A few weeks ago, Grace came to me worried about how tests were making her anxious. She was doing all right on tests at the start of the year, but then she had a bad one, and then at the next one she got really anxious before the test started and while it was happening, […]
teacher LTF
Setting a Summer Reading Project
In my last post, I suggested that there’s a time to take on no new reading at all, instead setting one’s course for the full exploration of a single book. I did this five years ago or so with Mike Schmoker’s Focus, and much of the subsequent blogging and teaching I’ve done (including the development of […]
No More (New) Reading
“I can’t imagine a man enjoying a book and reading it only once.” — C. S. Lewis It’s getting on summer time, and if you’re at all like me, then you’ve got an unreasonably high stack of books that you want to tear into between now and when school starts back up. Before you get […]
Optimal Pressure
The Yerkes-Dodson Law holds that the relationship between pressure (or stress) and performance is shaped like a bell curve. Place no pressure on a person at all, and their performance will likely be negligible; place the entire universe on their shoulders, and their performance will be similarly bad. Unfortunately, I know very few teachers who don’t operate on […]
How to Acquire a Distant or Super Famous Mentor
The most powerful kinds of mentorships are the ones where the mentee learns how the mentor thinks, essentially internalizing the mentor’s mind. In such arrangements, the mentor gives concerted effort and inquiry, and the mentee gains mental models. These models, be they for teaching, problem-solving, student motivation, literacy, or otherwise, are precious because they would likely not […]