Over the summer, my Advanced Placement World History students are assigned to learn a set of dates and what those dates mean. That assignment has evolved (and simplified) with each year I’ve given it, but it’s purpose is always the same: I want my students to have an initial, very rough draft of world history […]
Freedom through Restriction
Which is freer: to check your social media accounts any time you feel like it, or to do so at a single, designated time each day, and with a timer set to ten minutes or less? to give yourself an unlimited amount of time to read the professional development books on your shelf, or to […]
A Dangerous Assumption
When we assume a person understands us, has learned something, or has otherwise changed just because we told them something, taught them something, covered something in a meeting — that’s First Degree Assumicide. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students all fall prey to this dangerous assumption. Example 1: “Class, stop with the lower-cased first person pronoun! We’ve […]
Setting a Summer Reading Project
In my last post, I suggested that there’s a time to take on no new reading at all, instead setting one’s course for the full exploration of a single book. I did this five years ago or so with Mike Schmoker’s Focus, and much of the subsequent blogging and teaching I’ve done (including the development of […]
No More (New) Reading
“I can’t imagine a man enjoying a book and reading it only once.” — C. S. Lewis It’s getting on summer time, and if you’re at all like me, then you’ve got an unreasonably high stack of books that you want to tear into between now and when school starts back up. Before you get […]