Okay, here's a couple random thoughts and then something a little more serious.

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It's testing time in our state and school. Our fourth and fifth graders started on Monday and the third and sixth will be starting soon. I'm not going to spend too much time on standardized testing and NCLB, other than to say too much emphasis is being put on these tests. Sure, we can take some good out of the results, but as educators, we all know the way things are currently going, is certainly the wrong direction.

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Does anyone still have Halloween costume parties at their schools? Our district got rid of them a while back. I guess we can't let the kids have fun anymore. My daughter's school still has a costume parade and the kids get to have a little party. I heard a teacher at my school today say she wishes we could get rid of Halloween and Valentine's day parties. I say let the kids relax and have some fun.

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Why do classroom teachers collaborate little with others who can help their students. I'm the Library Media Specialist in my building and have all classes for an hour a week for library time and technology time. The tech part consists of going into the lab to work on something. If it was up to the little kids, it would be Kid Pix for 30 minutes. For the older kids, it would be listening to music videos while hitting Funbrian.com or even KidPix. I'd like to do some neat stuff with the kids, but with only 30 minutes a week to do it, my time is limited. How could it improve - collaboration! Could the classroom teachers work with me to integrate technology into what's going on? Of course. Do they? NO! I get some teachers who bring their kids to the lab and as the kids are walking in, the teacher will say, if you have some time, can you help them find some stuff on explorers when you go to the lab? Wow, nothing like giving me a heads up on it.

Here's the question of the moment - why do you think classroom teachers don't collaborate enough with the Library Media Specialist to better incorporate technology.

Side note: I do have more technology experience and ability than probably all of the classroom teachers.

Choice Schools - are they better than a traditional public school? Do they improve public schools because they create more competition? Proponents of Choice Schools have felt they are good for kids and families in Milwaukee and across the country. A recent report and ensuing article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contradict those claims. The study was even funded by Choice supporters and they were surprised at the results.

Am I surprised at the results of the study? Not at all. In fact, when we discussed the article at lunch the other day, other educators weren't surprised. It seems to me that the teachers, parents, administrators, and students are the ones who make schools successful. By giving students a choice to switch from one below average school to another certainly doesn't guarantee improved learning. Good schools - traditional public, private, choice, etc. are going to be successful. Bad schools are not. What we as educators need to figure out is how to improve the poor achieving schools. It's not as simple as putting the best teachers there. We also need good families and administration.

As educators, we often try to look at things through rose colored glasses. The glass is half full, not half empty. We look at every child as a learner and try to see the positive in all children.

Sometimes, however, we don't. Some of us get in the lounge or at a happy hour function and start telling it like it is. In most cases, there's not an administrator around and the people we are talking to are one's we trust. I recently came across a blog entry that certainly speaks the truth - to some extent.

If you haven't read this entry from Scheiss Weekly, please do so. I bet you'll be nodding your head more than once! At my school, we really liked the reference to a acertain kind of behavior!

With 2 months into yet another new school year already gone, I've decided to set a few goals for myself for the rest of this year. These are going to be school/professionally related, not personal. Some are going to be rather serious, others are not. Here we go.

1. Write something at least once a week. While some may have noticed that I took a rather lengthy vacation from blogging, I'm going to work hard on writing something each week that expresses my thoughts about something.

2. Read several blogs more than once a week. We all know there is great stuff being written by others regarding education (and crappy stuff as well) I'm going to try and read some- it might inspire, motivate, and frustrate me, but I'll take my chances.

3. Gain more patience with all of my students. Some knowingly try to under my skin while others do it without knowing, but either way, I've got to work on not getting to pissed off at the kids.

4. Take another class to complete my IMC certification. IF this happens, it will be during the second semester - we'll see.

5. Figure out the next few years. Our district is going through some reorganization, much of it will impact my future. There's some discussion that over the next few years, our elementary schools will go from K5-6th grade to full day K4-4th grade with our intermediate schools housing grades 5-8. I'm 99.9% sure I do not want to be working with K4-4th graders if this is the way of our district. Big decisions may have to be made.

6. Work out more. Yes, it's a personal goal, but if I'm feeling better, I'll have a better attitude at school, etc. I also won't be wasting a ton of money on a health club membership!

7. Don't sweat the small stuff - enjoy job security, friends at school, the opportunity to work with kids all day (a blessing and a curse), and all the other good things in life.

After a super (too long) break, I'm going to start writing again. It might be useless stuff that no one reads, it might not.

I'm also going to start reading again - which just might lead to a few people stopping by my site.

Hope to see some familiar bloggers back.

It's been a week or so since my latest blog and it actually seems like it's been much longer. I really don't have any excuses as to why I haven't written anything lately. I've logged on and read some stuff, but for whatever reason, I have put the actual writing off. To get back on track as far as blogging, I'll put together a list of somewhat random thoughts.

1. We have an after school math program that I am part of. It's near the end of the program and because of this, I've had to administrator a standardized test to the participating kids. I'm not done yet, but after giving me this test, I've confirmed my complete dislike for standardized tests.

2. My wife traveling for work pretty much sucks. She's been on the west coast for the past 5 days and it's been just me and the kids. Now, she's good at her job and I'm very glad she has the job, but I wish the travel was a lot less.

3. I'm blogging while I watch Arrested Development and this show is hilarious.

4. I have a ton of reading to do to catch up on the blogs that I've been failing to read. I miss the entertaining and relaxing writing that many of you do. I will catch up.

