Who is this guy???                                           


About me:

  • I was born and raised in Washington state.
  • This is my 20th year teaching English at Enumclaw High School. 
  • My amazing wife teaches math at Enumclaw High School.
  • I have two awesome kids aged seven and 11. 
  • I love to play basketball, but I do it poorly. 
  • I am passionate about most Seattle sports teams. Go Hawks. 
  • I am not sarcastic. Ever. 
  • I have some pretty complicated feelings about my job. There are things I love. There are things I hate. And I generally flow pretty freely between the two.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What can I control?

Image
Just a normal Saturday with some AP Lit kids watching some Gatsby at Crane's house One of my greatest talents is my ability to criticize and rant. I’m really, really good at it. People who know me will tell you, I can spit fire. I can offer scathing critques that wither souls and melt faces, but most of the time, this isn’t wonderfully productive. In fact, it usually changes very little.  So rather than compose another diatribe about the inherent injustice of being a classroom teacher, this post is about being resourceful, about finding a way. Changing the inertia that plagues our education system is a Hurculian task, beyond my scope and abilty. However, changing my classroom, changing those 50 minute periods,  as flawed as they might be, is well within my scope. I am the master of that universe, so what will I, what will we, do with that power? I’m choosing to try. I recently invited my AP students to come over to my house to watch the Great Gatsby movie. It was n
Read more

Confession

Image
The secret truth is that I made it all up. After 20 years in the classroom, National Board certification and recertification, teacher leadership teams and distinguished evaluations, I feel I have just enough job security to admit the painful, embarrassing secret I believe most teachers keep. We make it all up. In my first job, teaching English at Lake Roosevelt High School at age 23, the truth came as quite a shock. There was no real “curriculum” or even a scope and sequence that laid out the standards or assessments. There was none of that. There was a cupboard of marginally useful books, six 50 minutes periods a day, and three different preps. My job was to make it work. To blend, weave, create, and fake my way through it, take a deep breath, and then do it again the next day. It was incredibly difficult, but I made it. I gradually found my voice and philosophy. I created systems and assignments and units. I developed projects and lessons that seemed worthy of re
Read more

The Project - Reflection 1

Image
So I have launched "The Project" in my sophomore and junior classes. We are a week and a half into the process. These are my reflections thus far: 1. My proposal process was much tougher than I thought it would.be. I expected it to be challenging, but I underestimated the time it would take to read, critique, and return each proposal, almost always working though multiple drafts. Doing it in four classes at once was a lot.  2. Kids are not used to thinking on their own. Many kids struggled to come up with even a topic. Others got started, but at the first sign of uncertainty, they didn't know what to do. This is new stuff. It is new to me too. I'll admit that after awhile, I began to help/write many of their central questions for them. I'm not sure how big a foul this is. On one hand, I'm doing the hard work for them. On the other, they chose the topic, and this is new, so giving them a solid base to work from, rather than letting them struggle through to
Read more