I’m going to stop blogging* for the rest of 2017. Let me explain. For the past two years, I’ve published articles regularly on this blog. There was one month where I published three posts per week (August, 2015), one month where I didn’t publish at all (December, 2015), and one month where I published once per […]
Archives for August 2017
When Current Events Remain the Job of Single Departments, Kids Won’t Graduate Understanding the World Well
If current events are only being studied and discussed in one class during the school day — say, in your school’s English classes, where you’re having kids read and respond to an Article of the Week a la Kelly Gallagher; or it’s in your high school’s Current Events elective — then kids won’t graduate as smart about […]
Writing (and Learning) for Democracy
Some time ago, a professor in California named Dr. Sue Baker wrote me after my post on the economic advantages of writing well. She asked, “Would it be possible to do a plug for writing instruction and how it supports our democracy? I understand that writing skills are key for employment, and that employment and being […]
The Skull and Crossbones List
If we’re going to improve the quality of writing our students are capable of — an absolutely critical endeavor — then we first need to ensure that our kids have a large amount of writing that they do. Quantity precedes quality. In improving the amount of writing students do across the school day, we need […]
Cheap Prizes: We Didn’t Get into This for Those
I recently met a teacher who had just finished his first year on the job somewhere in the northeast USA. He had just sat through my session on “Jedi Mind Tricks for Avoiding Burnout,” and he came up to me and said, “I get it, but I still don’t feel any better.” We kept talking, […]