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 […]
Inner Work
Optimal Pressure
The Yerkes-Dodson Law holds that the relationship between pressure (or stress) and performance is shaped like a bell curve. Place no pressure on a person at all, and their performance will likely be negligible; place the entire universe on their shoulders, and their performance will be similarly bad. Unfortunately, I know very few teachers who don’t operate on […]
Less News, Better Brain
A few weeks ago, I realized that consuming the news was messing up my brain. I’d get done teaching my classes all morning, and then I’d sit down for lunch, and I’d pull up The Week or some other news site, and 60 minutes later I’d still be reading the latest stories and commentaries. It’s […]
The Most Dangerous Word to Your Sanity (and How to Stop Saying It)
“The most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary [is] ‘yes.’” –Cal Newport in Deep Work If our fixed-schedule commitments are going to yield their greatest fruit, then we have got to reduce the number of times that we say “yes” in response to requests for our time. I could delve into the things that I […]
Learning for Life
In the March 2016 issue of Educational Leadership, Editor in Chief Marge Sherer poses a provocative question: “What about [our students’] learning today will they consider ‘Learning for Life’?” I have two answers to this question. First, teaching toward my students one day considering the learning in my class “Learning for Life” is not my objective. […]