Primary Education Fun =)

Ideas from various blogs and other teachers, alongside cool quotes, thoughts about teaching, and random funnies!

[srsfunny]

Why Number Are The Way They Are

[teachingwithcoffee]

OH

[languageboutique]

[teachingwithcoffee]

I love you, #educhums. 

[dustinteractive]

If writing utensils could talk

[thesecretdiaryofateacher]

This is why I don’t use red pens on the students work!

[lunarbaboon]

lunarbaboon facebook twitter 

[drawing-interrupted]

I want to send this to all my kids parents

[offbeatteacher]

“5 Things Teachers Do Every Day That Are a Complete Waste of Time 

 Most of my job is essential and challenging and valuable. These five things? Not so much. - Captain Awesome, June 2, 2017 

 Teaching is valuable, crucial, fascinating work. Except, you know, when it isn’t. Most of my day is spent hanging out with amazing young people and, I hope, making a difference in their lives. However, other parts of my day are just pointless. Here are some ways teachers waste time every day. 

 1. Write the standard on the board. 

You know who reads it? An administrator doing an observation. Nobody else. Just them. I’ve never seen a kid read the standard or ask any questions about it. And sure, I’m supposed to reference it in the course of my lesson. But come on. I’ve got 50 minutes to beat some basic literacy into these kids. There’s only so much I can do. 

 2. Teach grammar. 

Okay, some of it is useful. I’ll work on sentence fragments and run-ons until the cows come home, and I’ll drill my kids on the difference between “your” and “you’re” until it’s coming out their ears. But I just can’t bring myself to care whether they know the difference between past perfect and past progressive verb tenses. Unfortunately, the standards include a lot of pointless knowledge that will not help my students’ writing or their understanding. 

 3. Grade daily work. 

Like most teachers, I have to put in a certain number of grades per week. Some of those are big, meaningful assignments. Some are smaller, but no less important, tasks that ask students to reflect on their learning or check their understanding. And some are filler so I don’t get in trouble for not having enough grades. With these minimums, it’s impossible not to give the occasional meaningless busywork that boosts the number of grades I’ve posted without really improving the kids’ learning or understanding. 

 4. Collect data. 

It seems there’s always some kid who desperately needs an IEP but doesn’t have one, which means we have to go through the process to get the kid services. Yes, it’s incredibly important to provide kids with the accommodations they need. But spending 20 minutes twice a week using some “intervention” one-on-one just to prove that it doesn’t work, then giving a “probe” that’s completely unrelated to my curriculum or the skills the kid needs? That’s meaningless paperwork, and it takes away from my students’ learning. 

 5. Enforce the dress code. 

The justification is always “If we sweat the small stuff, we won’t have to worry about the big stuff,” but that’s never been my experience. I just don’t care if Yolanda in fifth period has fake nails. Could they potentially be dangerous? Maybe. But the back row of my class is passing around a jar of Nutella and eating it with their fingers, and I feel like that’s way more of a health hazard. I. Just. Do. Not. Care. 

 I love my job. I plan to teach at my current school at my current grade level until I eventually collapse in the hallway and nobody notices until rigor mortis starts to set in. But I’ll admit, I get a little frustrated when I miss lunch—again—to do a reading fluency probe that will give me information I already know, or when I get knocked down on an observation for rephrasing the standard on the board into language that’s comprehensible to my students. Maybe someday the whole teaching process will be streamlined, and I can focus my attention on things that are really important. Until then, I’ll keep ignoring Jose’s flip-flops, leave the same standard on the board for three weeks, and plug in each kid’s average three times as a “participation grade” when I realize I haven’t entered enough marks in my grade book for the week. I don’t think it’s causing my kids too much suffering.”

[offbeatteacher]

Ya’ll, I had to edit for formatting. Mobile was not friendly. 

