If you, like me, hope to put an entire career’s worth of effort, care, improvement, and service into teaching — in other words, if you want to invest the bulk of your adult life, day by day, into this work — then there’s a job you’ve got to quit, right now. If you don’t stop […]
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Humble-Boldness: A Common Trait of the Greatest Teachers
To be good at teaching, you need to do a few things well, getting better at them as your career progresses. And then you need to do all the rest of the things just well enough. (The “well enough” things get satisficed — one of the most useful terms I’ve come across in my research.) To be great at teaching, you need to keep on doing […]
The “Disappointing” Key to Impactful Teaching
On the first day of my teaching career, I gave my students a rehearsed, hooyah speech. I’m pretty sure it involved standing on a desk, and I know I was decked out in the only suit I owned. I can still picture that classroom in Baltimore, filled with terrified sixth graders. You could almost see […]
The Case Against Complaining
Some time ago, I met a pair of teachers who happened to be married. Each of them had been teaching for several decades, and both seemed thoroughly unhappy. Every time that either of them contributed to the conversation that we were sharing, they complained, making known another thing they found unsatisfactory or unacceptable. I’m not talking about […]
Perfectionism Behind, Improvementism Ahead
In the New Year, new semester, new school year, the impulse to believe that things can be perfect is real but invisible. Of course I don’t think I can be perfect, the savvy person says. That would be naive. But our reaction to the inevitable setbacks — the abandoned resolutions, the failed lessons, the kids we can’t […]
