For the second week of June Academy, my colleague Mary Fierabend and I co-taught a course called Create Your Own Country. Mostly working in pairs, students imagined and created their own countries, emphasizing one or more themes: maps political structure/government… Read More ›
For the first week of June Academy, I taught a 15-hour course on Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Many students produced spectacular results, as you can gather from this poster showing their name cards (explanation to follow): The student work is visually beautiful, much of… Read More ›
Usually a school year ends with final exams — at Weston and elsewhere. As we know, final exams are designed to reduce stress and pressure by providing a relaxing time when classroom temperatures are over 90°. Right? No? You say… Read More ›
I originally started drafting this post well before last night’s presidential debate and the follow-up by Van Jones, but these events have slightly rearranged what I need to say. This thread actually started on September 27 with four talks (to different… Read More ›
What a great start for the Weston High School Math Team! In our first Massachusetts Math League meet of the year, our goal was a simple one: to beat Canton. Simple, but definitely not easy, as it almost never happens. And beat Canton… Read More ›
A headline writer attached this misleading title to an opinion piece in the New York Times last Sunday. My response (this post) is yet another follow-up to the follow-up I posted on February 18. Apparently the issue just won’t go away! Andrew Hacker continues to… Read More ›
If you’re reading this in the Boston area, you probably know about the Boston Globe’s problem with home deliveries this month. As soon as they switched delivery companies just before the beginning of the year, massive problems ensued — principally a complete… Read More ›
Yesterday was a professional development day in Weston. The entire K–12 faculty met together for a long lecture on special ed law, two workshops (I picked Google Classroom and 3-D Printing among a lot of choices), and a film about… Read More ›
Surely our top priorities in a school must be teaching and learning…right? We know that a lot of things get in the way of those priorities, but still they’re the essence of what school is all about. At some point,… Read More ›
Two headlines from different publications: No Rich Child Left Behind, and Enriching the Rich: Why MOOCs are not improving education Weston High faculty creates online courses for the world Are these headlines saying the same thing in different words? Not really…. Read More ›
