If we don’t hold their feet to the fire Keep up the pressure Ratchet up the stress They’ll do nothing. If we don’t hold threats over their heads Like swords of Damocles Or pendulum blades Or Looney Tunes anvils, They’ll be lazy And nothing will get done. If we don’t hold out carrots And threaten Read More >>
My curriculum map ended the year with a survival unit, and took it very literally: essays and texts about urgent, life and death situations. Good stuff, actually. But I wanted to make the survival unit part of my year-long unit on the purpose of education (which I’ll be writing more about later). Students often complain Read More >>
We think about the mind With our minds. It’s very meta. Our metaphors of the mind Morph across time. Is the mind a container? An aviary? A garden? A clockwork? A machine? We think metaphorically Because that is what minds do. Perhaps the best metaphor Is Mind as metaphor generator. Yet any single metaphor conceals Read More >>
I recently joined a group on Facebook called the Badass Teachers Association. I joined it because I, like the other 20,000-plus people who joined in the group’s first couple of weeks, am fed up with teachers being blamed for everything that is wrong with society. I started a thread there, about changing the narrative of Read More >>
We are social distancing to avoid the spread of something bad. But I also feel that we are intellectual distancing, and doing so is preventing the spread of something good, or rather, of a multitude of good things. I’m not talking just about the “distance learning” that teachers around our country have been asked to Read More >>
I left for Spring Break, as many of us did, expecting to be back in a week. Obviously a week became two, and then two weeks became a month and a half, and that is likely to become the remainder of the year for us here in Florida as it has for much of the Read More >>
After my recent announcement about moving from six strips a week to just three, I received a message here at this blog from someone who loved the strip. Interestingly, the series he brought up as his favorite was a series from three years ago that wasn’t even set in the classroom or at school. It Read More >>
Many years ago I worked at a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Skye Farm. I was a counselor, and one of the group-building activities we did there was called Quicksand River. It involved a group, in this case my cabin group, trying to cross a fictitious river of “quicksand lava” as I recall. Read More >>
As my students will attest, I am a Star Wars fanatic. I have been since I was 10 years old in 1977 and saw the original movie from the front row. As I began to think about the politics within the Star Wars universe, the role the Jedi Knights played in the Old Republic, and the role Read More >>
There is an epidemic of teacher depression, demoralization, and stress in this country, and for a while I was part of it. The series of comic strips I have assembled below, is, at least for me, the most important series I have ever done. Drawing it meant I was past the events that inspired it. Read More >>