First of all, thank you. I am grateful for so much from January 2015, and I owe a heckuva lot to this Teaching the Core community. Specifically: You’ve commented on this past month’s blog posts like never before. Hearing your stories, your encouragement, your descriptions of what this blog does for you — I can honestly […]
A Simple, Powerful Tweak on the First Day of School Index Card Activity
If you’ve been around for a bit, you know I’m pretty old school in a lot of ways. When it comes to deciding which instructional strategies to use, my thinking goes like this: If multiple strategies do what I want them to do, then the simplest, quickest strategy is the best one. This is why I use index […]
On Work Schedules, Perfectionism, and Hidden Autonomy
This post will be short because Tuesday is almost over and homeboy be sleep deprived. A few things: 1. When work schedules meet recovery schedules Since the last post, Crystal’s path to recovery has become clearer and longer. It looks like she will be on bed rest for at least a few weeks, and this means that my […]
How Gratitude Makes Us, and Our Students, Better
Gratitude has been on my mind a lot this week. In some ways, gratitude has been easy; in other ways, it’s been hard. And all along the way, it’s been interesting to examine how the character strength of gratitude can make us and our students the kinds of people we want to be. I. Easy “I […]
There Are No Silver Bullets, but There Are Swords
I’m writing this on the afternoon of my first day back to teaching after a nice winter break. And merely one day back into the thick of it, my body is telling me that, indeed, teaching is work. This isn’t my first goat rodeo, though. As the week matures, I know I’ll re-acclimate to the pace, […]
