I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. ~Socrates
Many school districts—I wonder if this is true across the country?—are encouraging and even requiring teachers to inflate their grades. I was told I should give no grade lower than a 60 to my students, even if they earned a 0. I was also encouraged to give easier tests to students who did not perform above a certain standard and to reduce the amount of work I gave them (I am disregarding students.. Read More
We overuse dichotomies in education. We taught “subjects” for years and then someone cried, “I teach students, not subjects!” There was a major shift in education after that. The student became the touchstone for everything. Don’t we teach subjects to students? Parker Palmer has a compelling argument on this issue in his book The Courage to Teach. He describes a paradigm where the subject sits in the middle of the classroom so students and teachers.. Read More