The design of the course asked students for their input, their opinions, and their reflections upon reading articles and viewing films that allowed them to move past the stereotypes and deal directly with the issues of intolerance, violence, and double standards applied to one particular group of American citizens. Just…
Category: Damian’s Favorites
The Ick Factor, Part I
Hot on the heels of The Teachable Moment comes another collection of short stories by educators, One Size Does Not Fit All: Diversity in the Classroom. My offering for this collection draws upon my experience co-teaching a high school (junior & senior-level) course called Multicultural Studies, in which we examined…
Alleviating Shakes-fear, Part II
When my young charges entered the room that day, they saw five red balloons stuck to the whiteboard with tape. Each balloon had taped to it an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper with one of the following phrases printed on it in 100-point font: Shakespeare wrote intellectual “high…
Alleviating Shakes-fear, Part I
I’m proud to announce that this month, my first short story was published by Kaplan Publishing in an anthology entitled The Teachable Moment: Seizing the Instants When Children Learn. The book was compiled and edited by fellow school psychologist/blogger Dr. Rebecca Branstetter, and is available at finer online and offline…
Text Messaging and Executive Functioning
Background PingMe is a service that allows users to schedule reminders to be sent via SMS, email, and Twitter. I’ve been a loyal user for over two years now (according to my archive, the first reminder I sent myself was to prep then-newborn Kiera’s bottle at a certain time) primarily…