Tuesday, April 25, 2006

New direction

After last night's rant, the machine is still in motion. There is no turning back, it's definitely time to change direction. I will write more on this later. I just changed the rss feeds on the right side of this blog. Welcome to the up-to-the-minute thoughts from Doug Noon and Bud Hunt! More to follow soon.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mark, thanks for the vote of confidence. If I wasn't so fried from a day of teaching-and with a pile of lousy school papers still to plow through-I'd offer a few thoughts of my own on the value of practitioners pushing the research agenda. But I'm busy at the moment. (I was taking a brief crap-avoidance break and saw your post.)

Just this for now: any authority or credibility I can offer comes from the fact that I seem to be stuck with two pairs of glasses. I never know which pair I have on when I leave the house. Some days I see possibilities. Some days I see limitations. I write about what I see.

Anyone who claims to know what teaching in public school is all about is lying. The longer I do it, the harder it gets. Nobody told me to expect that, but I shouldn't be surprised. If you ask any retiring teacher why they're hanging it up, the honest ones will tell you that they'd given everything they had. My mission now is to poke holes in the pretty pictures that people who are looking for easy answers keep trying to draw.

Anonymous said...

Like Doug, I appreciate your inclusion of my blog on your sidebar. But I don't know if it's as simple as "you're either a teacher or you don't get it." I depend on some of the voices in my aggregator from people who aren't in the classroom everyday. Their ability to research new information and trends helps me to do my job better. Also, I rely on the ideas of everyone who has a stake in education.
Not everyone needs a classroom to be helpful to me in mine. I'd love to know more about why you feel the way you do. As far as I'm concerned, we need every voice at the party.

Mark Ahlness said...

Not enough time to post here, but I do want to thank those who have stopped by and left comments. I was very much expecting to be slammed for saying what I did. I have been criticized before when expressing similar ideas. I will certainly hear more when I do not recant.

But I need to prepare for tomorrow in the classroom and take care of Earth Day stuff that is piling up. Leaning toward the weekend... Mark