The Dim Bulb

The Occasional Musings of an Educator

by Michael Keany

The brain is capable of performing 10 quadrillion (that’s 10 to the 16th)…

Do students still have free speech in school?

Parental Involvement Is Overrated

“Poverty-related Challenges Sap Instructional Time in High Schools”…

Principals slam 2014 NY Common Core tests as badly designed

Effective Writing Instruction 

(Originally titled “What Writing Is and Isn’t”)

“Let’s keep this in perspective,” says writer Jeff Anderson in an article in Educational Leadership. “The Common Core State Standards are a guiding document. Educators must look beyond the artificial boundaries assumed in such a document and dive into pedagogy, process, content knowledge, and research that reveals best practice in teaching…

What Teaching Is All About

In this evocative Boston Globe Magazine article, novelist Steve Almond remembers the precise moment when he felt literature come alive: his ninth-grade English teacher picked up a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and read the first chapter to the class. “Nearly every person I know has some version of this story,” says Almond: “The moment when a teacher changes the course of your life. A good teacher, after all,…

Robert E. Slavin

Director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University

Support Your Local Principal

April 2014

Dear_______________________

As you are profoundly aware, there has been much controversy surrounding not only the Common Core Learning Standards, but more specifically the testing of students in grades three through eight.    As an elementary principal I have had many conversations with parents regarding their concerns about testing.  I have also had many meetings with teachers who express their concerns about when the test is…