Whether teaching or tutoring, a harsh truth awaits the instructor. At some point, a student is going to refuse to cooperate. That student might progress from being obstinate to being outright antagonistic. The instructor could have difficulty mustering the patience …
Writing is an art. But when reduced to rubrics, margins and word counts, it becomes a chore. Unless you’re Charles Dickens, who got paid by the word, you probably don’t look forward to writing a ten-page paper. To compound the …
Health instruction typically isn’t controversial. Discussions of sex education are the most common exception. More conventional units on fitness, safety, and overall wellness tend to pass without incident. Similarly, nutrition lessons rarely create any tumult. A unit that examines vegetarianism …
On my desk right now is a book titled Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland. I don’t plan to read it. In fact, I don’t even like wrestling. It’s on my desk waiting for …
Across much of America, spring means testing season. Students, parents, and even teachers tend to lament the season’s arrival. Standardized assessments remain controversial and polarizing. Most students will face them in one form or another in the latter half of …
It was Thoreau who said “simplify, simplify.” This sounds…well, simple but I think it’s actually one of the more difficult skills to master in life, mainly because life itself tends to not be all that simple. However, I believe the …
A well-known adage in education suggests every teacher is a reading teacher. By extension, every teacher also might be a writing teacher. Writing serves different purposes across content areas. In a math class, writing might be less about crafting eloquent …
Snowflakes, fingerprints, whatever cliché you want to reference, we know all students are unique. The question is how do we educators avoid rote, the belief that students can obtain knowledge through inflexible repetition and memorization? I worked with a student …
Then end of the school year is approaching very quickly. This is the time when many students start slowing down or falling behind in classes. Think of this as the final leg of a race – you want to end …
Student writing portfolios make sense as assessment tools in English language arts classes, but they have broader utility. Not only can teachers employ these across content areas as meaningful forms of assessment, they can help students build them to be …