Almost every morning of my life, I have a conversation with one of my best friends in the world. His name is Craig. Our conversations wander. I never really know what our serpentine dialectics will yield. But there is one thing I know for sure: these conversations over the past five years have made me […]
High School
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, High School, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies, Literacy
Controversy: Addressing Challenging Topics in Your High School English Class
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was killed in the streets of Ferguson, MO. On August 11, just two days later, school was scheduled to begin. As I watched the story unfold over the weekend, I was met with an anger and frustration I had not experienced since Trayvon Martin was […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Educational Apps, Featured, From the Front Lines, High School, Literacy, Social Studies
Classroom Work Flow Before the Holidays
I have one week and three days to go before students are released for the holiday break. It is such a difficult time of year to set goals, establish a workflow and keep the enthusiasm in student learning. Students carry the stress and the burden of the holidays on themselves in a myriad of ways […]
Posted inHigh School, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies, Literacy, Mathematics
Teaching Math: Is There a Right or Wrong Way?
When I talk to math teachers I tend to forget that most math teachers see themselves as an “expert” in teaching mathematics. So, last night’s Twitter Chat was not any different. If you have ever participated in a Twitter chat you know that the chat is an hour long with about 5 to 6 questions […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, High School, Social Justice, Uncategorized
Terror, Terrorism, and the Teaching of Social Studies
“We are not used to live with such bewildering uncertainty” wrote Jessica Stern in a New York Times editorial How Terror Hardens Us on Sunday (12/6/15) after the San Bernardino, California, shootings. Stern, an adult, was writing about adults collectively when she used the pronoun”we.” That same bewildering uncertainty also confronts our children, our students in schools. That bewildering uncertainty is happening at […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Educational Apps, From the Front Lines, High School, Instructional Strategies, Literacy, Social Studies, Technology
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 […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Fine Arts, From the Front Lines, High School, Opinion, Social Justice
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 […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, From the Front Lines, High School, Literacy
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 […]