“Teachers don’t need to be evaluated on what they can do, given unlimited prep time and warned well in advance, they need to be evaluated on what they actually do, every day.”

You won’t find many teachers earnestly blogging hosannahs about the evaluation process but Mr. AB doles out a great solution — amenable to both sides of the administrative divide — along with the requisite criticism. [via Jacobs]

When you find one great blog in the morning and another before tucking in, it doesn’t really matter what happened between breakfast and dinner, does it? Mr. C and I are just too close together on the learning curve — both a few years in, both having taught urban high school students — for me to ignore him. In a blogosphere full of English and History teachers blogging it’s great to find a few right-brain types reflecting and self-analyzing.

I killed a few months of his archives in just a few spins of the second hand, every post eliciting either an Oh-I-Went-Through-That or an Oh-I’m-Going-Through-That response. His continuum to burnout is just some heartbreakingly true stuff. Watch out for this guy.

I keep my blogroll slender. I have plenty more bloggers tucked into my feedreader but at this point there are only six I know I could recommend to a teacher stuck in quicksand then walk away with a smirk and the knowledge that they’d be alright.

The most recent is Dave Marain and his Math Notations. Dude’s experienced yet vital, provocative and eloquent. He’s fresh to the scene and his posts have flipped from open letters to graybeards like John Derbyshire to what I hope will be an ongoing series of math warmups. He hasn’t pinned himself down yet, which is great. If you’re stuck in quicksand, this is your guy.