Yesterday I was able to attend the PFT rally held at the Philadelphia School District office building on North Broad Street and I will attach some photos to this blog entry. It was encouraging to find that the crowd was full of parents, teachers, students, union members, and concerned citizens and numbered about 3,000 in […]
Author Archives: tremphilpa@gmail.com
The Inquirer reported that the city simply cleared the books on almost a billion dollars of debt from one time fugitives mostly because it was uncollectible. Such sad irony that this news came just a few days after Mayor Nutter said it was necessary to cancel the teachers’ union contract in order to fund the […]
I have learned from many people that we are the stories that we tell and the stories that are told about us. This was made real again for me when I recently visited my sister and her family and we spent hours going through some old boxes of family photos and documents. When […]
This was the question put on my observation form after a lesson in my English class – an eighth grade English class in a large middle/high school in Philadelphia. I will write more about the question and my response at the end of this narrative. Since school is about to begin in […]
The financial state of the School District of Philadelphia has for a long time gone beyond criminal. Recently the state government has passed (sort of passed, since the tobacco lobby influenced the proceedings) a cigarette tax that would apply only to the city of Philadelphia. Have we really reached the point where the […]
After I was discharged from the military (honorably even though I had been AWOL for a short time, but that is another story to be told at a later date) I worked for a couple of years in a fabric and dye plant. I wrote about that experience in my entry titled ‘Remembering […]
Socratic Seminar is a teaching strategy that I used in my middle and high school literature and history classes. Seminar of course, is not my original idea, and through my teaching years I ‘borrowed’ from great teachers and then tried to make a strategy my own – based on the text(s) we were […]
I suppose it is the Grinch in me that rises up on holiday and celebration days, wishing that the day would pass quickly and I could get on with the rest of the year, but this year today seems right for a bit of reflection. When I was younger my father and […]
My parents started, or at least I think it started with them, a practice of visiting cemeteries on Memorial Day and placing flowers on the graves of ancestors. I recall that my mother always was particular about the floral arrangements that would be used and she spent a lot of time thinking and […]
I was born in a small town in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania where Memorial Day meant that as a small child I would observe the annual Memorial Day Parade honoring veterans. The parade would include fire trucks from local volunteer fire companies, children from girl and boy scout troops, decorated bicycles, American Legion […]
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