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brian
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Sep 16, 2012 • I love my blog. For years now I have been chronicling thoughts, hopes, aspirations, hurts, and writing tips right here on Sharper Thesis, the blog. But last night I was reminded in an abrupt way that there are rules to social media, and that if you forget them like I did you can miss out...
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brian
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Sep 10, 2012 • So we’ve been giving these pre-tests at work in accordance with the new mandates from SED, which got me thinking. The tests measure what students know coming into the year- a test of your curriculum, basically. In theory, students should do poorly on these exams, since they haven’t been taught any of the material before....
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brian
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Sep 5, 2012 • Today was the opening day of school, the day when we, as teachers, meet our students for the very first time. And it was great. Yesterday we had our meeting day where just the teachers get together and listen to the professional development spiels set out for us by well-meaning administrators- all well-intended and helpful-...
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brian
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Sep 3, 2012 • Labor Day. The end of a glorious summer filled with vacations, sharks (the Cape was teeming with them!), writing, relaxing, angst, and realizations. For all of its apparent calm, there was a lot of work, too, both professionally and emotionally. And now here we are on Labor Day, prepping lessons, writing SLO’s (the latest horror...
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brian
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Aug 29, 2012 • Ok, so I have a bit of a writer’s crush on Paolo Coelho (once I figured out how to spell his name I was golden), I’ll admit it. The writer of The Alchemist, among other profound and lyrical novels, is a prolific tweeter, and I’m often transfixed by the nuggets he sends out as tweets...
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brian
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Aug 28, 2012 • Fall is upon us. School starts back up next week, and it starts with a whole slew of firsts for me. Personally, it’s all new this time around,the newest its ever been since I started teaching. Gone is a lot of the stability and support from year’s past; in short, I’ve lost some of my...
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brian
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Aug 16, 2012 • As a teacher, the lure of summer vacation is that it entices you into all kinds of escapist thinking. This morning, while having coffee with a friend who works from home and listening to her description of a working life spent in front of the computer in her living room, I was forced to confront...
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brian
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Aug 15, 2012 • Look, I make errors. I repeat the same errors over and over again, usually on this blog. This is one of those times. I’m writing the mea culpa for a post I wrote yesterday in anger. Im going to try to take the bee out of the honey, as it were. Here goes. My last...
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brian
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Aug 14, 2012 • I know that I’ve been sort of preoccupied with the old inward stare lately. No arguments out there? I didn’t think so. So we all can agree that I’ve been languishing a bit in the inner workings of me, or, as my daughter says, I can’t get out of my own head. It’s a writerly...
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brian
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Aug 12, 2012 • The following bit of brilliance was taken from Paolo Coelho’s blog. He acknowledges in the article that he didn’t write the piece, but it was attributed to him, and that he has modified it and republished it under his name. It is an incredibly eloquent treatise on letting go. I thought it might be nice...
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brian
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Aug 11, 2012 • By now, many people will have read about the journalistic indiscretions of Fareed Zakaria, the CNN on air host, Time Magazine writer and editor, and celebrated foreign affairs correspondent. It appears that Mr. Zakaria played fast and fancy with works from other writers, often lifting passages from other work and placing them into his own....
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brian
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Aug 10, 2012 • My iPad arrived two days ago and I’m writing my first post on it. Sure, I had to download a slew of apps first, including this really cool writing app called Write-2 and a really handy blogging app called Blogsy. They’re both very cool little apps that will allow me to write wherever I need...
