Guest Writer: Rachel Harvey Recently, I’ve seen a lot of TikTok videos that paint the year 2020 as a sort of apocalypse. Picture this: years from now, when people mention those four digits in tandem, they’ll recall a montage of bad memories set to the sounds of melodramatic shuffle music. The word “moistly” will […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
[Opinion Piece] Why Do You Love Teaching?
Guest Writer: Meran Khon Meran Khon holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Spring Arbor University and a Master of Education in Middle-Level Education degree from Walden University. She taught seventh-grade language arts and a third-grade self-contained classroom before reinventing the library and computer lab into a twenty-first-century Learning Lab/Maker Space, where she currently teaches […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Opinion: Red for Ed Has Gone Rotten: School Funding+The Great Recession +COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has been an incredibly stressful and scary time for many, and for teachers, it has been no different. When the pandemic first kicked off many of us felt very grateful because at least we had jobs and could pay our bills when we knew so many in other industries were not as […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
Standards-Based Grading Must Die
For those unaware, standards-based grading is a popular evaluation system designed to simplify teaching, learning, and assessment. It strips a student’s grade down to their ability to meet the announced standards. The idea is that students will learn more easily if teachers grade based upon very explicit and clear standards. Moreover, by standardizing the grading […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Opinion: Right Now Things Are Hard, But It’s Going to Be Fine
Right now, things are hard. Nothing feels fine, or normal. As we all know, teaching in person is different than teaching online. There are many things that we as educators are dealing with right now. How do we ensure that our students are learning, when there are some students without the ability to attend online […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
A Conversation With Words: The Importance of Annotating
In high school, when I first learned the skill of annotating, I was hooked. I couldn’t stop; my books were decorated with a rainbow of different highlighters and my pages were weighed down by insurmountable notes. It became an addiction – I would test myself with how I could “out-annotate” my last literature book. As […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Three Runners, Two Zacks, and One Call to Action: Teachers Play a Larger Role in Combating Racism and Hate
On Friday, May 8, 2020, I hit the empty, quarantined streets of my local Atlanta neighborhood and united in solidarity with people around the United States as we ran 2.23 miles in honor of Ahmaud Arbery. It was on February 23 that the unarmed Arbery was shot and killed while jogging in Glynn County, Georgia […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Schools Are Closed, But Educational Inequality Remains
Inequality in education exists. I have observed it from the beginning of my career in a relatively poor area of Philadelphia. It is real and it has gotten worse over the years. I began teaching about a decade after President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was implemented. The middle school where I taught had its cornerstone […]