“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 […]
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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, […]
To the Teacher Who is Struggling Right Now
Maybe it’s your first year. Or your fifth year, or your fifteenth. It could be that you’re trying out a new school, a new curriculum, or a new grade level. Maybe you had a choice — maybe you didn’t. Maybe there was a schedule change, and now you don’t have that last period prep anymore. […]
The Work, the Gap, the Mission
This blog is about the work, the gap, and the mission. The work is teaching. Whether you read as a coach or an admin or a superintendent or a teacher, what we want is for teaching to be as great as it can be. We believe there’s an inherent nobility to teaching, as well as […]
Warm Self-Critique: A Mark of Great Teachers
If we stick to teaching as long as we ought to, we’re going to make bad decisions — all kinds of them. The key to becoming a wiser teacher, then, is not to aim at making no mistakes, but to learn from the mistakes of this year so that next year we can make different […]