A group of 40 year old war buddies meets and discuss where they should meet for dinner. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at Gasthaus Gutenberger restaurant because the waitress’s there have low cut blouses and nice breasts.

10 years later, at 50 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because the food there is very good and the wine selection is good also.

10 years later at 60 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because they can eat there in peace and quiet and the restaurant is smoke free.

10 years later, at 70 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because the restaurant is wheel chair accessible and they even have an elevator.

10 years later, at 80 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because that would be a great idea because they have never been there before.

It was a slow day on Friday – just a few children came to play. We had a nice pancake breakfast and then a morning of listening to the story of Rumpelstiltskin, and then acting it out. We talked about the children learning quickly what their character would say or do. With some kids it’s an easy lesson, and with others it’s a no-go.

We waited for the snow all day. I think some of the kids were thinking that it was NEVER going to happen. Surprise!

It was too cold to go out, so we stayed indoors. We had our very popular pizza for lunch, and then had a nice long play period. In the afternoon, we had one of Mrs. St. Louis’s very wonderful drawing lessons. We drew giraffes.

For snack, we had a new cookie: apple, oat, coconut softies.

Still working on the cookbook when time permits.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the snow.

Teacher-Dismissal Powers Found to Affect Absences

Chicago teachers who didn’t have tenure took fewer days off after principals were given more flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers, a new study has found.

The policy reduced teacher absences on an annual basis by about 10 percent and cut the number of teachers with 15 or more annual absences by 20 percent, according to the report by Brian A. Jacob, a professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan. It has been published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for which he serves as a research associate.

“We think teacher absence is somewhat correlated with student achievement,” said Mr. Jacob, who is the director of the university’s Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy. “Some of it is hard to measure.”

In Chicago, principals were given the ability to dismiss the probationary teachers—those with five years of experience or less—without completing elaborate documentation or attending a dismissal hearing, under a 2004 collective bargaining agreement between the 409,000-student school district and the Chicago Teachers Union.

In return for the flexibility, the district expanded the pool of teachers who were placed on a tenure track. The policy change went into effect for the 2004-05 school year.

The study examines the effects of the policy from that year through the 2006-07 school year, and compares teacher-absence rates from before and after the policy was implemented for probationary vs. tenured teachers. Mr. Jacob used payroll records to review the teacher-absence data, and the academic years 2001-02 through 2003-04 were used as the pre-policy period for comparison purposes.

In the two years before the policy change, the study found, the average teacher was absent about eight times a year, a figure that declined starting in 2005, especially among nontenured teachers. By 2007, that number for probationary teachers was just above six times a year.

Tim Daly, the president of the New York City-based New Teacher Project, said Mr. Jacob’s study is noteworthy.

“Teacher attendance is an overlooked aspect of performance that we know has a direct impact on students,” he said. “We know that it matters if kids have a teacher that shows up. I think he’s bringing that into focus.”

‘Social Norms’

Even with the flexibility, 30 percent to 40 percent of principals in any given year examined in the study did not dismiss a single teacher. That was the case even among schools in the lowest quartile of student achievement.

“I think this is a caution. It isn’t simply the nature of the contract,” Mr. Jacob said. “There’s a lot about the social norms of the schools and the availability of high-quality replacement teachers that limits how much principals would use the flexibility even when given it.”

More than half the dismissed teachers, in fact, were later hired by another school in the district. In 2005, for example, 50.6 percent of first-year teachers dismissed in the spring were rehired by a Chicago school for the fall, the study found. In some instances, that was because principals used the nonrenewal process to dismiss teachers who would otherwise have lost jobs because of budget cuts, allowing the teachers to begin looking for another position earlier.

Since the study was conducted, the district’s policy on absences has changed. Now, principals are required to do more-formal evaluations of the probationary teachers, Mr. Jacob noted.

“It’s not clear if that is a good or bad thing,” he said. “It is re-erecting some of the procedural requirements to dismiss a teacher that were eliminated initially.”

Rosemaria Genova, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Teachers Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, said the shift reflects the feedback novice teachers say they need.

“For teachers who are new and are making decisions on whether to stay in the teaching profession, it is the most critical time when they need evaluation, feedback, and mentoring,” she said. “If principals can eliminate staff without due process, who is to say cronyism won’t take over the whole system?”

In a related paper, Mr. Jacob takes a look at the characteristics of the teachers who were dismissed by principals. It finds that absences and previous negative evaluations were key factors.

In addition, principals were more likely to get rid of teachers whose students had shown less value-added achievement compared with those of other teachers, and who had fewer academic credentials and accomplishments before becoming a teacher. Teachers who were dismissed and rehired were also much more likely to be dismissed again compared with first-year teachers.

