Dear colleague, Years ago, I travelled to Germany with a group of teachers to study the school system there, and one of my traveling companions was an economics teacher named Martha Sevetson Rush. Martha was one of those second-career teachers that exudes a passion for the work. After college, she had been a journalist, but […]
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Expertise: The Best Professional Investment You Can Make
Dear colleague, The most resilient thing you can build for yourself as a professional educator isn’t a beautiful classroom (those can get reassigned) or an iron-clad curriculum (we’ve seen how quickly the winds of policy can reduce these to rubble) or a foolproof methodology (looking at you, AI). Nope. The most resilient thing is expertise. […]
What If What You Were Doing Was Silly and Fun?
Dear colleague, I read this line from comedian Jack Druce once that sat with me for a bit for both its humor and wisdom. Trivialize what you do. I learned this with comedy but I think it applies to everything. If you are betting your self-worth on everything you do, it’s easy to crumple under […]
Icky Bickies
Dear colleague, I’ve been wanting to write about the term icky bickies for almost 10 years now, so I guess you could say that writing about icky bickies has become an icky bicky for me. Let me back up. It was early 2018, and I had just finished writing These 6 Things. I was knee […]
The Engaged vs. Disengaged Teacher Modes
Dear colleague, I think there are two ways to live the teacher’s life and that we need a bit of both of them. We Need Both Modes The trouble with my descriptions above is that they’re positioned like categories or identities. You’re either one or the other. You can’t be both. Realistically, though, most of […]