February 12, 2016

Last week in MBUSD, over 500 people from around Los Angeles came to MBMS to participate in an all-day workshop featuring Dr. Jo Boaler, a world renowned professor of mathematics at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. We cohosted the conference with UCLA. All MBUSD secondary math teachers attended, and many of our elementary teachers […]

June 15, 2015

2014-15: The Year of the Maker in MBUSD Students are the core of all of our efforts in the Manhattan Beach Unified School District. The 2014-15 school year has been a year of significant accomplishments for MBUSD students and staff, yet we remain steadfast in our determination to engage in continuous improvement. To provide MBUSD […]

May 30, 2015

We are a reading family.  It’s been that way since the words of Goodnight Moon and The Big Red Barn echoed through the house as our children were young.  One of my favorite memories of reading is in 2007, when the last Harry Potter book came out.  My son Ryan could not wait.  He was, after […]

May 29, 2015

For the first time ever, we implemented a weighting policy in our high school. Advanced Placement classes will receive an extra grade point when we compute a student’s GPA. Students and parents may think it will provide an advantage in college admissions, but it won’t. We already do quite well in that area, and no […]

April 26, 2015

One of the major focuses for improving instruction comes in Common Core math. Our district is in the midst of adopting new teaching methodologies for our math teachers aligned to meet the demands of the Eight Standards for Mathematical Practices and the new standards in each grade. In spite of the politics that sometimes exists […]

April 15, 2015

I went with my son Ryan today to his Constitutional Law class in UOP’s McGeorge School of Law taught by Distinguished Professor Brian Landsberg.  The class was one hour and twenty minutes long and was fascinating on a number of levels. First and foremost, the dominant style of instruction is Socratic.  This is the second class I have experienced […]

February 21, 2015

My dad took up bicycling in the 1970s.  Biking with 10-speed bikes.  No one biked with 10-speed bikes back then!  I was a swimmer, so ever since I was ten years old, I was always in good enough shape to go for a thirty-mile bike ride.  So my Dad would take me.   We’d go on Saturday […]