The Friday following Thanksgiving is National Day of Listening, when people are encouraged to interview and record the stories of their family. My request last night for stories about education in your childhood homes comes in that spirit of listening. I welcome brief snippets of your stories on the comments, but Grandma, looking for extra…

Nothing beats overdue grad school papers to get me back into the blogosphere! So as School and Society fester in a window buried deep below this one, let me catch you up! The paper I’m writing is about the Senior Pinning Ceremony that happened last Friday night. Parents presented their seniors with a pin of…

In Physical science, George found it remarkable that there is an element with every whole number of protons from 1 to 109, without missing a single one. “Why is it like that?” he asked, “Did the Count from Sesame Street have anything to do with it?” BTW Sadoway’s new liquid batteries sound pretty hot!

My life seems to be a collection of lists. There’s just a stack of thing to which I must attend. Likewise, there’s a stack of things I want to tell you about. I’ll write in reverse chronological order. Logical? Beans. Rice. Spice. Dinner was a stroke of genius. I think I’ve decided that to call…

mbjohnson here, reporting live from Gate E7 at the Philadelphia International Airport, where flight 178 to Manchester is expected to depart. Eventually. Apparently the plane is in the air… over Florida… I guess that’s good news? I hate flying. I don’t really mind the claustrophobic accommodations, which were certainly not designed to accommodate passengers with…

To my national web team: Your mission (should you choose to accept) is to find big 3D models of the human eye and the human ear that I can buy for a reasonable price. My students have been more interested in human hearing than in the abstraction of sound waves. I anticipate a similar reaction…

We had a largely successful first day of project presentations in Science of Communications! The slides were incomplete, the presentations were unrehearsed, and several students had no idea how to pronounce words on their slides and notecards (much less what those words meant). BUT most of the presenters did, in fact, appear to have learned…

My Science of Communications students were using Google Docs to compose their unit project presentations. The idea of using Google Docs instead of Powerpoint was to: facilitate student collaboration allow me to grade/check progress from home without extra steps allow students to work on any connected computer at school or at home eliminate students’ dependence…

Maine makes me sad, and I feel like it’s my fault since I just ignored the many pleas for help with phone calls and letter writing over the past few months. What a bummer. Nakir, the freshman in my physical science class who was incarcerated for half of the first marking period, is back and…

Don St. Pierre is an opera and voice coach on the Curtis faculty, the rehearsal accompanist and composer-in-residence for the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and a member of my church who has composed several pieces for our church choir and accompanies us frequently. Don heard me singing with the choir back in September, and decided…

First off, I’m sorry for the extended absence from the blogosphere… and I’m sorry that this post isn’t the epic novel you’d hope to get as makeup work. Today was a full-day PD. I went to a PD for High School Science Content Leaders. There were a lot of cool people with a lot of…