I have been poking around among in-school school counselors, whose lives these days are consumed by supporting colleagues and students in acute personal distress, much of it related to the uncertainties, constraints, and ongoing sorrows of the pandemic. I’ve been interested in their overall relationship to academic […]
Read more →Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category
If you are of a certain age and perhaps a certain sensibility you will recognize a phrase in the title from your younger days. “The usual gang of idiots” was how the editorial staff of Mad magazine presented itself, and I have lately realized how much I owe to […]
Read more →The education news these days has its sickening aspects: state governments in many of these United States are working to ensure that an honest, evidence-based approach to issues of race and social justice be expunged from these states’ public school classrooms, with certain materials banned outright. A […]
Read more →The other day I exhorted schools to start living up to the most meaningful ideals they express in their foundational and aspirational statements, to make missions and values a real part of all of their thinking. I realize that folks may not really have much of a […]
Read more →THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN JULY 2020 ON THE INDEPENDENT CURRICULUM BLOG. (Content lost in a hosting transfer, alas.) In this moment the world is clamoring for independent schools to be held, and to hold themselves, accountable to a higher standard, and we must examine ourselves and […]
Read more →In one of my other lives I do a great deal of work predicated on the idea that schools want to be intentional in expressing their missions and values in their programs, policies, and practices. Since my entire life (literally) has been spent in the independent school […]
Read more →Much of the optimistic messaging I have seen since the pandemic began has been about the promise of project-based learning, which has kind of laid exclusive claim to the moniker “PBL”. But some of us have been talking for a while about two other kinds of PBL, […]
Read more →Cognitive dissonance has become a way of life for us in the past ten pandemic months, soon to be a year of 525,600 minutes and very likely at least that many deaths. But lately I’ve been on the edge of cranial detonation, watching the COVID-19 numbers rise […]
Read more →In my life I am connected to a whole lot of independent schools. Through family and friendships, not to mention professional connections, I am hearing a whole lot about life in schools during this unbelievably stressful time in our educational history. Teachers aren’t very happy, administrators aren’t […]
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