In “The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs,” I shared an “experiment” I whipped up last year to help my students set and stay committed to their goals. If you read that article, you’ll know that I have to put “experiment” in quotation marks because it was missing a few important pieces of experimentation (like, you know, […]
Archives for August 2015
Simple Interventions: Preventing Symptoms of Depression by Teaching Kids that People Can Change
I want to share with you the most exciting thing I read all summer: it’s a study by David Yeager and Adriana Miu. In less than 1,000 words, I’ll lay it out briefly and then explain why I think it basically proves that our most idealistic conceptions of teaching — that it is magical, that […]
The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs
I’ve written elsewhere that, of the 3,500 people who have answered the subscriber survey I put out a year or so ago, a strong majority are educators wearied from years of high-stakes accountability and the over-sciencing of teaching. But with that latter descriptor — the “over-sciencing” of teaching — I want to be clearer because, as […]
Mechanics Instruction that Sticks: Using Simple Warm-Ups to Improve Student Writing
English teachers are, in my humble opinion, the hardest working people in public education. We have the unenviable task of trying to convince a generation of kids raised on electronic devices and nursed by spell check to slow down and write with purpose and precision. We see ourselves as the last line of defense against the continual erosion of the language, and we try to teach our kids to avoid all of the dreaded errors – the run-on, the forgotten apostrophe, the misplaced modifier – that threaten to reduce our language into an incomprehensible stew of unpunctuated gibberish filled with text-friendly abbreviations and inscrutable emojis. We admire our content-teaching colleagues, but we secretly envy their ability to simply ignore the numerous errors that litter essay responses as they grade for ideas and content knowledge.
“Marly Attacks” and The Power of Expectations
Our third daughter, Marlena Grace, is a miniature tank with the face of an angel. Of our three girls, she’s been by far the quickest to upgrade her mobility skills, learning to crawl by six months and walk by nine months. (We aren’t the Parents Who Want Our Kids to Be First, either — Marly just […]
