The Dream Teacher Blog

National Teacher of the Year Program Conference – Day 1

January 31, 2013

I had the honor in January of 2009 of representing North Carolina’s teachers as the State Teacher of the Year at a conference in Dallas. This year, I’m back again…this time in Scottsdale, Arizona, as a companion to the 2013 NC TOY, Darcy Grimes.

Most of my day included sitting on a very bumpy plane – almost six hours total – because of high winds and tornadoes spinning around the Southeast. I have to say I’ve never heard so many apologies from the flight deck and so many explanations of how equipped our plane was to handle crosswinds. I don’t …

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Life As I Know It…

January 20, 2013

A few years ago, I blogged once a week, on two different blogs. My Dream Teacher blog was my way of sharing stories of the classroom – fun, happy, silly anecdotes about those unpredictable middle schoolers or emotional stories about everything from struggling students to school shootings. My other blog, NCTOYTreks08-09 shared my journeys as a state Teacher of the Year, the places I traveled (all over the country and even to Europe), the amazing people I met in those places, and an occasional thought or two about education policy.

It was a tall order, blogging once a week, but …

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Holiday Teaching

December 27, 2012

One thing I miss the most since I’m out of the classroom is the fun of teaching during the holiday season. And it’s not because of the gifts students bring…although I’ve written on that subject before. I have such great memories of a warm time in schools, a time when I bonded with my students more than any other time of the year: the band and chorus concerts, the holiday “centers” where students learned about celebrations around the world, the ornament making, and even the card designing.

Once I brought in hundreds of holiday cards that I had saved …

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“A School Is Not A Fortress”

December 18, 2012

Last week I walked to the eighth grade hallway at the back of the middle school to talk to a teacher. As I returned down the long main hall toward the front of the school, I saw a man walk in the front door, pass the office and all the “check in with the front office” procedures, and head straight toward me. My senses became alert: I didn’t recognize this man, he had no visitor sticker, and he made no attempt to enter the office, sit down at the check-in machine, sign in, and take his picture for the sticker …

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I Love to Write!

November 15, 2012

Celebrate I Love to Write Day! Start your own blog…write your “story” down…write some poetry…write a letter. Share what’s inside you using the words in your head!

Recently I was listening to a local radio personality talk about some struggles she was having with her preteen. She reached out to listeners for ideas on punishments to use with her daughter and shared some she had already tried. When she mentioned that she previously had assigned sentences for her daughter to write – 250 of them, to be exact – I almost ran my car into a ditch.

I was …

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Hold On…

October 30, 2012

I spent the day in a high school media center trying to do some very important work. But I couldn’t concentrate. I was agitated, distracted, stressed, and even a bit scared. Hurricane Sandy, reported to impact 60 million people and some of the biggest cities in the country, loomed right out my window, ripping autumn leaves from trees and pressing down with ominous clouds that looked like they belonged on that first Ghostbusters movie. I was mostly stressed due to the fact that the hurricane was headed toward New York City, toward my son, his wife, and my granddogs, Ramsey …

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Tweetin’ Got Me Thinkin’

October 10, 2012

I took a minute during my lunch break to hang out on Twitter, specifically to glance at the NPR Twitter Education Forum (#npredchat) and see what some national names in education were saying…um…tweeting. As I scanned down the TwitterChat page, I kept seeing the word “reform” over and over. It was at that point that my tweeting fingers started twitching. Here’s my first post:

We shouldn’t be talking about how to REform education; we should be talking about how to TRANSform education. #npredchat

In Latin, the prefix “re” means “again, back, and backward” – exactly what we DON’T …

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Go With Your Gut

October 3, 2012

The guidance counselor at my school and I like to share cute things that little kids say. I told her that my granddaughter Taylor used to say, “My not like that” when anything displeased her. The counselor shared that her nephew used to say, “I can’t know that” whenever he didn’t understand something.

Yesterday my mother told me a story about lying to her first grade teacher and leaving school in the middle of the day to go play with a friend. It was 1932. She was five. She told the teacher that she had a headache and that her …

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Having My Cake

September 8, 2012

When it comes to nature vs. nurture, I’m all about the nature of things. I mean, unless something devastating happens in a kid’s life on the way to adulthood, I believe their personalities are already shaped when they come into this world. There is just so much to be said for genes and chromosomes and how nicely the puzzle pieces fit together to make us who we turn out to be.

For example, my Daddy had a sweet tooth…as in, really sweet. I love sweets, too. Like an addict. One of my favorite words in the English language is “cupcake” …

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The Truth About Teaching

August 14, 2012

I arrived at my school this morning, one of the last of the summer days before kids arrive in two weeks, and realized the parking lot was full of cars. I asked a teacher I passed in the mailroom, “Who’s here today?”

“It’s the district’s new teachers,” she said. And I felt all my senses stand up at attention.

Beginning Teacher Orientation. BEGINNING. TEACHERS. These are our colleagues who are fresh out of college, who’ve spent the summer looking for jobs and then, once hired, have hit every teacher supply store in driving distance to get classroom necessities. These are …

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