As an educator, a some-time college counselor, and the parent of college-age kids, I watch with great interest the various morality plays unfolding on college campuses—many of these on so-called “elite” college campuses. Between trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, and the spread of awareness of sexual assault and harassment, […]
Read more →Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category
When I was in high school I remember the excitement every year when my uncle, who lived across the street and was doing his stint as “headmaster” of the small boys boarding school that was still at that time the family business, prepared each year for “NAIS.” […]
Read more →It happened again the other day, when I started a story, “In my village….” Apparently this is hysterically funny. Villages, it seems, don’t happen any more in the kind of world where someone like me could possibly live, and in living memory they never have. Over-educated, middle-class, […]
Read more →I’m a lucky man. Upon occasion I do reflect in my old age on the heaps of cultural and social capital I carry around, or rather that carry me around, elevated perhaps above my true existential worth by flukes of race and gender and the socioeconomic accident […]
Read more →Stories of schools transformed and students’ lives transformed are always inspiring and always thought-provoking. Fare on transformational teachers has infused my life from The Blackboard Jungle to Conrack to Les Choristes, but transformational schools are another matter. From Ted Sizer’s Horace books to watching a video about […]
Read more →I often muse on the news but seldom write about it, but several of today’s stories in my part of the world are particularly compelling. The pieces that catch my eye tend to be cautionary tales of both positive and negative import relative to topics that have […]
Read more →One of my pet projects for the past few years has been to find ways to increase the real, teacher-level discourse among educators from the private and public sectors, in all their manifold incarnations. The metaphor I and my colleagues in this endeavor has been that of […]
Read more →It’s been a week for even more milestones, and if you’ll allow me a moment of pride, I’ll share that the Independent Curriculum Group just took on its 75th Partner School (which makes a total of 78 Partners, with The Association of Boarding Schools, the Progressive Education […]
Read more →I enjoy school strategy statements. These days they take the form, variously, of strategic visions, strategic priorities, or the tried-and-true strategic plans. Most of these are pretty interesting, although one can fault the form as being perhaps a little bit too standardized, like Brill Building hit songs […]
Read more →It’s the middle of July, for crying out loud, and never before have I been so laggard in maintaining this blog. I plead both personal and professional reasons; I’ve had plenty of mostly welcome distractions—with an unhappy sidebar—that have been keeping my head busy in other ways. […]
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