America you have changed so much and it's not for the good! ( an open letter to the people of America)

Dear America:

Given the two SCOTUS rulings by today, The Supreme Court of the United States is, as of today, officially owned by and ruled by corporations and the wealthy.

The same plutocrats in other countries and which America claims are undemocratic in so many other countries of the world are now your destiny fulfilled. Democracy in America died today.

Your "Land of the Free" no longer exists and to just live there, it certainly has become the "Home of the Brave" and not in a military sense.

Plutocracy or oligarchy ... it doesn't matter because the U.S.A. is a morally bankrupt country run by corporations and the wealthy 1%ers.

As Justice Ruth B Ginsburg wrote on her Twitter feed today:
"The court (SCOTUS), I feel, has ventured into a minefield."

Good luck America you will very much need it in the future.

William A. Hoch

P.S.     I know you can do better and my hope is you will make the changes needed at the ballot box in 2014 and in 2016.

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Words To Live By! Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '97. Wear sunscreen.

Today someone on social media caused my brain to rewind to the June 1997 graduation advice from Chicago Sun columnist Mary Schmich and put to  a spoken word video by Baz Luhrmann in 1998. Here are the words (and lyrics?) and why everyone should consider following this important advice everyday. 

 If you want to skip the required reading you can fast forward to the end of this post and see the advice in a video encapsulation.  

 The truth is the free advice is a s good today as it was in 1997.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '97.

Wear sunscreen.


If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.
The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience... 
I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded.
But trust me, in 20 years you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked... 
You're not as fat as you Imagine.

Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. 
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind.
The kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy; 
Sometimes you're ahead, 
Sometimes You're behind.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; 
If you Succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your
Life.
The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium.

Be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't, maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't, maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.
Whatever you do, don't Congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either.
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's. 
Enjoy your body, Use it every way you can... Don't be afraid of it, or what other people Think of it, 
It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own... 

Dance... even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.

Brother and sister together we'll make it through
Someday your spirit will take you and guide you there
I know you've been hurting, but I've been waiting to be there
For you. 
And I'll be there, just tell me now, whenever I can. 
Everybody's free.

Get to know your parents, you never know when they'll be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings; 
They are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. 
Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; 
Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will Philander, you too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. 
Maybe you have a trust fund, Maybe you have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen... 




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7 Characteristics of a Digitally Competent Teacher

The-Characteristics-of-a-Digitally-Competent-Teacher-Infographic
Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics


7 Characteristics of a Digitally Competent Teacher

  1. You can integrate digital skills into everyday life: digital skills are transferable.
  2. You have a balanced attitude: you are a teacher not a techie.
  3. You are open to using and trying new stuff: find digital tools and explore how they work.
  4. You are a digital communicator: you can use email and social media with ease.
  5. You know how to do a digital assessment: you’re a sound judge of the quality of information, apps and tools
  6. You understand and respect privacy: you treat personal data with the respect it deserves
  7. You are a digital citizen: you know how to behave online appropriately and you’ll pass it on to your pupils

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You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.




