simplify

Every week, I take Sundays off from school work. More and more frequently, I’m taking Saturdays off, too.  It hasn’t always been this way, and once in a while it stops being that way (like during the weeks leading up to the manuscript submission deadline for These 6 Things, or during the final weeks before AP […]

There’s a pretty straightforward skill that master teachers — and maybe I shouldn’t call them that, maybe instead I should say “good and sane” teachers — tend to have that I’ve not treated yet — the way that they work. It’s both hard and smart. They’re constantly pushing at the edges of their expertise but also […]

“That’s the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They’re type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.” — Paul Graham, computer scientist and essayist, on his blog There are always infinity things that you could be working on as a teacher, so procrastination […]

Often times, the thing that keeps me from doing the deep, non-instructional work of teaching — the planning, thinking, giving feedback, researching, problem-solving — isn’t students dropping by (which we discussed last time). Instead, it’s me. In particular, it’s my bad habits — my time-wasters on autopilot. When my bad habits kick in — news reading, […]

To produce the clarity of thought necessary for deep and impactful teaching, the teacher has to do something that her environment constantly resists: she must avail herself of distraction-free blocks of time each day in which to do her most important work. I’ll use my setting as an example of what I mean by an […]