January 2015

Some days teaching feels like being a mama bird, catching and chewing the food and trying to spit it into beaks which remain stubbornly clamped shut. When you question the baby birds why they refuse to accept nourishment, they tell you plaintively that it's "too hard".

Unlike the easy accessibility of Sally Kern’s “Use Shock Therapy on Gay Teens” bill or our state guidelines for which angry white men we’ll send to the new Constitutional Convention to rewrite that sorry remnant of darker times (because our current leaders are SO much smarter than the Framers and besides what could possibly go wrong?), contention over something as specific as an AP curriculum can be a bit bewildering for those not walking daily in that world.

What exactly IS the kerfuffle with the ‘new’ College Board Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) course and exam?

Oh Senator, you certainly do manage to stay colorful, don't you?

In case you don't recall, Senator Brecheen was the figure kind enough to spend 10 minutes on the floor being shocked that somewhere deep in Appendix G of the Common Core standards, among a few hundred various books, poems, and documents cited as examples of different reading levels, Toni Morrison has written a dirty book.

Sometimes we just make things too complicated.

How do we this? How do we that? How can we overhaul our public education system without changing anything about it? How do we reach diverse students from inequitable backgrounds and make them all the same person by 3rd grade? How do we recruit and retain higher quality teachers without increasing fiscal incentives, but while stomping out every last vestige of the things that used to make it a fulfilling career? How do we patch up old wineskins to endure new wine without bursting?

Simple - we don’t. But that’s OK, because the old wineskins have outlived their usefulness. And just between you and me, new wineskins needn’t be all that complex or much more expensive than the old – and they might just lead to much better varieties of wine.