You went to school so you think you know what teachers do, right? You are wrong. Here’s a piece explaining all of this from Sarah Blaine, a mom, former teacher and full-time practicing attorney in New Jersey who writes at her parentingthecore blog, where this first appeared.
By Sarah Blaine
We all know what teachers do, right? After all, we were all students. Each one of us, each product of public education, we each sat through class after class for thirteen years. We encountered dozens of teachers. We had our kindergarten teachers and our first grade teachers and our fifth grade teachers and our gym teachers and our art teachers and our music teachers. We had our science teachers and our social studies teachers and our English teachers and our math teachers. If we were lucky, we might even have had our Latin teachers or our Spanish teachers or our physics teachers or our psychology teachers. Heck, I even had a seventh grade “Communications Skills” teacher. We had our guidance counselors and our principals and some of us had our special education teachers and our study hall monitors.
So we know teachers. We get teachers. We know what happens in classrooms, and we know what teachers do. We know which teachers are effective, we know which teachers left lasting impressions, we know which teachers changed our lives, and we know which teachers sucked.
We know. We know which teachers changed lives for the better. We know which teachers changed lives for the worse.
Teaching as a profession has no mystery. It has no mystique. It has no respect.
We were students, and therefore we know teachers. We denigrate teachers. We criticize teachers. We can do better than teachers. After all: We do. They teach.
We are wrong.
We need to honor teachers. We need to respect teachers. We need to listen to teachers. We need to stop reducing teachers to arbitrary measurements of student growth on so-called objective exams.
Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching merely by virtue of having once been students.
We don’t know.
I spent a little over a year earning a master of arts in teaching degree. Then I spent two years teaching English Language Arts in a rural public high school. And I learned that my 13 years as a public school student, my 4 years as a college student at a highly selective college, and even a great deal of my year as a masters degree student in the education school of a flagship public university hadn’t taught me how to manage a classroom, how to reach students, how to inspire a love of learning, how to teach. Eighteen years as a student (and a year of preschool before that), and I didn’t know shit about teaching. Only years of practicing my skills and honing my skills would have rendered me a true professional. An expert. Someone who knows about the business of inspiring children. Of reaching students. Of making a difference. Of teaching.
I didn’t stay. I copped out. I left. I went home to suburban New Jersey, and a year later I enrolled in law school.
I passed the bar. I began to practice law at a prestigious large law firm. Three years as a law student had no more prepared me for the practice of law than 18 years of experience as a student had previously prepared me to teach. But even in my first year as a practicing attorney, I earned five times what a first year teacher made in the district where I’d taught.
I worked hard in my first year of practicing law. But I didn’t work five times harder than I’d worked in my first year of teaching. In fact, I didn’t work any harder. Maybe I worked a little less.
But I continued to practice. I continued to learn. Nine years after my law school graduation, I think I have some idea of how to litigate a case. But I am not a perfect lawyer. There is still more I could learn, more I could do, better legal instincts I could develop over time. I could hone my strategic sense. I could do better, be better. Learn more law. Learn more procedure. But law is a practice, law is a profession. Lawyers are expected to evolve over the course of their careers. Lawyers are given more responsibility as they earn it.
New teachers take on full responsibility the day they set foot in their first classrooms.
The people I encounter out in the world now respect me as a lawyer, as a professional, in part because the vast majority of them have absolutely no idea what I really do.
All of you former students who are not teachers and not lawyers, you have no more idea of what it is to teach than you do of what it is to practice law.
All of you former students: you did not design curricula, plan lessons, attend faculty meetings, assess papers, design rubrics, create exams, prepare report cards, and monitor attendance. You did not tutor students, review rough drafts, and create study questions. You did not assign homework. You did not write daily lesson objectives on the white board. You did not write poems of the week on the white board. You did not write homework on the white board. You did not learn to write legibly on the white board while simultaneously making sure that none of your students threw a chair out a window.
You did not design lessons that succeeded. You did not design lessons that failed.
You did not learn to keep your students quiet during lock down drills.
You did not learn that your 15 year old students were pregnant from their answers to vocabulary quizzes. You did not learn how to teach functionally illiterate high school students to appreciate Shakespeare. You did not design lessons to teach students close reading skills by starting with the lyrics to pop songs. You did not miserably fail your honors level students at least in part because you had no books to give them. You did not struggle to teach your students how to develop a thesis for their essays, and bask in the joy of having taught a successful lesson, of having gotten through to them, even for five minutes. You did not struggle with trying to make SAT-level vocabulary relevant to students who did not have a single college in their county. You did not laugh — because you so desperately wanted to cry — when you read some of the absurdities on their final exams. You did not struggle to reach students who proudly announced that they only came to school so that their mom’s food stamps didn’t get reduced.
You did not spend all of New Years’ Day crying five years after you’d left the classroom because you reviewed the New York Times’ graphic of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and learned that one of your very favorite students had been killed in Iraq two years before. And you didn’t know. Because you copped out and left. So you cried, helplessly, and the next day you returned to the practice of law.
You did not. And you don’t know. You observed. Maybe you learned. But you didn’t teach.
The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.
Copyright  The Washington Post ©   February 22, 2014 
The Answer Sheet   By Valerie Strauss

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The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013

The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013 ©

By DEBORAH HOFMANN
December 18, 2013 published by The New York Times ©

In lieu of a lesson on this last Wednesday before the holiday break, we asked Deborah Hofmann, the senior editor of the New York Times Best Sellers List, to create a special list for us of the top 75 best-selling education titles of 2013, and to explain how she defined and ranked books for this new category.

We hope it starts conversations, introduces you to new ideas and authors, and provides inspiration for teaching and learning well into 2014.

The Learning Network
Teaching and Learning with The New York Times

Reading List | The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013


By Deborah Hofmann

Welcome to the debut of the New York Times Best-Seller List of Education titles.

This collection of eclectic and far-ranging titles is intended to get people talking and thinking about the many ways we discuss education, how we present sometimes arcane subjects, and how we think about teaching and learning at all ages and in many contexts.

The list was compiled by looking at every adult nonfiction title that was reported each week to the New York Times Best-Seller Lists though Dec. 7, in both print and electronic formats. This includes titles that were released in earlier years, but continue to enjoy sales; for this first experiment, we wanted to cast a wide net to see what turned up naturally.

