The Inspiration Gap: it’s 0ne of the weirdest things about teaching teens. This Gap yawns between the adult who knows this stuff — history, literature, science, whatever — is endlessly wondrous, and the majority of students who haven’t figured that out yet and, worse still, in so many cases are so educationally poisoned they refuse [...]
Archives for the ‘teaching’ Category
Farewells, Four Loves, Confucius, etc.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
[S]peaking about his own spiritual development, Confucius said: “At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At thirty I could stand. At forty I had no doubts. At fifty I knew the Decree of Heaven. At sixty I was already obedient [to this Decree]. At seventy I could follow the desires of my mind without [...]
Teachers as Professional Lovers
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Another beauty of blogging: how the archive of our thoughts allows us to chart our own change and development, and do that wonderfully weird thing called “dialoguing with our former selves.” Here’s what I mean: Sylvia in Australia, commenting on a sour post I wrote three years ago, writes, I am at university now (studying [...]
On Student Genius, How Not to Grade a Wiki, and Making the World a Stage
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
How Modern People Read
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Beach-Side Thoughts on History, to My Students
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the [...]
“You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning
Monday, 4 January 2010
I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place. Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in [...]
Wikipedia: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”
Sunday, 3 January 2010
I wrote recently about how many of my otherwise sharp students were “Google fundamentalists” who argued, to simplify a bit, that “if it’s in Google, it’s valid.” These are often the same students who insist they should be able to use Wikipedia as a source for research. I’ve been skimming Wikipedia’s own policies for writing [...]
New Tech Teaching Habits
Thursday, 31 December 2009
I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread: What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution? I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can [...]
On the Art of Being Boring
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
I’ll have more to say soon about how I’ve been trying to teach the wisdom in this “napkin philosopher” piece in my classroom all year. It’s going to get center stage on my classroom door window first day back to school. Maybe even tattooed on students’ hands. But right now, it’s off to the airport [...]






