Last month, the Washington Post wrote an article called “Why Alabama and West Virginia Suddenly Have Amazing High School Graduation Rates.” Immediately, the title of the article should raise some eyebrows–but the Post took a rather uncritical view of West Virginia and Alabama’s graduation rates. The article starts with the…

Anxiety has fundamentally shaped who I am as a teacher. People with anxiety suffer from “cognitive distortions” — thinking patterns that color how we view the world. One common cognitive distortion is called over-responsibility. In this thinking error, the anxious person takes responsibility for things that, in reality, other people…

In his August 21st article “Some kids need harder lessons…,” Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, citing a report from TNTP, warns that throughout American schools, students who are ready for grade-level content are instead receiving below-grade-level readings. The report’s problems start with the arbitrary dichotomy between “grade-level” and “below-grade-level”…

It’s the week before school starts. You haven’t had a chance to set up your classroom (or you are moving rooms or you are trying to find where all of your supplies went over the summer). You haven’t had a chance to read your students’ IEPs yet or make cubbies…

Since the pandemic began, schoolwork has become increasingly digital for many students. While personal computer use had been on the rise throughout the 2010s, the turn to all-remote learning only threw fuel on the fire, and many schools now expect students to have some kind of device–a laptop, a Chromebook…

It’s the beginning of a new school year, and while many teachers called it quits after last year, thousands of new teachers will be entering into their classrooms for the first time this month. As someone who has worked with student-teachers at NYU and Columbia’s Teachers College–and as someone who…

It was December 2015, and President Obama just got a rare landslide bipartisan win: 85–12 in the Senate and 359–64 in the House. The cause had united labor unions and conservatives alike. What could have brought such disparate groups together in what Obama called a “Christmas miracle”? No Child Left…

This school year, in addition to keeping schools open during a pandemic, teachers and administrators have had to combat the “devious licks” challenge on TikTok, where students steal or vandalize property at school. Interestingly, most of the occurrences of the challenge have been in school bathrooms, where students have pulled…