Freedom in Education is Good, Chaos is Not

I love teaching in the homeschooling community so much, because there is just so much to love. The students, the parents, teaching in weird places….. During my time in the homeschool community I’ve taught in two different barns (finished thankfully), two old industrial buildings, outside… a lot, a smelly old church, several not smelly churches, …

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The Most Important Thing You Can Do For A Student

As an educator, the most important thing you will ever do for a student has very little to do with teaching. It has to do with saving that student’s life. It’s not about classroom methods, it’s about being there in the right moment to play a part in preventing a suicide. Suicide can be a …

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How to Help Troubled Students

Some students will make you feel like a great teacher no matter what you do. Success lives inside them so fully, it seems to spill over to you as a teacher. Some students reveal to you how good you are as a teacher. They’ll drink if you bring them to the water, but they’ll make …

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Ask Them to Listen to You Less

In the midst of my student teaching (I was teaching Debate and History at Davis High School), I was meeting in my college education class with my student teaching cohort and we had been assigned into small groups to talk about our classes and to workshop any classroom management issues we may have been experiencing. …

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More Than Just a Curriculum

“I don’t even know what changed but I used to feel like I didn’t want to be myself, and I was ashamed of myself all the time. But I don’t feel that way anymore, I am happy to be myself, I feel valuable and I just feel good about myself. This year I learned that …

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A Meaningful Definition of Propaganda

To begin my class each week, I will present to students a scenario for us to discuss and debate. The scenario will center on some controversial legal, political, ethical, or philosophical question. After doing my best to press students to take and defend positions, challenge whatever position the students take, and introduce them to some …

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What Actually Works in Education?

In my time in education, I’ve come across or been presented a number of theories of how education works or should work. These have included smaller learning communities, piagetian constructs, TJED, the trivium, VARK learning styles, open classrooms, Bloom’s taxonomy, critical approaches to education, Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, and many others. I would assume …

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