Thinking About Education

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. ~Socrates

First Do No Harm: The Damage of Low Expectations

I had a student once, let’s call her Leah.  She was a transfer during the first few weeks of school. We were alerted that she had some “problems.” I always begin the year with a study of word stems, and expect students to learn certain common roots, prefixes, and suffixes because then they have a base for understanding thousands of words. They memorize 10 or 15 at a time—a list like this one:.. Read More

Natural Differentiation

Two seventh-grade boys with baseball caps on are seriously engaged in Chinese brush painting in their Language Arts class. Their caps are well worn, fit snugly on their heads, and the bills are curved just right. The students are not speaking but are examining their pictures with heads bent while adding more brush strokes of black paint on the white paper. Their faces are relaxed and other paintings are lying around—previous attempts using.. Read More

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