Deal or No Deal…

…Dumb or Dumber.
If this show lasts past tonight I’m gong to puke.
Or at least experience a shot of heartburn.
The lady on the show now just announced she feels lucky because she’s wearing her lucky bra.
Those of you who know me must know I’m dying to know exactly what brand of bra that is.
Not really.
But this show is dumb. You could blow through twelve contestants a night on this thing if they didn’t do the phony dramatic crap in between the person selecting the suitcase they want.
I mean, there’s no skill involved. Just pick a freaking suitcase and move on.
With your cool mil.
Or with nothing.

I went to lunch with the people I used to work with before having kids and getting MS.
It was fun but a tad depressing.
Being out of the loop sucks.
Knowing I’d rather be writing anyway does help.
But I miss those guys.

Anyway,
part of what we do is work with teachers, administrators and reading coaches.
One of my colleages was asked to give an inservice to some coaches at a wealthy suburban district (99% of our sites are urban and most are poor) where they were they heard coaching teachers was the way to go.
Well, she arrived there to find that the school district had actually hired football coaches to be reading coaches.

Did this make you choke on your filet mignon?
It should have chilled your blood a few degrees at the very least.
It made me laugh, actually.
Apparently, the administrators decided that since the teachers love football and the coaches in particular, they would be likely to listen to what they have to say.

Without a doubt these coaches have a rich and valuable core of information to offer regarding the act of coaching–no matter what the field or content involved. I have used articles from sports illustrated in working with people myself (and many teachers could learn a lot about examining their instruction from the crazy obsessive way coaches dissect their work) but you have to understand the process of reading to teach people how to teach it. If phychologists could map exactly what the brain does when dealing with text, they’d know how the brain works. Won’t happen anytime soon. And I doubt it will be within the confines of a locker room, that the process is finally revealed.

NOt that it matters in this particular school.
Their test scores are sky high, no matter what the instruction looks like…just a little side-effect of making testing the most important aspect of education and having middle/upper middle class students to be good little soilders.

Uggghhh, this post sucks. None of this matters.