teaching
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Cold Call
Are you willing to put your students on the spot? A reader, Damommachef, has asked me to discuss a problem that can arise with classroom dynamics: the Constant Commenter. She says, “Some kids want to constantly comment, but the smartest are often the quietest. How can we get them more involved? How do we subdue Continue reading
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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
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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
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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
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What Have You Been Thinking About?
Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a student, or just a citizen of the world who believes that learning is important, you may be thinking about new problems or dwelling on old fears or puzzles as the school year begins. Maybe you’d like to hear what others have to say about your burning questions or Continue reading
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“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
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What Swimming Taught Me About Teaching
It’s good for a teacher to be a student once in a while. I learn this lesson over and over as I pursue my MEd. I have encountered all sorts of challenges I’d forgotten about, like worrying about grades and managing my time in order to get readings done and papers written. I’ve had to Continue reading
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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
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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
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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
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 