Teaching with Less

My thanks to Cal Teacher, who notes John Spencer as one of his “must read” blog authors. From Spencer’s article Monday Metaphor: Barbecue Guy:

I teach best when I have fewer resources. It forces me to be creative and to design and custom-fit resources to the context of my classroom. I am better [...]

Teaching and Email: The Problem of Lost Letters

Email transmits so fast that we are led to believe it is also reliable. But between spam filters and imperfect humans, email delivery can and does fail. As teachers we must be especially aware of this potential loss.
Lost email can unnecessarily, unintentionally, and silently end long-standing friendships and well-established trust. It is not uncommon [...]

Practices for Living: DBT

Over the years I have come to judge various approaches to life and the sacred by their accessibility. While this is often more about the presenter’s abilities than the path itself, if the teaching is not accessible then it is useless.
It is easy to make an important teaching more complicated. Making it usable is [...]

Making Progress

If you study a subject at length and with diligence you will wonder, reasonably enough, if you are making progress. If you teach long enough, your students will ask a similar question: am I getting anywhere?
In many studies there are objective measures: a correct proof, a game won, software that runs properly, a passed final [...]