Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon. If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a [...]

[Note: I'm going to spend the summer cross-posting here any posts I wrote for Change.org's Education blog that I feel are worth the effort. This is the first.] U Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham‘s video below is about reading instruction. I recommend it to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and school board members – and especially [...]

Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet. So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet? I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind. John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about [...]

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 [...]

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept [...]

Just a quick share of some resources I made optional for the “In Google We Trust” students I mentioned last time.  Transparency is all, so enjoy, quibble, supplement, whatever: Optional Media Literacy Readings: 1. Think Peer Reviewed journals are no better than blogs? “How Stuff Works” gives a good overview that will (I hope) make [...]

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” True here as well, but only slightly. Autopsy The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up: My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb And my piano crouched in the corner of my room With all its teeth bared Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not [...]

Contents: 1) Dry but necessary (and interesting, really) background to computer-assisted “corpus linguistics”; 2) Application of Vocab Profiler to a little “Scribe 2.0″ medieval satire I had fun writing way back when; 3) Tutorial on some uses of Vocab Profiler to aid in scaffolding classroom reading comprehension; 4) Caveats and Take-Aways Dan Meyer just posted [...]

I’ve wanted to help this happen for the last five months. And I need your help to launch it with quality and good aim. Just a thoughtful comment consisting of a short list is all we ask. First, a recap. Why re-write what was already obsessively written since May? So: What would happen if we [...]