[funtimesineducation]

This stuff has literally been bugging me all week x

[javert]

one problem with education (one of many many many) is that schools keep on saying ‘we want to make outlr students successful regardless of their home life’ and then they just… don’t even put in the batest effort towards doing that. If you want students to be successful at school if they have a bad home life, you need to stop relying in the home for A N Y T H I N G

for example: you cannot depend on a child’s home to provide a good environment for doing homework –> kids with poor home wnvironments will be punished because they cannot do their homework –> this is not supporting children regardless of their home environment

stop punishing children for not having their parents sign forms (esp academic ones- reading logs, report cards, etc). stop making field trips opt-in-by-parent-signature, make them opt-out

don’t assume that every child (or any child) eats at home. at the very least, offer free breakfast and lunch to every student. ideally offer a dinner, too.

stop requiring out of school commmitments like community service hours, group projects that require meeting out of school, anything that requires bringing supplies in to school

stop only offerring ‘extra curriculars’ [things like band/chorus, sports, enrichment classes or clubs] outside the school day. it makes a whole segment of the population unable to attend

ideally, schools would have a place where students can tend to their personal hygeine, like showers etc

if you require students to bring a book to read, you better provide a library

there’s like so much more, too. but making the student’s school success at least /theoretically/ not depend on their home life is the absolute bare minimum of treating disadvantaged students with dignity and not kicking them when they’re down

tldr if you say ‘we want our students to succeed at school regardless of their home life’ stop making academic success depend on things that happen at home or out of school

[beben-eleben]

Punctuation Matters by The Visual Communication Guy

[thewrittenmagic]

I’ll never understand writers who don’t care about punctuation. It adds control,  clarity, meaning, and variety. 

[saramcclarinet]

My English major ass appreciates this so hard 👌🏻🙌🏻

[rlbirl-blog]

And they may have my oxford comma when they pry it from my stiff, cold, and dead hands.

[artemistudying]

just because you seem to be slower at understanding something, does not, in any way mean that you’re less smart or inferior. you’re on your own path of learning. every single step is progress, no matter how slow you think you’re going.

[prophecydungeon]

that’s not………. how child speech works…………………………………………..

[prophecydungeon]

god okay in an attempt to be less of an asshole, here’s how child speech DOES work (or tend to work, at least)

kids tend to hypercorrect — this means that they tend to say things like “sleeped” instead of “slept,” “writed” instead of “wrote,” “goed” instead of “went,” etc

kids tend not to make errors such as omitting verbs (“i hungry”)

kids also tend not to make errors in the i/me, she/her department (“me am hungry”)

simplification of difficult sounds — consonant clusters especially, so things like st, sp, ps, etc., as well as f, v, th-sounds, ch-sounds, etc.

“babbling”-type utterances (“apwen” for “airplane,” using one babbly word for multiple objects, things like that) generally occur in children under the age of three and a half

say it with me: an eight-year-old child is not going to be saying “me hungwy”

do not confuse child speech with stereotypical learner english mistakes, that’s not only incorrect but also gross on the stereotypical learner english front (“me love you long time,” anybody?)

if you’re going to write kidfic please do some * research

[prokopetz]

Totally. It can be helpful to remind yourself that young children tend to speak as though the English language actually made sense. Our brains are pattern-recognising machines: children are really, really good at puzzling out the implicit rules of the English language, but they don’t necessarily know all the silly exceptions and bizarre edge cases that break those rules yet - those can only be learned through experience and rote memorisation.

Basically, when children who speak English as a first language make mistakes, it typically reflects a tendency to treat English as more grammatically, syntactically, and/or orthographically consistent than it really is. In some cases, this can be compounded by the fact that some kids will get offended at how little sense “proper” English makes, and insist upon using the more consistent forms even though they know very well that they’re technically “wrong”.

for a long young portion of my life I insisted on pronouncing Sean “SEEN” because that’s how it’s spelled.

[pftones3482]

As someone who spends a good majority of her time working with kids, it irks me to no end when I see children written as if they’re babies.

Past the age of about five or six years old, children can have deep, intellectual conversations about the most bizarre of things. I HAD A CONVERSATION LAST WEEK WITH FOUR THIRD GRADERS ABOUT THE GAS PRICES AND TAXES IN HAWAII.

Were they entirely correct in the facts they were giving? No, because it was all from what they had heard from parents or on the news. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I was having a genuine conversation with four eight and nine year olds about taxes.

Just about the only speech problems most kids have, unless they have a speech impediment, is not being able to pronounce certain consonants (replacing ‘th’ with ‘fw,’ for example, and some letters are harder to form with your mouth than others) and doing exactly what the person above said: using the English language the way they know how, which isn’t always the way English works.

Kids aren’t stupid. Stop writing them like they are.

[oldtoadwoman-deactivated2018121]

I was tutoring a little kid (second grade, I think). He was complaining about a worksheet. “This is hard.” I started to correct him as I knew he was more than capable of it and this bright kid, who had obviously heard the lecture before from others, interrupted me and said: “I know. I know. It’s not really difficult. It’s just time consuming.” Some kids are spooky-smart and even quite articulate.

