Intrepid Classroom

Hello and good morning loyal readers and members of the IntrepidClassroom. I hope those of you who are back in your real classrooms enjoyed a relaxing and rejuvenating break. For those of you still taking pleasure in the last days of August, enjoy it while you can, because it is time for all of us to go back to work.

I start work in a few days; my new job is working with K-5 ESL students. Working with younger kids is new for me, but I am very much looking forward to working with kids whose only worries are imaginary monsters in the corner of their rooms, as they sleep, not real corporate monsters who are destroying their planets.

I am sharing my new status with you in hopes that you will understand how important IntrepidClassroom will be for me this year; I need some form of activism in my life, and I hope IntrepidClassroom will fill that role. By sharing my standing I hope this online classroom experiment will be important to you as well. Despite what you do in your “real” schools this year, I hope you will make time to touch base and stay involved with the work we are doing here.

We still have a substantial amount of unfinished business from last year, but I am starting to realize that without the threat or rewards of grades and credit, I will always have a hard time motivating you to “get things done.”  I hope that you will prove me wrong this year. All I can do is throw project ideas at you and hope that some of them are completed. I will do my part in making this site a resource for important books, music, and films. So the least you can do is read the blog, but I hope you will take ownership of the work we do here and make this site a productive agent of change.

Please read the first two posts of the year: Introducing Michael Franti and Daraja Academy, and let’s get started on our first full year in the Intrepid Classroom!