teacher/learner
Joined August 2014
- Tweets1.1K
- Following260
- Followers276
- Likes12.4K
Patty Carpenter retweeted
For anyone wondering why this @nypost op-ed—like so many NY Post op-eds—is absurd and nothing more than propaganda, here’s a very simple example.
#education
Patty Carpenter retweeted
If you have served in public education for 20 years or more, this post is for you.
You are part of the roughly 28% who entered public-school teaching and were still in the profession two decades later.
So for the veteran teachers and staff who have served for 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, and beyond, this is to celebrate you!
You have endured some of the most difficult changes education has ever faced.
You witnessed standardized testing grow into an overwhelming system of high-stakes pressure, excessive data collection, and constant documentation.
You adapted to new standards, new technology, new programs, and an endless cycle of initiatives.
You carried students and families through COVID, even while facing your own fears, losses, and uncertainty.
You have watched respect for educators decline while expectations continued to rise.
You have been asked to do more with less, solve problems you did not create, and meet needs that extend far beyond the classroom.
And yet, you continued to show up.
You taught the lesson again.
You encouraged the struggling student.
You supported the overwhelmed colleague.
You welcomed the nervous parent.
You kept schools functioning during some of the toughest years education has ever experienced.
Most people will never fully understand what it takes to dedicate decades of your life to serving students, families, and communities. They will never know how many evenings, weekends, personal dollars, and pieces of your heart you have invested.
There are adults walking through the world today who are stronger, wiser, and more confident because you once believed in them.
To every teacher and staff member who has served for 20 years or more:
Thank you for your dedication.
Thank you for your sacrifice.
Thank you for your wisdom.
Thank you for caring for our children.
Thank you!
So true! They return and tell you how they cried , how we all cried , during the read aloud of “Where the Red Fern Grows” or laughed during “Lulu ‘s Mysterious Mission” ❤️
The teacher who reads aloud to their class every day, not as a lesson, just as a gift, is building something.
Not reading skills. Not comprehension scores. A shared imagination.
A room full of children who have all been to the same place together.
Who have all felt the same thing at the same moment. That's not a literacy intervention. That's a community.
Patty Carpenter retweeted
A subtraction game. The goal is to get the lowest answer. Roll dice four times and each S places the number on their game board. Once a number is played, it can't be moved. This was an assessment. Both had the right answer, but oh the reasoning.
Patty Carpenter retweeted
This week, I got a snapshot of how knowledge impacts reading.
I was progress monitoring my reading intervention group with two passages, one fiction and one nonfiction.
Here's how that played out (1/8) 🧵
This is the reality of these systems.
Common Outcomes of PBIS in Schools:
•Students behave for rewards, not internal motivation. “What do I get if I behave?” becomes common.
•Chronic disruptors stay in class, impacting everyone else.
•Teacher exhaustion from tracking behavior, rewards, data, and meetings.
32
Patty Carpenter retweeted
Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers.
Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.
Not surprising to be honest. Teachers are being micromanaged by admin, textbook companies, testing companies, and politicians who have never managed a large group of diverse children, let alone teach a child to read. It might help if teachers were given a bathroom break.
In 2008, 62% of teachers said they were very satisfied with their job.
In 2022, that dropped to 12%.
We've got a serious problem brewing in education...
36
Patty Carpenter retweeted
A child who reads twenty minutes a day encounters millions of words in a year.
That exposure builds vocabulary, background knowledge, and language patterns.
No worksheet can compete with that.
Reading widely is one of the most powerful learning engines we have.
Patty Carpenter retweeted
If you haven’t taught in a classroom post-Covid, you don’t know what it is like to teach the modern student.
The students have changed.
Teaching has changed.
You have to be in the classroom daily to understand what I mean.
Patty Carpenter retweeted
OTD in 1980….
The Joe Greene Coca-Cola commercial airs during Super Bowl XIV
Although it debuted earlier that season, the ad reaches new heights with a Super Bowl audience, eventually elevating it to one of the most memorable ads in sports history.
Patty Carpenter retweeted
I don’t know what to make of prolific people on social media who appear to never have mixed feelings. Who take a certain side, defend a certain position down the line no matter what has occurred. I mean, nothing ever happens to make a person cry foul on their own team? Nothing?? Is there no point when our side has gone too far? I can’t comprehend it. Seems to me that is putting way too much confidence in humans. Nobody’s always right. The thing about straight lines drawn by human hands is how prone they are to get crooked.
Patty Carpenter retweeted
When a 2nd-grade math word problem is written at a 4th-grade reading level, it’s not really about the math anymore.
It’s about reading above grade level.
Reading belongs in math. Kids have to make sense of problems.
But when the language is harder than the math, the outcome is predictable.
Students can understand the math.
They can know how to solve it.
And still fail — because of how the question is written.
This isn’t an accident.
International comparisons (PISA and TIMSS) show that U.S. math assessments are often longer, wordier, and more linguistically complex than those used in many higher-performing countries — even when testing the same math concepts.
In other words, testing companies design questions that make it easier to miss the math.
If we want math scores to mean something, grade-level math needs grade-level language.
