Factorials, anaphora, metonymy, stoichiometry, wave oscillation, geometric proofs: there are so many things I kind of remember learning in high school, but to be honest, a lot of them simply don’t apply to my everyday life. Someday, maybe not in …
Music always has either directly or indirectly reflected the times of the songwriters who have made it. In this way, music has acted as a secondary and even a primary source for historical events and select periods of history. Sometimes …
What is ‘storytelling’? Telling stories, of course. In 2016, there are so many diverse, wonderful and sometimes overwhelming ways to do this. What I want to explore is traditional, oral storytelling, which has been a part of human life since …
English teachers often worry the novels they’re scheduled to teach will fly over the heads of their students. In some schools, these teachers might have entire classes of students whose reading levels are significantly below grade level. Naturally, this deepens …
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 …
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 …