Who has the right to punish electronic Bullies?

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Can a student be suspended for posting a video on You Tube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack? Times

Grading--Marianne Baker

Only assign what helps students learn and what you can grade. Your time should be spent in assessment that drives instruction and results in learning.

Have students grade what they can.

Spelling, The IE Rule is just silly!

Oh, My. The erroneous things we are taught in school. How do we really learn to spell? That's what I'd like to know. I have been participating in the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee every morning, and I have learned a few things, like we spell a lot from memory about what the word looks like. Or we associate a root word with the bigger word, or we think, "Oh, that's a foreign word, so it has to be --ette, et, oux--(I can recognise some French bits, and maybe a couple of Spanish bits)." By far and away the "ie" rule has given me the biggest challenge (or ous, or tion, or ly, and ALL of their various ways to say the exact same sound--honestly there are not a lot of rules you can extrapolate that hold up). So frustrated, I looked up the "ie" rule--in Britain recently they begged teachers not to teach that rule any more--here goes:

"Just when a "rule" is learned, such as "I before E except after C" there are exceptions put in: "or when sounding like A as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'." Then, some aspiring novelist decides to put in a sentence like "Neither of the foreign sovereigns wanted either of the feisty heifers for protein, and they seized the weird kaleidoscope from the counterfeit poltergeist!" and the rule goes up in a puff of smoke.

"One of the best and most-overlooked techniques for learning both grammar and hard to spell words is simply reading – a wide variety and as much as possible. The more times the eye sees words spelled correctly, the more easy it is to spot mistakes. It becomes less a matter of following rules as much as gaining an intuition as to when a word simply feels "wrong.""

Cliche

I think when you are teaching students about cliches--I usually hear teachers in the faculty room disparaging student use of cliches--that you need to realize that students are just learning cliches, so technically they don't know that they are cliches.

Typical advice goes something like this, "You should avoid using a cliché in your writing like the plague. It's simply an expression that has become overused to the point it has lost the impact; such as 'avoid...like the plague.'"

I like what George's dad on Dead Like Me had to say to his poetry class about cliche. He said, "When you're suffering, truly suffering, it's the cliches that heal you. When I'm sad give me George Jones, or Willie Nelson. That's the brilliance of these sonnets. They state the obvious. Cliches are cliches because they are the things that have stuck to the wall. Our greatest arrogance is to believe that we are all special, because the truth is we are all unbelievably the same."

How do you define cliche? If there is a universal feeling, there is a cliche to go with it.

A cliche is not just something that lots of people say; It's something that lots of people say and it conveys some sort of idea or message. A cliche is, in other words, a metaphor characterized by its overuse.

The blogger at westegg says, "I have my own test to see if a phrase is a cliche or not. I read the first half of the sentence, then I ask myself, "do I just know (because everyone knows) how the sentence ends?" Someone recently submitted, "The gene pool could use a little chlorine." I knew this wasn't a cliche because when I say, "The gene pool could use what?" I don't know how to end the sentence."

What Book Got You Hooked?

What book hooked you on reading?

Check out some of the great names on good reads 'find books'--"What Book Got You Hooked?" "Read These In School--Would Have Preferred A Root Canal" "Best Vampire Books" etc.

Also, I've got to go back and pick-up on the library page theme flow find a book gadget.