personal
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How I Saved My Teaching Career: Step 3: Find Your Community
This is the fourth post in a series on how to overcome burnout and love teaching again. See the end of this post for previous entries. Teaching can be lonely. We spend a lot of time with our students, but our relationships with them can feel adversarial and/or distant. Even our good relationships with Continue reading
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How I Saved My Teaching Career: Step 2: Take Time Off
One of my favourite quotes about burnout is from Bertrand Russell’s essay “Education and Discipline”: … it is utterly impossible for over-worked teachers to preserve an instinctive liking for children; they are bound to come to feel towards them as the proverbial confectioner’s apprentice does towards macaroons. I do not think that education ought to Continue reading
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How I Saved My Teaching Career: Step 1: Take Stock. Is It Worth It?
This is the second post in a series on how to overcome burnout and love teaching again. For the introductory post, go here. On Monday, I introduced my career crisis. After teaching joyfully for many years, I was tired, discouraged and ready to quit. But I paused before throwing in the towel. I took a Continue reading
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How I Saved My Teaching Career: Introduction
A few years ago, I was ready to quit my teaching job. But I didn’t. I’ve been a teacher in some capacity for twenty-three years. I fell in love with the profession when I was a college student and landed a part-time job as an assistant language teacher in an elementary school. I was sure Continue reading
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How I Saved My Teaching Career: Reprise
Dear readers: I’ve received some comments and missives recently from discouraged teachers who have stumbled upon my blog and have found it helpful. This makes me very happy. However, there’s a place I want to send them, and I can’t. So I’m going to try to fix this problem. A few years ago, I published Continue reading
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I Like Teaching You
Today is the first day of the new semester. I’m not exactly pumped. I’ve been working all weekend to find a motivator, or an inspiration, or a visualization to turn to when I feel it’s all too much. What’s my objective for the next fifteen weeks? What mantra will I repeat to myself on the Continue reading
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Bloggers Anonymous
As is usual this time of year, I’m dealing with a trying student. Yesterday, as a cathartic measure, I prepared a post in which I collated our email exchange since the beginning of the semester. If you are not me, this exchange is no doubt extremely entertaining. (If you are me, you spent most of Continue reading
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When In Doubt, Make a Plan
On Monday, I posted a letter I received from a reader, asking advice about whether he should stay in college. I promised you I would post my reply today, and here it is. I sent this response before posting his letter here, and before reading your thoughts on his situation, but some commenters will notice Continue reading
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Three Things That Are Driving Me Crazy This Week
1. Plagiarism In my remedial class, we have been talking for two weeks about paraphrasing, integrating quotations, citing sources and so forth. Nevertheless, three students have received zeroes on the first version of their final paper because of incorrect use of source material. There are a few mitigating factors here. First, I don’t believe that Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 