“These results provide suggestive evidence that reforms along the lines of the Chicago policy might improve student achievement,” Mr. Jacob wrote.

In a November report, the New Teacher Project found that a majority of the more than 7,000 Chicago teachers it surveyed believed that factors other than seniority should be taken into account when making layoffs. Teacher absence was among the top four factors listed by teachers.

Mr. Daly said other districts would be wise to take a harder look at attendance policies.

“If you make clear attendance matters, teachers will put forth more effort,” he said. “We probably should be considering having attendance woven into more policies. If absences have no consequences, they will continue.”

Not many people get a picture of this proud bird snuggled up next to them!

Freedom and Jeff

Freedom and I have been together 10 years this summer.

She came in as a baby in 1998 with two broken wings. Her left wing doesn’t open all the way
even after surgery, it was broken in 4 places. She’s my baby.

When Freedom came in she could not stand and both wings were broken. She was emaciated and covered in lice. We made the decision to give her a chance at life, so I took her to the vets office. From then on, I was always around her. We had her in a huge dog carrier with the top off, and it
was loaded up with shredded newspaper for her to lay in. I used to sit and talk to her, urging her to live, to fight; and she would lay there looking at me with those big brown eyes.
We also had to tube feed her for weeks.

This went on for 4-6 weeks, and by then she still couldn’t stand. It got to the point where the
decision was made to euthanize her if she couldn’t stand in a week. You know you don’t want to cross that line between torture and rehab, and it looked like death was winning.
She was going to be put down that Friday, and I was supposed to come in on that Thursday
afternoon. I didn’t want to go to the center that Thursday, because I couldn’t bear the thought of
her being euthanized; but I went anyway, and when I walked in everyone was grinning from ear
to ear. I went immediately back to her cage; and there she was, standing on her own, a big beautiful eagle. She was ready to live. I was just about in tears by then. That was a very good
day.

We knew she could never fly, so the vet asked me to glove train her. I got her used to the glove, and then to jesses, and we started doing education programs for schools in western Washington. We wound up in the newspapers, radio (believe it or not) and some TV. Miracle
Pets even did a show about us.

In the spring of 2000, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had stage 3, which is not good (one major organ plus everywhere), so I wound up doing 8 months of chemo. Lost the hair – the whole bit. I missed a lot of work. When I felt good enough, I would go to Sarvey and take Freedom out for walks. Freedom would also come to me in my dreams and help me fight
the cancer. This happened time and time again.

Fast forward to November 2000, the day after Thanksgiving. I went in for my last checkup. I was told cancer was not all gone after 8 rounds of chemo, then my last option was a stem cell transplant. Anyway, they did the tests; and I had to come back Monday for the results. I went in Monday, and I was told that all the cancer was gone.

So the first thing I did was get up to Sarvey and take the big girl out for a walk. It was misty
and cold. I went to her flight and jessed her up, and we went out front to the top of the hill. I
hadn’t said a word to Freedom, but somehow she knew. She looked at me and wrapped both her
wings around me to where I could feel them pressing in on my back (I was engulfed in eagle wings), and she touched my nose with her beak and stared into my eyes, and we just stood there like that for I don’t know how long. That was a magic moment. We have been soul mates ever
since she came in. This is a very special bird.

On a side note: I have had people who were sick come up to us when we are out, and Freedom has some kind of hold on them. I once had a guy who was terminal come up to us and I let him hold her. His knees just about buckled and he swore he could feel her power coarse through his
body. I have so many stories like that.

I never forget the honor I have of being so close to such a magnificent spirit as Freedom. Hope
you enjoy this.

Jeff

Some children are selfish; it’s a personality trait. It begins with a little thing called “lazy.” It’s the same question as which came first the chicken or the egg. Truth is – the chicken. But with the selfish- lazy debate, these side by side unruly disorders are very fluid. Sometimes you get the lazy first, and then sometimes you get the selfish first. Either way, the teeter totter is an unlovely balance!

I know about lazy because as a kid I was always accused of being lazy. It was a title I carried throughout my life growing up, so I had plenty of time to think about lazy. Quite frankly, I have always wondered what “they” meant as I analyze walking two miles every morning down island roads, and then dodging waves breaking over the sea wall to keep as dry as I could in the uniform I had ironed myself. I walked the length of the peninsula, crossed the railroad tracks and the highway, and then stood waiting for my ride to school with no breakfast. Is this actual laziness? When you are seven, eight, nine and ten, and you do this every day once uphill and once down, and at the end of the day, four or five days out of seven, nobody is home to receive you but a note to say make your own dinner; I think someone is lazy, and it isn’t the child.

