It’s no secret that there are more birthdays in August, September, and October than any other month. In fact, LiveScience’s 2006 study has only become more cemented by our culture and propensity for the late summer and early fall birthdays. There are many factors related to the cause of that trend, but the greatest overall […]
Current Events in Education
Landmine Ahead! – How to Traverse Politics with Students
We have almost 11 more months of dealing with pollsters, pundits, politicians, and partisans who have opinions about the presidential race. Each of the presidential candidates will take the podium, attempting to address the ills of our nation, and often chief among them is the role of education. Additionally, students will harbor their own opinion for a […]
One-Day Workshops Are Here! Join Us in 2016
In 2015 we struggled with what we could continue to do to support our thousands of readers across the world. We already publish three articles a day from teachers. We’re active on our social media channels (Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) giving advice. We’ve started offering professional development opportunities for schools and we’re constantly adding to […]
E-Sub Plans for Educators
Writing sub plans is the task I dread most as a teacher. It is time-consuming and often the best-laid plans go awry. Substitutes misinterpret directions or students use that excuse to claim that they were led astray from a meaningful task. I have found a few digital applications that have changed the nature of the […]
Why NYC Students Seeing 'Hamilton' Is a Big Deal
On October 27th, a joint collaboration of The Rockefeller Foundation, The Gilder Lehrman Foundation, producer Jeffrey Seller, creator (and star) Lin-Manuel Miranda, and New York City public schools announced that they will provide a means for more than 20,000 eleventh graders to not just watch Hamilton, the hottest, most ground-breaking musical in decades – but to actually go […]
Different Teachers, Different Pressures
There is a certain about of pressure that comes with being a high stakes teacher, okay, it is a ton of pressure. A high stakes teacher is a teacher whose class performance on a standardized test is directly tied to the School Performance Score. At a small school, this means there are only four or […]
5 Ways to Flip the Parent-Teacher Conference Script
With a total of five hours to meet 20-something families, elementary school teachers in New York City have between 10 and 15 minutes for each conference. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to cover a child’s academic progress, social-emotional progress, areas for growth in these areas, and provide suggestions for supporting learning at home. […]
Zero Tolerance For Zero Tolerance
As Russell J. Skiba points out in his research on zero-tolerance policies, it’s quite difficult to find the “moment” when our schools implemented zero-tolerance policies in our school, but we can trace the impact of them to the 1994 Free Schools Act as a time when districts were quick to suspend students for fear of […]
