Alfred Thompson

I'm from an education family. My mother was a teacher and my wife is a teacher. But in my family teaching is not just a women thing. I have a male cousin who is a kindergarten teacher. My son teaches special education students in an elementary school. And while I taught high school for 8 years I…

I read a very interesting take on the Teach For America program today. (Article here) Briefly Teach for America recruits some of the top US university graduates and gets them to make a 2 year commitment to teaching in resource poor schools. Most of them do rather well but leave teaching after two…

Earlier today (on my Computer Science Education blog) I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students use tools (computer software tools) that are often blocked or banned in schools. As the day wore on though I heard…

The job of schools, in my opinion, is to educate and to enable. So I don't like a lot of rules especially when they consist largely of lists of things not to do. Rules all too often prevent thinking. Telling students "don't do" is the opposite of enabling them to actually do things.…

At this morning's NECC keynote discussion Elizabeth Streb noted that students who come to her workshops have time to play before the lessons start but that the line between when play ends and learning begins is very often blurred.  Mitchel Resnick at the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong…

I spent today at EduBloggerCon - a pre-unconference at NECC. At one of the sessions I made that comment that "what goes on in school stays in school”. What I mean by that is that students think that what they learn (or at least what teachers are teaching) doesn't matter outside of…

The title of this post is a statement I have heard from teachers, in one form or another, more often than I can count. Often times it feels like people say it to justify boring students out of their minds. Not always of course. And just as often those same teachers do use entertaining techniques,…

You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to hit your head and say "how in the world did I not think of that?" Vicki A Davis did that today in her Cool Cat Teacher blog. No wonder she is one of the most linked to education blogs around.…

I found a facinating article on the sucees and struggles of a Catholic high school in Harlem today. Rice High School spends less than half per student as the city's public schools and yet:A public high school principal who lifts the minority graduation rate above 50 percent will win accolades for…

The other week I attended a good sized programming competition at St Joseph's College in Patchogue New York. It was a great event and very well run. There were over 100 high school students in 34 teams representing about 16-18 high schools. I'd love to point you to an online news article about it…