I don’t follow Technorati so closely to know this answer – but I see that your own rank (32,335) is way the heck higher than Mr. Moses (329,471) so that sounds favorable for YOU. But your authority (183) is not as good as his, so I don’t know the relationship between those metrics….?

Scott, Supermoses has a Technorati ranking of 29. Who do I have to bribe?

1. The students come first. Anything else is BS.

2. When you are looking at what your program is telling you to do, what your fellow teachers are telling you to do, or what you are telling yourself to do, is it for adult convenience, or is it in the best interest of the students? If your answer is the first, you’re doing the wrong thing.

3. Just because it’s being done that way, has always been done that way, or the state says it should be done that way doesn’t make it right. Don’t be afraid to question the dominant paradigm.

We all could have different ways of translating these into practice. Example: Dan is more content with the content standards than Glenn, BUT this is probably (I’m inferring from his writing–feel free to disagree if I’ve misread) because he wants them to learn and be successful, so he would generally speaking, pass Glenn’s BS test.

I’ll probably be blogging on this topic soon myself, since I’ve been reflecting on my credential program vs. my professional experience lately. I think this would be interesting to see from others.

In his third paragraph, however, the math teacher/ex-engineer (read: analytical and rather literal reader) in me has to wonder how far he really would go with this “polar opposite” notion:

Next, take note of everything these classes area telling you to do and plan on doing the exact opposite. This will also help you once you get into a building. Look at what other teachers are doing, and do whatever the polar opposite is.

That is, clearly there must be some things that even the most mediocre teachers are doing right; there must be some things that the professors in colleges of education are teaching right; there must be some educational theory that is on target. So I’d say that the real challenge is having the discernment to figure out what is worth keeping, and what’s worth throwing out as he suggests.

Pragmatically, doing the polar opposite of everything that my classmates did (and professors taught) would obviously not leave me in good stead as the end of the semester approached, but that’s fairly self-serving. Doing the polar opposite of everything that my colleagues do would quite likely cause some friction, and no doubt Mr. Moses would agree that friction is a necessary part of challenging the status quo. But doing the polar opposite of everything my colleagues do also means that Rich is now reinventing everything about teaching math. And I have to consider that there are some things worth sharing from others (or why else would I be reading thing blog, for example?).