I am a huge fan of reading Daniel Pink‘s work as well as thinkers like Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman, and all of the others. I don’t dismiss their ideas, points, and theories, but I don’t use them for anything more than starting points for deeper thinking. What concerns me is that every time [...]

It drives me crazy when people say things to kids like “you know, in the real world…” as though it is some far-off place that requires the indoctrination of 13 years of boring, irrelevant schooling to enter. How about this? WE SHOULDN’T WANT THE CLASSROOM TO BE “THE REAL WORLD”! Why? Because: The “Real World” [...]

Last Thursday I left on a field experience for the Teaching American History Grant that my district participates in with four others. I knew I was taking at least one day off from blogging (Friday), and I figured I could deal with that. Come Friday night, I had amassed a piling of napkins and scraps [...]

This TED video was sent to me by Sarah Joy Albrecht (@mrsalbrecht) this morning, and I am simply memorized by the way in which 12-year old Adora Svitak clearly articulates her vision of how adults can learn from kids. I particularly like her emphasis on trust and the development of “childish thinking” versus the restrictive [...]

With opening day for baseball occurring last night/today, I couldn’t resist talking about this topic. I have never understood the ridiculous emphasis that players and coaches put on opening day for baseball. There are 162 games in the season, and rushing a player that may be a little “bruised up” from a Spring Training injury [...]

I don’t hate the status quo. I hate it when people don’t continually challenge the status quo. This should not be confused with “changing” or “overthrowing” the status quo. Changing the status quo for change sake is a terrible practice and will almost certainly lead to disastrous results. At the same time, we should be [...]

The first administrative interview I ever went on I knew after the first five minutes I wasn’t getting the job. The question revolved around something like this: As a current teacher of Advanced Placement United States History, what is your belief in who should be admitted in the class and how many sections should exist? [...]

This week, David Loitz asked me a really interesting question following a post discussing the value of student ownership. The question was this: What are the points of complex words or any words for that matter? I was really struck and found this to be an amazing question to ponder. I’m actually still thinking about [...]

Though I can’t stand the subject in general, human pyschology kind of interests me. Especially when it comes to how teachers act with a specific emphasis on what they say and how often they say it. For whatever reason, I find that teachers feel the louder they say something or the more often they say [...]

There are some things that really interest me when it comes to engagement, motivation, and finding ways to get students to realize that education is important. One of these is the idea of making student work more “personal”. I bring this up only because it seems to be that emphasizing a personal feel of work [...]