a skateboard movie. I had seen Endless Summer, and wanted to make a similar sort of skateboard movie about skating in our neighborhood. I used three reels of film at about 4 minutes each. My friend Ziggy and I used his dad’s old-school film editor, and literally taped together a masterpiece. It only survived 4 or 5 showings before some of the splices melted, and well…today all I have is a reel of outtakes. The other movie was a cartoon (of sorts), and thus has the Sharpie connection, since I used Sharpies for my “artwork.”  The pens were of the old formulation – I used to get mighty loopy after a couple of hours in the closet with my

Read more »

Flash(way)Back II

February 12, 2009
By

Ok, back to my story.  So after the fine phone call that started my Friday, I go up to the office to let the secretaries know that a representative of our city’s finest might be paying me a visit. First they think I’m joking, they they start razzing me, “Cops comin’ for you again Coward?” “Same same since seventh grade.” “What?” It was 1974, and I was late for school. I hate being late. For anything. Even school, even then. I was riding my bike as usual, and in 1974, we didn’t wear helmets, let alone worry about which side of the road we were riding on, and we thought stop signs were for cars and losers. Today, the road I was on the wrong side of is 4 lanes wide, and the light I ran controls one of the busiest intersections (the cross street is 6 lanes now) in my old hometown. Back then, it was a mere 2 lanes (plus the turn lane) I was crossing against the light. I got across without a care, though that was probably because I didn’t look. I was looking a block ahead, and I could see them lining up outside in

Read more »

Flash(way)Back

February 6, 2009
By

Today the cops came for me at school. Wow, that’s a pretty dramatic opening for a teacher blog entry. With any luck*, visions of God-knows-what are flashing through your head right now. “What did he do? Did they haul him off in handcuffs in front of his students? OMG, will his next post be from the cooler?” The reality wasn’t quite so dramatic, though the front office staff got quite a charge out of it. Actually, it was only one officer. And he left his number, instead of leaving with me. But it took me right back to when I was in seventh grade. That was the last time the cops showed up for me at school. Yep, this post isn’t about my class or teaching, this is all about me. I got a phone call at school at 7:30 in the morning. This in itself is a bit unusual, because I don’t really talk on the phone (no, I don’t own a cell phone – and never will), and most people know not to call me. Even the office staff knows (if it’s not an emergency) to send a runner, instead of

Read more »

Random Featured Post

Oh Raffle King, Oh Raffle King…

(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]

more -->


Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

Archives

May 2012
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Recent Comments

Links

Privacy Policy

Tags

cartoons Charlotte Doyle Class Activities clickers CPS CTEL Flashback grammar high school idiosyncrasies irony Mailbag Me mechanics middle school teaching Monsters on Maple Street Moodle online learning oral reading Outsiders CHapter 5 Outsiders Chapter 7 RaffleKing Ray Bradbury Reading Richard Cory Seventh Grade Behavior Stories of Seventh Grade substituting Teaching Teaching Tips teaching with technology teaching with technology teaching writing Technology techology testing The Earth Men The Giver The Midwife's Apprentice The Outsiders Tips Tips for teachers Tom Sawyer Wiki Writing