Teaching in Hard Times

Well, it's not the first post about being a teacher in hard economic times, but I can say, as several of my friends find themselves either
A) Out of work
or
B) worried daily about the potential of soon being out of work.

It's yet again good to be a teacher! I actually had noteworthy conversation with one of my friends, a guy who recently lost his very lucrative wall street job, and he asked me what we teachers are going to do to help out--are we going to take a reduced pay or what? And I couldn't help but chidingly respond to him: "Are you going to give back all of your bonuses from the last decade?" Well, I could tell from his grin that he got my point!

If you need a teaching job, go her for teacher placement services. I've used both NAIS and Carney Sandoe(for private school job hunts) and can recommend both.

The TI 89 Graphing Calculators: They can do anything!

I have taught Math for many years and have generally used the TI 84, TI-83 Graphing Calculators--pretty cool calculators that can do neat things like add imaginary numbers and output the results in reduced form etc.. But the TI-89 is like getting used to a whole new machine. When you first encounter it, you might not even know how to use it as the main screen's menu and interface is completely different. However, if you work your way through learning it, the 89 can really do some powerful things including algebra! This of course raises the issue of whether or not it is appropriate to use such powerful machines to take a test; many tests, in fact, do not allow the 89's to be used. So before you go out to buy a graphing calculator like the 89, you should first make sure that it a) can be used on any standardized tests that you take and b) isn't too fancy for your own tastes.