Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category

Last year I posted here “A Letter to New Teachers,” which I was pleased to learn seems to have been passed around and possibly to have done a bit of good in spots. It’s rather unlikely that a new teacher, or at least a teacher new to […]

One of the more entertaining bits of cognitive dissonance I have experienced this summer includes the disparate “ideas of the university”—and of learning platforms in general—that emerge, implicitly and explicitly, from my simultaneous indulgence in Christensen and Eyring’s The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education […]

Last year about this time I posted “A Letter to New Teachers.” I’m planning to update that soon, but I didn’t want to neglect those of us who have been at it for a while. So here goes: Dear Experienced Teacher: We know it’s important to pay […]

In the last week or so there has been some startling and potentially tragic news on the accreditation front at the university level. No fewer than three institutions, with nearly 100,000 students, have been notified that they are at immediate risk of losing their accreditation. The public […]

(Informed consent: This is not a post about school bullying.) One of the later chapters in Ted and Nancy Sizer’s compelling 1999 The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract is called, and is about,  “Shoving.” While, yes, the authors do discuss the term in the […]

Since the economy started sputtering four years ago I have noted a particularly interesting trend. With businesses shedding jobs, prospects for college graduates looking generally dimmer than a decade ago, and a housing bubble largely inflated by the banking system pretty clearly at the bottom of our […]

If there is a consistent subtext to much of my thinking here, it is that amid all the fervor of change and development taking place in independent schools, we as educators must never lose sight to the human, personal scale on which our every action is taken […]

Having just passed one of the more enjoyable Fourth of Julys in recent memory, with 360-degree fireworks—and I am a sucker for fireworks—and some fine reunions with summer neighbors, I got to thinking what it is that makes this holiday so special for me. Sure, there are […]

I have lately spent quite a lot of time delving into the world of specialized programming, what we might once have called “centers of excellence,” in independent schools. I’ve simultaneously been working my way through Kevin Kelly’s amazing What Technology Wants?, which contains among its opening chapters […]

I spent some really hot days in the middle of the past week in Baltimore, Charm City, home to a number of independent schools and (apparently) a whole lot of cooks specializing in crab in various forms—and in making diners very, very happy. It was also the […]