5. My daughter's soccer coach made a good coaching decision today (putting the good kids in at the end of a tie game) and the kids won their game because of it.

6. As of today, we have 19 days left of school - yippee!!

7. As much as I love blogging, I'm starting to realize that there are other things that are in competition with my time - kids, tv, sleep, friends, golf, etc. With the summer coming, I'm wondering if I'll blog more because I don't have school or I'll blog less because I'll have more stuff to do. Hmmmm.

This weekend, my daughter was in a soccer tournament. There were four teams in her bracket and it turns out two were 7 year olds and two were eight year old teams. They played one of the 8 year old teams today and were totally outmatched. Then, the head coach makes a horrendous decision - he stops the game. Now, my wife is the assistant coach and he asked her what she thought. Of course, she says to let the kids keep playing. They can use the practice and what does quitting teach them? Now, it was not even halftime yet and the score was only 7-0. He didn't take that advice at all and called the game. This not only pissed my wife off, but many of the parents were ticked as well. He also never told the girls the real reason the game was off. What does that teach them? The good news is that he told my wife and the team manager that he wasn't going to coach the girls next year! For the second game today, our team beat the other 7 year old team, so that was good. That team was hammered earlier today by the other 8 year old team. Tomorrow, was supposed to be the other games, but the coaches for all 4 teams wisely redid the games so we play the other 7 year old team and the two 8 year old teams will play each other again. This will be much better for all of the girls involved and we won't have to worry about our kids only playing half of a game. Thank goodness this guy's not a teacher!

By the way, we got a call from the insurance company yesterday about the accident and the car is totaled. We ended up buying a new car today and will pick it up on Tuesday. I think we got a decent price, but you never know how honest car salesmen are! Oh well.

My day started off just fine- woke up ready to go. Wife and son left for school and daycare and I was off with my daughter to drop her off at her school before heading to mine. After I dropped her off, I get a phone call from my wife that she was in a bad car accident on the way to daycare/work. To make a long story short, I proceeded to head to the accident, not go to school, then take my 4 year old to daycare. Luckily, he wasn't hurt. Then, met my wife at the hospital while she was checked out - nothing but a few bruises and some pain for her. After 3 hours in the ER, we made it home, took care of the insurance phone calls and are kind of back in the swing of things. Now, we await the call from the insurance company to tell us if our car is totaled or not.

I feel bad for my very sore wife because we have my daughter's birthday party tomorrow, a run/walk for the local school district, and 3 soccer games this weekend that she'll have to somewhat suffer through.

On the good side, no one was seriously hurt in the accident and I missed the day of the week at school where my schedule stinks because I have some crazy classes.

Tonight was my last grad school class for the semester - and am I happy. No more Monday nights wasted sitting in a windowless room while the professor reads the info from a Power Point to us. I turned in my final assignment tonight - that's another relief. Now, it's time to wait for the grade - which apparently will be an A. According to others who did some background checking on the professor, rumor has it that if you turn your work in and it's not totally crappy, you get an A. I can now spend the next few Mondays watching my 4 year old play soccer!

This Friday marks one of the big days. We will be training our staff on how to do the elementary report cards online. A couple of the teachers who were previously trained thought the process was fairly simple - time consuming at first, but easy. As they got going with it, they liked it much better than the paper report cards. We met last week to plan out the day (this Friday) and to get ready. We already know a few people who will need extra attention, but we'll work with them. Hopefully things will go smoothly, if not, we'll be heading to a local establishment for some adult beverages while we complain about the technology challenged who came into the training with a bad attitude and left with a bad headache. Oh well - let the fun begin!

I had one of those days today. I'll apologize right now, but this is going to be more of a venting post that anything else.

My day was going pretty good. My morning classes were pretty good - kids worked hard and for the most part, behaved. Afternoon kindergarten classes were better than normal. This was a little surprising since a college student was in to observe a library class for a while. Don't things usually go a little wacky when someone's observing? This time, they were great. Anyway, the day ended, I got some work done and then it was time for the after school math kids to come in the library for about 15 minutes before their after school teachers came to pick them up. Now, I'm not usually Mr. Strict during this time because I believe the kids need a little time to let loose after a day of classes and before another 45 minutes of learning. However, today, I lost it. There were about 45 kids in the library and things started to get a take a turn for the worse. First, a carton of milk, which they had for snack, suddenly spilled all over the carpeting, on it's own apparently, and no one told me about it for at least a couple of minutes. Then, I see several fourth graders playing a little tag - yes, running around the library. Of course, I tell them to stop. Then, some more wonder children decided that some pushing needed to occur. I'm not talking about a little one handed push - I'm talking two hands, hard to the back of another unsuspecting student. Well, this of course, resulted in the pushee shoving another student in the same fashion. The girl who got shoved, was pushed into some other students and I lost it. I yelled louder than I probably have ever yelled at a class. I told everyone to sit down on a chair at a table and be quiet. I would have loved to say "Get your ass to a table and shut the hell up," but of course, I couldn't do that. Since this was near the time when their teachers were going to pick them up, I now had an audience of a few teachers, including the principal, to hear my lecture on behavior and safety and so on. I'm quite sure the principal heard me blow up from where ever she was in the building. She took the 2 pushers and the other kids involved out. I left school shortly after that pretty pissed off. I feel better now, but it still bothers me that these little children don't know the difference between good behavior and screwing around. Thanks for listening. I hope to put together a more meaningful post in the next day or 2.