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I’ll celebrate my second day home sick this week with a few random thoughts about school:
1. It’s funny when people aren’t around high school students much and don’t think like a high school student. Last Friday, I had to listen to the incessant banging of  hammers as they busted up the concrete on the steps [...]

How come when a guy writes its when he really means it’s it gets blamed on his high school English teacher, even if the guy dropped out in 1974? As though he hasn’t encountered 38,263 uses of it’s/its in in the intervening  years and couldn’t once have said, “Eh, that’s weird. Two different its. Wonder [...]

This was one of those days when teaching feels like one long test of patience. It can actually be a very spiritual profession if you can make yourself treat every frustration as a challenge to your equanimity. Seven days before final exams and you would expect that a little extra motivation would appear, especially among [...]

In response to the article “School Board Approves New Band Curriculum,” one scholar responded:
These cuts are getting ridiculous! What’s next, cutting the concerts for choir? Or maybe eliminating the actual debates from the debate class? Or maybe we will allow the drama classes to practice but not perform…
No wonder the school keeps losing tax payer’s [...]

I read an interesting article at TheAmericanScholar.org called “The Decline of the English Department” and I sadly found myself cheering along a bit. The big picture is this: from 1970 to 2003, English as a college major dropped from from 7.6 percent of all majors to 3.9 percent.
Now I do have a two questions about [...]

There’s a truly great article in this month’s New Yorker that manages to make both unions and teachers look terrible (and the combination of the two absolutely abominable). It’s like a car crash—looking at your own profession and being ashamed of it but unable to look away. Briefly, it’s about the 600 teachers in the [...]

So we’re three days into the new school year and the most surprising feeling so far is one of ease. After five years of learning how to teach, followed by five years with small children at home, teaching has turned into a fairly routine job. Not routine in the sense of nothing happening. C’mon, it’s [...]

I’m at Borders earlier tonight, in the Literature section, when I overhear two high school girls in the aisle next to me:
“Oh, you’re going to be busy if you have to read that. I’d SparkNote it.”
“Yeah, we also have to read Lord of the Flies. I got to page forty but now I’ve switched to [...]

An interesting psychology experiment in the bathroom next to my classroom. It seems to be the official graffiti bathroom, often filled with the usual high school comments—homophobic, mildly racist, pro-drug, pro-gang, scatological. In an attempt to cut down on it they painted the stalls a deep blue color. Why deep blue? I assume they thought [...]

One thing that makes my job teaching high school students enjoyable is that I have essentially the same sense of humor. Example: The Culinary Arts classes purchased two full hogs so that they could practice butchering them. In honor of the release of Notorious, they named one hog Notorious P.I.G. and the other swine Piggie [...]