If you need (plotwise) to emphasize that the child is specifically childish … have them tell the same joke to everyone they meet, cracking themselves up before they get to the punchline … have them ask “Why?” incessantly … have them fidgeting and possibly breaking things (”Oops.” “What?” “Nothing!” “WHAT?!”) … and if you have more than one kid, even of the same age, you don’t have to write them at the same intelligence level or emotional maturity. Some kids are messy and some are obsessively neat. Some are quiet, some loud. Some giggly, some surly. They basically come in the same range of personalities as adults. 

If you don’t want to invest a lot of time writing dialog for kids, just establish that you have a quiet kid. But a kid who gives single-word answers is usually doing so because they don’t like you (or trust you) or they are focused on their own thing and you’re interrupting them. It doesn’t mean they lack the vocabulary or that they don’t understand the adult conversation going on “over their head” (the more inappropriate the conversation, the more likely the kids are paying attention).

[santheum]

I have jabbed the back button so many times on terrible kid fic. This is an excellent resource - kid fic, when done well, is a real treat for me.

[thaxted]

The only children I have ever met who did say things like “me hungwy” were the ones who had figured out that if they sounded “adorable” they could wrap adults around their precious little fingers. Kids get it.

[just-shower-thoughts]

The division symbol, ÷, is just a blank fraction. You replace the dots with the numbers.

[infinity-imagined]

The Worlds of our Solar System

[memeufacturing-deactivated20161]

teacher *while handing out 40 year old textbook*: wikipedia is very unreliable

[teachinginreallife]

When I try to get students to tackle a new challenge

[sosuperawesome]

Illustrations for the Uppercase Planner by Simini Blocker on Tumblr

More like this

[writing-prompt-s]

You quickly realize you have been given the wrong folder at your new government position. The folder reads that there is no such thing as a “natural death”.

[advanced-procrastination]

*Quiz on Friday*

Student: “I wasn’t here on Wednesday”

Me: “You were here yesterday though.”

Student: “Yeah?”

Me: “Did you ask me or a classmate for the notes?”

Student: “No.”

[headlessmonk]

I quit playing the game of figuring out which kid was here and wasn’t and when with quizzes. If you’re here the day of the quiz you’re taking the damn thing. I’ve got straws in the back to help them suck it up.

[dudeinthestacks]

Please tell me there are literal straws, @headlessmonk

[mdmshakespeare]

I will be buying a jar of straws to keep next to my Ashes of Obnoxious Teenagers jar.

[wincherella]

I’m moving the straws to my desk just so I can eat that.

[srtrues]

Oh man! That’s awesome

[the-taintedtruth]

One day, she’s going to know. She’ll know your birthday, your middle name, where you were born, your star sign, and your parents names. She’ll know how old you were when you learned to ride a bike, how your grandparents passed away, how many pets you had, and how much you hated going to school. She’ll know your eye colour, your scars, your freckles, your laugh lines and your birth marks. She’ll know your favourite book, movie, candy, food, pair of shoes, colour, and song. She’s going to know why you’re awake at 5am most nights, where you were when you realised you’d lost a good friend. She’s going to know your phobias, your dreams, your fears, your wishes, and your worries. She’s going to know about your first heartbreak, your dream wedding, and your problems with your parents. She’ll know your strengths, weaknesses, laziness, energy, and your mixed emotions. She’s going to know about your love for mayonnaise, your dream of being famous when you were five, your need to quote any film you know all the way through, and your fear of growing older. She’ll know your bad habits, your mannerisms, your stroppy pout, your facial expressions, and your laugh like it’s her favourite song. The way you chew, drink, walk, sleep, fidget and kiss. She’s going to know that you’ve already picked out wedding flowers, baby names, tiles for the bathroom, bridesmaid dresses, and the colour of your bedroom walls. She’s going to know, get annoyed at and then accept that you leave clothes everywhere, take twenty minutes to order a Starbucks, have to organise your DVD’s alphabetically, and check your horoscope… just incase. She’ll know your McDonald’s order, how many sugars to put in your tea, how many scoops of ice cream you want, and that you need your sandwiches cut into triangles. She’s going to know how you feel without you telling her, that you need a wee from a look on your face, and that you’re crying without shedding tears. She’s going to know all of it. Everything. You, from top to bottom and inside out. From learning, from sharing, from listening, from watching. She’s going to know every single thing there is to know, and you know what else? She is still going to love you.

(via youwillgetbetterrr)