Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. — Tim Kreider for The New York Times “You know, teaching is one of those jobs that you just […]
Inner Work
Unconscious Thought Theory: This is Why Teacher Intuition Matters
In a simple thought experiment (described in this post and in the second chapter of These 6 Things) I’ve asked several thousand teachers over the years what it is that makes a student likely to succeed. By asking participants to think quickly (“Who’s the first student that comes to mind…?”; “What’s the first descriptor that […]
We Become What We Do
The best way to become a certain kind of person is to do what those kinds of people do. This common sense dates back to at least Aristotle, who taught that the paths to both vice and virtue run through our actions. For teachers, this means that if we want to be sharper thinkers, then […]
The Quarry Worker’s Creed
“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The line above is the “Quarry Worker’s Creed,” as seen in Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 89). Newport explains that he first saw this line as an epigraph to The Pragmatic Programmer, a book that also has strong connections to […]
Feeling Burned Out? Read This
I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t go into education hoping that they’d make a difference — that, ultimately, their work would promote the long-term flourishing of young people. There’s no other way to begin talking about burnout than by starting with the ultimate aim of teaching: the long-term flourishing of our students. From there, we find our truest, […]