Welcome!

Why read my Blog?

I've never been on a School Board.  I don't have an EdD.   

But I have been teaching high school  for 48 years, and am excited about my last 20.

When I started teaching  in 1976,  I focused on lesson plans, labs, and surviving.  Never gave much thought to the American Education juggernaut.  As the years became  decades, I started to notice an ominous trend in education:  public confidence waned; public dissatisfaction  waxed.  As parents' confidence crumbled, an urgency sprinkled with touches of panic crept into schools--we've got to do better!  But how can we be sure we are getting better?   Hence the quantification of education with ever greater emphasis on standardized tests.

I don't believe a multiple choice test in June can measure how much a student has grown that year, academically, intellectually, emotionally, as a result of a teacher's tutelage.  I decided to write a book to spread the word about a different way, and the encouraging outcomes that result.  The title, AS TOLD BY THE TAUGHT, refers to the bizarre state of education wherein  educational experts decide what students should learn each year, and, at the end of the year, test them to see if they did.  For 48 years, I have guided my development as a teacher that affects students' lives not on their test scores.  Instead I simply asked my students,  "How am I doing?"  As well as direct conversations during the year, and random conversations with former students years later, my research for this blog is based on a 3-foot tall stack of teacher evaluations I'd collected over the years.

Since I got only rejection letters from book publishers, I've decided to pour my book manuscript into this blog.  

Shall we?

- Bruce ("Mr.") Ratcliffe