Category Archives: teaching

The Home-to-Prison Pipeline

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A School Called the Cops on a Black 12-Year-Old for Having a Toy Gun in His Own Home (Vice.com)I Refuse to Be the Pajama Police (weareteachers.com) Someone needs to come up with a new term to describe clichés that have been overused to the point where they’re a whole level worse than your garden-variety cliché. I’m not sure if the saying “Dress for the job you want, not for the job you have” would qualify for such a classification, but I’d nominate it anyway just because…

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Teaching to a Virtual Wall

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As with all other activities that involve some form of public speaking, one of the most common tips that new teachers receive is to practice spoken instruction out loud to an empty room, which is sometimes called “teaching to a wall.” This is a technique that I still sometimes employ, more than fifteen years into my teaching career, but only when it comes to those rare instances where I’m delivering more of a monologue to students. That kind of thing is necessary for the first…

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… and Expecting Different Results

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College party with 400 people shut down in North Carolina (Houston Chronicle)Miami University parent files class action lawsuit over tuition charged for blended courses amid coronavirus (Cincinnati Business Courier) My alma mater started its fall semester last week, and they’ve already confirmed twenty-seven cases of COVID-19 there, according to what passes for a newspaper in my hometown. Absent so many similar stories from campuses and schools across the nation these past few weeks, this might have garnered more attention. Instead, though, this is quickly becoming…

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‘Bad Luck’ Yourself

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When I was having difficulty remembering to pass around sign-in sheets for each of my classes in my early years of teaching, I created my own set of sign-in sheets with one of my favourite quotes on each of them. Even though I knew that the quotes would make my students realize that I’m even more of a dork than I appear at first blush, the ability to share those quotes with my students still did its trick in getting me to take attendance more…

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Deadline Approaching

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Teachers Are Scared to Go Back to School. Will They Strike? (Education Week) We don’t talk about school shootings enough. It’s bad enough that this country has gotten to the point where even a school shooting with multiple deaths may no longer merit the briefest of mentions on the evening news, but what’s worse is how those people devoted to destroying public education silently use these tragedies to their advantage. Even if growing waves of school shootings might not penetrate the broader American consciousness that…

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