Six-year-old Timothy likes to stand up and walk around while eating his dinner.  He plays basketball or hockey while watching TV.  When reading with his mother, he moves the book up and down, swings his legs back and forth, and makes it hard for her to focus on the words that they’re reading together. Nine-year-old Caleb...Read More

After this pandemic is over with (or at least sufficiently in the background of American life to warrant little comment), plan to go into a classroom and ask yourself, does this classroom have life?” That’s the key test of whether there’s any real learning going on. There could be fake learning going on, to be...Read More

This is going to sound ridiculously simplistic, but there is one basic way to learn how to write better:  write more.  That’s a little like saying A = A, so I perhaps need to flesh out this little gem in greater detail.  The point I’m trying to make is that you don’t learn to write...Read More

William Shakespeare is generally regarded as the greatest writer of the English language.  All too often, though, he is taught at the secondary school level in a way that does not endear this brilliant man to high school students.  I remember being bored by Shakespeare when I was in school.  What can be done to...Read More

This blog post of mine, entitled ”What If Great Minds Ran Our Schools?” based on my book If Einstein Ran the Schools: Revitalizing U.S. Education, first appeared in the blog TeachThought on May 1, 2020: The long-awaited test results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in, and although there’s something there for...Read More