I recently wrote the most-commented article on this site to date about the number of hours teachers work and comparing those to standard business world people. As I write this one, I’m sure it will stir up just as many responses, though many of them will surely be in disagreement with me. Just keep reading, [...]

Just in time for March Madness Watch this video Read this article Being a Middle-Aged Nerd is No Excuse for Stupid What did you just learn? How can you relate it to classroom management? Also, I want to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the new “Rate this article” thing at the top of each article now. Go ahead ...

I have found that People   really   don’t   like   As I prepare my bands for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest that is now less than a month away, I have noticed that they seem to have a big problem with rests. For the uninitiated, rests in music represent silence. If I reduce the amount of noise that ...

On February 11th, 2007 I wrote the first blog post that is included in the archives of So You Want To Teach? I didn ‘t actually set up the blog on this domain until June, but I thought that since the blog was now over a year old (at least as far as some of the content), I’d go back and take a look at some of the old stuff. By the way, ...

This is perhaps the most influential article I’ve posted on here. At least as far as my own personal perspective goes. Read on… I realized some things today There never will be enough time to do everything I want to do. There never will be enough money to do everything I want to do There never will be enough people to do ...

So on Tuesday, I wrote about an incident I had where I was awfully sarcastic with a student and it upset him. I received some great comments. The conversation is continuing over there. If you haven’t chimed in, now would be a great time to do so. And better yet, subscribe to receive comments so you don’t have to keep going back to ...

Today was a pretty good day in parts. In fact, most of my classes went really well. Except for my percussion class. It has been bad since the middle of December. This is slightly abnormal for me, but the following post is a narrative with a question and plea for help at the end. Why is my percussion class getting out of hand? Because I have two ...

My life has changed quite a bit since December 1st. Today, I want to look back on some of the things that have happened in the life of this blog, as well as some things that have happened in the life of Joel. Blogging changes The number of readers continues to climb (164 as of Friday). It seems that the number is doubling every three to four ...

Even if you ignore the majority of this article, check out the last sentence. I am absolutely loving school since coming back from Christmas Break. Even so, I am beginning to get burned out. If you want to know why, go read this. He’s still not back yet and it’s all but certain that he will not be coming back next week either. Still ...

I have found this year that I have been making a lot of progress on my own personal teaching style. It’s my 6th year to teach, and I begin what could be seen as the downhill slope of teaching. Now that I am pretty adequate at getting children to be and stay quiet throughout class so that I can teach them, I run the risk of slacking off and ...