We didn’t light the autumn sky with homemade rockets or harness the wind to electrify remote villages. But in 1974 a group of juniors sitting in the back of biology hung on every word our teacher said, because we never knew when
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From, “Arggghhhhh!” to “Awesome!”
A few months ago bloggers argued about a parent who complained that the Common Core had needlessly complicated subtraction. The controversial techniques involve deconstructing “hard” numbers into “easy” numbers and working on the parts to get the answer. Most the teachers commented that
Read MoreDeconstructing a Teacher Leader Cliché
"Being a patient's not like being a doctor, though, is it? A doctor has to know what's wrong with people. A patient sits there and waits for the doctor to put it right." That line, spoken by a character in A
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Institutional Mindsets and Whether We Stay in Education
Let’s see, there are one, two, three, four, hmm…, five, six, hmmm…, oh right, seven, eight,…, nine colleagues, at least, including me, who have changed their professional context in this last year. I’m not counting those who have had their professional context
Read MoreUnfinished Thoughts
Well, I missed my second deadline in a row and can't claim to have been too busy. Truth be told, I haven't been able to string together enough complete thoughts on a single topic to hit our 600 – 800
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7 Observations About Defining Expert Teachers
My teacherpreneur work includes working on diverse teams tasked to do everything from describing the state of early childhood in Arizona to determining the skills that make a new teacher safe for the classroom to delineating the continuum of growth
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Ed Solutions Are A Breath Away!
It’s natural to think that the answers to today’s education questions lie somewhere on a continuum between two extremes: How much autonomy should students have – all or none? Hmmmm…. probably somewhere in the middle. Where should curriculum decisions be made –
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My Reply to Our Biggest Failure by Mike Lee
In Our Biggest Failure, Mike Lee wrote in this space that all other problems in education: Pale in comparison to our students’ ultimate inability or unwillingness to think for themselves, to recognize learning and inquiry as enjoyable, identify their own biases
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When does 1910 = 2014?
In 1910 William Howard Taft was president of 46 states. Thomas Edison demonstrated talking movies. Mark Twain and O. Henry died. Mother Theresa and Dizzy Dean were born. So was my father, August Merz, Jr. And The Carnegie Foundation
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Balancing The Load With The Brain In Mind
How do you handle your work load when you have unstructured time and many tasks that vary in complexity and duration? In my teacherpreneur role I’m learning to balance more tasks with more variety and complexity than ever. I learned
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