Teaching is a strange business! It’s a little like gardening in that you plant seeds and hope that they grow and that you will recognize the plant that appears. It’s fair to say that learning will always happen, but that we teachers have little or no control over what is learned.

In this wild and scary world there are numerous challenges facing teachers. There are so many aspects to being an effective teacher that begin with mastering content and developing a strategy for how to teach it, meeting ever-increasing state mandates, dealing with the mass of paperwork and finally, meeting the learner in the classroom. There is the curriculum, mandated and explicable, but then there is the hidden curriculum reinforcing inequities and socio-economic differences and based on some abstract idea that there is a regular learner.