There are so many ways to start a school year: list rules and procedures and consequences, talk about yourself, give them a worksheet, give a diagnostic test… I guess how you start a school year depends on your model of teaching. The new model of teaching I see being promoted these days it this: List Read More >>
I have a lot of posters and a few bumper stickers hanging in my classroom. One of the bumper stickers simply says, “Speak up, even if your voice shakes.” I do speak up, and while you can’t tell because I draw and type my ideas, my figurative voice often shakes – a lot. And yet, Read More >>
Here is how writing is typically taught in schools these days. Students are given three essays to read about a dull topic – say, fence posts for instance – and then asked to write a synthesis essay, either expository or argumentative, about fence posts. These essays are designed to get them ready for the writing Read More >>
I am a fan of the great Broadway composter/lyricist Stephen Sondheim. My high school English teacher Mr. Jacobs introduced me to his plays during my senior year, and Sondheim’s lyrics became the subject of my college senior thesis in English. I was a high school senior in 1984/85, when Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize winning musical Sunday Read More >>
Teacher and theologian David Dark (what a cool name – so much better than Finkle!) wrote a book I enjoyed titled The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. Since that title is taken, and since I teach in a secular setting, I’ve titled this post “The Necessity of Questioning Everything.” It doesn’t mean I think questioning is Read More >>
I posted at length about each part of Mr. Fitz’s new mantra, “Teach Happy, Teach Right, Speak Up” on recent posts, but perhaps “at length” made the ideas I presented less rather than more accessable. I’ve always liked brief, meaningful pieces like Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and Kent M. Keith’s “Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments,” so in Read More >>
In my last post, I lamented the fact that our entire school system in the U.S. has been built around a model of assigning and assessing, of measurement. Everything we do in schools becomes about hoop jumping. The Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus closed last night, though, so perhaps hoop jumping is too dated Read More >>
It is with a heavy heart, and a sense of relief, that I have decided to end the newspaper run of Mr. Fitz and stop producing new Mr. Fitz comics at the end of its 22nd year, on March 27th, 2022. There are plenty of new strips to come before then, and I have a Read More >>
I am sure I am not the only teacher to have some of these insights, but after a few weeks away from the 2020-2021 school year, I feel a need to write them down, if only for myself. I spent this school year kind of exhausted. I was teaching with a mask on all day, Read More >>
The actor Charles Grodin passed way recently, and while others remembered his major movie roles, I instead thought immediately of a role he played in a theme park attraction at EPCOT called Cranium Command. Cranium Command is no longer open – it was part of the now defunct and re-purposed Wonders of Life pavilion – Read More >>