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education – Peter Sipe
http://petersipe.com/project-type/education
Bio & Contact. Newjack: Teaching in a Failing Middle School. Harvard Educational Review, Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2004. Last year, before I had even thought of becoming a teacher in New York, I read the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Through his insights into the harsh culture of prison, the grueling and demeaning working conditions of the officers, and the unexpected ways the job encroaches on his own family life, we begin to see how our burgeoning prison system brutalizes everyone connected with it.
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Newjack: Teaching in a Failing Middle School – Peter Sipe
http://petersipe.com/portfolio/newjack-teaching-in-a-failing-middle-school
Bio & Contact. Newjack: Teaching in a Failing Middle School. Harvard Educational Review, Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2004. Last year, before I had even thought of becoming a teacher in New York, I read the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Through his insights into the harsh culture of prison, the grueling and demeaning working conditions of the officers, and the unexpected ways the job encroaches on his own family life, we begin to see how our burgeoning prison system brutalizes everyone connected with it.
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How to Challenge Voracious Young Readers – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. How to Challenge Voracious Young Readers. Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s. November 12, 2014. Ambiguous is a reliably fun word to teach sixth graders. They quickly grasp its essence and utility. I introduce it by explaining how I was once given a keychain with the legend I Teach. I Make a Difference. I assure my students that I have never used this keychain, for, in keeping with my unyielding commitment to personal excellence, I would only ever boast of making a. Confessions of an Opium-Eater.
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op-ed – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. Obituaries Teach Life’s Lessons. February 28, 2015. I’ve always liked Fridays as much as the next guy, but this year I especially like them: every Friday, my students and I read an obituary together. If that sounds morbid, let me tell you what I tell the kids: an obituary is the story of a life; death is just the detail that gets it printed. How do I select the weekly life story we read? Susan Cain, author of the book. Characters. These good men and women were part of our communities, ...
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Incoming and Outgoing – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. Green Hills Literary Lantern, Vol. XIX, 2008. It was awful, she says. It went on for bloody ages, and it was terrible. Just terrible. She’s clamping her eyes shut in a kind of ocular grimace. Then she opens them and lets loose. First of course, there was the actual transfer of the bodies to individual graves. Good Lord. And it went on for bloody ever. And then the bourgemestre went on and on about how we. Did nothing to stop the killings, and how the killers were now in our. Tom leans into...
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The Less True Sport – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. The Less True Sport. February 5, 2009. It was a bad idea to be on the road after dark. In fact, it was a rule that all vehicles had to be parked in the driveway by six. I made it a point to always head back to base, as it was called, by five. It wasn’t out of respect for the rule that I did this; it was out of a healthy fear of being out after sundown. OK, land mines, he began. These were one of the region’s main dangers. Well. I should say, first! He then ran through the basic preventativ...
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Civil Affairs – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. Glimmer Train, Issue 93: Spring-Summer 2015. I arrived in Rwanda in June, a couple of weeks after graduation. As I stood in the airport’s baggage claim area there was no carousel, items were tossed into piles I was greeted by a white man in a camouflage uniform. He was about forty, average height and build, with a military haircut. You the intern? He asked. He identified himself as Larry, the embassy’s defense attaché. I was thoroughly flustered. I’d never seen Larry angry before, and ...
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The 40-Year-Old Paperboy – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. Transitioning to the Common Core, May 12, 2014. When I was in 6th grade, my parents, displeased with my less than Stakhanovite approach to labor, signed me up to deliver a weekly local, the Parkway Transcript. I never see paperboys anymore. As best I can tell newspapers are now delivered by adults in cars. But I’m a holdout, more than a quarter-century later. I pick up stacks of the free daily Metro. At the subway station and order my 6th grade students to pass them out (my interpersonal s...
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At Ed Schools, a Low Degree of Difficulty – Peter Sipe
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Bio & Contact. At Ed Schools, a Low Degree of Difficulty. June 20, 2014. Twelve years ago my wife and I went back to school. Not the same one, though: she went to medical school and I went to education school. I don’t think I’ll shock even the gentlest reader by asserting that the former was harder than the latter, but I would like to offer a glimpse of how differently rigorous they were. Here’s a reconstruction of a typical conversation from our school days:. Me: How was school, dear? This ed student’s ...
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