We  haven't been linking enough to the people who are actually doing the work out there.  This post is a slight attempt to make amends mostly by writing briefly about how I relate to their posts:

• Mr AB remains the teacher blogger whose writing most reminds me of my own struggles in the classroom -- although I suspect he's a lot more effective than I was.  He gets at how you can make your mark, but the kids themselves dictate a lot of what's going to happen in the classroom, for good and for ill.

• Julie at School of Blog is having trouble with military recruiting at her school. Twenty years ago this was something that concerned me about the trade school I taught in. We were, after all, graduating airplane mechanics, so the recruiters were there.  I grew to have a lot of respect for some of them and for a number of the shop teachers -- including a diminutive former Navy chief -- who worked with them.  But I had a faith in our democracy on issues of war and peace that, hopefully just for the moment, I've lost. And I wonder if the recruiters are following the standards and norms now that they did then.

• Ms Cornelius, as always, has a lot of good stuff. I wouldn't call this situation good under any circumstance, but I appreciate the way Ms. C has channelled her anger at it into the written word. Are there states that keep those convicted of crimes from voting but let them bear arms? Just wondering.

• Ms Frizzle is thinking of applying for a job at a charter school.  It pays $125k, and does so by totally altering the staffing model.  I'm betting that over time the school will end up with a somewhat larger administrative profile than the one they predict now.  But this is a truly innovative charter proposal. Good for the people who came up with it.

• Polski 3 discusses cheating and wants to know how other teachers cope with it. Startling confession: I, in fact, copied other people's homework and - when I did it - lent others my own to copy in high school. So I had a lot more tolerance than P-3 does on this. When I taught I tried to get those who cheated out of laziness/misplaced priorities to see what I eventually saw about the value of applying yourself.