Posts Tagged ‘teaching’
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.
Read MoreNo 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 is a dominant an essential force. “While exceptions exist, research shows again and again that when people are staring at a screen, or skip-jumping through a…
Read MoreThe 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 stole that one from me. But he’s right. I’m often asked to expound upon this line from the book, which is one of the most…
Read MoreHow 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” instead of rules, because norms is quite the buzzword these days. One of these words that filters into education for a while, only to be…
Read MoreMy 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 House work again than electing every woman on the ballot,” Clinton told the Democratic Women’s Leadership Forum. “There are ten women running for the Senate,…
Read MoreI 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 tragically absent from teaching today. Of all the strategies that teachers could do to be more effective, making the school day more fun for their…
Read MoreThe 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 of the year, the discussions about their fabled syllabi begin to appear, both in real life and on social media. Their comments can usually be…
Read MoreIf 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 has dug ditches in Nicaragua, survived an encounter with a grizzly bear, panhandled across Europe, or spent ten years working in the private sector over…
Read MoreThe 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. These tests were designed to prevent African Americans from voting in local elections. They were purposely difficult and confusing, and many times, the questions were…
Read MoreWhy 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 levels is taught primarily by teachers who are not writers and do not engage in writing on a regular basis. Most teachers are readers. We…
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