I want to camp out on the idea of home life today. Too often, I think we tend to write kids off who meet the following two conditions: They’ve got a tough home life. They are not motivated to learn. When I say “write them off,” I mean one of these: We stop trying to […]
Archives for January 2018
Five Key Beliefs: The Source of Abbe’s Superpowers
Abbe personifies a lot of the habits and traits I want my students to cultivate: working hard each day, maintaining a great attitude, treating others with kindness, keeping track of her work and completing it with care, asking questions when she has them, appreciating a challenge, and on and on. If my classes were filled […]
Semester Two and New for the Sake of New
One of the folks who reviewed an early version of the book I just finished writing had this critique: There aren’t enough new things in this book. Teachers want new — where’s the new? The answer, of course, is that there’s not a ton of new in my book, just like there’s not much new on […]
Doing It All vs. Doing One Thing Well
Note from Dave: This article is by my friend and our colleague, Lindsay Veitch. I find Lindsay’s New Year’s Revelation to be especially poignant to my own season of life right now, and I hope it’s timely for you as well. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were sitting around a spread of appetizers: […]
The “Disappointing” Key to Impactful Teaching
On the first day of my teaching career, I gave my students a rehearsed, hooyah speech. I’m pretty sure it involved standing on a desk, and I know I was decked out in the only suit I owned. I can still picture that classroom in Baltimore, filled with terrified sixth graders. You could almost see […]