I classified a title as “Education” after I examined multiple standard sources, including its industry identifiers, reviews and interviews, to create a sort of card catalog of titles that — to this editor’s sensibilities — spoke to an enduring appetite for books that try to teach the reader, or tell us how we learn or why we learn — or, sometimes, why we do not. There were no vetting experts or outside education consultants. Had that been the case, we might still be debating.

Although some titles are familiar for having made the traditional best-seller list that is published weekly in the Book Review, many of the titles are books that were reported, but perhaps often in quantities too low in any given weeks to qualify for the traditional rankings. Cumulatively over the months and in this subgroup, however, they emerge in clearer relief. They are ranked below by their relative reported sales, the same way we rank all books on the best-seller lists.

Please note that I chose not to consider for inclusion any titles that are actively tracked toward ranking among the Childrens’ Best-Sellers List categories, so you will not find classroom evergreens or coming-of-age narratives here.

One might argue that some of these titles are simply too narrow, too literal, or, in some cases, spoofery or farce. But isn’t argument what makes for lively hand-raising and calling out of turn?


1. America the Beautiful, by Ben C. Carson with Candy Carson
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
3. How to Read Literature Like a Professor, by Thomas C. Foster
4. How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough
5. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

6. The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
7. Pathways to the Common Core, by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman
8. Far from the Tree, by Andrew Solomon
9. The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe
10. The Smartest Kids in the World, by Amanda Ripley

11. Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch
12. How Music Works, by David Byrne
13. Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, by Charlotte Mason
14. The Autistic Brain, by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
15. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Wheelan

16. One World Schoolhouse, by Salman Khan
17. The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky
18. F in Exams, Richard Benson
19. Letters to a Young Scientist, by Edward O. Wilson
20. On Writing, by Stephen King

21. NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
22. De-Textbook, by Cracked.com
23. F for Effort, by Richard Benson
24. The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
25. Walk in Their Shoes: Can One Person Change the World?, by Jim Ziolkowski with James S. Hirsch

26. Teach Like a PIRATE, by Dave Burgess
27. What You’re Really Meant to Do, by Robert Steven Kaplan
28. Make Good Art, by Neil Gaiman
29. The Education of a Lifetime, by Robert Khayat
30. The Naked Roommate, by Harlan Cohen

31. Sticks and Stones, by Emily Bazelon
32. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, by Daniel C. Dennett
33. College (Un)Bound, by Jeffrey Selingo
34. Confessions of a Scholarship Winner, by Kristina Ellis
35. How to Create a Mind, by Ray Kurzweil. (Penguin)

36. Pandora’s Lunchbox, by Melanie Warner
37. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s, by John Elder Robison
38. This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace
39. Heretics and Heroes, by Thomas Cahill
40. Instant Vocabulary, by Ida L. Ehrlich

41. Onion Book of Known Knowledge, by The Onion
42. Disney U, by Doug Lipp
43. Smithsonian Book of Presidential Trivia, by Smithsonian Institution and Amy Pastan
44. Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, by Mignon Fogarty
45. Things Come Apart, by Todd McLellan

46. Real Talk for Real Teachers, by Rafe Esquith
47. The School Revolution, by Ron Paul
48. What Great Teachers Do Differently, by Todd Whitaker
49. Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson
50. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

51.Shouting Won’t Help, by Katherine Bouton
52. Teach Your Children Well, by Madeline Levine
53. Big Book of How, by Editors of Time Magazine for Kids
54. Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt
55. Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett with David Wilezol

56. Here Is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History, by Andrew Carroll
57. Art As Therapy, by Alain De Botton and John Armstrong
58. A History of Western Music, by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca
59. My Bookstore, by Ronald Rice
60. Hello! My Name Is Public School, and I Have an Image Problem, by Leslie Milder and Jane Braddock

61. Thinking in Numbers, by David Tammet
62. Who Owns the Learning? by Alan November
63. Good Luck, Graduate, by Gregory Lang
64. First Class, by Alison Stewart
65. A Year Up, by Gerald Chertavian

66. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
67. History’s Greatest Hits, by Joseph Cummins
68. Strings Attached, by Joanne Lipman and Melanie Kupchynsky
69. Hope Against Hope, by Sarah Carr
70. Learning by Doing, by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many

71. Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice, by David Stinson and Anita Wager
72. Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few
73. Fire in the Ashes, by Jonathan Kozol
74. What Your Third Grader Needs to Know, by Hirsch, E. D., Jr.
75. All Roads Lead to Austen, by Amy Elizabeth Smith

Sales of both print books and e-books are reported confidentially to The New York Times; retailers were not asked specifically about Education titles. The sales venues for print books include independent book retailers; national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and discount department stores; and newsstands. E-book rankings reflect sales from leading online vendors of e-books in a variety of popular e-reader formats.

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