My beautifully dressed mother was always so concerned about my school work. I wonder if it was because she was off playing while I was struggling to keep up all by myself. Past hurts? Not at all. All these things in my life helped to make me a hater of lazy, a hard worker, a problem solver, and develop a good eye for parents who put on a show.

What I’ve come to know is that lazy means “I won’t do it.” Lazy is the ego centric thumbing the nose at the world and saying, “You can’t make me do it no matter what you do.”

Lazy is extremely self-centered. Lazy allows the world to work around you, to do it for you while you play. Lazy is always short sighted, short willed, short brained, and short on everything simply because lazy begins and ends with self – an underdeveloped, dull and grasping self.

So when confronted with a lazy child, what do we do? Lazy is something we recognize after the fact – when it has been allowed for a long enough period the child becomes comfortable with it. But lazy still carries the stigma of guilt. Every thinking human knows what he or she should do and will feel the pangs of guilt when caught not doing it. But playing on guilt creates a battle in a domain where lazy is residing. No lazy person is going to allow someone to guilt them into work without a huge struggle.

Best thing to do with a lazy child is quietly present what you need, want, or expect in as few words as possible and then have a ginormous crushing repercussion happen when they don’t do what is expected. Here are some examples:

A little boy was lazy every morning about dressing. One morning his mother told him what she expected and he relaxed back watching his cartoons. She scooped him up as is and brought him kicking and screaming to school with one foot of his pajamas dangling off his skivvied body. Needless to say, he never did it again. He was dressed before leaving his bedroom for the rest of the school year.

A mother was always yelling about picking up the mess before dinner because her lazy children were always reluctant to get started. It was too big a job, to hard, to much to handle. They didn’t know where to start…so the mother told them what she expected quietly, and then when the mess was still a mess, the mother sat down with the father to eat dinner. “My place isn’t set,” said one selfish lazy child standing at his chair, and the mother replied, “You didn’t clean up your mess. When you do, you can eat.”

I can’t tell you how many times I said, “I’m going to the store. If you want to come, be ready in five minutes. When they weren’t ready, they didn’t go. It was that simple.

One of the biggest lazy makers is TV and that includes video games, movies and anything that is watched. Not turning TV on in the morning makes for a much more productive morning. Not allowing TV to be turned on in the evening with the exception of the news makes for a much more productive evening. No child HAS to watch TV or play video games. It’s not like breathing, eating or taking a bath. It’s an extra.

But lazy never needs to be the cause for yelling or punishment. Lazy should always punish the self very nicely. If laundry is not put where it belongs, then the child has no clean laundry. If the toys are not put away properly, then there is no “next.” If a child is not ready for bed at his prescribed time, then he goes as is. The lights are turned off at 8:00 p.m. no matter what. If a child does not comply with morning routine, then he goes to school as is. If he refuses to do his homework, he suffers in the classroom until he does. These are child tasks, not parent tasks. Lazy cannot be cured by the parents picking up the slack. Lazy can only be cured with consequences.

Letting a child feel the consequences of his behavior is the quickest route to learning that hard work and relying on self is the name of the growing up game.

Next week – talking to the lazy child.

It’s a cool morning. Looks like snow on Thursday. It’s kind of a nothing week, but it is January, and because of the possibility of snow, we don’t plan a lot. But February is next month, and we already have four or five things in the hopper. Full report later this week with a calendar!

We noticed that seventeen families out of forty-one read the calendar note. That’s not a good. There was a little bribe at the bottom of the note that said if you say…and only seventeen families “said.” We’ll try it again this time. The project is not to single out anyone, but to try to grasp who is reading and who isn’t. Reading your child’s material that comes home from school is a habit every single parent should get into right now because it’s not going to stop for all the years he is in school. Being the last to know that the Football Banquet is tonight and you are expected to… is a nightmare at 4:30. So it’s best to start reading right now.

This week we are still working on the Geography “I know where ______ is on the map.”

We will look at rocks today in science.

In art class, we will be building monsters from colored paper.

Today we will celebrate the Americas and have chocolate cake for snack and for lunch we will be having enchiladas, fruit and salad.

Have a great week!

This week I am suggesting that a cookbook for parents that is personalized as a keepsake is in order. We are going to publish all our recipes at the Garden School for all the parents. Each page will have a list of ingredients, directions, a picture with a “how to” by a child along with a nutrition corner, a shopping tips place and serving suggestions. We hope you like this. The estimated arrival date is Mother’s Day. Not sure of the cost – somewhere around $10.00. The book will be spirally bound.

