Concentration: I barely know what this word means anymore. Some days, I really feel like you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more distracted than me. Case in point: not too long ago, I couldn’t find my phone. I looked and …
The presidential election will dominate the news in 2016. This makes the entire year a teaching opportunity. Teachers, tutors, and parents who provide social studies instruction will have heaps of current subject matter to use when creating and implementing lessons …
One of the latest educational buzzwords floating about is ‘grit’. Angela Lee Duckworth made this term popular among educators in her widespread TED talk. In her talk, she defines grit in the following way, Grit is the passion and perseverance …
The numbers are staggering: in a survey of 15,000 students, one of every three reported that they had experienced occasional or frequent bullying (Nansel & others, 2001). But what constitutes bullying in 2016 and why does it happen? By definition, …
As students with disabilities approach graduation from high school, IEP teams might wish to consider scaling back the accommodations in the IEP. This might seem like a way to undermine student success, making parents reluctant to agree to the idea. …
What is STEM? The letters stand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and it is an acronym used to represent all of these fields interrelated together. There is an increasing number of jobs that incorporate all of these skills and …
My sophomore year, our English teacher, Mr. Tabor, assigned John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. This intimidating, 600-page tome wound up being a game-changer in my life as a reader. All the other English classes that year were reading The Grapes …
Graffiti appeals to youth culture, making a unit on graffiti an easy sell to students. Such a unit could be appropriate for a middle school or high school art class. A briefer version—or aspects of it—could fit in a social …
A perennial struggle for English teachers is helping students connect with literature. This can be most challenging with some of the archaic works of the traditional canon. The themes might be universal, but the dated language and sheer density of …
New year, new you right? We say this every January. We’re all going to lose weight, break our bad habits, go the gym, buy less junk online, etc, etc. If you’re human, you know that keeping a New Year’s resolution …