Just a few more days to the end of the first school year of simply being a part-time teacher at Chrysalis. Been an interesting year. I aided Alysia with her 6th grade math class. For the first month, I worked…
Category: Chrysalis
Stories from my experiences with Chrysalis Charter School, the school my wife and I co-founded.
Cairns #84 – End of the Long Nights, 2016
pkrafel
Posted in Cairns of H.O.P.E., Chrysalis, Nature, Turning the Prow Upstream, Upward Spirals
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Moving a Boulder An old ranch road traverses the upper regions of this area’s watershed. Its ruts capture many small drainages coming down the slope and gather all of their runoff onto the road where the runoff flows quickly towards…
Cairns #82 – End of the Long Days, 2015
School has started so teaching is dominating my mind, including this issue of Cairns. Schooled I recently read “Schooled”, an article in The New Yorker by Dale Russakoff <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled>. It describes what happened when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s donated one hundred…
Cairns #81
Helping turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the vast headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. Cairns 81 Beginning of the Long Days, 2015 The…
Cairns #80 – Teachers as Leaders
Cairns #80 – End of the Long Nights – 2015 Alysia has become, officially, an ambassador for teacher-powered schools. She even gets to go to Washington next month, all expenses paid, to be on a panel at a conference. I…
Cairns #79 – A Watershed Metaphor
pkrafel
Posted in Cairns of H.O.P.E., Chrysalis, Learning/Teaching, Nature, Turning the Prow Upstream, Uncategorized, Upward Spirals
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Cairns #79 – Beginning of the Long Nights, 2014 but massively late as days begin growing longer in 2015. The drought this summer was extreme. The ground was baked hard. Many lower branches died and easily snapped with a…
Cairns #78 – The difference between “more wealth” and “more wealth than.”
pkrafel
Posted in Cairns of H.O.P.E., Chrysalis, Learning/Teaching, Turning the Prow Upstream
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Cairns #78 – End of the Long Days, 2014 Crunching branches The West, including our area, is in severe drought. I’m a little terrified at how many of the lower branches in the blue oaks that surround our homestead are…
The Point – Cairns #78
This year is my last, full-time year at Chrysalis. I will be retiring from administrative duties at the end of the year. I might remain teaching part-time but I view this year as an opportunity to draw on all of…
Why Teacher-led? – Cairns #78
I was working on showing how certain characteristics of Chrysalis emerge from our mission statement of encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter. A kind environment is obvious. Less obvious is teaching for understanding (as differentiated from covering…
The Self-Organizing Trip – Cairns #77
The Self-Organizing Trip I’ve been too busy with multiple Chrysalis transitions to be able to write all I intended for this one. So, instead, a fairly straight-forward Chrysalis story, except for another strand I get to interweave at the end.…
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