Hey! I got a shout-out on another teacher's blog: So you want to be a science teacher... Jeff is just starting his student-teaching in rural Oregon. Our blogs are very similar, both in appearance and the kind of content included. I found his post on 3-ring binders particularly true!

While I'm on the topic of other teachers' blogs, please note the links I've added in the column to the right - I'm looking for more blogs by teachers, and I'm sharing some of the resources important to me as a middle school science teacher in NYC. I think teachers should share resources & experiences as often as possible, so please send me the link to your teaching blog or must-see websites.

This afternoon was our first meeting with our AUSSIE Consultant. These consultants are part of the changes to the Dept. of Ed. here in the city. Each school is supposed to have a literacy and a math coach who are themselves trained by the AUSSIEs, but since my school is a collection of smaller "programs," we are working with the AUSSIE directly. Many of the AUSSIEs really are Aussie, as in, Australian. They are former teachers and administrators who will be helping us implement the new Balanced Literacy and Mathematics curricula. While children are children everywhere, it is still a little odd to have a few hundred advisors arrive from halfway around the world to help us improve our school system - and it must be really bizarre for them to find themselves immersed in a new city, new country, and enormous, chaotic school system, trying to give us advice.

Adding to the irony is that while Australians come to the US to help us improve education here, experts from the US are in Iraq trying to overhaul their education system: Educators confront daunting task in Iraq (Contra-Costa Times). They have to help teachers and students deal with the trauma of war, take the pro-Saddam propaganda out of the textbooks, convince students, parents, and teachers that the schools are safe, and replace hundreds of Baathist Party teachers with politically neutral or pro-democracy teachers - among other things. And teachers there are getting a raise from just a few dollars a month to between $60-300 a month. Whatever complaints I might have look pretty meaningless when I think about teaching - or learning - in an Iraqi school.