Yes, I said it.  Yesterday, after one of our quarterly assessments, I had finally realized why my 5th block class was full of such low-performing students.  Ready for this? They didn't care.   We had talked about the test beforehand, I encouraged them (or thought I did) to do their best, I even went as far as showing them how ...

Since the 1970s some aspects of students and their lives are relatively unchanged according to a study by the Foundation for Child Development. Reading abilities, graduation rates, and suicide rates have basically remained the same for teenagers since the 1970s. Also, math rates have risen despite the bad press math and science teachers ...

Two of my favorite teachers, both journalism instructors, are admittedly not the typical readers. One reads only non-fiction books, newspaper and magazine articles, and online list serves while the other contends he’s “not the typical English teacher” because he only reads online articles, list serves, and blogs. Even though they ...

One of my criticisms of NCLB is that it causes too many schools to focus all of their attention on the bottom 25% of a school’s population while ignoring the middle- and upper-level students. Some of the effects of this focus in my school are: fewer upper-level course choices in order to create more lower-level courses, larger [...]

I often comment that educational solutions cannot solely be a responsibility of the schools. Communities must take the reigns and help solve many of the dilemmas facing education, and the ETS seems to agree with me that poverty may be the largest obstacle to overcome when creating academic success. Here are some of the highlights from [...]

According to a new study in a Washington Post article: At a time when more authors are writing more books for young people, fewer children are reading for pleasure. A recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts showed that the percentage of 13- to 17-year-olds who read daily for fun dropped from 31 percent [...]

I thought I’d post some updates on the goings on I’ve discussed previously. When my class created bulletin boards about the 1920s for The Great Gatsby, things did not go exactly as planned. Being literal-minded students, almost everyone basically created the exact same research piece–exactly as I had written up the assignment. A ...

Is it possible to create a culture of failure? My school is currently being asked to discover why the Freshman failure rate is so high. 1/3 of the Freshmen failed a class during their first semester in high school, and statistically speaking 30% of Freshmen who fail a course in their first high school year do [...]

Ok, before you read this post, I’m going to admit freely that this issue is one which brings out my snarky and biased side. A writer with the News Tribune advocates higher pay for math and science teachers to lure better and new teachers to the profession. No other content area would receive the extra [...]