In a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (they were pretty nearly all great), Calvin asks his dad where the wind comes from. His dad replies, “It comes from the trees sneezing.” Calvin replies, “Really?” His dad responds, “No, but the truth is more complicated.” Flash forward to Calvin and Hobbes walking through a windy landscape, where Calvin Read More >>
If you have children, think about them, and what you wish for them. If you don’t have children, but are a teacher, think about your students. If you don’t have children or students, think about your nieces, nephews, grandchildren, younger siblings, or at least hypothetical children. Think about sending them to a classroom where they Read More >>
It’s teacher appreciation week. Some days the idea of a “teacher appreciation” seems like a sad, ironic joke. It is easy to forget you are appreciated when politicians and millionaires vilify you and your profession. It is easy to forget you are appreciated when your very best, most creative efforts to reach children are seen Read More >>
Is teaching online just as good as teaching in class? Is it better? Will the students want to come back to class next year, or will they just want to stay online? Is online teaching the same as classroom teaching – just in a different format? I’ll get back to these questions in a moment, Read More >>
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 >>