alicelafferty

  July is nearly over. We’ve had our down-time and now we’re warming up again! But Twitter, Edutopia, Pinterest never took a break!  I love them, but there are so many ideas of perfect classroom design, ways to engage, technology to infuse, flipping, gamification . . . Your head is soon spinnin’. But you keep […]

Today’s beautiful snow day has provided a break from doing education and has given me some time to think about it instead.  Teachers are rubber bands.  We stand between two equally tension-stretched ends. One end is pulled by the tension of our students’ emerging futures and how to prepare them to master it. The other […]

I love this picture. I love teaching middle school boys. It probably started with my love of teaching my own three sons. But we are losing too many of our young men.  Their graduation rates, both high school and college, are dropping.  The unique spirited and joyful ways boys approach life don’t often translate well […]

A friendly contest to request a Promethean board be mounted in my classroom.  

I am so excited!  Two great opportunities to open our rural boundaries to students and adults around the world have begun. The first, Kiva, is a website dedicated to providing loans to adults in countries that don’t have access to banks and opportunities.  There are 100’s of adults with various needs (business start-up, community health, […]

About three years ago, I realized something difficult to accept.  I was moving from sharing the events and emotions of 9/11 with my students to telling them about it. I am a rememberer. They only know what they’ve heard.  That’s huge! It hurts.  It is also a big responsibility because an adult must share the […]

I’m sitting here on the Sunday night before school starts contemplating two questions: 1) If your students didn’t have to be there, would you be teaching to an empty room? 2) Do you have any lessons you could sell tickets for? (from Teach Like a Pirate) Education is making a very needed change.  The shift […]

A fellow teacher sent me this info-graphic recently and it surprised me.   I would want to know where this data came from, but as a literacy teacher, this is not what I wanted to find!  Never read another book?  And the percentage is even higher for college graduates?  That is hard for me to […]

“Junior, you need to go college” is probably one of the better known mommy-isms, second only to ‘Be careful, that’ll put your eye out!”  Due to the changes in our modern workforce, (including globalization) – we need to step up the heat on our kids and proclaim college as a non-negotiable.  Taking a few minutes […]

One of my strong memories is waking up early on a summer August morning in 1975  to take my driver’s test. I arrived before the DPS office opened – and sat out on the curb nervously waiting. I realized this was a life changing day – mine would ever be the same!  Back then everyone […]