Dear Students, “Do your work!” You hear it all the time. Work! Work! Work! No wonder so many students hate school. It must be confusing for you students. In case you hadn’t noticed, adults have a lot of different views about work. Work can be see as a rotten way to spend your time– something Read More >>
Dear Students, I want you to be interested, not bored. I often think you want the same thing. But sometimes I think you like being bored. You seem to revel in it. Sometimes it seems everything bores you, and that you think it’s cool to be bored. But I want you to be interested. I Read More >>
To My Students, As I said in my first letter, I want you to understand about rules: why they matter, when they should be resisted, and that ultimately it’s not about rules – or shouldn’t be. I hinted that there was more I wanted for you. Just as the nature of rules is paradoxical, the Read More >>
Dear Students, I am your teacher – for a time. We will spend a year, maybe three if I loop with you, together. You may remember my class fondly for many years. You may remember my class as a torture chamber you need to recover from once you escape. You may forget you were ever Read More >>
I drew this series back in 2010. Here is is, 2019, and sadly, nothing has changed. We are as obsessed with test scores as ever. I wish this series was no longer relevant, and that we could look back on it and laugh about how silly we all were to be so obsessed over silly, Read More >>
I wrote earlier this week about how a brochure for public education might read now that education deformers have had their way. Such a brochure would advertise things like Conformity, Data-Obsession, and Core-Class Focus (at the expense of the arts). It seems to me that most of the “improvements” hoisted on public education have actually Read More >>
Our son is in his in his senior year, and after his perfect SAT score, he’s been getting mail from colleges just about everywhere. It’s an interesting exercise in marketing and current culture to see how colleges and universities are trying to appeal to today’s prospective students. Some of the schools pander so much to Read More >>
At the end of the summer, the day before I went back for pre-planning for the new school year, I went with my teen-aged kids to see The Dark Knight Rises, the last movie in Christopher Nolan’s superhero trilogy. I really liked it, more than I expected, but one scene stood out for me, a scene Read More >>
I have often talked about how things are in education; I have not yet delved into where they appear to be going. And where they are going is the Common Core State [sic] Standards. The subject is so big, and so complex, that I’ve hardly known where to start. As newspapers and parents here in Florida Read More >>
And now for something a little different for this blog: some fiction. A colleague recently mentioned how Florida’s test, the FCAT, is transported from Texas to Florida in a fleet of armored trucks protected by armed guards. I said, “What do they expect, third graders with Uzis to try to steal the test enroute?” And then I Read More >>