Satisficing isn’t my word. It’s Nobel winner Herbert Simon’s. It means, “Doing something at the good-enough level, not the optimal level.” Few skills are as critical to the well-lived teacher’s life. Here’s why. On paper, teaching is an impossible job. So is administration. Doing education by the book in the twenty-first century is hopelessly Byzantine. […]
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Finish Like We’d Like to Start: The Return of These 6 Things
Author’s Note: May the 4th be with you. How’d I do on the title? It was between that and These 6 Things Strikes Back. (These 6 Things: A New Hope seemed a little much.) I was talking with my friend Dr. T a couple weeks back, and he said this line that had immediate resonance: […]
The Workload-Pressure Paradox
Workload and pressure work together deviously to demoralize and demotivate even the best teachers. Here’s how it works. First, workload. The default circumstance of teaching in the twenty-first century is that as time goes on, the teacher’s workload increases. Each year there is more of all the things we’re tasked with doing: More email to […]
How to Humanize Your Classroom or School When You’re Teaching from a Distance: Principles and Practices
The thing I miss most about the way school was before COVID is the human-ness of it all. Even though I’m pretty introverted, I miss the sounds of voices in the hallways, the smiles and waves and hellos and laughs and handshakes (remember those?). I miss the moments of electricity when you connect a young […]
The Precious S’s, Part 1: Satisficing
If you and I are going to stay sane this year — sane as in healthy, of sound mind, common sensical, practical — then we’ll need to practice what I’ve come to call the precious s’s: satisficing and skipping. Satisficing is what we do when we accept an available option as satisfactory rather than working […]