Kaulbach's Modern World

Every Sunday my husband and I sit with our daughter after breakfast in front of our woodstove and read or listen to the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz.  Most of the time we make fun of the program and award the person who yells out the most random and wrong answers to his questions.  But once in awhile, we get one right. Or we conquer the weekly puzzle and enter the drawing to be on the show. It is very exciting even though we have yet to win. I do worry about the influence this has had on our daughter since she now follows Rachel on Twitter and requested Will's puzzle books as Xmas gifts.  However, because of she obsession with radio voices and puzzles I have become enlightened once again in the field of education. I'm in love with anagrams. Scramble letters that turn into memorable phrases or names of countries or words with a "q" sound like cupid, or cubical have helped stimulate my brain during car rides, dinner dishes or right before bedti...

Cold War Studies- links to worksheets My students just finished a unit on WWII and a subunit on the use of the atomic bomb. While my colleagues were able to rush forward into another large and content rich unit on Cold War I chose to slow down the pace and let students alleviate concerns developed about nuclear war, unfinished studies of Japan's role in Korea and interest about Korea resulting from recent inflammatory rhetoric in the news. North Korea seems on the verge of attack so knowledge of what we don't understand seems relevant. Combined with a need to improve writing skills, vocabulary and reading, my hands are full. And I need to cater to the specific needs of these students. Their needs and interests are different from students I taught last year. When to find the time? Aha! April break. Many mumble that teachers have more breaks than other professions. But I concur that many waking hours, dreams and strolls on a beach are cut short by my mad scramble to write down ...

The month of April is a perfect time to to give attention to poetry. A middle school colleague and poet urged me to give some undivided attention to this often waylaid genre. My first email response was to do no more than to consider it but then I took a big breath and sent a second response pledging to commit to poetry prowess. Why am I so reluctant to present poetry to students? It is a deep seeded reluctance for which I blame on an intimidating high school English teacher. I remember the long eye roll and eyebrow lift that indicated a wrong analysis of classic poetry. It was followed by lectures on how we were not advanced enough to see the historic meaning or imbedded references. T.S. Elliot's purposeful citation of Heart of Darkness or that poem in which a guitar is shaped like a beautiful woman had little relevance to my sixteen year old mind and stick figure body. Instead I gave up thinking that my opinion mattered on poetry. As a teacher I have continued to worry about...

These last two weeks have really been busy for me as a classroom teacher. Our department is pushing to get through a very content rich curriculum in US history. One goal is to have all students writing a persuasive essay that we can score together using the same rubric. I decided to slow down and give students an opportunity to debate the necessity of the use of the atomic bomb before giving them a graded assessment in essay writing. We used a map from readthinkwrite.org to practice persuasive argument before studying events leading up to and away from the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Students read articles, studied archival photo sets and watched videos. But they still had unanswered questions. I'm no expert on atomic or nuclear studies so our high school tech integrationist suggested contacting the Los Alamos lab or the Bradbury Science museum. He tried to set up a video chat but for security reasons this was not allowed. Instead we set up an email discussion with great...