“Third grade reading proficiency matters — enormously,” declares Mike Schmoker in How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient for Education Week. When I saw this piece from 2019 pop up on my social media feed this week, I immediately noticed the subheading: “Scaling back small-group instruction would have…

Stories matter. Throughout my childhood, my father told the stories of him growing up, and life before my sister and me, so many times, with so much detail, I can retell them myself today — several years past his death, many decades since I was a child. Not a literary…

My poem The 451 App (22 August 2022) is a science fiction/dystopian musing about the possibility of technology providing a comforting veneer to the creeping rise of totalitarianism — a simple App appearing on everyone’s smartphone before erasing all our books. The point of the poem is less about technology…

This past week an early career teacher, highly regarded in the classroom and very accomplished in the field of education, received a parental request that a student not be required to read The Great Gatsby. …

I teach good students. I write that with no sarcasm, or cynicism. For the past 20 years, I have been teaching at a selective liberal arts university, and the students are mostly high-achieving young adults who graduated high school as A or B students. Like me, my students also have…

My home state of South Carolina appears determined to join the misleading and misguided “anti-CRT” bandwagon that mandates curriculum gag orders, centers parental control over schooling, and legislates a simplistic and nonsensical characterization of “ideology.” After weeks of deliberation and public testimony opposing a flurry of five bills (H.4325, H.4343…

“I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes,” Commander Buck Murdock (William Shatner) muses in Airplane 2: The Sequel. I immediately thought of this iconic Shatner scene from the Jerry Zucker-Jim Abrahams-David Zucker film when I saw a brilliant and urgently serious post on Facebook from a former student of…

It seems almost quaint now, except for the racism, but in 2009, Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted “You lie” at Barack Obama. …

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Your elected state legislators are confronted with a series of bills addressing crumbling bridges and roads in your state. …