Take a close look at the human brain in the this photo. I taught my students: “Your brain is neurologically unique.”
As a teacher it became my life’s work to uncover their unique learning styles and open the doors for their optimal learning.

Nelson Mandela once wrote:
"What counts in life is not the mere fact that we lived...
it is what difference we have made to the lives of others
that will determine the significance of the life we lead."

"Sometimes it is the very people
who no one imagines anything of
who can do the things no one imagined."
--Alan Turing

Framed over the entrance to my classroom:
"Forget the struggling world
and every trembling fear.
Here all are kin...
and here the rule of life is love.”

--Irving Stone, 1947. (If students didn't see it overhead on the way in, they would come to feel it on their way out.)

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

CHAPTER 18: The" Missing Bullets": Setting Sun, Rising Moon

Chapter 18

Epiphany #87,017 occurred while reading How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg: at that very moment it occurred to me that "my students were the MISSING BULLETS.  Put another way, sometimes answers can be found by examining what is not there, what is missing.


FOR EXAMPLE:
On our first date, following dinner,  Patricia and I, hand in arm, walked along Margueritte Avenue to Corona Del Mar State Beach just as the sun was about to set. Dozens of people had stopped to enjoy the "golden moment," many were taking iconic sunset photos.

But I've always been interested in what most people don't see, what they are not looking straight at,  so I turned to look behind us and found, surprisingly... the full moon, rising bright off the eastern horizon while everyone else was looking west.
 
I spun Patricia around, and that's we began our together journey looking for all the thing we cannot see. So much to learn, so many things to explore: not just that which is front of us but everything including what we were not seeing behind us. 

So what was it about the At-Risk students in my Foothill Continuation High School  classroom that schools were missing?  Why were so many schools bouncing out students that were so gifted?






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