Wendell Berry once wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” I don’t go as far as Wendell Berry – I am typing this essay on a computer – but on the other hand, I think he has some valid points. Even Stephen King has a section in his book Read More >>
As the new year started, I attended a district professional learning and decided to draw a comic strip about it. The after-school workshop was ironic on so many levels, I HAD to write it. In fact I started writing this comic about the workshop while I was still sitting IN the workshop. Here is the Read More >>
Each January, I start the new year with my ninth graders with a weird activity. I know we will be working on expository writing, and I’m going to be encouraging them to write about an enthusiasm – something they love. But first, I want to build their confidence. I want to show them that they Read More >>
So… it’s almost 2024. Our politics have seldom been so fraught and, frankly, so dangerous. Our country has seldom been so polarized. Education is part of the polarization, with some of us trying to preserve public schools as a cornerstone of our democracy even as we try to save them from becoming testing and standardization Read More >>
The second quarter of the school year just ended, and my 9th graders and I spent it talking about definition. That may sound boring, but we start the quarter with two books excerpts. In the first excerpt, from Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, Pinker uses a debate about whether the 9/11 attacks at the Read More >>
Today my Creative Writing class held its kickoff for this year’s Children’s Books project. This project involves a neighboring elementary school. We survey 25 first grade students with a series of questions, things like: What makes you happy? What makes you sad? What do you wonder about? What is your favorite toy, movie, character, etc.? Read More >>
For Banned Books Week this year, I posted about several books that I have taught or read that have been frequently banned or challenged. Some of them I love. Some changed me as a person. If someone had banned them, I might not be the person I am today. And while I may not be Read More >>
In the 2011-2012 School year, Florida introduced one of the worst of its many bad ideas for education: VAM. VAM stands for Value Added Measure. It is a statistical formula that knows your students’ past scores, predicts what their future scores will be, and then rates students based on how much “growth” they showed. Here’s Read More >>
I recently finished reading James Carroll’s epic 2001 history book Constantine’s Sword: the Church and the Jews. The book traces anti-Semitism through church history, from the very early days of the church, through the Roman Emperor Constantine’s vision of a cross on the Milvian Bridge in Rome, all the way up to the Holocaust and Read More >>