Dear colleague, Recently I came across this article in my archives from 2017 and found it very helpful, in that it both convicted and encouraged me. Gotta say — it’s uncomfortable for me to read at this point in my life, afflicted as I often am with concerns regarding rapidly advancing AI, the student motivation […]
Inner Work
Beware the Planning Fallacy
In 1994, 37 psychology students were asked to estimate how long it would take to write their theses. On the bright side (“If everything goes as well as it could”) they estimated an average of 27.4 days; on the dark side (“If everything goes as badly as it could”) they estimated an average of 48.6 […]
Successful v. Useful: Lessons on Teaching from Jim Collins and Peter Drucker
When management researcher Jim Collins was 36 years old, he was invited to spend a day at the home of Peter Drucker. Drucker is someone I’ve just started reading, as I’m in the research phase for a course on time management. The more I read on this topic, the more I find people reverently referencing Drucker’s work. The guiding question […]
The Shift
Last time, I shared a long and impossible list of things that teachers like us feel expected to do. Many of you wrote and shared your additions to the list (e.g., club sponsorships, lunch duty), making it even more accurate, and even longer, and even more oppressive. Suffice it to say, the default conditions of […]
The Pressure
Teaching can pretty quickly turn you into a basket case. Consider a list of responsibilities — of things that we “have to do” — that our colleague Lynsay Fabio, a secondary English teacher, came up with recently. (Note: A potential side effect of reading this list is shortness of breath.) Read the class novel myself, […]