As a teacher of gifted students, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Most students demonstrate asynchronous development. Others are bright but underachieving. Still, other students are not truly gifted, but are bright “teacher pleasers,” with the sort of behaviors that make teachers lives easier. What I did not expect was to find three students in […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Teaching Skills for Survival in Dystopia
Skill #1: Radical Imagination Welcome to Dystopia Last week I presented an argument. We should teach kids to value diversity and to speak up against bias, hate, and bullying. I thought it was a pretty innocuous idea. But by leading my post with a list of factual statements and actions taken by President-elect Donald Trump […]
Who Will Care for the Teachers: A Podcast on Teacher Depression
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18% of the population. During this episode, Franchesca Warren breaks tradition and talks with not one but four fellow teachers who suffer from […]
Top Ten Reasons to Feel Gratitude as an Educator
I did not start out wanting to teach. In fact, I recall sitting in a classroom with kids that needed help because the teacher quite obviously put me with them for that reason and thinking, “Oh my God! I will never become a teacher.” I had no patience for the kids who seemed not to care […]
If A Rose Can Grow in Concrete, You Can Find A Flower in the Desert
(Shout out to Tupac for the quote) A few weeks ago, I found myself in yet another frustratingly familiar place. Sick. I hate being sick. Hate with a capital “H” for “Heck no I don’t have time to be at home in recovery. I have too much to do!” If you know me at all, […]
Teaching in the Era of Trump
Why We Need Anti-Bias, Culturally Relevant Teaching Now More Than Ever On Tuesday, November 8th America elected Donald J. Trump, a man who pushed the racist theory that President Obama was born in Kenya, called Mexican immigrants “rapists and drug dealers”, falsely insisted that Muslim citizens were complicit in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, made countless sexist […]
The Whole Teacher Movement… We Need It Now…
It’s November and right now every teacher I know is in a “funk” where we know Thanksgiving is upon us and very shortly after Winter Break will be peeking its head around the corner. These past four months have been difficult, to say the least. We’ve dealt with: we’ve dealt with the effects of a […]
What You Need to Know About Brain-Based Learning
The human brain weighs about 3 pounds, and, according to Jensen (2005), is adaptable in nature, has good integration between structures, and is sophisticated. Certainly, something to marvel at, the human brain has the capacity to do things that science has just begun to identify. As teachers, learning more about the brain and how it […]