Today the topic is cake. All that glistens is not cake. Although one of the best treats in the world is Donut Bank cake, cake does not have to be mostly sugar. Cake is a very old treat, and only when sugar became available in Europe in the Fourteenth Century did cake really become what it is today. Cake takes its shape because of the balance of sugar and flour. A cake without sugar is bread.

Today we are lucky because we can actually buy a small mill to mill just about any kind of grain into flour. Yesteryear allowed us the flour we could buy at the store, and that was nearly always limited to wheat – whole or white flours – containing only the limited vitamins and nutrients found in wheat. Today, you can also buy many different flours at both ethnic markets and upscale markets in most areas.

Today, our cake product can contain a healthy list of foods far better than many other foods. This weekend I baked a cake that began with whole wheat and bean flour. This upped the vitamin ante with a nice helping of nutritious beans – fifteen kinds. I used both brown and white sugar, carrots, pineapple, peaches, cherries, coconut, and orange peal. The fruit I ground into pulp with my food processor.

I used butter and canola oil. Both are better for you than either margarine or the kinds of oil and fats that are in cake mixes.

The recipe called for molasses as well which is full of iron, and four eggs. There were nutritious spices in the cake as well like cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. All these fresh spices are really good for hearts, brains and body functions.

The cake is light, delicate and filled with flavors and tastes that are actually good for you. In the frosting, I used powered sugar, butter and ground oranges.

The whole idea behind making a light and delicate cake is not so much the ingredients as the way you add your ingredients. It is necessary, if using butter, to let it become room temperature or put it in the microwave for about 25 seconds. When beating butter and sugar together, the idea is to turn the mixer on high and really beat it. Dropping one egg at a time into the butter and sugar and then add your vanilla.

In a whole other bowl, it’s best to whisk all your dry ingredients together and spoon into the beating sugar butter and eggs. Last, it’s nice to add your additions one at a time with a spoon.

Bake at 350 degrees in a preheated oven. When your cake is done, it’s best to cool it on a rack. If you don’t have a rack, jack up one side of the cake pan on a book. Frost when cool.

Here is a no-fail chocolate cake that you can’t destroy and kids love:

2 and 1/2 cups flour any kind
1 and 2/3 cups sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
1 and 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 and 1/4 cup warm water
1 and 1/2 stick butter
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

Beat butter, sugar eggs and vanilla

Whisk all other dry ingredients together

Add water and then the dry ingredients

Beat, beat, beat

Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes

Frost with:

1 stick butter, 1 box powdered sugar, and 1/2 cup cocoa mixed together in a food processor.

Friday was pajama day, and almost all of the children wore their pajamas to school. It was fun to see what everyone does at home at bed time. Apparently, Jasmin and Miss Judy have the same taste in pjs! Because of the rain, we couldn’t go out – which was just as well. We played many many things at school and finished our Shirley Temple movie which Miss Amy said the children liked very much.

We listened to a Bible Story – the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, and had a directed drawing lesson that taught us how to draw a donkey. And these donkeys were adorable. I brought them home to download ;-} Children will take them home on Monday.

It was a fun day even though we had two teachers out with illness. There is a crummy flu going around that really attacks the stomach – must be careful – it’s very contagious. Please ask your child every morning for the next week how his stomach is feeling. If you think he’s snowing you to stay home from school, offer him a candy bar… ;-}

We are house cleaning at the Garden School, and there is a car toy at the front of the school. If anyone wants this toy, please take it home. I will take it to Mother Theresa’s on Wednesday.

We are looking for big handle-less baskets. If you have one you do not want, please bring it in.

Last week we studied North America with its 23 countries. This week we will review South America. Please help your child learn where one country is on the map at least. There is a contest and it is going very slowly. Please remember that it’s never too late for parents to learn this stuff right along with their child.

Have a great “rest of the weekend!”

Comment: This is an excellent article and well worth adding to any school or curriculum. The very idea of this article makes my heart sing. Read it and enjoy!

Published: January 20, 2010 byTeacher Magazine

Giving Classrooms a Purpose

Professional development books, workshops, and teacher hand-outs at staff meetings are filled with lots of ideas on how to use multiple intelligences, technology, and specific instructional strategies with students that have special needs. The list seems endless.

These techniques are obviously important. I wonder, though, if we teachers and our students, our schools and districts might be better off if we spent a little more time focusing on the cultural orientation of our institution. In other words, shouldn’t we question our ways of thinking?

