Kate was my best friend in third grade. We both had wild imaginations and loved to spend recess pretending to be fanciful creatures. Other kids didn’t seem to like to play “our” way or weren’t very good at pretending, so we stuck to ourselves and thought everything was fine—until we were called into the guidance counselor’s office and told we were a clique and making other kids feel bad for excluding them. By definition, we [...]
Looking back across my son’s 13 years of elementary, middle, and high school education, I would do some things differently. When he was in 3rd grade, my son was identified with a disability, and while he thrived in so many ways, I would have made different choices along the way if I had known then what I know now. Being a teacher as well as a mom of a child with a disability certainly had [...]
Mornings during the school year are chaos at our house, and there are many times when it would be easier to turn off the alarm and just let us all stay in bed for the day. However, like most parents, I value the education of my children and therefore drag myself out of bed to ensure I am doing my part by sending them to school on time. The “on time” part is frequently a [...]
When we think of homelessness, we usually imagine shelters or living on the street. Yet, homelessness among children and families is much more than living in non-habitable environments. The federal McKinney-Vento Act and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have tried to capture what homelessness really means and expand the definition to include families or children fleeing domestic violence situations; families or children living with relatives or friends as temporary housing; families that [...]
Kentucky’s children will have newly trained allies in the effort to erase child abuse thanks to the Kentucky General Assembly: their teachers. In March 2015, our legislature passed Senate Bill 119 which ensures that educators receive information on the prevention and recognition of all forms of abuse and neglect. Previously, educators were notified that they were required to report child abuse, but many were not given specialized information on how to recognize the subtle early [...]
As a former educator, I know that one of the most complicated, and I’d venture to say one of the most critical aspects of teaching children is the management of the various behaviors in the classroom. And as a mom, I know how frustrated I get when I try to provide various types of discipline to my three very different kids. Not one of the three respond to a certain method in the same way. [...]
You may have heard that if something is working, you should just leave well enough alone and let things continue as they are. At some point, progress will plateau and you can figure out how to move forward. However, I would contend something different. In his book, If It Ain’t Broke…Break It!, well-known business leader and author Dr. Robert Kriegel states that when things are going well, that is just the right time to re-think how to improve [...]
It is such a contrast. At the last stop in my public school career, I led a campus with a high school, a middle school, and two elementary schools. It was a rare opportunity as some of those were brand new places, and we had the chance to truly create the culture. At the campus, we had a school resource officer - a law enforcement officer working in the school. Though SROs are expressly prohibited [...]
The directions clearly stated, “Color the triangles blue.” Then why in the world did Karson—one of our five-year-old twin granddaughters—leave the triangles blank and color the rectangles red? I mean, my wife (a retired master elementary teacher), her parents, and even her grandpa have been getting her “ready to learn when entering kindergarten” since some six months before birth. Was she going to be doomed to wherever Kentucky kids not ready for kindergarten go? Our [...]
In its recent release of its annual “Answers Issue,” TIME asserts, “It’s an irony of the second Age of Reason that the abundance of data—the effervescence of sources and ease of delivery—makes so many more questions answerable while at the same time making it very easy to get lost.” And then the magazine’s preface teases answers for everything from the most dangerous U.S. intersection to the safest places to live, as well as revealing where [...]
