society
-
What If They Don’t Do the Required Reading?
It’s a perennial problem for teachers. You plan a great lesson around today’s short story, but it turns out two-thirds of the students haven’t read it. What do you do? Do you kick out the slackers? Give them class time to read it? Give up and do something else? As a follow-up to last week’s… Continue reading
-
Willing to Read and Write
Yesterday, I told my college students that they need to read the next 150 pages of the novel we are studying, Life of Pi, over the next seven days. This is not news – they got a reading schedule on the first day of class, and were told to read ahead. Nevertheless, there was a… Continue reading
-
Late Penalties?
Throughout the years, I’ve heard a lot of arguments against giving penalties for late student work. Back in February, Tom Shimmer outlined some of the arguments against late penalties in a post, and they reflect the main argument I’ve heard again and again: students should be evaluated on the learning they can demonstrate, not punctuality.… Continue reading
-
“Either You Can Be a Teacher or You Can Be the Plagiarism Police”
As the new semester creeps nearer, I’m starting to think about plagiarism again. My use of Turnitin.com, a plagiarism-detection software, is helping me relax a bit – last semester, the software made discovering plagiarism, and talking to students about it, a lot easier. However, cheating is a perennial source of anxiety for most teachers, and a… Continue reading
-
Word Jars and Grocery Lists: “Your Child’s Writing Life” by Pam Allyn
The premise of Pam Allyn’s parenting guide Your Child’s Writing Life is as follows: “There are endless practical books to help parents raise their children. But until now there has not been a book about the importance of getting our kids to understand that every book and story began when someone, somewhere decided to write down… Continue reading
-
Should We Bid Farewell to the Academic Paper?
Is the academic paper the best way for students to demonstrate their learning? Will learning to write papers help students develop the skills they will need later in their lives? One of my heroes, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times (whose Sunday Magazine column, The Medium, is sorely missed) writes this week that “Education… Continue reading
-
Khan Academy: What are the Possibilities?
I just today learned about Khan Academy, the online education institution whose goal is “providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” In the TED talk above, the academy’s founder, Salman Khan, describes exactly how the project works. The site is home to more than 2400 educational lecture videos, mostly in the domains of math… Continue reading
-
What Young Adults Should Read
There’s been a lot of furor over the recent Wall Street Journal essay that claims that YA fiction has taken a turn to the dark side. It isn’t surprising that my favourite commentary on this piece so far comes from Linda Holmes, editor of the NPR pop-culture blog Monkey See and moderator of my fifth-favourite podcast… Continue reading
-
Looking for Thoughts on Waiting for Superman
Last week I finally saw Waiting for “Superman,” and I found it both compelling and suspect. As a post-secondary Canadian teacher, I find myself unable to evaluate the validity of the questions posed or the answers suggested by this film. Are charter schools the answer to the US’s educational woes? (Or ours?) Will merit pay… Continue reading
-
Does Reading Great Literature Make You A Better Person?
I love Laura Miller, the Books critic for Salon.com. However, in today’s Salon she’s making an argument that I’ve heard a lot and that I do not like. She’s reviewing William Deresiewicz’s new book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things that Really Matter. I have not read this book… Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.