Recently I held the first pop-up debate of the school year in my on-level world history courses. (For my most thorough treatment of pop-up debates, see Ch 4 of These 6 Things.) The lesson began with the following prompt: They had five minutes to write a response, and then I asked them to share something […]
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The Snowball
Two of the four groups I teach each day are ninth grade AP World History students. These kids opt-in to the open enrollment class of their own volition, and their most-cited reason for taking on such a daunting challenge — an Advanced Placement course during their ninth grade year — is because they want to […]
What If Our Students Are Bored Because We’ve Taught Them So Little?
The other day I gave my students a scenario to write about as their 100-word warm-up: Ninth graders around the United States are having a hard time caring about school. To some, it’s so boring or pointless that they consider dropping out — even in ninth grade. Imagine you are writing an article to these […]
Reading Comprehension Is Primarily a Function of Knowledge. It’s Not a Skill!
What would happen if we were to select a literate person from each of the past thirty centuries and ask that person to tell us which of the following reading comprehension skills is most important? What would they tell us? Identifying the main idea Making an inference Sequencing Drawing conclusions Relating background knowledge All but […]
What Do You Do When Your Head Blows Up?
If there’s an emoji to describe my writer’s mind during the last 4-5 months, it would be the one with the nuclear explosion coming out of the top of the head: 
You see, before this past summer started, I scheduled fewer speaking engagements than normal so that I could bury myself in research. When […]