School Shooting

http://gma.yahoo.com/ohio-school-shooting-victims-parents-forgive-suspected-shooter-161435847--abc-news.html

Directions for Submitting A Blog

Hello students! Your blogs are very important to me and should reflect your best possible work. To ensure this is done, please read the following guidelines. Your commitment to this process will affect your grade and how others respond.

Happy BLOGGING!! 

1. Plan your ideas on paper using a variety of pre-writing strategies (your choice).
2. Create a rough draft on paper and then type the submission in a Microsoft word document.
3. Read over your blog to revise and edit for mistakes (especially spelling).
4. Copy and paste your blog onto the page.
5. Create a title.
6. Be sure to respond to at least two other classmates blogs. The response should be a minimum of three sentences in length.

Blog Rubric

____ On Topic/ Focused

____ Organized/ Coherent

____  Conventions (spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, length etc)

____ End with a question to the reader

Revelations

     As a child, I always knew that teaching was going to be apart of my life. I loved placing my dolls and teddy bears into rows and teaching them. . . God knows what. My big brother was always in the room laughing at his little sister, and when I would leave to run "teacher errands" he was the monitor. I always had a least one student to start talking (according to him), which meant time-out. 

     Fast forward. The year is 2001. I had less than two months of college left and I no longer desired to write for a professional newspaper. I was burned out and needed a change. Through the direction of my mom and sisters, who all work in the field of education, teaching became an option. Today, I am glad I made the choice.

     I do not claim to be super-teacher or even "the best", but I do feel like I genuinely connect to my students. I love those moments when information that I have shared with them becomes their common knowledge and they truly understand it. I love seeing them excited about the learning and having fun with it. I love being the reason why they smile (at least, most). 

     I do not know if it is in my future to actually have children, but I do feel lucky and blessed to have played a role in so many precious lives.  

The Words are the Problem

            The use of cross-curricular teaching methods is a positive and effective instructional strategy used in many schools across America. However, the way in which the math teacher at a Norcross, Georgia elementary school incorporated the history of slavery into third grade math problems was, in my opinion, very obtuse and insensitive. As a teacher, I know the many pressures we face in trying to motivate and encourage our students to gain new knowledge. However, that pressure should never outweigh commonsense.

            Yes, the information which he referred to in the math problems might be based on factual events of the past, but was the content really relevant to the overarching understandings one would want a student to take from lessons on the Civil War and slavery? Did the math problems truly show a valiant effort made by the teacher to critically infuse important facts about history?

            I believe the teacher was being insensitive to the content in which he/she decided to use and should have followed the protocol set by the school to send all cross-curricular material to school administrators first for approval.

Question: Since the reporting of this incident, the teacher in question has resigned. Do you think the situation required his/her resignation? Why/Why not?