Pre-School Math Instruction Versus Phenomenon-Based Learning

Sometimes it feels that newspaper articles about education fall into two categories: "alarming trend" and "promising trend." The first kind might have a headline like "99% of American Schoolchildren Can't Find the USA on a Map," the second "New Computer Application Makes All Kids at Crumbling School in Geniuses." (I guess there is also the...

Preparing Students to Face Troubling Issues

When we teach our students about death in the trenches of World War I, what do we want them to learn? And how should they feel? What comes of a 15-year old considering some 300,000 dead at the Battle of the Somme? I would find it chilling if a student had no emotional response to the scale...

Teaching Against Hope?: Helping Students Face Global Problems

It goes something like this: I cannot save the people out in the rafts upon the Mediterranean. I cannot help them-- a few dollars to a worthwhile charity is essentially meaningless. I cannot help the women trapped in sweatshops because I don't know where my clothes come from and without those jobs, they might starve...

Are High School Clubs a Bad Idea?

I teach at a wonderful independent school at which everyone gets along really well, the curriculum is rigorous and innovative, the students are kind and curious, and the faculty and staff are amazing. I treasure the commitment and dedication of everyone, faculty, staff, students. I love being in the classroom with my students or collaborating...

Intrinsic Motivation and “The Whole Student”

The Infinite Monkey Theorem describes a very simple problem in probability yet it offers many opportunities for philosophical reflection--and jokes. Given enough time and sufficient numbers, a group of monkeys will eventually produce all of Shakespeare. As a teacher, I reflect upon the truth that even the worst educator will "produce" a conventionally successful student, eventually....

How Can Young People Best Help the Neediest in a World of Staggering Inequality?

The students in my course on Globalization have just finished their project on sourcing. A few looked at the companies that make some of their favorite jackets or shoes and tried to decode corporate double-speak and find the truth about how factory workers are treated. Others have offered the school more sustainable and just options...

Learning by Doing: Sourcing at School

For years, I've asked students to use sourcing websites and internet articles about labor rights to search for the factories in which a couple of items of their clothing were made. Usually a pair of shoes and a favorite shirt. By undertaking this search, students think about the labor that supplies them with so much....

Oxfam: The wealthiest 8 men on earth possess wealth exceeding the poorest 50% of humanity

The wealthiest 8 men on earth (and yes, they are all men) possess wealth exceeding the poorest 50% of humanity. That's about 3,700,000,000 people. My students are stunned by this simple statistic from Oxfam's new report on economic inequality. The report is readable for secondary students and filled with prescriptions for change. For educators interested in solutions-based...

New Topics in Globalization: Chinese Outsourcing to Africa in the “Trump Vacuum”!; Microbeads & Patagonias!

I began a post a new few weeks back, but I doubt I will finish it. I confronted the grief I felt this autumn, teaching about 19th-century imperialism and my misery at the unpaid debts owed by the old empires--the US included--to the so-called developing world. It is unhappy business, teaching 15-year olds about King...