As a doctoral student in a small Education Policy cohort, I attended lots of Friday potluck dinners—cheap wine, the requisite tabouli and Korean mondoo, and hot discussion about which educational research grants are getting funded these days. The usual entertaining...
If I could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, I’d choose Anna Quindlen. And before we got through the salad course, I’d try to figure out how contemplate life and make connections as Quindlen does. Of course, it would...
Starting a little meme here at Teacher in a Strange Land: Five Things I Wish Policy-Makers Knew About My Classroom 1. There is no such thing as a foolproof curriculum that works reliably for all kids, or even most kids....
My friend the newspaper editor forwarded me an article she read in Slate’s “Dismal Science” section, Hot for the Wrong Teachers, with a little note: “Is this true?” I was excited: had Slate (Slate! Cool!) decided to write one of...
My fellow TLN blogger, Bill Ferriter (a.k.a. The Tempered Radical—one of the all-time great blog names) and I had a chance to do a little point-counterpoint on the Learning First Alliance website this week. It was on the subject of...
Interesting discussion on the Teacher Leaders Network, kicked off by a TLN member who just held her 90-year old mother’s hand through a minor medical crisis—and had time, in the waiting room, to wonder about the array of medical specialists...
Every now and then, someone will take a critical potshot at Ruby Payne, whose “Framework for Understanding Poverty” and interactive professional development workshops are enormously popular with schools trying to engender “cultural competence”—which might be loosely defined as the ability...
Education Sector has an interesting new policy report making the rounds. Here’s Education Week’s take: Think it's hard for schools to get bad teachers out of the classroom? Turns out teachers agree. More than half of teachers believe it's too...
I’m not a math teacher, but I played one in a middle school, not too long ago. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was surprised to find myself teaching 7th grade math, in the fall of 2003. The...
For the past six weeks, I have been hooked on the HBO series, John Adams, with the same dedication and fervor other people seem to find for Dancing with the Stars. Technically, I know the facts, from 7th grade American...
