It's Thursday and I've graduated from the small iced coffee to the large. Mind you, I don't drink coffee. It's one of my nyc behaviors that goes along with not allocating sleep time. As soon as I slam that beverage down I can take my 20 minute lunch hour power nap and perk back up for the p.m. Oh, and look! The nice man put a piece of baklava in the bag too!
At the morning keynote Stephanie Harvey lead the charge to bring fun, wondering, and investigation back
into the classroom. She talke
d about how since No Child Left Behind, (or as she called it, No Child Left Untested),
we have drained curiosity out of our curriculum with the focus on teaching students how to determine correct answers, rather than ASK questions. Try to project each of those differing paths out into the future and ask which one will support innovation and problem solving in the future... Stephanie encouraged establishing "Wondering Notebooks" and modeling wondering about and researching about an issue or curiosity.
In the morning session we worked in small groups dissecting and developing Teaching Points for a non-fiction unit of study.
In the afternoon we examined the progression of patterns and content elements that students need to understand in each level of the primary leveled books.
K and I took an evening, sunset saunter through Central Park with S.M. and C - colleagues from another Santa Cruz County school.
Then settled in to dine at a Peruvian restaurant where the sangria flowed like water at my end of the table. Most of that food on the table belongs to S.M. and me. We were splitting the Matador Combo, which turned out to be enough platters of roasted chicken, fried plantains, fries, sausages, beans, rice, avo and tomato salad for a matafor and an entire flock of bulls. We were joined by a friend of S.M., who is a producer/writer/director for 30 Rock, the only show that the hub and I are 100% in agreement on as a hot tamale on television. More
academic genius.
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