A few months ago, I noted the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth. A renowned business and management philosopher, writer, theorist, and analyst, Drucker is considered “the first real management guru.” In an interview this fall on the public radio program Marketplace, Harvard business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter shared that Drucker’s greatest contribution to organizational behavior is the idea that corporations need to have a mission, a sense of purpose in order to be successful.

When I talk about a “cultural orientation” or a “way of thinking,” I mean something like what Drucker proposed—a sense of mission and purpose. And I mean for us to have a mission beyond simply, “whatever is good for kids.”

In my previous career, I was a community organizer. Before we did anything, we would ask ourselves these two questions:

• Does our action help develop leadership among local residents?

• Are we honoring the father of modern-day community organizing Saul Alinsky’s “Iron Rule”? Alinsky famously said, “Never do for someone what they can do for themselves. Never.”

If the answer to either of these questions was “no,” then we either dropped our plan or we revised it. This way of thinking often resulted in what some might consider missed opportunities or decisions that didn’t appear to result in an immediate benefit.

But in the long term, staying true to our mission often resulted in the emergence of self-realized community groups that had confident leaders and committed members. These groups were more successful in gaining affordable housing, creating jobs that paid a living wage and benefits, and building safe neighborhoods than other organizations that never developed their own sense of identity and purpose.

Schools and classrooms need a mission and a shared way of thinking to be effective. I’d like to give three examples of what I mean for the classroom, a school, and in the context of our connection to parents.

In a Classroom

In the first part of each school year in most of my classes, I lead a discussion with students asking whether they want our class to be a “community of learners” or a “classroom of students.” On our overhead, I enter the choices in side-by-side columns and give examples of the difference between the two.

In a classroom of students, a teacher does most of the talking. In a community of learners, students work in small groups and are co-teachers. In a classroom, people laugh when others make mistakes, but in a community, people are supported when they take risks. In a classroom, the teacher always has to be the one to keep people focused. In a community, students take responsibility for keeping themselves focused.

At this point, most students will say that their previous classes have been more like a classroom of students. I then ask students to share what other differences they might see between the two types. Here are a couple of examples my students gave this year:

• In a classroom, “students start a fight and end up hurting each other.” In a community, “they don’t start a fight, they talk it out.”

• In a classroom, “the only way to succeed is doing exactly what the teacher says.” In a community, “you have more than one choice in succeeding.”

After adding to the list, students then decide which one they’d rather have. No group has ever chosen to be the “classroom of students” option.

By starting with this cultural orientation or way of thinking, students develop their own approaches or techniques for how the class will operate. What emerges is a lens for looking at numerous issues throughout the school year. It’s my job to honor my own rules of community organizing, to promote leadership development and self-sufficiency by respecting their judgments and desires.

In a School

Ted Appel, our high school principal, has done a tremendous job of working with teachers over the past few years to develop their mission. Basically, it’s not acceptable for students to not do well. Everybody must succeed. That way of thinking operates almost universally among the faculty, and it is prevalent among students as well.

Our tutoring project, which allows students to hire (and fire) teachers of their choice, is an example of this way of thinking. We didn’t set up an after-school tutoring center and then blame the students for not showing up. Ted and our staff began with the idea that some students needed help, and then they looked for the barriers that might keep students from getting the most effective assistance. They thought outside the box and had the courage to give students the chance to control their own destinies.

Engaging Parents

In my book Building Parent Engagement In Schools, I highlight the differences between parent involvement and parent engagement. When schools involve parents, the primary involvement tool is the mouth. When they engage parents, the primary tool is the ear. Involvement is often about one-way communication: educator to parent. But engagement is about two-way conversation. The invitation to become involved is often through irritation, since educators challenge parents to do something the schools want them to do. With engagement it’s often about agitation—challenging parents to do something that they themselves say they want to do.

Here again, the strategy begins with a commitment to leadership development and self-sufficiency, and it produces a community with a shared sense of purpose that guides its members.

I wonder how many schools and districts are overlooking Drucker’s admonition to develop a sense of mission or purpose that defines why they exist and what greater good is being served? How many instead focus their attention on tasks and techniques that they think might produce short-term results, without developing the cultural compass that every community needs to guide their continuing journey?

Techniques are important, but no laundry list of them will ever be long enough to help administrators, faculties, or students resolve the challenges they face each day, to the benefit of everyone involved.

I wonder if faculties, schools, and districts should devote more time and energy to developing compasses and less time rushing down the road, never certain where we are, or what we will do when we round the next bend.

In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tin y size, died shortly after birth.

The mother tiger, after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health, although physically, she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother’s cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment.. Sometimes a mother of one specie s will take on the care of a different species. The only ‘orphans’ that could be found quickly, were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger. Would they become cubs or pork chops?

Take a look…