2019 in Books

Finished 52 books (17K pages) in 2019! Favorites: Becoming, Dessert First, Belonging, Where the Crawdads Sing.

On Paying Off the Loans

Twelve years after I started paying them down, my student loans are paid off. People ask me, knowing what I know now and having chosen not to practice law, whether I regret going to law school, especially a more expensive one like Duke. That's a tough one. I loved my time at Duke. It was …

Summer Goals

Students returned this week, so sadly/happily summer is coming to a close. This has been the first summer in a long time that I haven't had school-specific responsibilities (camp, curriculum writing, PD). I decided that my goal for the summer would be to read a book per week and see a movie (ideally in a …

Reading Journey

Student computers were collected a little early this year, so our final assignment for Language Arts needed to be analog. Below is what we asked students to do and a picture of some of the results. Imagine that the books that you've read independently this year have been part of a reading journey. Perhaps you …

What Should the Fellows Read?

One of the things that I'm most proud of from the school year that just concluded is our hire of the first teaching fellow at our school. The idea for a teaching fellows program came out of the strategic plan team that I co-chaired, and I am coordinating the program going forward. Throughout the decade …

The Paradox

For the past two months, I have been at home taking care of our newborn daughter. She's adorable, incredibly alert, and usually snuggly. Perhaps the most frequent piece of parenting advice I've received is "Enjoy this time; it goes so fast." That's true... except when it doesn't. At three AM when 15 minutes with a …

Great TED Talks for History Teachers

One of the most popular posts that I've written on this blog is Great TED Talks for English Teachers from 2010. Sure, it's a listicle, but given the sheer number of TED talks, folks have said that the post has been helpful to them in suggesting some talks with which to start. I'm currently teaching history …

The Boredom of Summer

I like the rhythm of school year and summer; it's one of the reasons I became a teacher. But even though the summer brings a welcome change of pace, I don't usually hope for unstructured weeks on end. During the school year, my life is segmented into 45 minute blocks and so to wake up with …

A Change Would Do You Good

One of my favorite features of Facebook is the Memories tab. I keep a journal, but rather sporadically, so for reminders about what was happening in my life in the past, Facebook is a more consistent reminder of the day to day. There are certainly challenges with this, perhaps the chief being, the difficulty of …

SOARing

In 2016-2017, the Language Arts and Social Studies departments at our school will be undergoing a curriculum review. This news wasn't meant with universal acclaim. I think it's very easy, especially for those who have been teaching for any number of years, to feel like whatever professional development we undertake is just the latest new …