One of my fictional characters has found his way into math class
A tweet from a student: I wrote Budo in my math project. <3 As an author, a teacher, and a lover of the subversive, this made my day.
No technology is a great way to teach. Also, PowerPoint is more than two decades old. It doesn’t count as technology anymore.
Rebecca Shuman of Slate writes about the benefits of a low technology classroom, despite complaints by some students that they are not being prepared for a world in which technology…
The difference between playing school and teaching school
Budo, from Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, is credited as saying that there are two types of teachers: Teachers who play school and teachers who teach school. In truth, he…
How I establish the rules of my classroom
A teacher recently asked me if my students and I collaborate on the rules of my classroom at the beginning of the year. Actually, the teacher used the word “norms”…
My annual plea to the girls in my fifth grade class: Maintain your advantage over the boys. Rule the world.
On Friday, Hillary Clinton pledged to work to get all the female Democratic candidates on the ballot elected in November. “I can’t think of a better way to make the…
I have a simple, inexpensive, highly effective means of improving learning for all students: Make things fun.
The makers of the dancing traffic light get it. It works because it is fun, and fun always increases attention, engagement, effort, and performance. Fun. It’s a word that is…
The tyranny of the syllabus
I know a handful of college professors personally. I know a handful more via Facebook and Twitter. I have known many, many more throughout the years. Right around this time…
If I was able to choose my children’s teachers, this is what I would want more than anything else.
If I were allowed to choose the teachers for my children, I would almost always choose the teachers with the greatest variation of life experience. Give me a teacher who…
The Louisiana Literacy Test of 1963 is astonishing. Impossibly difficult and truly evil. I think I’ll give it to my students.
The website of the Civil Rights Movement Veterans, which collects materials related to civil rights, posts samples of actual literacy tests used in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.…
Why does writing instruction so often suck?
Slate’s Matthew J.X. Malady offers any number of reasonable answers to this question, but I think the answer is far simpler: Writing instruction at the elementary, middle, and high school…
