Dear colleague, Today was one of those days: full schedule yesterday, full evening last night, busy morning this morning. As I was driving to school, a wave of anxiety and guilt washed over me: My first hour lesson wasn’t in place! And class was set to start in under thirty minutes. Noooooooot good. Thankfully, I […]
Archives for November 2024
The Value Puzzle
Dear colleague, I don’t think it’s melodramatic to state the following: The vast majority of students today have a deeply impoverished view of the value of an education. It’s way more popular today to decry the pointlessness of learning school subjects than it is to Value them. And on top of this, a pre-COVID national […]
The Stockdale Paradox
Dear colleague, Someone asked me at a PD recently, “What’s the most important teacher book you ever read?” At the time they asked me, there just happened to be a copy of Jim Collins’ Good to Great sitting on a table nearby. I picked up the volume and I said, “Let’s go with this one.” […]
A Thousand Is More Than Four: The Quiet Power of Teaching
Dear colleague, I run this blog like I run my classroom: I assume nothing about your political leanings and keep private my own. Education, I’ve long said, is all about promoting the long-term flourishing of young people by teaching them to master things that, apart from school, they’d be unlikely to master. This is a […]